Biodiversity net gain – are we ready?

Mandatory biodiversity net gain under the Environment Act is just round the corner with Government confirming at the end of September that all the regulations and guidance setting out the details of legal requirements will be out in November and BNG will start for major applications in January 2024, swiftly followed by small sites in April 2024 and NSIPs by November 2025.

PAS started its biodiversity net gain (BNG) project in March 2021 with the aim of helping local planning authorities (LPAs) to be ‘Day 1 ready’ for BNG when it became mandatory. So, two and half years on: Where are we?, How’s it going? and Are we ‘ready’?

What does ‘ready’ mean?

ready

/ˈrɛdi/

adjective

1. in a suitable state for an action or situation; fully prepared.

I ponder this question a lot and am often asked for my thoughts on LPA readiness for BNG. In the context of our project plan agreed with our Defra-led steering group, we said that we’d evaluate the project based on a target of 80% of a sample of LPAs being aware and agreeing that our resources help them do their jobs. We feel we’ve met this brief with 99% of local planning authorities in England having engaged in the project in some way (by coming to an event and/or joining our LPA officer network) and more than 90% of attendees of our events saying they were somewhat or very helpful in polls, plus lots of informal positive feedback coming our way.

We also know that more local authorities are working on BNG over time – at an event we hosted in October 2022, 76% of attendees said that their authority had started working on BNG, this was up to 83% at a similar event in April 2023 and I’m sure would be even higher now. Our practitioner network for local authority officers has grown from around 100 members a year ago to over 600 now.

Is anyone ready?

We are definitely more ready in the sense that we know a lot more about how mandatory BNG is going to work now than we did two and a half years ago. Aside from the Environment Act 2021 receiving Royal Assent in November 2021, we have had a BNG consultation and a response to that consultation from Government, plus Defra BNG guidance and blogs published. Then, at the end of September, the press release that set out a timetable for the implementation of mandatory BNG. Alongside all this information, our knowledge and understanding has grown as LPAs start implementing BNG and testing how the system will work, shown by the depth and number of FAQs we now have answers to and discussions on our practitioners’ network forum.

Local authorities are not alone in being more ready than they were, but maybe not totally ready yet. Developers need to understand the detail of legal requirements before they can have planning applications ready to submit and we will all have only two months to work this out for major applications, and luckily a few more months until April 2024 for small sites. PAS has been working closely with the Future Homes Hub to understand BNG readiness across the board and feed into Government’s plans.

A key thing to bear in mind is the shared positivity across the public and private sector around BNG as a mechanism to improve nature and people’s lives, the keenness to find solutions and recognition of the excellent opportunity BNG gives us to improve the status quo. We need to focus on this as we delve into the detail to stop us getting too bogged down in what might becoming frustrating about the process and the ‘don’t know’s.

Does this mean LPAs are or aren’t ready?

Local planning authorities are not a homogenous bunch and vary considerably in how they work, including in their preparations for BNG, so we can’t say that LPAs are ready or not as a cohort. How about we identify which councils aren’t ready for BNG? Well, that’s tricky too. We can’t base it on who’s engaged with our project, as I know at least two of the LPAs that haven’t engaged have been implementing BNG through Local Plan policies for a couple of years. We also can’t decide readiness according to whether the local authority has a BNG policy in their Local Plan, as that very much depends on the council’s local plan review cycle and where they are with that. Some LPAs are already implementing BNG based on the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) requirement for development to ‘secure measurable net gains for biodiversity’ where appropriate and may have developer advice notes setting out their expectations to meet this, but no Local Plan policy. We have shared examples of these on our webpages.

A recent RTPI survey highlighted issues with preparation for BNG amongst local authority planners and a lack of confidence in practical requirements of BNG, but this wasn’t the case across the board for all those that responded. And it’s important to think about the difference between whether an individual planner is ‘ready’ and whether their local authority as a whole is ‘ready’. We have a hugely informed set of folk making up our LPA BNG practitioner network, ranging from planners to BNG officers to lawyers, with variation in understanding and knowledge of BNG shared across those groups.

Ready for mandatory BNG?

And what does ‘ready’ really mean? In the end, being ‘ready’ probably means prepared for when BNG becomes mandatory. For local authorities, they will have to be able to receive and determine planning applications with BNG, i.e. assessing whether they meet the mandatory BNG requirements, and ready to assess and approve BNG Plans prior to development commencement. Even the most advanced local authority probably wouldn’t say they are yet at that stage, as we look forward to the publication of the secondary legislation and associated guidance that will set out the detail in November, and will enable final preparations to be made in planning departments for applications arriving from January 2024.

Expectations of ‘readiness’ also differ across different audiences and some of the feedback from developers and others around a lack of local authority readiness may stem from higher expectations of what they should be doing beyond the legal requirements, for example, engaging in the off-site BNG market, providing mechanisms (S106) to secure habitat bank sites, etc. Many local authorities are doing some excellent work in this space, including Buckinghamshire Council, Plymouth City Council and Greater Manchester Combined Authority, but many others are not yet engaged in this level of detail or have decided not to take on this role. 

How ‘ready’ is ‘ready’?

The PAS BNG readiness checklist, based on existing experience amongst local authorities, pulls out what we think LPAs need to do to meet the mandatory requirements, but also identifies activities beyond those that will enable BNG to be a success locally. These include establishing a strategic approach to BNG locally and setting up monitoring, enforcement and reporting arrangements. A LPA’s role in the latter is nicely covered by this article for the Chartered Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management (CIEEM), which highlights the key solutions to LPA readiness – working together, innovating and sharing best practice – across the public and private sector.

PAS has a range of good practice Local Plan policies and SPDs, as well as S106 and planning conditions for BNG on our webpages that have been shared with us by local authorities. For example, Doncaster BNG Supplementary Planning Document sets out further information for applicants on applying the relevant local plan policy on BNG. GMCA Biodiversity Net Gain Guidance for Greater Manchester has been prepared to enable developers and potential offset providers to run biodiversity assessments in a consistent way across Greater Manchester. The document also enables the consistent verification of biodiversity assessments by local planning authorities. Buckinghamshire Council Strategic Significance and Spatial Risk Guidance sets out how the council will assess these two elements of the Biodiversity Metric to help support local nature recovery before the LNRS is in place. We have also shared case studies of early preparation for mandatory BNG by Cornwall Council, Bath and Northeast Somerset Council, Tunbridge Wells Borough Council and the London Borough of Sutton.

For me, readiness is not a binary state, but signals readiness to start the journey and some of that will only come through skills and experience gained as we test out BNG in practice. So, as I blogged over two years ago (!) BNG won’t be perfect to start with, but we can give it a go and get better (and more ‘ready’) as we go. In the meantime, the key areas I would focus on if I was a local authority officer would be:

• Getting familiar with what we know already about how BNG works – look at the PAS BNG webpages and past events, including on the Biodiversity Metric, and join our practitioner network to help you get started.
• Reviewing how the Local Plan – vision, policies – and any SPDs fit with BNG, including how existing policy compares to the legislative BNG requirements, to be clear on what are policy requirements and what are legal requirements.
• Determining what skills and specialist resource, including ecology, the council is likely to need and how to procure it to make sure you can cover when specialist advice is needed on planning applications. See the PAS BNG resourcing guide for some ideas.
• Getting some dates in the diary in December/early January, once the BNG regulations and guidance are published, to train development management planners, validation officers and Planning Committee members on the detail of what they need to do. See our BNG essentials slide-pack as a starter for ten on this.
• Understanding and planning for how the council will update its local validation requirements to encompass BNG.
• Integrating BNG into the LPA’s internal consultation triage process, i.e. when planners consult ecologists and other specialists, and considering whether to put in place any other procedures to help manage specialist input, like BNG casework meetings or having a BNG specialist planner identified.

In the end, we just need to give it a go, be as prepared as we can be, use all the support and guidance out there and work together to make it work as well as we possibly can, learning as we go along. Despite all of the angst about how ready everyone is, one thing is absolutely clear which is that the purpose of BNG – planning to deliver a better outcome for nature – is 100% supported by planners and their stakeholders.

BNG Online: Bringing the sector together to deliver Biodiversity Net Gain

Biodiversity Net Gain today (April 2) becomes mandatory for small site developments. As RichardPritchard asked back in February: ‘Are we Ready’? There’s a lot to learn and quickly for developers working with and submitting planning applications, and for local planning authorities (LPAs) receiving and considering them. Two of the big challenges for all of us are:

• Where to start? There is an impressive body of work out there – how do I navigate the plethora of guidance, regulations, case studies, toolkits?
  
• Understanding what happens before and after ‘my part’ of the process. LPA planners need to understand the sorts of things developers are grappling with, developers need to know what support the LPA can provide, and what information is required and when.

