Planning Act Blog 211: Assessments Put Flesh On Bones Of Localism Bill

This is entry number 211, published on 2 February 2011, of a blog on the Planning Act 2008 infrastructure planning and authorisation regime. Click here for a link to the whole blog. If you would like to be notified when the blog is updated, with links sent by email, click here.

Today's entry analyses a suite of impact assessments published on the Localism Bill.

The government published no fewer than 33 assessments of the impact of the Localism Bill on Monday, which can be found here. The assumptions made in costing the impacts of the Bill give a useful indication of the take-up of the Bill powers that the government expects, as well as other information about how the Act will operate.

Pre-application consultation

The Bill extends the requirement for pre-application consultation that applies to nationally significant infrastructure projects to other applications, albeit to a lesser degree. For the first time, the impact assessment provides an indication of which developments will be caught by this requirement.

The requirement is proposed to apply to all residential developments of at least 200 units (or 4 hectares) and all other developments taking up at least 10,000 square metres (or 2 hectares). This is expected to apply to 3000 planning applications a year. Thus the scope of types of planning application is all types...