Local councillors must get 'proper training' to help them make planning decisions, says inquiry

Local councillors should be given proper training to help them make planning decisions, a parliamentary inquiry has heard. Two local councillors joined witnesses from the British Property Federation (BPF), who told the Communities and Local Government Committee's inquiry into planning skills that planners and councillors did not fully understand the economic realities of development.

Despite taking decisions which can affect thousands and cost companies millions of pounds, councillors currently do not have to have any formal training or certification.

Liz Peace, chief executive of the BPF, told Phyllis Starkey MP, chair of the committee, that it was 'incredible that those involved in a quasi-judicial process do not have to have formal training'.

This follows a government review of skills carried out in 2004 by Sir John Egan, recommending that training councillors involved in planning decisions should be compulsory. This recommendation has since been ignored.

The solution proposed by the two sets of witnesses – who appeared at different sessions yesterday - was to agree areas where council members must be trained.

The BPF believes that councillors must have training in areas such as commercial awareness and development economics.

Cllr Ruth Cadbury said there was a lot to be gained from external trainers, and that training could be a lot more imaginative. She added that there had been little mention of place-shaping and sustainability, despite Egan’s review and the government’s public commitment to delivering sustainable communities.

The BPF had suggested that its leading member companies would be willing to hold training sessions to help inform the public sector, and improve the skills of those already working within the system.

Private sector funding for local planners?
The property industry is also keen to see formal guidance issued regarding developers funding additional planning resources to cater for large developments.

Speaking on behalf of the property industry, Sue Willcox, head of town planning at Sainsbury’s and chair of the BPF’s planning technical committee, outlined how developers could take the strain off of local planners.

She said that some authorities faced with a large scale development had negotiated arrangements whereby the developer funded the additional planning staff needed to deal with the scheme. They could then deal with other applications, freeing and speeding up the process. Even if the decision was refused, the developer would prefer minimal delays.

Such arrangements, which must be totally transparent, had been successfully negotiated in places such as Birmingham.

Liz Peace added that 'many authorities are reluctant to enter into such arrangements as they fear accusations of impropriety'. She said that central government could help expedite many major developments by 'encouraging wider use of this approach and providing guidelines to reassure local planning authorities that they have nothing to fear'.

Ms Peace said: 'Some local authorities deal with very few major development applications and it makes no sense to create a permanent capability to handle those. There are a number of creative and imaginative ways of supplementing local authority resource in those situations – and they should be explored more vigorously then they have been in the past.'

Cllr Cadbury agreed that 'staff shortages reduced the quality of advice being given to councils'.

Ms Willcox added that planners could consider pooling resources regionally in areas such as housing or retail, to ensure that specialist projects could be given specialist treatment.

Take small domestic decisions out of the system
The property industry also renewed calls for ‘low level’ decisions to be dealt with by ‘planning technicians’. This would free up skilled planners to enable them to focus on more significant developments.

Liz Peace said: 'It is pointless beefing up skills and numbers if they are then employed on low level tasks that do not require that level of skills. We need to ensure that our skilled planners are used on ‘quality’ planning issues and not diverted onto domestic cases that could well be dealt with by a technician.'

Climate change must be understood
Finally, there was a call for climate change policy to be better understood locally with a better coordination of local planners.

Ms Willcox said that policies were being interpreted locally without a full understanding of their impacts.

There has been much debate surrounding levels of renewable energy contributions developments should include and whether these should come from on-site or off-site sources. A government policy statement on climate change has since prescribed that developers should seek the most viable method of meeting green building targets.