To be honest, the planning department cannot afford to pay salaries that I would pay to [skilled planners], and I cannot find them.—Mr Brian Mark, Director, Fulcrum Consulting[1]

1.  England's planning system oils the engine of economic growth. Decisions made by planners and local planning authorities shape and underpin the construction of new houses, roads, rail links, supermarkets, schools and every other structure in the built environment. What is built—and where, when, how and by whom—may depend primarily on need and demand matching financial viability and willingness to supply, but the on-the-ground delivery of projects, and of high-quality projects, relies substantially on the ability of planners in the public and private sectors to facilitate their design and implementation. The remark quoted above, made by the director of an engineering consultancy during our recent inquiry into Existing Housing and Climate Change, pinpointed two significant difficulties—too few planners and inadequate skills among those who remain—that impede the capacity of the planning system to meet the demands placed upon it. These shortages prompted us to investigate how well placed the system is to cope with even greater challenges in the coming decade.

Labour shortage

2.  Local authorities in England process more than 650,000 applications every year, ranging from small-scale plans for household extensions and advertising consents to large-scale mixed-use developments, and major projects such as waste incinerators and power stations.[2] This number has risen by around a quarter since 1999-2000, when about 526,000 applications were made.[3]

3.  This expansion in demand for planning services has not been matched by the supply of new planners. Partly as a result of economic downturn in the late 1980s and early 1990s and a lack of investment in planning at that time, and partly because a number of planning schools consequently reduced intakes and closed courses, significant recruitment and retention problems have arisen for most local authorities, particularly the non-emergence of a 'missing generation' of mid-level planners aged in their 30s and 40s, ready to fill the senior roles from which their senior colleagues will increasingly retire.

Skills gap

4.  The shortage of planners has also coincided, since 2004, with a significant shift away from development control-led planning towards 'spatial' planning, which requires a range of new managerial and other 'generic' skills and which has also altered the technical skills range required by planning professionals. This has led two Government-funded bodies, charged with meeting the demand for a sustainable communities workforce and promoting high-quality development, to outline the risk to future programmes, particularly the substantial house-building targets the Government has set itself as it develops the Housing and Regeneration Bill, the Planning Bill and the Climate Change Bill. The Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) notes that

one of the biggest challenges for the planning system is how to cope with the big increase in the number of residential applications that are coming forward to meet the commitment to build 3 million new homes by 2020. Managing proposals to ensure that what gets built makes a positive contribution to the local area, in accordance with national policies, requires a big increase in the skills capacity of planning departments.[4]

The Academy for Sustainable Communities (ASC), estimating that there will be a 46 per cent labour gap in local government planning by 2012 on the current trajectory, concludes that delivery of the Government's ambitious targets will be hampered if action is not taken to build skills and capacity across the sector.[5]

5.  Private sector developers are equally concerned that staff and skills shortages within the planning system will exacerbate the pressures already being felt by builders and developers, particularly in a declining housing market. Liz Peace, Chief Executive of the British Property Federation (BPF), told us:

If you get more and more delays in the system then you are going to see developers who are less and less willing to undertake big and high risk schemes and that is going to become even more relevant given the current climate for development and the current attitude to risk […] planning oils the development system, and if planning is not working well, the development system is going to be severely impacted.[6]

6.  There is a significant risk that major Government targets for development and regeneration will be missed because our planning system is unable to manage either the volume or the variety of tasks it will be asked to perform between now and 2020. This includes, perhaps most notably, the intention to build 3 million new homes. Wider economic well-being and delivery of the Government's environmental priorities could well be hindered simply because the system cannot cope. Two linked and chronic problems need to be urgently addressed to prevent this—a drastic shortage of planning officers, estimated to affect 46 per cent of local authority posts by 2012, and a significant and growing skills gap among those planners who remain within the system.