BNG Online – getting acquainted quickly with BNG
I recently moved across programmes at PAS to begin work on BNG. In at the deep end, lots to learn and enormous shoes to fill. My colleagues Beccy Moberly and Richard Crawley have steered the PAS BNG ship expertly, creating a wealth of pragmatic BNG advice and establishing a network of over 1,000 members.

In my new pair of enormous shoes, and standing on the shoulders of giants, I’ve been working on what (somewhat serendipitously) is the perfect foil for accelerating my understanding. It’s called ‘BNG Online’, it launches today and is a collaboration between Future Homes Hub & PAS.

‘BNG Online’ is a new digital resource that brings together in one place, insight, guidance, and tools for delivering BNG. It is designed to help developers and local planning authorities to work together and factor in BNG at the key stages of the planning process. It is organised around 4 key development ‘stages’:

• Sites – how are they selected and allocated?
• Application – what advice is available, what information is required, what do I need to do?
• Delivery – delivering and maintaining habitats, on & off-site.
• Monitoring – how do we know what’s happening and who is responsible?

This is just a start
Some elements of BNG Online are more developed than others (e.g. what does (can?) anyone really know about monitoring until BNG is a little more established?). The planning application stages (the ‘PAS bit’) include a summary of each stage, key considerations for LPAs and links to regulations, guidance and resources that will assist in preparing and processing a planning application. It is not exhaustive, still being developed (Beta they call it) and will grow and be updated regularly as we learn more from the experiences of planners and applicants using it.

The sector working together
This is a great example of the sector coming together. As well as collaborating with Future Homes Hub, BNG Online has been developed with the input of Natural England, Defra, DLUHC, Joe’s Blooms, Verna.Earth and development industry bodies representing both large and SME developers.

Why this is important
If I have learned one thing over the last month, it is that it is a mistake (despite how the system for planning approval has been designed) to think of BNG as a post-permission matter. Successful strategies for the delivery of biodiversity gain have to be considered early, and throughout the planning process. BNG is new for everyone and the more information that LPAs and applicants can share, the more we can all learn about what makes the process efficient and what works best. BNG Online is designed to facilitate this.

We will update and improve BNG Online as we learn more. This is where planners and developers using it can help – tell me what you think here or email me (martin.hutchings@local.gov.uk) and let me know how it can be improved.

The changing governance of water

Launched in April, the Government’s Plan for Water could be an opportunity for a step-change in how water resources and the water environment are protected and managed in an integrated way. Central to this ambition is the idea of integrated catchment management plans led by local partnerships. In this blog, I share some insights from a handful of local authorities on the governance of water, and how it needs to evolve, and reflect on what this might mean for planning. At this point I think its important for me to be honest and say that I am still relatively new to most things water-related so please bear with me as I take you on my recent journey.

Conversations with Defra
In PAS, we’re always on the look-out for opportunities to simplify and streamline the many demands on local authorities in ways which maximise public benefits and make better use of limited resources. For example, through our nutrient neutrality project, we recognise the potential of strategic, catchment-scale partnerships to deliver long-term improvements to the water environment. We are supporting local authorities to respond to the implications of poor water quality for development and planning and we hope this collective learning will help them to respond to emerging and future challenges, such as concerns relating to water resources and development in parts of the south-east.

We are also mindful that, whilst water is a very complex area of policy and delivery in and of itself, it is also cross-cutting. For local authorities this requires an understanding of how the water agenda relates to other corporate and community priorities, for example, managing the risk of flooding and responding to climate change. 

So, when Defra asked us for our views on catchment plans as part of a stakeholder engagement exercise, we jumped at the opportunity to share our own insights and offered to convene a group of local authorities for Defra to talk to. We’re always happy to represent the views of local authorities but this was one of those occasions where we felt it was particularly important for Government to hear direct form the horse’s mouth. After all, local authorities are at the sharp end of implementing Government policy and regulation, so they know what works and what needs to change. More on this later.

What are catchment plans and why are they relevant?
The first part of this question sounds quite straight-forward but as I often find when I start digging deeper into areas of policy that I have limited knowledge of, its all a bit mysterious and complicated, and its only when you speak to people who have been immersed in it for years that you begin to understand why. I’ve heard people talk about catchment management planning and catchment plans for years, without ever really getting into the detail. I’ve also heard of drainage and wastewater management plans, nutrient management plans, water resource management plans, river basin management plans, surface water management plans, and flood risk management plans, among others. I am also aware of the Catchment Based Approach (CaBA) which we heard about in one of the early nutrient neutrality webinars. CaBA is about stakeholders working collaboratively at a river catchment scale to deliver a range of social, economic, and environmental benefits, supported by a catchment plan.

Defra’s Plan for Water is built around an integrated catchment approach to managing the whole water system. Catchment management plans will be supported by new funding for catchment groups and partnerships and a streamlined policy and legal framework to deliver clean and plentiful water. Alongside this, the Government has committed to streamlining the current framework of plan and strategies for water. This is important because it means that in the next few years there will be changes to the governance of water, at national, sub-national, and local levels, which in turn will present new challenges and opportunities for all stakeholders, including local authorities.

What has this got to do with land use planning?
Water constrains land use and development in lots of different ways, for example, increased design and construction costs to mitigate flood risk, impacts on habitats sites and a lack of available mitigation solutions, limitations on water supply and the need for water efficiency measures, inadequate wastewater infrastructure etc. The job of the planning system is to address these constraints through policies and decision making on the use of land. Of course, there is a wealth of policy guidance for planners to consider: the NPPF requires planning policies and decisions to make provision for water supply, wastewater, and flood risk management; prevent unacceptable levels of water pollution; and where possible, improve water quality; Planning Policy Guidance notes provide a layer of detail on a wide range of policy matters concerning the management of water including flood risk and coastal change; climate change; natural environment; SEA/SA/EIA; water supply, wastewater, and water quality. 

With my rather simplistic view of planning, I have tended to characterise the water ‘problem’ in my head as ‘too much, too little, or too dirty’. That’s not to say that I think the nature of the problem is simple or that it is easy to resolve – blatantly it isn’t. I sometimes quip that nutrient neutrality is harder than rocket science (I know it’s not really) but having listened to local authority practitioners talk about their experience of the water agenda, it makes nutrient neutrality seem like a doddle (again, I know it isn’t really). 

Before hosting the local authority sessions with Defra, I did what any self-respecting planner would do – I did a quick crash-course of my own, involving an afternoon of reading on the internet and drawing lots of blobs and arrows on a big piece of paper, in a vain attempt to make sense of all the different pieces of the jigsaw. To be honest, it’s a work in progress and I will share it in a future blog, but for now it is helping me to see this as a systems problem which requires a whole-system solution.

Greater Manchester partners are on the road towards integrated water management (see below for a link to their work) and this infographic illustrates how they are thinking about governance and building a strong partnership over time. Its a really simple way of setting out what is a very complex activity – and its way better looking than my scribbles!

So, are catchment plans a key part of the solution?
In July we convened two sessions for local authority officers to talk to Defra about their experience of catchment management plans, in particular, what’s working well/not so well, and what governance and funding is needed to drive forward a more integrated approach. We invited a range of people from a cross section of combined, unitary and district authorities, principally those involved in managing water and flood risk, planning, and infrastructure. Several themes emerged from these discussions:

• Integrated Catchment Management Plans don’t really exist so there aren’t many examples to learn from. There are already lots of plans and strategies for water doing different but complementary things, operating at different scales. There are also lots of catchment groups and partnerships doing good work. But this is not the same thing. River Basin Management Plans are probably the closest things to catchment management plans currently. 
• Despite the many catchment groups and partnerships that exist, the biggest challenge is implementation and delivery. There are some good examples where local authorities are collaborating with private and public partners across boundaries to do the right thing at the right scale. For example, Smarter Water Catchments is a pilot initiative led and funded by Thames Water in partnership with key stakeholders – it is based on the idea of prevention rather than end of pipe solutions; in Greater Manchester, the Combined Authority, Environment Agency and United Utilities are working together to develop an Integrated Water Catchment Plan; and the Greater London Authority has recently produced an Integrated Water Strategy for the Lee Valley, and is working with GMCA to capture best practice and learn from each other. 
• Whilst the effort going into collaboration and engagement is very welcome, stakeholders talk in different languages, have competing priorities, and want different benefits. Without consulting and agreeing a broad set out of outcomes at the beginning, some partners may be reluctant to come to the table and there will often be winners and losers.
• Funding is critical and catchment planning works best where the water companies are involved. A lot of existing catchment working is based around WFD objectives but unless its in the WINEP, the water companies are less likely to engage and the activities are likely to be relatively small scale. The objectives and outcomes of the WINEP need to be integrated across other policy objectives and knit together other relevant plans and funding sources including nature recovery, biodiversity net gain, ELMS etc.
• There is a lot continuing to happen in this space, which will need knitting together to ensure effective integration of policy objectives. For example, a recent NIC study on reducing the risk of surface flooding, commissioned by HM Treasury, highlights pressures from climate change and new development, and recommends joint strategies, devolved funding and implementing schedule 3 (SuDs) for new development. 
• The scale of existing catchment planning and partnerships is highly variable. Most are small scale, reactive to issues, and lack funding. Although there is recognition that defining appropriate boundaries for catchment plans is difficult, there is nevertheless a clear need for catchment plans to be scaled up to a much bigger geography with clear ownership, leadership, delivery, funding, and democratic accountability. 
• In terms of governance, there needs to be consideration of what weight catchment plans would have, where they fit in the hierarchy of other plans and strategies, including Local Nature Recovery Strategies, and whether new governance structures are required at an appropriate spatial scale.
• Alongside governance, big data is critical, to ensure that the right priorities and solutions are identified to deliver the required outcomes and ensure that money is directed towards preventative solutions that deliver multiple benefits. Natural Capital evidence and approaches can help to remove barriers which limit investment in nature based solutions are a particularly important source of data.

