The Planning Delivery Fund

The Government has announced a new Planning Delivery Fund to help speed up planning decisions and help deliver quality new homes.

The new £25 million fund recognises that there are difficulties for local authorities in delivering the scale and quality of housing growth required. The first tranche of the fund (totalling £15.8 million) has recently been released and will support authorities with the required resources to plan for new homes and infrastructure in areas of high housing need. The aim is to enable councils to “process more applications, implement changes and train planners to tackle the housing challenges faced by their local area”.

The first wave of the fund has been split into three streams to support:

• local authorities working together across boundaries to ensure that “there are the skills and resources where they are needed to plan strategically for housing growth”.
• a step change in the design quality of developments to give local authorities access to the best design and town planning advice, to ensure the Government’s ambitions for “quality as well as quantity”.
• “innovation in the planning system” to enable local authorities to process a greater number of planning applications and enable the delivery of “more quality homes”.

All local planning authorities are able to bid into the three streams for funding. A total of 68 projects will receive funding from the first tranche of the fund from 2017 until 2019.

For any planning related enquiry, please contact the Michelmores Planning Team.