Somerset's planning woes should be a wake-up call for government

Last year, Regen warned that under-resourced planning departments could become a major roadblock to decarbonising the electricity system. That warning is now playing out in real time.

A significant backlog of approximately 1,600 planning applications in Somerset has made headlines this week. It’s part of a much wider issue: if we don’t invest in local planning teams, we risk slowing down progress on clean power and net zero.

To tackle the backlog, Somerset Council has brought in a range of emergency measures, including:

• Asking applicants and members not to chase updates, to give officers time to focus on decision-making

• Reducing officer attendance at events or meetings that don’t directly help reduce the backlog

• Only accepting amendments to applications in limited circumstances

• Only undertaking essential site visits

• Adopting a ‘one chance’ rule to correct validation failures within 14 days

• Enforcing strict adherence to call-in criteria for committee discussions

• Introducing a triage approach to prioritise applications  

• Planning teams having “all in” office-based days to support the above.

This isn’t just a local problem. Councils across the country are facing similar challenges. It’s a warning sign for the whole planning system and for the pace of the energy transition.  

We’re in a decisive decade for the energy transition. Local authorities are being asked to support more renewable energy and energy storage projects at the same time as managing stretched budgets and competing priorities.

But many councils simply don’t have enough planners, or the right specialist expertise, to meet this challenge. As we set out in our recent resourcing the energy transition paper, local planning departments are under-resourced and under pressure. Without urgent investment, challenges such as those faced in Somerset could become commonplace.

This has real consequences. Clean energy developers can’t move forward. Communities are left waiting for answers and we risk falling behind on our national targets for clean power and net zero.

Regen is calling for urgent action to:

• Increase funding for local authority planning teams

• Train more planners with energy and climate expertise

• Consider hiring specialist renewable energy planners to work across local authorities, to help focus on meeting our 2030 targets

We can’t afford for planning to become the bottleneck in the energy transition.

Regen is continuing to focus on this issue through our planning working group and wider work in this space. If you are interested in working together on addressing this challenge, please contact our planning lead, Rebecca Windemer.