As a town planner specialising in gaining consents to alter listed buildings, I agreed with just about everything in Hugo Cox’s article about the struggle to make England’s older homes energy efficient (“Retrofit roadblocks”, House & Home, April 22). Delays have never been worse, inconsistency never greater. A main reason for this is the under-funding of local authority services over more than a decade.
But the problem is much wider. All forms of sustainable development (from much-needed housing, including affordable housing, to projects delivering economic development) are now mired in the planning system.
Successive governments over decades have tried to tinker with planning policy to fix this. The Johnson government went so far as to propose a wholesale reinvention of our planning system, proposals the same government ditched because they were, it seems, vote losers in Tory seats. Braver political decisionmaking, supporting major investment, is needed, but that is elusive.
We can, though, get more resources into this in two ways. First is to increase fees for major applications enabling more staff to be hired. Cox, incidentally, does not point out that no fees are charged for listed building consent applications, which are often time consuming to determine.
Higher fees would in many cases be insignificant relative to the cost of delay (particularly in times of high interest rates). But then, second, you need more staff. The solution to that is for government to fund bursaries on planning courses, requiring graduates to spend the first few years of their careers in local authorities or public bodies.
Delay from lack of resources is now turning planning into a macroeconomic problem.
Chris Miele
London SE24, UK