Planning Act Blog 188: Lessons Learned From Planning Act Regime Analysed At Seminar

The Planning Act 2008 is one of the most important pieces of legislation affecting major infrastructure projects for many years. The same new procedure will be available for new nuclear power stations, onshore and offshore windfarms, railways, motorways, electricity pylons, and many more high-profile projects.

This is entry number 188, first published on 18 November 2010, of a blog on the implementation of the Planning Act 2008. 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 reports on a seminar held yesterday that looked at lessons learnt from the Planning Act regime so far.

At the seminar, Sir Mike Pitt, chair of the Infrastructure Planning Commission (IPC) defended the new regime as it came under scrutiny from two infrastructure planning experts. The seminar was hosted by RPS, planning and environmental consultants - the third they have held on the new regime.

Sir Mike said that the IPC's caseload was growing, although as a rule of thumb, each month that passed usually meant about two weeks' progress on promoters' timetables. He said that the IPC's policy of openness, where every email, conversation and meeting was summarised on the IPC website, gave stakeholders confidence in the system. He said that the new regime focused on consensus between the parties and was not intended to result in a simple win/lose decision.

He displayed a slide showing the Rookery South application documentation (the application that is furthest through the process and whose objection deadline is tomorrow) This consisted of about 14 lever-arch files, a roll of plans a few CDs and four or five spiral-bound documents (which can be yours for £3000), but he refuted allegations that anyone making representations would have to read all of it.

He stressed that project promoters needed 'extremely good legal and technical advice' and only applications that were 'top quality' were likely to make progress.

He referred to the forthcoming demise of the IPC in terms of it being a merger between the IPC and the Planning Inspectorate. He said that he hoped that the new regime would be the best of both worlds (the worlds being the Planning Act 2010 and the Localism Act 2011). Although ministers would make final decisions on applications, he expected that decisions that went against the recommendation of the IPC or its successor would be very rare.

Robbie Owen of Bircham...