Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, what steps he is taking to reduce waiting times for planning appeals.

The Inspectorate has been implementing actions to maintain performance in the areas currently performing well and to improve end-to-end times for other casework. In the short term those actions are focused around increasing capacity by:

• increasing the available capacity for inspectors/other decision makers by recruiting more. The Inspectorate is on track to recruit the planned 50 inspectors/other decision makers this year and are also recruiting 30 more;
• using contract (non-salaried) inspectors to the full extent of their availability and running a procurement exercise seeking to increase the pool of this resource; and
• training inspectors to handle different casework to increase flexibility.