The East of England will be the first area in the country to have its regional planning strategy officially abolished from 3 January 2013, communities secretary Eric Pickles has revealed.

Under powers brought in by the Localism Act 2011, the Government will remove the previous administration's regional strategies giving local councils and communities more control over development.

Local plans produced by councils in conjunction with communities - as outlined in the National Planning Policy Framework - will now form the ‘keystone' of the planning system DCLG officials said. An order to abolish the East of England regional strategy was put before Parliament on 11 December.

Mr Pickles said: ‘Regional planning built nothing but resentment. This is the next stage in the abolition of the whole tier of regional government in East England. We are devolving power from unelected regional quangos down to elected local councils and to local communities.'

DCLG officials stressed that the previous Labour government's ‘top-down approach of regional strategies… imposed centrally set building targets on communities rather than giving local people the powers to plan'.

This led to ‘the lowest peacetime levels of house building since the 1920s' they claimed.

Critics of the move to abolish the regional bureaucracies say that the planning system is now lacking a key level of strategic leadership.

At the Adept conference in Manchester this year, president Miles Butler told Surveyor many of the group's members had raised concerns about how this would impact regional development and major schemes.