What does this mean for local planning authorities?
I think there is cautious optimism that catchment plans will make a positive difference in terms of the planning process and delivering sustainable, place-based outcomes. As always, there will be opportunities and risks but at this stage I would like to think that the pros outweigh the cons. Below are some of the main ones which came up during the discussions.

The pros…

• clearer leadership, governance, and coordination at a catchment level will set out the key issues and priorities for action
• more collaborative working between public, private and third sectors to ensure priorities and plans are integrated and delivering multiple benefits
• a better understanding of how the framework of policies, plans and strategies should be interpreted in the context of planning; more outcome-focussed and integrated with other relevant plans and strategies e.g., Local Nature Recovery Strategies
• better access to data and evidence will help planners to understand what they should be trying to achieve in an area where development is planned/taking place
• increased funding and blending sources of finance for catchment management plans will support delivery of planning policies and decisions, including developer contributions to improve grey and green solutions

The cons…

• potentially another layer of complexity to an area of policy which needs to be simplified and streamlined
• more consultation, engagement and collaboration for local authorities takes more time, money and expertise
• complicated spatial scales of water catchments and political/administrative boundaries
• rapidly evolving water agenda is a challenge for local authorities to stay up to date with  

What next?
Over the summer, Defra is aiming to consolidate the information and evidence from an extensive programme of stakeholder engagement. They have indicated that they would like to keep the communication channels open and potentially test further thinking with a group of local authorities – which we have offered to convene and support. This is a complex and evolving policy agenda and we will do our best to keep LPAs informed as things progress, whether that be through events, case studies, our newsletter, or blogs such as this.

Finally, I would like to say a big thank you to all the individuals who gave their time to share their insights and perspectives in such an open and constructive way. I have no doubt that Defra will have learnt a lot from talking to you, as did I.

Understanding and avoiding designation

Currently only one council in the country, Uttlesford, is formally designated under S62 of the Town and Country Planning Act.  However, 17 councils are currently waiting with bated breathe to find out whether they will be designated and a decision is due shortly.  Every one of these councils has a team of excellent, highly professional and dedicated officers.  They also have passionate, dedicated, committed councillors who are trying to do the best for their local residents. So why are they in this position?

How are councils designated?

Councils can be designated through speed or quality of decision making.  Councils have to determine 70% of non Majors or 60% of Majors or County Matters in time (i.e. within statutory time limits or as agreed through an extension of time) or not exceed 10% of Major of non Major decisions being overturned at appeal.  Both quality and speed are assessed over a rolling two year period.

What does it mean to be designated?

Very simply it means that an applicant has the choice of applying directly to the Planning Inspectorate (PINS) to determine any application that falls under the application type that has caused the council to be designated (i.e. Majors or non Majors)

So what?

Councils have said to me they don’t care if they are designated.  They are overworked and understaffed so if the Government wants to take some applications off their hands that’s great isn’t it?  Unfortunately it is not that simple – just ask Uttlesford!  The council has to register, consult and consider the application.  Officers then need to form a view on the application and, where necessary, seek its Planning Committee’s views. They then provide this view on the application to PINS.  However, and significantly, the council is only a consultee rather than the decision maker – imagine how councillors react to that.  Also, the fee goes to PINS who assigns a case officer and determines the application.  So, in summary the council still does a lot of work, but loses the power of decision making and doesn’t get a penny to resource the work.  On top of this, designation will result in negative press coverage and it is unlikely to help a council compete in an ever challenging job market.

How can you save yourselves?

The good news is that DLUHC provides the Planning Advisory Service (PAS) with a grant every year to help councils who are either in designation or threatened with designation.  We have our “crystal ball” that we use to spot councils likely to fall into the danger area and we will contact you and provide you with support free of charge.  It is relatively easy to spot a council in trouble when it comes to speed of decision making, but much more difficult for quality – see Martin’s excellent blog on quality to explain why.

Also, the Government has always to date given councils the opportunity to identify “exceptional circumstances” that the Minister will consider before designating a council.  Most councils have avoided designation through their ability to persuade the Minister that they have genuinely exceptional circumstances that have been taken into consideration.

Our top tips

Every council suffers from financial constraints and a national shortage of skilled planners.  Many councils struggle with their 5 year housing supply and ability to adopt a Local Plan.  Some councils have had to suspend decision making due to nutrient issues. Many councils have had recent political changes and some have political leaders who have been voted in on their ability to resist rather than promote development.  Yet at the last count over a two year period 123 councils have determined 90% or more of their non Majors in time, 151 councils have determined 90% or more of their Majors in time and 137 councils have had no Major decisions overturned at appeal.  So how do they do it?  Here are a few of the most easy to solve tips that I’ve picked up after having spoken to many councils on performance matters.  These are just the easy ones and PAS will work with you on other, more difficult to solve reasons for poor performance.

Tip 1 – Don’t be afraid to ask for help – and do it as early as possible

PAS doesn’t have all the answers by any means, but we have been working with councils for many years and have an extensive library of what works for others at our fingertips.  We also understand as we have worked at the coal face of Development Management. We will try and seek you out, but don’t be afraid to give us a call and we will be able to help you best if you contact us as soon as you know you have a problem. Also, DLUHC will be looking to see how councils have engaged with PAS as part of their final assessment on designation so why not take up our support?  It will only help your cause.

Tip 2 – Be aware of your performance

This sounds so obvious, but it is amazing how many councils simply don’t know their own performance.  So far the Government has only been interested in councils who don’t meet the minimum performance thresholds.  If you determine 70% of non Majors in time you don’t get contacted.  If you determine 69.9% of non Majors in time you might get contacted.  Therefore, keep monitoring performance and if you are getting close to the line do something about it before it is too late.

Tip 3 – Make it everybody’s problem

Too often we find that the managers – usually Head of Planning and / or Head of Development Management – keep the impending crisis from the rest of the staff and councillors.  This is normally for the best of intentions, but performance only improves when everyone helps.  The technical team will put in the extra work if they know that fast registration really helps; case officers will avoid determining an application a day over time if they think it really matters; and councillors will think twice about overturning an officer recommendation or deferring an item if they really understand the potential consequences.

Tip 4 – Sometimes the easiest corrections can make all the difference

Here are some examples of simple own goals.  One council found that case officers didn’t know how to log an extension of time on the software system so applications were being logged out of time when they were in fact in time.  Another had a backlog of applications waiting for manager sign off because of software issues so target dates were being missed by a day or two on a regular basis. Another council allowed every officer to use their own project management tools to monitor progress on an application so there was no central database to monitor overall performance.  All these examples were simple to fix when the problem was pointed out to them.

Tip 5 – Listen to your staff

Time is so often wasted when different officers do things their own way or do something because it has always been done that way.  You can get consultants in to help you redesign your ways of working and sometimes this is needed.  However, in our experience staff have some of the best ideas themselves to speed up performance if only you give them the confidence to speak out.  Capture the innovative ideas from your staff, agree a single way of working that everyone can own and then make sure you all follow that way of working until you agree something better.

Tip 6 – Get the easy applications out as soon as you can

Believe it or not some applications are straightforward. No one objects, it complies with policy and there is no councillor interest. When you get these wonderful applications determine them as soon as you have met the statutory notification requirements. It will take the same amount of time as if you wait for the end of the 8 week deadline. However, making a quick decision will make you look super efficient, will help keep caseloads manageable and will stop anyone coming up with a reason to delay the application any further – “sorry I’ve already determined that one”

These are the “get your started” tips.  PAS has loads of self help on its website and I recommend you work through the PAS DM Challenge Toolkit to MoT your Development Management service.  There are loads more “top tips” to help you decide what might work best for you. Also don’t be afraid to drop us an email and have a chat. We really don’t mind you contacting us and we can be very discrete if you want to speak “off the record” or simply want to let off steam.

