Changes to planning system will silence local voices

Durham County Council met on Wednesday 15 July to discuss amongst other issues the local impact of the Planning & Infrastructure Act 2025. In essence the government is proposing changes through the Town & Country Planning Regulations that will refer most minor planning applications to senior officers of the council for a decision rather than put them before the council's area planning committees for deliberation as they do at the moment.

As things stand Durham County Council has a Countywide planning committee which considers major planning applications such as large-scale housing developments and infrastructure issues such as wind and solar farms. Alongside this committee there are also three Area planning committees where relatively minor planning applications are decided. However a majority of minor planning matters are already referred to senior planning officers or directors who make decisions by themselves under what is known as Delegated Authority. At the moment local members have the right to refer any potentially contentious matter to the planning committee for a decision, and this is where residents and their local councillor have the opportunity to tell committee members what they think of a particular planning application.

Changes through the Town & Country Planning Regulations are to due to come into force on 31 October this year, which will mean the three Area committees will be scrapped, with most applications to be decided under Delegated Authority instead. Although the Countywide committee will continue it will subsume the responsibilities of the Highways committee which will also cease to exist from 31 October.

At Wednesday's council meeting I raised my objections to the changes because they remove the right of residents and local councillors to have their say on planning matters that might affect them and their communities. I fully acknowledge the need to speed up the government's pledge to deliver on its housebuilding programme - something that will bring housing developments to those locations where it's most needed - but there are better ways to achieve those aims other than to silence the voices of local communities.

For decades planning committees have been one of the main ways for residents and their local councillors to have a direct input on issues that shape their own villages and towns. This is a vital element of local democracy, especially so in this case because no one knows their own communities better than the residents who have sustained them for generations,

By way of an example of the potential problems ahead, there's a developer currently making preliminary enquires about potential housing developments on two patches of land in our villages (full details here: Developer seeks public opinion on potential housing development sites). There has been no planning application submitted at the moment, but if the developer eventually decides to go ahead and submit an application it's likely that local residents will no longer have the opportunity to air their views in front of the council's planning committee. Instead the decision will be made under delegated authority by an officer of the council, and I don't think that's good enough.

I'm not implying that officers aren't able to make decisions of this nature, in most cases they do that already, but I'm genuinely concerned that the people who know their own villages better than anyone else will no longer be able to put their case in the public arena of a planning committee. That cannot be seen as anything other than a retrograde step that closes down the voices of the people who matter the most and will be most affected by planning decisions.

The Planning & Infrastructure Act is already up and running so the chances of anything changing soon are slim at best. But that doesn't mean we should back away or stay silent on matters like this that will conceal the decision-making process behind closed doors and undermine local democracy itself.

As this is a central government issue I've contacted the office of the Easington MP Grahame Morris with a request that our concerns are raised in all the right places. If the government is serious about empowering local communities they could get off to a good start by making sure that the decision-making process on planning matters remains in the hands of local authority members and the residents they're elected to represent.