Statutory Consultees

Statutory consultees play an important role in the planning application process by providing expert advice on significant environmental, transport, safety, and heritage issues.  There are currently 13 organisations that local planning authorities (LPAs) must consult about specialist issues when they receive relevant planning applications, from the Environment Agency and National Highways to Historic England.

Their role is very important, but there is widespread agreement that the system is not working well, causing needless duplication of effort and delays in making decisions. Hence the Government issued in November a consultation document about ways to make the system more efficient and effective. One of the key aims is to reduce the amount of statutory consultation and follow up requests that are required, and it is difficult to argue against the proposition that there are currently too many needless referrals to the consultees.

The most eye-catching proposal is to remove Sport England, the Gardens Trust, and the Theatres Trust from the list of consultees, mitigated by requirements to notify these bodies of a subset of cases which have the highest impacts. Other measures seek to reduce the number of needless referrals and to improve levels of engagement between LPAs, developers, and the statutory consultees. Perhaps most important, statutory consultees will gain extra funding through planning fees and an ability to provide pre-application advice on a cost-recovery basis. Whether this will make more than a small dent in the funding that the consultees have lost since 2010 is far from certain.

Various other measures are proposed, and many of them seem reasonable. But our response to the consultation, available in our What we’ve said archive, makes clear that we have reservations about some of them. It remains to be seen, for instance, how well changes to the requirement for LPAs to notify statutory consultees of certain kinds of applications will work, with a particular worry about removing the requirement to notify Historic England of works on Grade 2 listed buildings (works on Grade 2* and Grade I buildings will retain that requirement).

Our main concern, however, is that the proposals do not do nearly enough to address the root cause of the problems with the statutory consultation system at present: the radical reductions in funding over the last decade and a half that have left both LPAs and statutory consultees such as the Environment Agency and Natural England without the necessary resources to make the system work as effectively as it should.

Michael Jubb, Chair