Nutrients as it approaches 3 years

Ever since Natural England issued advice to the councils around Stodmarsh we have been trying to be helpful to the councils caught up by nutrient neutrality. We are approaching three years now*. It has been a tough gig – previously I have been heard to whinge about GDPR but by comparison to nutrients it is a walk in the park.

A key part of our support, alongside our web content and legal advice (shortly to be updated), we have held regular meetings with the lead people from the catchment, helping everyone involved learn from each other [and – no joke – go through the Kubler Ross grief cycle]. As is the way these days, mostly the meetings are virtual get-togethers and we have been fortunate to get the help and support of the key players including DLUHC, Defra, NE, EA, Ofwat, and some of the trusts.

However last week [before all the nutrient news over the weekend] we met up in person, at the London Wetland Centre [recommended as a meeting venue if you can get there]. It felt like good timing – many councils have submitted a bid to get involved delivering mitigation, and while the assessment process grinds on in government this was a chance to think through what might happen next. It feels like** there may be many millions of pounds up for grabs – so we wanted people to think beyond the normal “we need money and resources” and to spell out what else they might need to get things done fast. 

Perhaps playing to the strengths of being in the same room we had quite an old-fashioned table discussion complete with (real) post-its and pens. This post is a reflection then on the conversation my table had, along with some thoughts I had on the train home.  Let’s start with the six post-its from my table: [note that I haven’t had time to turn this into finely crafted text and it is still quite post-it-y]

There is already lots going on in the world of nutrients

Not all of it out in the open yet or finished (or clear what is going to happen)

• NE wetland guidance (its pretty finished, just needs a final shove)
• Subsequent phases of the NE mitigation scheme
• Credit tracking software from NE – will they let other providers use it? Tracking offsets sounds like one of those things that is more difficult than it seems
• Protected sites strategies (a longer-term but more holistic approach – we are recruiting for this at the moment)

We should avoid reinventing the wheel, and most obviously learn from NE’s experiences so far from the Tees and elsewhere. Everyone is desperate to find quick solutions, but we need to find things that are robust enough to withstand the inevitable challenges.

We’d like help with process please***

Huge potential time sink if we all try to learn some of the basics from scratch. We need help, support, framework, template (whatever) :

• procurement
• legal
• site screening / assessment
• probity
• due diligence

Beyond the routine paperwork, its helpful also to understand relationships and roles

• talking to farmers / landowners
• working with trusts and ecological groups
• calling on ecological expertise

We’d also like help with stewardship please

Lots of potential process specific to stewardship. This isn’t natural territory for planners. We probably don’t want to get too involved unless we really have to, but it would appear that enforcement (at least) is coming our way.

• management, maintenance over the long term
• enforcement (perhaps in another council’s area)

Doing “deals” unconnected with planning applications is novel. There might also be some probity angles if we’re using council-owned land or giving some private people the benefit of sewarage upgrades for free. We don’t really understand all this stuff and don’t want legal challenge or delay. Other people must – can they help?

Doing deals with land owners requires “certainty” for them beyond nutrients

Land owners want to enter into the most advantageous deal

• they need to understand time (land locked in) and money
• and their other options: what is nutrients worth? What is BNG worth?

Interaction with other types of payments and systems. Risk of delay / unforseen consequences

• eg BNG, but also FIPL, and possibly ELMS (if that’s still a thing) and probably other things we don’t even know about

Councils (and others) want to make deals best value

• yes nutrient credits, but also secondary benefits (eg public access) and other stacked environmental credits

Do we understand the business model? is it simple and clear (to landowners especially). Are all the values known?

We want more data, but not much more complexity

There remains a frustrating lack of basic data and lots of it is controlled. We still can’t share maps and models in the public domain because we are told they relate to commercial assets.
People seem to be doing interesting new things not just in the UK but around the world. Thats great, but LPAs not that interested in cutting edge academic research. We’re not here to do a PhD we just want to issue decisions on planning applications. We just want to know: what works? 
Protected Site Strategies sound like the future, a more holistic way of thinking about catchments. They might be 3-5 years away – this feels like quite a long time.

Some catchments might need help with governance

Many catchments cross council boundaries, and upper- and lower- tier councils feel the pain in different ways. And, across the whole catchment, mitigation schemes might only be available in some places. It’s slightly awkward to talk about in public, but some catchments might not naturally all pull in the same direction. No names, but some councils might even act in a slightly selfish way.
Who’s job is it to help everyone see the bigger picture, and to establish a more strategic approach? There are some mature river management organisations out there – is that the model we should copy? [by way of background you can see one of my favourite presentations on the governance of the River Wye
https://youtu.be/EYKJnm_mRkA ]

__________________________________

It was a really good day, and I think everyone being in the same place helped us understand some of the motivations and thinking across the range of organisations that were there. I think there are probably three things that I haven’t been able to let go since the meeting:

1. What is the problem we are trying to solve?

I learned the value of this question from my very first boss at PAS. I think we’ve fudged the question for a while – we talk about mitigation that somehow leads to restoration. Or perhaps, more honestly, mitigation that doesn’t prejudice restoration. 

And I get it. Delivering a nutrient mitigation scheme is really really difficult and you risk making your task next to impossible if your goal is restoration. You could be setting yourself up to fail. Perhaps the correct problem we are trying to solve is “just” nutrient mitigation. 

And yet, without some eye on the longer term and bigger picture, I worry that we will chew through some big lumps of cash and end up with sites in even worse condition. It annoys me both because I’m mean and also I don’t think it’s good enough. 

So many people involved in the Wye crisis, extensive publicity, over a long period of time plus a lot of money pumped into schemes – yet ecological conditions declined & the socioeconomic context of the catchment has been decimated. Why is it so hard to stop the rot & restore? – 

Merry Allbright

As a minimum we should understand what “restoration” actually means. We need something to keep us all honest and to ensure we are focused on what makes a difference to the catchment – otherwise its just busywork. I don’t think “just” mitigation feels right, or will look right to a sceptical public. We should be working back from fixing the site condition****.

2. Why do we STILL not have any sensible evidence?

It’s just how planners think. Show me the evidence. Let us consider options. Make some decisions. Monitor what happens. And not just planners – it’s the basics of thinking in systemic terms. 

And yet we are unable to share catchments maps and infrastructure (because they belong to the water companies) and we might know some of the WWtW permit levels but we don’t know what is actually going on in the river let alone having some educated guesses why. [there are some exceptions – and growing gang of people just sticking meters into rivers] 

I’ve met some really clever people working their socks off with modelling, but even they are left trying to compensate for the lack of data showing what pollution is where. 

It is just stupid. Infuriating. 

3. Why is it only planning that still seems to be on the hook for this?

This is a bit of a recurring theme of mine, and something I have never really got squared away in my mind properly.  In LPAs we operate as “competent authorities” who take their responsibilities under the habitat regulations seriously. We heard in the High Court a few days ago that this is the right thing to do (at least for now – see planoraks for an excellent overview and simonicity for something a bit deeper into the detail).

So – and this is where I need to remind myself and everyone else that I am very very far away from a precise legal mind – why is nobody else playing the competent authority game? The Harris judgement suggests to me that it is incumbent on several other competent authorities to revisit licenses and permits when a natura site is in unfavourable condition, and I’m left wondering why it is only us in the planning world taking this seriously (and not the WFD regulators or the environmental permitting people or lots of other bits of water governance machinery that I don’t understand very well).

* The HBF will tell you they are four years in. At our event we heard from the River Mease catchment who have been going for 13 (!) years, and are on their third version of a strategy.

** Perhaps “felt like” might be more appropriate at the time of writing. It’s really unclear what is going to happen next.

*** There are big cross-overs between this list of things that the local authorities wanted and the sort of things we hear from our BNG network. Let’s have the SAME APPROACH for BNG, nutrients, carbon, tree cover and anything else please.

**** And, importantly, restoration can’t be a simple “make the river like it used to be in the 1950s”. Restoration needs to be a forward looking version reflecting the changing climate.

Working in local government – let’s reinvigorate the USP

The recent Local Government Workforce Survey published in January 2023 highlighted some of the recruitment issues being faced by local government. The study found more than half (58 per cent) of all county, district and unitary councils said they were experiencing difficulties recruiting planning officers. The hardest to recruit roles aren’t usually the graduate or junior planner spots, it’s the senior/principal/team leader type roles which makes up the biggest resource gap in local government.

The difficulty in recruiting experienced planners is certainly something that crops up in most conversations I have with councils; and it not just recruitment, it’s the ability to keep experienced staff from leaving local government too.

