District council leaders have welcomed a proposal that could increase planning fees to help over-stretched departments.

The Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities yesterday launched a consultation that proposed increasing the fees councils charge developers to adjudicate on their plans by 35% for major applications and 25% for minor applications.

It acknowledged that planning authorities were facing a lack of resources and staff, and proposed the creation of a working group with representatives from local government, private sector and professional bodies to deliver a programme of support to build capacity and capability.

Finance spokesperson for the District Councils' Network, Peter Fleming, said: ‘This is an essential boost to our over-stretched planning departments that have experienced increasing workloads but fewer resources as a result of fees not keeping pace with demand.

‘With overall council budgets under pressure, many authorities have been unable to give their planners the support they need.'

However, Cllr Fleming argued the Government should 'go further to give us the freedom to recover the full cost of adjudicating on planning applications'.

The consultation also proposed introducing more methods for assessing the performance of planning authorities after 'feedback from industry representatives' suggested the time taken to get a planning application decided ‘consistently takes much longer than the statutory period'.

However, Cllr Fleming hit back: ‘We are concerned the Government is proposing even more performance indicators when planning departments are already subject to numerous measures which are publicly available.

'We need to make sure that any increase in planning fees isn't swallowed up by time-consuming and onerous reporting requirements.'