Virtual meetings can push planning forward
In the face of unprecedented change, local authorities across the country are grappling with technology to push ahead with a backlog of planning decisions.
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This week, the government reaffirmed plans to introduce emergency measures allowing the use of virtual planning committees.
While most councils have cancelled their March planning meetings, several are assessing the latest government guidance for meetings going forward.
“There is a huge amount of pressure from government to push these things forward,” says Stuart Baillie, head of planning at Knight Frank. “Planning is the early phase of the development sector and can be a catalyst or a barrier. It is difficult to get local authorities to make this work with everything else they have to deal with, but they need to try or planning will grind to a halt.”
In terms of how it can work in practice, councils are looking at getting applicants, council members and officers to login to planning committees via software such as Microsoft Teams. Baillie explains: “Key objectors may be invited onto the video conference but it would be logistically impossible to open it up to the general public. I expect written representations would need to be provided in advance. The council will then record the meeting and make it live afterwards.”
If a solution cannot be reached this way, councils are also looking at delegating all committee decisions to officers. For instance, at the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead’s Extraordinary Council meeting on Wednesday 18th March, members voted to delegate the determination of all planning applications to the managing director. “This is clearly a positive move and we fully expect other councils to follow suit to enable the planning system – which is a key driver of the economy – to function positively and proactively and enable progress to be made in a logical manner,” says Baillie.
When it comes to planning appeals, which are contingent on involvement from the Planning Inspectorate, efforts are also underway to use video-conferencing facilities. It is understood proposals are coming forward from several legal chambers to ensure that Covid-19 does not result in the indefinite postponement of all cases requiring cross-examination.
“We must watch this space in the meantime, but it does seem the backlog of appeal casework is likely to mount up in the coming months unless a technological or temporary legislative solution can be agreed upon.”
Looking to the future
Looking to the future, we may subsequently see councils and planning agents using technology in a more sophisticated way.
Local authorities were already poised to benefit eventually from the roll out of virtual reality development tours and the use of drones.
Already, technical engineers are sending out drones to do surveys and site visits. The ability to do this was available before the virus, but it is becoming more prevalent, particularly now that being on site is not possible currently.
There was also a lot of work being done to create virtual reality models rather than relying on two dimensional drawings for planning decision making. While it was not ready to be rolled out, now that councils have experienced adopting new technology, plans like this could be accelerated.
Currently, a lot of planning meetings focus on 2D drawings of new developments but in the future, they will have access to 3D visualisations that allow officials and interested parties to explore schemes from all sorts of different perspectives. This would have a significant impact on the planning process, particularly for public engagement. It would allow planners to reach a much broader audience as they could access younger constituents online rather than developers simply holding a public exhibition.
So, could the impact of Covid-19 speed up technological innovation like this up? Baillie thinks so: “This period of remote working will energise all parties to embrace technology, communication will be improved, and this will make things more efficient long term.”