The Government have released a Ministerial Statement today scrapping the Duty to Co-operate for Local Plans currently making their way through examination, KPPC  Planning Director Adam Bennett writes.

This is a big change, particularly as a number of plans have fallen at the Duty to Co-operate hurdle in recent months, including BCP Council’s Local Plan and South Oxfordshire and Vale of the White Horse’s joint local plan.

This is a rather worryingly inconsistent position from the Government again on this, with plans being prepared under the current system relying on the legislative framework of the December 2023 NPPF, and indeed this continuing to be the document that these plans are examined against and in the frame of Section 33A of the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 which sets out clearly the Duty to Co-operate and the obligation for authorities to demonstrate that they have complied with its intentions.

With plans having failed expressly on this earlier this year, why have the Government waited until now to seek to amend the ‘current plan making system’ and not just roll out the abolition of the Duty to Co-operate within the new emerging plan making system?

Particularly given that the ‘Duty to Co-operate’ (DTC) ceases once the Local Plan Examination has begun, so Councils should have fulfilled this before they submit their plans for examination and the absence of having done so is simply indicative of the fact that a well-considered strategic approach to working with neighbouring authorities has not occurred.

Amongst other things, the Duty to Co-operate requires that Councils preparing Local Development Plan documents ‘engage constructively’, ‘on an ongoing basis’, on the ‘sustainable development or use of land’, where this would have a significant impact on at least two adjoining Local Planning Authority areas. The requirement to demonstrate ‘constructive engagement’ may reasonably include or present itself through ‘agreements on joint approaches’ or ‘joint development plan documents’, or equally it may be an evidenced and justified common statement that no such collaborative working has been deemed achievable.

This is not an overly onerous bar, but simply demonstrates that proper thought on a strategic level has been put into decisions of where to deliver development having regard every day matters such as inward and outward movements for economic activity and travel for employment or an authority’s residents to their neighbours and vice versa.

This is an essential part of good place making, to consider where movements occur and where there is demand for development that would best contribute to sustainable development, reducing the need to travel or facilitating more sustainable or shorter movements by developing in the right places.

This is fundamentally a cross boundary issue and one which local authorities should tackle together.

This appears another regressive step here for plan making that will only foster poorer place making and a lack of joined up thinking.