Regen’s response to governments consultation on an ‘accelerated planning system'

In our consultation response, co-signed by the Centre for Sustainable Energy, we urge government to use an accelerated planning service to prioritise renewable energy projects. Specifically, we:

• Advocate for renewable energy applications to be the key priority of an accelerated planning system, affording them a similar level of prioritisation as the Critical National Priority designation observed at the Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project level.
• Raise the expected future increase in renewable and energy storage planning applications and the need to ensure the planning system has the capacity to process these in a timely manner.
• Raise the potential unintended consequence on the pace of decision making for renewables if Local Planning Authorities are incentivised to prioritise major commercial applications.
• Urge government to address the persistent resourcing challenges impacting Local Planning Authorities.
• Raise concerns regarding the resourcing and prioritisation of statutory consultees.
• Raise a concern about the potential future resourcing of the planning inspectorate if a new performance measure is introduced for local authorities. Instead, we suggest that efforts should be focused on helping to address local authority resourcing challenges.