How is Coronavirus (COVID-19) impacting on the three-year planning permission timescale?

We caught up with David Maxwell, GL Hearn's Head of National Planning, to get his take on how and why COVID-19 is impacting developers' ability to meet the three-year planning permission timescale?

It would be surprising if there wasn't some impact on developers’ ability to implement all existing planning permissions within the normal planning permission timescales through such unprecedented times. The ability to secure all necessary pre-commencement planning conditions may well be restricted due to a lack of access to carry out site surveys, and surveys potentially providing abnormal data which may not be acceptable to planning authorities and statutory consultees. That is without also considering that developers themselves have been unable to proceed with works on-site due to the lockdown.        

We are advising our clients to keep existing planning permissions alive through discharge of pre-commencement planning conditions and by commencing development so that extant planning permissions do not lapse. Where permissions can lapse then there will, in most cases, be associated costs and risks in securing a fresh planning consent later. In some cases, planning policies and site-specific circumstances may have changed such that securing similar favourable planning consents may prove difficult.  

Will UK government introduce extensions of planning permission timescales for English applicants? Will they be reluctant to do this? Questions we are all asking ourselves right now.

I would be surprised if government did not introduce extensions to planning permission timescales through COVID-19. Such measures would be reminiscent of the powers introduced in October 2009, and extended in 2013, allowing for applications for extension of planning permissions granted on or before a specific date. Where such powers are introduced it would be expected that this would apply for a limited time period.

A move to extend planning permission timescales in England would likely result in prolonged delivery of housing across several sites. The cumulative impact of this would be to reduce existing housing delivery at a time when delivery rates are already under severe scrutiny in several areas. This may result in a greater number of speculative planning applications for unplanned development being pursued to fill a void created by reduced delivery of plan-led developments.  

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