There are no quick fixes and getting new people into planning or keeping those already in it will require a collective effort from the industry.

How can more people be attracted to public service, planning particularly? If local government wants to draw people into Planning, there is a need to think about what are the drivers and motivations people have for leaving and what are the unique selling points (USPs) that can attract people back to local government, or into it for the first time.

So, I decided to find out. It all started with a relatively innocuous LinkedIn post saying I was interested in speaking to anyone who had left a local planning authority in the last two years to go into an agency, consultancy or private sector work. What were the drivers and motivations for leaving? And had the grass really been greener? I certainly wasn’t expecting the level of response I got! Within two hours, I had over thirty direct messages and forty comments from people wanting to explain why they had left local government. I’d initially thought I’d speak to only one or two people, but given the level of interest, I decided to get more scientific about it.

I then set off on a round of quantitative and qualitative research interviews with thirty planners and place-making professionals. There was a mix of those who had left for the private sector (developers/consultancies/housebuilders) and those who had taken up agency or interim work within the public sector. There was a reasonable mix of levels of seniority too. Not a very big sample size by academic standards I know, but it gave me some insights into reasons and potential solutions.

As someone passionate about local government, some of the conversations were hard to hear; however, all but two ended on a hopeful, even optimistic note that all we need to do is reinvigorate the local government USP to coax people back. 100% of respondents who had gone into the private sector stated they would return to local government in the future, if the reasons for leaving were redressed.

So why had people left? And how can local government reinvent its USP?

The first thing people I spoke to mentioned was salary difference; unsurprising really as a rule of thumb, private sector salaries are higher than local government. The recent Interim State of the Profession 2023 RTPI survey supports this and found that 68% of local authority planners saw competitive salaries as a key challenge for local authorities keeping staff. 13% of the people I spoke to had moved to a lower-level position without taking a cut in pay, less responsibility and workload for the same money. Heartbreakingly 6% of respondents said they had pleaded with managers to stay at their council if they could come close to matching the salary difference, around 5K per annum more.

The research also involved speaking to recruiters of agency staff for local government positions. They reported that salaries in the private sector and with hourly rates for agency roles hitting £65-£70 an hour. Increased pay motivates people to get on their books.

Let’s be practical local government is unlikely to match private sector pay, and the local government USP can only be partially monetary based. My research found that the increase in income from leaving local government was between £20-£35K, and for some, that meant a 25% pay increase. Figures, I’ll agree, would be hard to say no to.

The gulf between public and private pay scales is too wide; although increasing public sector wages would help narrow that gulf. There are things in the toolbox being used but not widespread. Local Government Workforce Survey shows that over 20% of councils found market supplements an effective tool for tackling retention. Still, it’s only used by 10% of respondents surveyed.

The second biggest (89%) reason given was a lack of career progression from mid roles such as ‘senior planner, principal, deputy team leader’ into the next step of more managerial & leadership roles. The phrase  ‘dead man’s shoes’ was a reoccurring joke within the interviews. Yet councils are good at career progression; the Local Government Workforce Survey found about half (49 per cent) of counties, districts and unitaries have career framework/grade systems for planning jobs. However, this data isn’t broken down by type of role but I bet it’s for graduates going up to planner roles rather than for more senior roles. Most planning teams have a triangular organisation structure with fewer opportunities to climb the tree upwards. One respondent stated, “Local authorities are bad at showing what the more senior career choices are”. If local government Planning is going to revamp the USP, we need to get creative around senior career progression.

We need to think about

• The potential for other organisational structures, expanding routes to senior roles and non-managerial career routes,
• More, and at a higher frequency, legacy & succession Planning for leadership roles,
• Expanding career graded roles to higher roles, an approach being taken by Lake District National Park Planning Team already,
• More opportunities for shadowing and mentoring by managers and senior leaders,
•  Opportunities for loaning people between councils to gain senior role experience,
• Genuine career development at all stages and seniority of roles,
• Expand the practice of shared job descriptions to move people sideways and upwards, keeping the talent inside.

Local government USP has been eroded; it used to be seen as the best work/life balance on offer with the benefits and flexible working, particularly attractive to parents for part-time opportunities and parental leave benefits. The pandemic has led to widespread homeworking and surprise; surprise productivity wasn’t affected. The myth that all homeworkers are slackers has been well and truly busted. The private sector has upped its game, and the gulf between those benefits has narrowed; however, local government still has the edge, which should be capitalised on. Councils have also been behind the curve in encouraging people back to workplaces, with some no longer having an office to work from. One respondent, who was in that situation, said: “Working at home all the time, it becomes a lonely place.”

The flexibility and work/life balance in the private sector was a mixed bag for those interviewed. Over 70% reported having less flexibility in choosing the frequency of going into the office than in their previous local government role. Many said they had core hours and there was the expectation that some events outside of working hours would be mandatory. Some respondents stated they had very flexible working arrangements; one person said, ‘I’m treated like an adult, as long as the work is done, and deadline met, I can do it at whatever time I want’. So a mixed bag and perhaps dependant on how flexible the employer is. Of those interviewed who had gone into an agency or interim work, a significant proportion, 75%, were doing work for local authorities and reported very little difference in the flexibility offered. Based on the limited dialogue I’ve had; local government still has the edge in providing work/life balance and flexible opportunities. Still, it’s been watered down, and we need to reset the dial. The Local Government Workforce Survey found that just over a quarter (27 per cent) of councils considered flexible working the most effective recruitment and retention tool. We need to get that up to 100%

Work/life balance will need to be part of the answer if we are to attract new talent into local government too. Recent involvement in the Pathways to Planning graduate programme has made me realise that flexible working is one of the first things graduates seek in their first planning job. So if ultimate work/life balance is the answer to reinvigorate the local government USP, how do we go about it?

Well, we could take a leaf out of  South Cambridgeshire District Council and Swale Borough Council, who have moved to a four-day week, and Swale has also introduced some additional annual leave days at Christmas time. When Swale asked its employees about the measures, it highlighted support for improving work-life balance, better productivity and being a more modern organisation.

Ultimate flexibility does need to be tempered with the fact only some people like to work at home as much as they like. My personal opinion is that Planning requires a degree of team discussion and learning-by-doing with more senior officers. So how do you balance being flexible and retaining the team’s camaraderie? It is about finding a balance and being clear about what that is. Recent job adverts (including a recent one for Sevenoaks District Council) were clear about how often attendance at the office is expected.

Establishing the balance of ‘being all together’ and WFH is critical to returning one of the most fundamental USPs of working in local government (in my humble opinion). In the words of Sister Sledge, ‘We are family; I got all my planners with me’. Working at a council really is like being part of a family and making connections for life. I still have contact with many people I’ve worked with over the years, and I’ve heard many a planner tell me they met their spouse at a council. Of the recent leavers I questioned, 93% said they missed the family feel that local government working gives, which made leaving such a hard decision. One respondent said, “It’s a sense of pride for the borough; the team was fiercely loyal to the borough and communities in a way that the private sector won’t understand”. Another stated, “Private work is not the same culturally; the family feel of a council is so unique”.

Getting the right balance of working flexibly will need to go hand in hand with a reinvigoration of the ‘nurturing’ element of getting the family vibe back. Of those who have left local government to go into agency/interim, 100% reported that their learning & development opportunities were significantly reduced in their new roles but also that a decline in personal development support had been a reason for leaving.

Respondents who left local government for the agency said – “I’ve had to make my own CPD, and that takes my own money and time”, and “I get no support for growing my skills.”

Over half of the respondents who had left for the private sector also mentioned a lack of learning and development had been behind their departure. On numerous engagements with planning officers, I’ve heard tales of budget cuts, no paid-for events or travel funding, and no time off for networking opportunities. One respondent said, “There were only two people in the team who were RTPI as they were the only two willing to pay their own subs every year.”

A vital element of the family vibe is the camaraderie and supportive environment local government gives an individual. Getting that back isn’t as simple as making everyone get back to the office full-time; things have changed, and working practices are better – plus, if local government is to boost its flexible working USP, then it should be heading that way. The nurturing needs to happen in the current working practices context, The nurturing won’t happen by osmosis anymore, and we need to get more structured about it. I can almost hear the naysayers now ‘I haven’t got time to do all this’ and ‘This is all well and good, but..’. My point is we need to make time to nurture people by

• Programming in more formal communication and setting diary appointments,
• Lining up mentors or shadowing opportunities,
• Recognising the importance of training and more informal CPD by allowing people to engage with others and learn via networking.

Getting the family vibe USP of working in local government is going to be key if we want to attract people into the sector. Growing your own in local government works but it requires dedication on behalf of the council to provide that nurturing environment that local government is famous for.

