Backlog of planning applications in city is ‘simply unacceptable’

Hundreds are still to be decided

THE backlog of hundreds of undecided planning applications in Portsmouth exacerbated by the outbreak of Covid-19 has only lessened slightly in the last year, despite council efforts to reduce it.

Portsmouth City Council contracted outside help from specialist firm Terraquest at a cost of £50,000 in a bid to clear more than 300 applications but its cabinet member for planning Hugh Mason said this had not been successful.

‘Some of them were done very well but quite a number of them we had to redo,’ he said. ‘This was surprising because they had a very good reputation but something had gone wrong, so we are not going to continue down that road. It didn’t work and was a drain on our resources.’

He said that despite this and efforts to recruit more planners, there was still a backlog of 280 planning applications waiting for a decision. The council typically deals with between 800 and 1,000 each year.

Conservative councillor Ryan Brent, the group’s planning spokesman, said the processing time, particularly for smaller schemes, was ‘simply unacceptable’.

At Tuesday’s full council meeting he called on the council to share information setting out its progress in clearing the backlog and to ‘set out and articulate options and solutions’ for how it will do this.

‘More transparency and [councillor] oversight and engagement is necessary to support council officers in further reducing the backlog,’ his motion said.

‘[The] council now regretfully condemns the Liberal Democrat administration's performance and mismanagement noting that there has been substandard progress in reducing the backlog.

‘It is now time to address this and put an end to the unnecessary delays impacting the residents of our city and ensure all applications are dealt with properly and that those undertaking the processing of such applications display the utmost competence and consistency with respect to the applications that are being dealt with.’

Cllr Mason said the backlog, which was initially caused by issues with nitrate pollution and increased by working from home arrangements required at the outset of the pandemic, was being ‘proactively’ dealt with.

‘We're looking at a systems approach and new ways of working,’ he said. ‘This seems to be the way forward and on test runs we’ve managed to get the average time for a planning application to be decided down to less than 24 days.

‘We can do it but we need to reorganise many of our systems to make that work.’

Cllr Brent’s motion, will require the council to provide a detailed update to be provided to councillors when they meet in March.

Some of them were done very well but quite a number of them we had to redo.

Hugh Mason