300 Planners to save us all: Realistic or not?

05 Nov 24

On 8th July, just 4 days after the Labour election victory, Rachel Reeves delivered her first speech as Chancellor. With planning reform at the top of the agenda, the speech outlined a number of key changes to the planning system which sought to speed up housing delivery and stimulate economic growth, the end goal being to “make every part of the country better off”. Along with a promise to restore mandatory housing targets and the creation of a new “taskforce” to accelerate stalled housing sites, the Chancellor outlined a commitment to supporting local authorities with “300 additional planning officers across the country”.

This has since been costed and a budget of £46 million has been pledged by government to assist councils with the hiring of these new graduates and apprentices. This process is expected to start in January 2025 with the hiring of 20 new planners per month, the end goal being for every local authority across the country to have at least one full-time planner by 2026 / 2027 which is currently not the case.

Iceni is supportive of these plans to assist local council planning teams and is actively engaged in training programmes which encourage the exchange of knowledge and personnel between the public and private sector planning departments. With our Engagement team regularly speaking at industry events, Iceni also contribute to thought pieces and regularly provide CPDs to Planning Officer Societies, reaching over 12 councils in the last 12 months. A Plan-Making CPD was also held by our Strategic Planning team for Swindon Borough Council last year. This involved a simplified simulation for the allocation of housing in the borough using real world constraints and targeted discussions to determine how best to utilise existing and proposed infrastructure improvements.

Additionally, in May and September 2024 respectively, Archie Noden and Will Clutton from Iceni’s London Planning Team signed up to the RPTI’s Young Planners of Tomorrow programme which gives planners in the first 10 years of post-qualification experience the opportunity to shadow a chief planning officer to understand the challenges and processes involved in making strategic decisions at senior level in either local government or at a private consultancy.

This experience was found to be mutually beneficial, first providing Will and Archie with a useful insight into some of the pressures currently affecting public sector decision making but also proved useful for Barnet and Haringey Council who were introduced to the ways in which a private planning consultancy runs large projects and how we liaise with clients and consultants to deliver viable developments.

This type of exposure is exactly what is needed for the 300 new planners that the government aim to recruit over the next 2 years as the exercise resulted in a greater understanding of the circumstances under which public and private sector planners are operating – inevitably leading to greater levels of communication between public and private sector teams.

Whilst there is a degree of speculation as to whether 300 new officers will be enough to re-tool council planning departments to manage what they need to as efficiently as needed, the pledge to increase the number of local authority planners is broadly welcomed. What is clear is that there needs to be good communication between the new recruits and the private sector to ensure that both sides are working together to deliver housing and economic development at a greater rate than before.