One thing I was surprised to unearth through my micro research project was the shift in risk appetite. I’m well aware that the job for life days are long gone, but working at a local authority was, until recently, viewed as a secure job environment. Local government positions are typically permanent and offer job security, and that isn’t necessarily seen, at least at the moment, as being the significant benefit, it once did. Respondents agreed with the statement, “The pandemic has made people have a higher risk appetite”. The recruiters involved in the research agreed that risk appetite for less secure positions is something they see anecdotally too.

70% of respondents said that before the pandemic, they were not considering a move to the private sector or agency, but as one respondent said,’ I thought if not now then when, what have I got to lose’. The risk appetite has increased, but perhaps it is due to the security provided, not from a permanent local government job but from the knowledge there’s a lot of work out there for those seeking it. 86% of agency & interim respondents stated they felt secure that there was available work from local councils to negate the loss of a permanent contract, a quote ‘ I’m never out of work’.  

But is the abundance of work available for agency & interim staff a symptom of there simply being too few planners in planning departments to do the workload, especially in development management caseloads. FYI – the highest I’ve come across this year was one officer who had 292 applications with their initials next to them.  After financial reasons the second highest (89%) motivator for leaving local government was the high workloads and linked to that ‘burn out’. There’s not much I can say about this, other than its gnarly out there and we all know it.

What is compounding the matter and leading to officers feeling harassed is the current working practises and how members of the public and councillors engage with officers. I heard terms like ‘bombardment’, ‘relentless’, ‘incessant’, ‘demanding’, and ‘harassment’. Has the next-day-delivery mindset embedded itself? One respondent commented, “People are moving for a break from the burnout”. For local government to reinvent its USP, we need to reset the expectations of all the stakeholders and the public on what Planning is and what it can and cannot achieve. This is a hard nut to crack, and a national rebranding of ‘Planning’ is needed? This blog isn’t going to be able to cover the multitude of issues causing the burnout and so it focussed instead on some practical things  councils could do and are doing. We need;

• Some clear comms on what Planning is. I enjoyed the recent example by Wandsworth and the South Warwickshire Development Plan Youtube channel.
• Reaffirming and maintaining trust between Councillors and officers. However, maintaining relationships and a structured approach to communication takes a lot of work.
• Setting clear expectations for the public around how to contact people and timescales for applications & enquiries

I recently lectured at Leeds Beckett University to a group of post-grad students. The students were enthusiastic and got stuck in to the workshop task I set of ‘If I could change the planning system, what would I do’. However, whilst they knew the council’s role in the planning system. Scarily they seemed unaware of the varied and exciting local government career options. Most were only considering private sector opportunities, apart from two students already at councils. All of us, including Planning schools, must do better in bringing practitioners’ voices into the classroom to estoile the virtues of local government careers.

So what are the USPs of working in local government that we need to provide for future planners and coax those who have left?

Family vibes – As mentioned, local government needs to find its family vibe again; that camaraderie and team support is still there we just need to make it happen a bit more structured and less organically than before. Even in desperate overworked times, we need to make the time for personal development and bringing back the nurturing of internal talent. Whilst the training budgets might not be available anytime soon, allowing people the time to undertake learning away from staring at a screen needs to make a comeback.

Variety – There is a considerable amount of variety in local government, and this isn’t shouted about enough. No days are ever the same. In development management, each case is different; there are different scales and types of stuff to get your teeth into. You can flip from being a transport planner to an urban designer to an environmental specialist, all within a single application. Plan making is immensely varied with the development of evidence base, strategies, and community engagement. You can flip in a single day from demographer to site assessor to facilitator and policy writer in an afternoon! Councils are really good at providing opportunities to get straight into the big and exciting stuff; there’s so much opportunity for learning and personal growth within local government. One respondent reflected, “It’s exciting working in a local authority; there are opportunities to be exposed to so much variety of work across the councils; it’s really interesting”. This is something that respondents in the research missed, “I’ve been put back into a box; just do the policies and nothing else”.

There are things only a local authority can do – It’s pretty unique in local government to have a private sector counterpart of the profession; however, the simple fact is that there are elements of the planning system and implementing a national policy that can only be done by councils. You can’t make a Local Plan unless you’re in a local authority, and it’s the only place with the agency to be the decision maker on development proposals.

For plan making, it’s the only place where the strategy gets developed, and that involves making some critical bits of evidence around the need and community demographics (I loved that) without any agenda; it’s all about finding solutions for community benefit and being the voice of the community within the council.

Working in local government is the only way to improve a scheme and champion the community’s needs. Respondents agreed, “It’s so exciting having the autonomy to be the decision maker at a council; now I’m private, there’s always the client’s angle to include.”

Talking to people – Councils are the first port of call to discuss an issue. Working in local government allows conversations and genuine engagement with residents and stakeholders; plus, it is the only forum in which that engagement can result in decisions being made. Councils are good at talking to their communities, but perhaps Planning departments lag behind their councils regarding reach, methods, and available engagement tools. Local government is the best place to do it if you want a meaningful discussion with communities.

Politics – If you have an interest in politics and democracy, then start working in local government. It is the only place you can interact and view democracy up close. Seeing how local elections & appointing members work, taking part in the cut and thrust of the Planning Committee, and seeing how members bring the communities perspective to the development of a local plan are all absolutely fascinating. 

Working in local government is so varied and fulfilling for hundreds of reasons, and this article won’t be able to capture them all. Getting the USP of working in local government will be vital to attracting people into the planning profession and luring those that left back into the family.

Collectively, councils and the industry need to sell that USP. Let’s get the local government mojo back.

Planning Application backlog

I’ve been stuck on the world of environmental planning and national infrastructure for a good while, so it was nice to spend some time discussing the basic building blocks of development management the other day. Planning applications, and the backlog that some places are carrying, is back in vogue so I’ve been doing some of my customary asking clever people what they think and passing off their thoughts as my own.

Planning Application backlog – why it matters even more just now

To begin with the obvious. Planning casework takes time – consultation requires each case to sit quietly waiting for things to happen (or usually, not happen). So: declaring “zero backlog” is a nonsensical target – an LPA with 3000 cases per year should have a work-in-progress of between 300-400 applications at any one time. However, as WIP rises more people start to chase progress and the more context switching case workers have to do. Lastly the more time cases spend open, the more things can happen to them. Work gets revisited and slows down, complaints rise, people lose heart, confidence disappears, things get horrible.

So backlog has always been an important indicator. But now – it matters even more for two important reasons:

1. We have a secretary of state that is in a bullish mood. In the past there was often (quietly) been a bit of leeway for people to get slightly the wrong side of the performance targets but be able to talk their way out of it with some explanation and promise to improve. Currently only one LPA is designated for poor performance, and (if memory serves) only two have ever been on the naughty step. Currently there are ten LPAs formally on notice, and looking futher ahead there will probably be more.
2. The recent consultation on performance and fees gave a pretty clear steer that the way performance is going to be measured is going to be changed. It’s not clear what the new framework is going to look like, but it is possible that there is going to be a link between performance on statutory timetables, quality and some sort of “stick” to act as companion to the increased fee carrot. It feels like there is an opportunity to clear the decks in the short term, to have perhaps a better time of it in the long term.

We recognise that local authorities need time and resources to adjust to any new planning performance framework, and that sufficient advance notice will need to be given before any relevant assessment period is applied. It is not our intention to introduce a new planning performance framework until such time as we have introduced an increase in planning fees and invested in supporting the capacity and capability of planning departments

From the consultation – your advance notice is on the way!

Clearing the backlog – it’s not about shouting at people

Before I dive in, I need to make clear that backlog is a real thing that many places struggle with. Dealing with planning applications is complicated and a team game – this is not a situation fixed by individual planners putting in a hero shift. Success requires a step back and some careful thought into how to bring people together including some consultees, legal people and experts who may not work in the department.

Step 1: understand the cause

It is tempting to assume that the backlog is a product of lockdown, or staff turnover, or something else “just obvious”. It might well be. But if the problem is systemic (or to put it in simpler terms, something stupid that everybody does / something clever that nobody does) throwing extra resources around will only provide a temporary fix. We make a toolkit to help you and your teams challenge existing processes to ensure they are fit for purpose – help yourself.

Step 2: define the problem / size the job

I’ve heard it said backlog is complicated. I think it’s helpful to think of a distinction between cases ready to work on, and those that are not. Cases ready to work on older than 8 weeks are backlog. Cases 4-8 weeks are work in progress. Your choice whether to include them. Return to those that are not ready to work on. Is it the applicant? the agent? chase them. If it is not (we are waiting for a stat con) then I think these cases are in. Count them all up. Have a think about how much of the work has already been done / not done in each case. Make it visible.

