Written questions by Heylings.

Communities and Local Government, if he will make an assessment of the potential merits of increasing funding to local authorities to support attracting and retaining senior planners.

Attracting and retaining senior planners in local planning authority (LPA) planning departments is vital not only to maintaining a proactive, efficient planning service for local communities, but also to ensuring that new developments are well designed and facilitate local growth.At the Budget, the Chanceller announced a £46 million package of investment into the planning system as a one-year settlement for 2025-2026.Our manifesto committed us to appointing 300 new planning officers into LPAs. We are on track to meet that commitment through two routes, namely graduate recruitment through the Pathways to Planning scheme run by the Local Government Association and mid-career recruitment through Public Practice.On 27 February, the government announced funding to support salaries and complement graduate bursaries. Further information can be found in the Written Ministerial Statement I made on 27 February 2025 (HCWS480).On 25 February, the draft Town and Country Planning (Fees for Applications, Deemed Applications, Requests and Site Visits) (England) (Amendment and Transitional Provision) Regulations 2025 were agreed. These regulations increase planning fees for householder and other applications, with a view to providing much-needed additional resources for hard-pressed LPAs.More broadly, the Department’s established Planning Capacity and Capability programme is also developing a wider programme of support, working with partners across the planning sector, to ensure that LPAs have the skills and capacity they need, both now and in the future, to modernise local plans and speed up decision making, including through innovative use of digital planning data and software.

Communities and Local Government, what assessment she has made of the adequacy of the resources of the Planning Inspectorate in dealing with (a) local and (b) national planning appeals within target timeframes.

The Inspectorate is performing well across a number of key areas such as local plan examinations, nationally significant infrastructure project applications, s62a applications, and planning appeals proceeding by hearings and inquiries. It is, for example:meeting all statutory timeframes for national infrastructure applications;increasingly deciding planning appeals by hearing and inquiry in around 26 weeks (the Ministerial measure), having already cleared a backlog of casework; andbeginning to decide enforcement appeals by hearing and inquiry in around 26 weeks (the ministerial measure) for the first time in many years, as it clears a long-standing backlog of casework.The Inspectorate is implementing actions to maintain performance in these areas and to improve end-to-end times for other casework including by:Focusing available capacity of both salaried and contract (non-salaried inspectors) on reducing the amount of open appeals. The number of open planning appeals by written representations has reduced significantly during 2024 and continues to reduce.Using contract (non-salaried) inspectors to the full extent of their availability and expanding the range of casework they determine.Moving more inspectors onto enforcement written representations casework in Spring 2025 once the work on improving hearings performance has progressed further.In addition, the Inspectorate has designed and developed a new digital Appeals Service currently in Beta phase. This new service improves the process for submitting appeals, including reducing the number of invalid appeals submitted. In turn, this reduces the number of validation checks required and is speeding up the time taken to validate appeals. The new service has been expanded to cover all local planning authority areas.In five pilot local authority areas the digital Appeals Service is now being used to progress the appeal from receipt through to decision. This provides an interface for Local Planning Authorities and appellants to manage appeals and automate notifications which are expected to save time for participants, improve their experience of the appeals service and be a foundation for further improvements.The Planning Inspectorate is an Arm's Length Government Body with responsibility for allocation of resources, prioritisation and overall operational performance. The Inspectorate publishes updates on its performance on its website regularly.

Communities and Local Government, what assessment she has made of the potential impact of the Local Government Pension Scheme on levels of economic growth in local communities.

The Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS) already invests approximately 30% of its assets in the UK, as part of its duty to invest to pay pensions. The government believes that the LGPS can make a distinctive contribution to local economic growth building on its local role and networks, through increasing its long-term investment in local communities.

Communities and Local Government, what her timeline is for implementing the decent homes standard.

The government intend to bring forward a consultation this year on a reformed Decent Homes Standard for the social and private rented sectors.