Decision details

The West of England Local Enterprise Partnership Board received feedback from a number of groups within the development sector several of whom had raised issues around barriers to growth caused by planning. The Board asked the Infrastructure and Place Group to consider ways of overcoming negative perceptions of the planning process to the benefit of all parties, including the identification of procedures which could be applied more consistently.  The IPG recommended that the West of England LEP should in conjunction with the representatives of the development industry publish a planning toolkit to promote a positive and consistent approach to handling large scale planning applications.  The Cabinets of all four West of England authorities are being asked to endorse the protocol in time for their next meeting in April.  In order to meet this timetable this report is brought to Cabinet under special urgency.

(1) To ADOPT the West of England Planning Toolkit and report its agreement to the next West of England Infrastructure and Place Group meeting.

The Toolkit is designed to provide a consistent approach to the development management process across the four authorities in the West of England, without overriding the adopted Policies within the individual Councils such as Local Plans or Core Strategies.

A decision not to endorse this joint protocol would not enable a consistent message across the West of England.  It would maintain the status quo in terms of this Councils Development Management processing response.  It would also potentially send out a negative message in terms of the state of readiness to deliver the growth set out in the Councils Core Strategy. It would also risk the loss of potential development investment