Member Article

North East councils must embrace planning regulations

The North East Chamber of Commerce (NECC) is urging councils from across the region to embrace new planning guidelines, which have the potential to stimulate regional growth.

The NECC believes that a robust planning policy is vital, as councils continue to cut planning and development spending. The region has the highest percentage fall in local spending at 6%, which has resulted in a 44% cut in North East planning and development budgets.

NECC Director of Policy, Ross Smith, said: “The Government’s austerity drive continues to impact heavily on the region and reductions to planning budgets are something of an unseen killer for economic growth.

“Councils must ensure that service levels, planning experience and current charges are all maintained and we avoid punishing levels of planning application fees in the North East when authorities are required to set their own rates.”

In the North East there are 134 jobs per sq km, in comparison with 205 in the rest of England. The NECC believes that this provides a 50% growth potential opportunity, which is why councils must be pro-development.

Ross continued: “As a region we have huge potential. By grabbing the opportunity created by planning reform we could deliver a major chunk of the growth the UK economy needs, but that more congested regions will struggle to deliver.

“The North East has the lowest land costs and energy prices, enormous resource availability and a lack of congestion that should see businesses flocking to and expanding in the region, but restrictive planning policy is hampering many.”

The NECC believes that the region must now focus fully on proactive planning. While this does not mean blanket development, it does place an onus on local authorities and statutory consultees to proactively help overcome issues to otherwise sustainable schemes.

He added: “Having a single framework increases accessibility to information and will enable a much better understanding of planning policy, which will hopefully make it easier for developers and business to contribute to it in the future.

“We must embrace the ethos of saying yes as quickly as possible – this doesn’t mean giving due consideration to projects that could be detrimental to the North East’s environment, it means getting to the correct decision faster. We should welcome development more than any other area as we have more capacity for development than any other area.

“There has been a clear fall in the number of decisions being made over past five years but if anything it is worse that decisions are not being made within set timescales.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .