The Localism Bill, the continued prospect of full fee recovery and the 'presumption in favour of sustainable development' contained in the Government's Plan for Growth. Few council departments have been the subject of as much change in recent years as Planning, and few face as many uncertainties over the future.

The past few years have seen an increased focus on modernising and improving planning services, and they are under pressure to maintain the pace of change. Pressure to lower costs, process work faster and deliver a better service to users are issues that many planning organisations will have faced. Whilst we don't believe that these issues are necessarily mutually exclusive, they do provide a backdrop to even greater change to come. In facing such change the organisations often best placed, in our experience, to help understand and explore these issues, are in fact other local authorities. Such sessions, supported by comparable data, offer the opportunity to investigate differential performance and the outcomes of particular improvement activity, whilst gaining the benefit of first-hand experience.

In other areas the national policy landscape has been subject to constant review over recent years, central to which has been a continuing tension between delivering sufficient property on one hand, and conserving the physical environment and green-belt on the other. This is still showing no clear sign of conclusion as the tension between the localism bill and the 'presumption in favour' aspect of the Plan for Growth will take some working out. All of this takes place whilst departments are trying to manage a broad and nuanced range of activity that runs from the development management process including enforcement, through to more strategic, design and conservation based work.

One area we have explored with authorities in the past is drawing out the links between these many activities and identifying where the value is added to the process. For example how are strategic planning documents and long term targets shaping the activities of the day to day development management team, and is this activity leading to the desired outcomes, of more employment land being developed increasing local employment.

The future may be uncertain however an understanding of the drivers, impact, and cost of current processes will help to ensure authorities are as well placed as they can be to face the coming challenges.

See our offer on the left and links to some of our work.