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

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, what assessment her Department has made the adequacy of the number of local authority planning officers in South Derbyshire to help support the Government's wider planning reform ambitions.

While it is for individual local authorities to make their own assessments of their workforce, the government appreciate that planning departments across the country are experiencing challenges with recruitment, retention, and skills gaps and that in many cases these issues are having a negative impact on service delivery.

At the Budget, the Chanceller announced a £46 million package of investment into the planning system as a one-year settlement for 2025-2026. A proportion of this funding will be used to support capacity and capability in local planning authorities, including the recruitment and training of 300 graduate and apprentice planners and developing the skills needed to implement reforms and unlock housing delivery.

This will be further underpinned by increases in planning fees that will help improve the resourcing of planning application services, so that local planning authorities can fund the skills they need.

More broadly, the Department’s established Planning Capacity and Capability programme is also developing a wider programme of support, working with partners across the planning sector, to ensure that local planning authorities have the skills and capacity they need, both now and in the future, to modernise local plans and speed up decision making, including through innovative use of digital planning data and software.