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

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, what recent steps her Department has taken to reduce backlogs of cases before the Planning Inspectorate.

The Planning Inspectorate has been performing well across a number of key areas such as local plan examinations, nationally significant infrastructure project applications, s62a applications and planning appeals proceeding by hearings and inquiries. It is, for example:

• meeting all statutory timeframes for national infrastructure applications;
• increasingly deciding planning appeals by hearing and inquiry in around 26 weeks (the ministerial measure), having already cleared a backlog of casework; and
• beginning to decide enforcement appeals by hearing and inquiry in around 26 weeks (the ministerial measure) for the first time in many years, as it clears a long-standing backlog of casework.

The Inspectorate is implementing actions to maintain performance in these areas and to improve end-to-end times for other casework such as those cases decided after a written exchange of evidence. In the short term those actions are focused around increasing capacity by:

• increasing the available capacity for inspectors/other decision makers by recruiting more. The Inspectorate has significantly increased the number of inspectors it employs over the past 18 months and is on track to recruit additional inspectors later this year;
• using contract (non-salaried) inspectors to the full extent of their availability and expanding the range of casework they determine; and training inspectors to handle different casework to increase flexibility; and
• moving more inspectors onto enforcement written representations casework in Spring 2025 once the work on improving hearings performance has progressed further.

In addition, the Inspectorate has designed and developed a new digital Appeals Service currently in Beta phase. This new service improves the process for submitting appeals, including reducing the number of invalid appeals submitted. In turn, this reduces the number of validation checks required and will speed up the time taken to validate appeals. The new service has been expanded to cover all local planning authority areas. Later this year the existing website will be closed so that all new appeals are submitted via the new service.