Step 3: relate the task to the current run rate

So imagine in step 1 you learn you have 300 cases in backlog. What does this mean? How much work is this? A quick guide is to compare to how many you issue in a week. If you’re issuing 3000 cases per year then this could be 5 weeks work, or 25 days for your team. Although, some of the work might already be done (so easier). Or you might find it is the most tricky cases in backlog (so worse). Don’t cheat this step. It provides a realistic marker for how deep the hole is.

Step 4: introduce temporary extra capacity

Lots of options here, but I don’t think much new. Working weekends / having clear-down days / employing consultants / trying to find bottlenecks and batching work of similar types to get better value from consultees. Make sure there is a clear link between this extra effort and the impact on the backlog. Make sure temporary means temporary.

Step 5: take advantage of the planning application amnesty

The what? Yes, this step is a cheat. There isn’t a planning application amnesty, so councils have to eke out their “out of time” applications alongside their “in time” so they don’t crash their performance. Look – we make a tool to help them do this – they can work out how many backlog cases they can release within the reporting cycle. This is why we need an amnesty councils to have a good clear out – an especially good idea as we wave goodbye to one version of the performance regime and prepare for another.

I’m sure there are some who might argue that an amnesty will somehow let “naughty” councils off the hook without facing their just deserts. I suppose this is true, just as all amnesties are expedient in this way. However it is the only way that I can see of allowing councils to deal with a backlog promptly without inviting punishment – which in the case of clearing a backlog is the opposite of fair. And, let’s not forget, all this slightly abstract talk of backlog obscures the fact that on the opposite end of a stuck planning application is someone trying to carry out a development that matters to them very much indeed.

How should we plan for a better environment?

This is a question that’s been rattling around in my head for quite a long time – at least as long ago as 2018 when Defra launched its 25 Year Environment Plan (25YEP). Since then, a lot has happened, at a national and local level.

Nationally, as a result of the Environment Act, biodiversity net gain (BNG) is going to be mandatory in 8 months’ time. We are expecting 50 or so Responsible Authorities to be appointed by the Secretary of State to begin work on developing Local Nature Recovery Strategies (LNRS) officially next month, and local authorities have an enhanced duty to report on biodiversity. We have had the LURB, which will introduce planning reforms including Environmental Outcome Reports and mandatory Design Codes. Natural England has launched a new Green and Blue Infrastructure Framework and I, of course, am very mindful that we have 74 local authorities affected by nutrient neutrality. I could go on.

I often use the jigsaw analogy when talking about environmental planning. Another piece of the jigsaw arrived recently in the form of Defra’s Environmental Improvement Plan (EIP23), which provides a welcome degree of coherence to the Government’s ambitions on the environment.

Locally, since at least 2019, most councils and combined authorities have declared climate and/or ecological emergencies. Alongside the lessons from the Covid pandemic, this has had a transformative effect in the way that local leaders consider the challenges and opportunities of the environment agenda and it has driven a significant shift towards a more corporate and partnership-led approach. In turn, this has put a spotlight on place-making and the role of planning as an important vehicle for change.

So recent opportunities to have joined-up conversations with local authority planners, Defra and DLUHC, including at our Heads of Planning Conference, about how we should plan for a better environment have been very welcome and timely. 

But what have I learned and are we any closer to having a fully integrated set of environmental outcomes for planning?

It is evident that planners see a lot of complexity and uncertainty, which brings significant opportunities as well as challenges. Overall there is a tremendous amount of enthusiasm and positivity but a strong message that planning can’t do everything. I really like the way Rich Cooke at Essex talks about this – the need for planners to work with and through others to deliver outcomes.

I think there are 3 take-home messages from our recent engagement with local authority planners:

1. the importance of leadership – to ensure that the environment is central to policy and decision making
2. the need for land use to be multi-functional and deliver multiple benefits – how do we ensure enough land in the right place to provide food and energy security, housing, economic growth and meet the challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss?
3. the need to develop more innovative ways of coordinating and targeting funding and investment in people and projects to make change happen.

So back to my starting point. How do we do this?

Well, it isn’t one thing – it’s a collection of things involving 5 principles of good planning – leadership, policy, evidence, decision-making, and delivery.

Since the 25YEP was published, I’ve followed the trajectory of the natural capital concept and the idea of being able to measure environmental net gain, following the introduction of BNG. I like the concept of Natural Capital because it offers a broad framework for thinking about the environment and the benefits that nature provides. I like it because it introduces the idea of quantifying the value of nature which can help to inform land use policy and decision making about what we need, where and why. And I like it because it is understood by both the business and environment sectors, and therefore offers a common language for politicians, planners, developers, and communities. In other words, natural capital supports those 5 principles of good planning.

Many local authorities have initiated natural capital assessments, some have gone further and published natural capital investment plans, and others have started to model the data to inform development schemes, working with willing developers. However, from talking to planners and reviewing Local Plans, it is evident that natural capital is some way off becoming mainstreamed in planning. It is there, as part of the policy narrative, drawing on paras. 174 & 175 of the NPPF, but we seem to lack the means to implement it in a meaningful way, at least, that’s how I see it. Planners tell me that there is an inconsistent level of understanding of natural capital in a planning context and the lack of tools and strong policy context means that green and blue infrastructure is often the default policy framework for enhancing the provision of the benefits from nature.

The consensus is that whilst natural capital is useful as part of an evidence base, we need to learn how to use it and apply it in practice, so that it becomes more mainstream.

I’m optimistic that natural capital and environmental net gain will have their day. Planners are already thinking about natural capital benefits in the context of BNG and LNRS, and I know of one planning authority (Bedford) blazing a trail for environmental net gain with a policy requirement (DM7) for major development in the submission version of their Local Plan (currently in examination so watch this space!). There will surely be others I don’t know about.

The last few months spent talking to planners about this has taught me one big lesson – Government provides the framework but the really good stuff happens at the local level. Planners continue to push the boundaries and we all need to learn from and share with each other.

So, as a starter for ten, we’ll be sharing some information on our website summarising our conversations with planners, and a snapshot of what we think the different bits of the jigsaw are. If you have ideas and experience of natural capital and planning for the environment that you would like to share, we’d love to hear from you.

Returning to the start again, I don’t know if natural capital is the ‘one ring to bind them all’ (sorry for mixing my metaphors) but my instinct is that it is an important piece of the jigsaw that will help us deliver a fully integrated set of environmental outcomes for planning.

Harder Better Stronger Tougher BNGer

Back in November 2022 we held a couple of workshops for some volunteers from our BNG network. They were quite small events that Defra had asked us to arrange to road-test some guidance they are making to support the new “strengthened” version of a duty to report on the actions local authorities are taking to conserve and enhance biodiversity. You can see the deck we used on the main site. I recommend the timetable on slide 10 to get some sense of the changes required, and the survey results towards the end of it if you want to spoil the surprise of this post.

Some of what I go on to write will inevitably get a bit whingey, so let me start by being very clear that I think this sort of informal testing and engagement is truly EXCELLENT. Well done Defra. Working with the people who do the work can make policy and guidance more robust and pragmatic. We have established networks of clever and experienced people (BNG, NSIP and CIL are three we have set up in the last year) and they are very generous with their brains and thoughts. More, please. We don’t bite.

The “weak” duty

To recap slightly, there has been a duty for public bodies to consider biodiversity for many years, but it wasn’t particularly effective. The House of Lords select committee in 2017 does a great job at setting out the problem, and leads to the conclusion that the duty (in something we call the NERC Act) was weak because it lacked a reporting mechanism.

This missing reporting mechanism was therefore addressed in section 103 of the epic Environment Act 2021. This requires Local Authorities to regularly publish what they have been up to, and extends the duty to include how biodiversity net gain is working.

So, problem fixed? We roadtested the guidance contents and template in the workshops to see what our network thought. Whilst we were focused on seeing if the guidance was helpful, inevitably we spent some time talking about how the whole duty might work out in the real world. I thought the headlines worth sharing more widely. This is quite new to me, so any errors and misunderstandings are mine to own.

Resources and Capacity

Let’s get this one out of the way. It wouldn’t be a local government event if we didn’t talk about the difficulty of introducing change, especially change that

• relies on a very rare resource (ecologists in this case) that local government has to compete with consultancies to employ
• seems to be unfunded [edit: there is a big pot of money to prepare for BNG, so perhaps some of it is also for reporting, enforcement and the rest of it?]
• is landing in stressed organisations where there are already lots of other things on the corporate radars

Who reports?

The Act says (confusingly) that the Act applies to Local Authorities and Local Planning Authorities. But Local Government can be a complicated animal. In places where there is an obvious lead  unitary authority (probably also a responsible body for LNRS) the exercise should be straightforward. But big chunks of the country have several tiers of local government. Are County councils supposed to collate this on behalf of districts? Should all the districts do their own reporting to ensure local buy-in and political oversight? What about MCAs?

