Planning issues in Chichester

Developers who delay for years after receiving planning permission to build new homes should be taxed, a Chichester councillor has said.

Talk to Jonathan Brown, deputy leader of the district council, about the planning system and you uncover plenty of frustration about the way things feel skewed in favour of developers, leaving local authorities with an illusion of control.

Once given planning permission, developers have a set time – often three years – to get things going. This means they can do as little as build a track onto the development site and dig a hole in the ground to meet the planning requirments, then down tools.

It’s a situation that has caused frustration for councils across the country. They give permission for a development of, for example, 100 homes but nothing materialises for years, if at all.

Mr Brown said: “If they’ve got planning permission they can start paying for the infrastructure and community services. Guess what? They’ve now got an incentive to hurry up and build those houses.”

Unfortunately neither he nor anyone else sitting on a local council, has a say in how these things are done. They simply have to follow the rules laid out by Government – rules that can change at the whim of those in power, often to the detriment of Local Authorities.

One such incident came around a year ago as the council was preparing its Local Plan for examination.

There are basically two key targets which local authorities have to meet – the total number of homes assigned by the government to be built over 15 years, and the rate at which those homes have to be delivered. The latter is called the five-year housing land supply and Chichester has achieved it – just.

If a council has a Local Plan in place but is not building homes quickly enough, something called the tilted balance kicks in, where the planning rules are tipped massively in favour of developers.

Mr Brown said: “The issue we’ve got is the Government in December last year changed the rules and new Local Plans now have to increase their delivery rate by 20 per cent from July 2026. 

“The challenge is that delivery is basically outside of council control. You’ve got private developers building on private land for largely a private market – and that market is currently in a bit of a slump.

“The district council can do its part – it can make a Plan, it can allocate land, but it can’t force developers to build.”

In an effort to meet the new delivery rate – an increase of hundreds of homes – the council is trying a number of things such as making it a bit easier to bring forward some already planned developments and searching for brownfield sites which could be used for housing.

In the meantime, the authority has asked the government for a six-month extension to the July deadline.

While Mr Brown is not a member of the planning committee, he recognises the frustrations felt by some.

The members are there because they are elected and know the area, but they are essentially taking part in a legal process. 

Mr Brown said: “Whatever their opinions and whatever the evidence, they have to follow the law. If the law says it’s illegal to call water wet then they’re not allowed to call water wet, regardless of what the evidence tells them.

“They are often faced with decisions where they can see that an application has a lot of draw-backs and under any rational strategy it ought to be refused, but they know the planning system requires them to pass it.

“If they do refuse it, it’s not just that we go to appeal and lose the appeal – and that costs money. Also at appeal we lose the ability to shape that final approval. It’s harder to put in conditions, make changes, negotiate with applicants.”

And just to give councils and councillors even less power, if they lose too many appeals, the government can ‘designate’ them – meaning the authority would no longer be allowed to make planning decisions. Everything would essentially go straight to an appeal, costing the taxpayer hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Mr Brown said: “There’s this illusion that local authorities have control over planning – but the system is set up to make councils unable to plan, in my view.

“I would like to change where the balance of power is. I wouldn’t challenge national government setting a housing target, but there are probably ways they could be set in a better way.

“I think the local authority’s job should be to make a plan to deliver that housing target – and if it does that, then it’s job done. 

“Planning applications that aren’t part of that plan should be refused. If it’s not in the council’s power to deliver it – and it’s not, it’s up to the private developers – then the council and the community should not be penalised for things that are outside of its control.”