Derry the ‘slowcoach’ council for planning

DERRY City and Strabane District Council took four times the average time to decide on major planning applications in the last year, new figures have shown.

The council took an average of 305 weeks to decide on large scale applications between April 2016 and March 2017.

That’s more than three times longer than the next slowest per- forming council. It made determinations on 19 applications. Almost three-quarters of those were legacy cases, which were received prior to the devolution of planning powers to councils in 2015.

A spokeswoman for Derry City and Strabane District Council said the “long processing time for major applications” was due to a “small number of complex legacy applications that had been under consideration for a number of years and were passed to council for determination as part of the transfer of planning functions”.

She said aside from legacy applications, the council processed applications in an average of just over 46 weeks.

Meanwhile, there were 13,037 planning applications received in Northern Ireland during the last year.

That’s an increase of 7% over the previous financial year and the highest number recorded in any year since 2011/12. Just shy of 13,000 applications were decided, which is an increase of 17% over the previous year.

But it’s still less than half the peak level of 30,161 decisions recorded in 2005/06 before the economic downturn.

The overall Northern Ireland approval rate for all planning applications for 2016/17 was 94.0% and the average processing time for major applications was 69 weeks across all councils. That is up from the 46 weeks reported for the previous year, more than double the target time of 30 weeks.

Across all councils, it took on average around 16 weeks to process applications to a decision or a withdrawal.

The shortest average processing time was nine weeks in Mid and East Antrim, while the longest was 23 weeks in Newry, Mourne and Down.