These sound like nit-picky points but they mean you can’t be sure that the duty to report is being applied everywhere. Imagine a map that gets coloured in when a report is published. There might be gaps in the map. Or the map might be coloured in twice. Or 3 or 4 times if there is an AONB or protected site strategy also reporting on biodiversity. It’s not just a compliance problem – things (interventions, results) might be double-counted, or triple counted. Messy.

Where to put the reports?

Where should the reports live? I know from bitter experience that trying to find reports on council web pages is grim. Our audience wanted some way of finding them, partly at this early stage so they could follow the noble Planner’s tradition of copying each others work. Publishing them all together in one place was one idea.

You can see from north of the border that it is not easy to run this kind of library, and any suggestion that we in PAS were to have some kind of role here is one tried to ignore.

I don’t know how much of a problem this will be for members of the public and other stakeholders. I’d imagine if you are a local you might not worry too much about the minute or two it might take you to find the report on your own council’s website – but if you want to compare and contrast or keep an eye on all the councils trying to improve some particular  class of habitat it could get boring really fast.

We also had a useful segue into how BNG registers might work, and how it will be a challenge to knit together the various data stores for onsite, offsite and national projects. This difficulty is going to be compounded if registers are kept by lots of different organisations some of whom might not last forever or have a great deal of interest beyond their own boundary.

It may be that the LNRS process might be the driver for some collaboration more generally, and that the duty data will be integrated with other organisational reports. But it would be nice to give some pushes in the right direction.

What to report?

The idea of a template was warmly welcomed. Common structures and approaches make for easier reporting and improve read-across and compatibility.

However the idea that there wouldn’t be any numbers (even voluntary numbers) baffled people. Many of the national targets (subsequently published in the EIP) can only be understood in numerical terms, so why not take the opportunity to hoover them up from local authorities? In fact there was a genuine gap between the LPAs, who wanted this to be based on facts and evidence expressed as numbers, and Defra who didn’t see that as important.

There is an unhelpful difference between the thinking behind this NERC reporting duty with where we are heading in the “digital planning” arena. The NERC duty is still in the “lets put a narratives in a pdf”, and the wider world of planning is thinking about machine-readable data in discoverable containers.

Why report?

This for me was the question we didn’t spend enough time on. In short I think there are probably two views:

• Local Authorities have to report because they have to comply with the duty. This is a compliance thing. 
• Making big organisations think about their potential to positively and negatively influence the environment and then doing something about it is big & difficult and we can learn from each other what works. This is a learning thing. 

Unfortunately I think the first view tends to crowd out the second. I don’t do “cross” in public so I’ll say no more.

It might be “stronger” but is it going to be a “better” duty?

Clearly only time will tell but my audience thought that it would not. Against which, I suppose, it is worth remembering the very low base we start from. This new model might not be perfect, but it represents a step on the way. Better perhaps to begin rather than waiting for perfection. 

Merely having anything to report – perhaps even something that requires clearance from cabinet might improve political visibility and traction. It might work well for those councils who have declared a biodiversity emergency to have a vehicle to explain what they are doing about it. It might also be a good way of playing to the council strength of convening partnerships and encouraging organisations to do the right thing by showcasing action in a public document.

It is also true that mandatory “must dos” can be quite helpful for officers in cash-strapped organisations where anything that isn’t statutory is unlikely to survive member scrutiny.

Lastly there was definitely a sense that while we might whinge about some of the implementation details, there was an enormous appetite to genuinely improve how councils work to improve nature. Better understanding, and better reporting, and avoiding greenwash are all things our audience was very keen to do. The reporting duty appears to be in force since January, and we’re still waiting for guidance and forms. Perhaps there’s hope that it will have picked up some of these helpful points from our group.

Modern local plans

For various reasons we’ve been doing some more thinking about digital local plans. I last wrote about them 18 months ago and I’m not entirely sure what’s happened since. In some ways there have been lots of exciting alphas and betas, and probably several months’-worth of show-and-tells. But in other ways, to be totally honest, I don’t know that I’m much further forwards in my own understanding of what they really are.

However, by happy chance, last week I went on a two day training course that I’d put my name in the hat for many months ago [side bar: it was good and you should go even if you think you know all this stuff inside out]. The course was called digital and agile for local government, which I worried would be a slightly paternalistic push for stuffy old councils to get on board the digital groove train. Instead it was an opportunity to think about what all this stuff means from first principles in the comparative calm and clarity of two days away from work.

Where I think have got to is that we should stop talking about digital local plans. The term is too loaded – to the point where I think it is unhelpful. I will try to explain, and to persuade you that there is a better way of approaching a better version of the local plan system.

Reminder: what is digital?

Let’s begin with a recap then, from first principles. What is “digital”? and what might a “digital local plan” be therefore?

I think an obvious and helpful place for us to start is the local digital declaration. Five years ago it established a set of commitments, ambitions and principles. It is worth reading properly (and going on a course to reflect on) but the principles are

• Service redesign around user need
• Using modular technology and open standards
• Sharing information safely
• Leadership of organisational change
• Working in the open and sharing good practice

This is all good stuff, and we can probably add a bit of arm-waving about the changing power relationship between the citizen and service providers, and how organisations operate and innovate in the internet age. Plus (for councils) the caution of digital exclusion.

And the reason my course was called digital and agile is that digital principles (and change) are often partnered with agile working practices. Out with boring old waterfall project management, and in with nimble and iterative value generation.

So, what is a digital local plan?

Well, having had a good look around the internet I think it’s fairly easy to explain what digital local plans are not. They are not

• Published as pdfs
• only readable by humans
• Documents with “baked in” data and maps as rasters

It is much more difficult to say positively what they are. The planning for the future white paper twice places them in sentences with positive adjectives, but I’m not sure much is revealed about the substance of what makes them new:

The new-style digital Local Plan would also help local planning authorities to engage with strategic cross-boundary issues and use data-driven insights to assess local infrastructure needs to help decide what infrastructure is needed and where it should be located. [..]

Reform should be accompanied by a significant enhancement in digital and geospatial capability and capacity across the planning sector to support high-quality new digital Local Plans and digitally enabled decision-making. 

Planning for the future white paper consultation 2020

There are also lots of examples of people sprinkling other related words and concepts, each of them fine in their own way but taken together make it almost impossible to know how or where to start. The language of user needs combine with agile processes and improvements in technology and accessibility. It sounds great so why are plans still slow, expensive and difficult?

This was my revelation. A Local Plans IS NOT A SERVICE, so the language and culture of digital promotes lots of distracting but plausible concepts and methods to confuse us all. [clearly PLANNING APPLICATIONS ARE TOTALLY A SERVICE but let’s get to that elsewhere]. A local plan is the bunch of policies you need to deliver services against. More certain (and more rule-based) policy = more digitally enabled consenting service.

So, talking about digital local plans encourages confusion. Lots of well-meaning but misapplied models. A mismatch between agile (where responsiveness is prized) to local plan policies (where stability is prized). So what should we be talking about?

Modern local plans

Modern local plans will share some qualities. They will not all look and feel the same, for the obvious reason that places are very different. This bears repeating. Some places have coastlines, others have mountains. Setting out to make local plans consistent is wrong. Go and look at Southend, then look at Hereford. However that is not to say they should all be unique – planning has a long and noble history of copying and pasting, and that should not stop now.

In no particular order here are some qualities of modern local plans – if you like this is how I would organise and challenge a plan to see if it is “modern” and fit for purpose. To make it easier to use and explain I have divided it across 3 dimensions:

Currency (what does up to date mean?)

• Plans must be based on the 2023 NPPF
• They must mesh with National DM Policies
• Plans cannot ever be more than 5 years old without a genuine review
• Between reviews the plan should be stable and unchanging (or go through well understood phases of waxing and waning versions)

Utility (how does it work?)

• Data and measures should reflect standards and be spatial where necessary
• Spatial policies should be made available in response to a query – eg “which policies apply at this point?”
• Policies should be made available in response to a query – eg “what is policy XYZ?”
• Policies should where possible be expressed in measurable ways and reflect how they might be best monitored – they should be designed with a feedback loop in mind

Accessibility: (Will people be interested in it?)

• Plans should address both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Plans should explain what they are trying to achieve, and the choices that flow from the strategy
• Where appropriate plans should use maps, diagrams and pictures to show what they mean
• Where appropriate plans should link wider themes to the specifics of places
• The success of a plan should be reviewed routinely and reported publicly

Onwards

I love lots of what “digital” gets us. I love lots of the mindset and some of the tools and methods when correctly applied. But it’s time to stop talking about “digital local plans” as if that means something in particular, and explain in simple language what a modern local plan should be, do, and look like. In my amateurish way I have started a list of what I think they are, and hopefully in another 18 months we will have some real examples to see how far away I was.