The scope of our inquiry

7.  As noted above, the genesis of this inquiry was the identification during our previous inquiry into Existing Housing and Climate Change of a planning skills gap, a topic we considered worthy of further investigation. We took as our starting point Sir John Egan's 2004 review Skills for Sustainable Communities, commissioned by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM) to identify means of improving skills across the 100-plus professions engaged in sustainable communities work. We appreciate that, as Sir John argued, the wider needs of sustainable communities will not be met by upskilling just one set of professionals in isolation.[7] The Chief Economic Development Officers Society and County Surveyors Society also told us:

Planning skills are clearly vital but whilst town and country planning is a broad profession, a wide range of others are equally vital including architects, surveyors, highway engineers, transport planners, economic development, community safety and other professionals.[8]

We agree that the problems discussed in this Report apply equally to many other professions within the confederation that makes up the sustainable communities workforce, estimated at around 750,000 people—3 per cent of all England's workforce.[9] We chose to concentrate on planning, however, in order to draw lessons from a profession of particular importance to future economic development and regeneration, and to pinpoint actions that the Department responsible for the planning system, Communities and Local Government (CLG), can take to remedy the deficiencies being experienced in both staffing numbers and skills. Many of the conclusions we draw and recommendations we make on how to raise both the numbers of planners and the skills they possess offer lessons for other sectors of the sustainable communities workforce.

8.  We are grateful to the 50 organisations that contributed evidence to our inquiry, and to those who gave evidence at four public sessions. We are particularly grateful to our two specialist advisers for the inquiry: Kelvin MacDonald is an independent policy consultant and affiliated lecturer at the Department of Land Economy, Cambridge, and was previously chief policy adviser to the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI); and Dr Helen Walker is an independent policy consultant who was previously National Advisor: Sustainable Communities at the Improvement and Development Agency for Local Government (IDeA), a member of the Egan Review Secretariat and Chair of the Department of Urban Development and Regeneration at the University of Westminster.

Review-itis

9.  We are conscious that in reporting on planning skills we join a long line of bodies which have sought to raise the status and skill levels of the profession. The Egan review of 2004, already referred to, is one of what Sheffield Hallam University terms a "plethora" of publications that have entered the field in the past decade; the RTPI rightly notes that there has been "inevitably some duplication of effort; and some reinventing of wheels".[10] Lord Rogers' Urban Task Force (1998), the Planning Green papers of the late 1990s, the Barker review of Housing Supply (2004), the Leitch Review of Skills (2005), the Barker review of Land Use Planning (2006), the ASC's Mind the Skills Gap report (2007) and the Calcutt Review of Housebuilding (2007) are, perhaps, the major inquiries to touch on the subject, but further investigations have been made by, among others, the Audit Commission and London Councils.[11] As the Minister for Housing, the rt Hon. Caroline Flint MP, told us, "we can end up into a bit of review-itis situation, where no sooner do we do one thing, we have another review".[12]

10.  Yet, even if the constant and repeated focus on skills and labour shortages in planning and beyond has resulted in review upon review, report upon report, it has not brought about the change in trajectory required both in the numbers of people entering, and staying in, the planning profession or in the levels and range of skills they require to do the job. The Minister for Housing and the Department for Communities and Local Government seem likely to continue to suffer from 'review-itis' until the repeated concerns expressed and recommendations made over the past 10 years are translated into actions that raise both the number of people who want to be planners and the range and level of skills they possess.

Following up on Egan

11.  The Egan review contained 24 recommendations, most of which were subsequently implemented by the ODPM, the predecessor of CLG. The most significant result was the creation in 2005 of the Academy for Sustainable Communities. Sir John himself was clearly concerned that progress on the outcomes of his recommendations had not been systematically monitored, saying: "If somebody has written a report like this, I would have thought it axiomatic that I should have had some contact with it over time, yes. That seems not to have been the case."[13] The Minister for Housing agreed that it would be right to ask what the impact has been of the Egan review's 24 recommendations and said that she would provide as much detail as possible on that. We welcome the assurance given by the Minister for Housing that the impact of the Egan review's implementation will be measured, but we recommend that in future the Department for Communities and Local Government ensure as a matter of routine that proper mechanisms are in place to follow up the accepted recommendations of reviews carried out by it and by its predecessor, the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister.

2   Kate Barker, Review of Land Use Planning: final report and recommendations, December 2006, p. 113. Back

3   Ibid, p. 113. Back

4   Ev 147 Back

5   Ev 134 Back

6   Q 70 Back

7   Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, The Egan Review: Skills for Sustainable Communities, April 2004, p. 33. Back

8   Ev 51 Back

9   Academy for Sustainable Communities, Mind the Skills Gap, 2007, p. 22. Back

10   Ev 105 Back

11   Ev 61-63 and Ev 150-153 Back

12   Q 225 Back

13   Q 24 Back