Question to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government:

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, if he will make it his policy to increase public engagement on planning applications in growth and renewal areas.

Our proposals will put effective community engagement at the heart of planning. We recognise that the current planning system has a very poor record on community engagement, with information that is hard to find, and difficult to understand, use and trust.

Our proposals seek to prioritise engagement; with better input from communities at the stage of preparing plans and design codes, local people with have real influence over both the location and design of development. And by taking a digital-first approach to modernise the planning process, we can use new tools and platforms to improve the user experience. From making applications to improving citizen engagement, our reforms will make it easier for people to understand what is being proposed and to feed their views into the system.

Rather than having to react to unexpected and ad hoc planning applications, our reforms will give communities a genuinely meaningful voice from the start of the planning process.