The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government is currently consulting on its proposed planning committee reforms under The Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025. The purpose of the reforms is to give more decision making powers to planning officers which – in turn – involves reducing the decision making powers of planning committees. The draft Town and Country Planning (Discharge of Local Planning Authority Functions) (England) Regulations 2026 provide for certain types of planning applications that must be determined by a planning officer under delegated powers and other types of applications that may be referred to a planning committee.
Under the draft regulations, all householder application and minor residential and commercial applications must be determined by a planning officer and not by a planning committee. For example, minor residential applications are for between one and nine dwellings with a site area smaller than 0.5 hectares. The majority of our clients will fall in that category.
The government’s view is that the reforms are necessary to speed up the decision making process and address the problem of the significant variation in how planning committees currently operate which it says can create inconsistency, delay, and inefficiencies. The impression that comes across is that planning officers play an enabling role that promotes timely development and that some planning committees do the opposite. In our view, that is not always the case and we have examples where planning officers have recommended that planning applications that have been supported by the Parish Council and by planning committee members should be refused when they have ultimately been approved by the committee. On the assumption that the new regulations take effect as proposed on 30 September 2026, those applications will simply be refused by planning officers under delegated powers and there will be no mechanism for them to be determined by the planning committee.
In our experience, minor residential and commercial development can raise significant issues that generate tensions between local plan policies, national planning policies and other material considerations, particularly in deeply rural areas including in National Parks. They can also raise one or more issues of economic, social or environmental significance to the local area, or one or more significant planning matters having regard to the development plan and any other material considerations – which are the tests that will be applied if larger scale applications are to be referred to committee. Even where those types of issues are raised by minor applications, under the current draft regulations, they will still be determined by planning officers and not by planning committees.
The fundamental question underlying the above is where the responsibility for decision making should ultimately sit – with elected local authority members or with local authority employees – and whether there should be a category of planning applications that can not be referred to a planning committee no matter what issues they raise. That will be the effect of the regulations as currently drafted.
Anyone who wishes to respond to the consultation can do so here.
