Planning applications are submitted on a huge scale, with new additions being mad every single day. Each regional council deals with their own planning applications and move respond to them accordingly, all assumed to be operating to the same standards and the same scales create a uniformed and standardised process of granting or rejecting planning permission for residential projects.
Despite this idea of fairness and the system that was designed for equality, specificity and to give each application the attention and expertise that they deserve, when looking at the figures published by the councils themselves, there are clear differences between the standards they set.
As the CK Architectural team have noticed the significant differences in attitudes across the entire West Yorkshire region, we have further decided to conduct a survey based on results from the planning portal.
All councils are supposed to follow the same rules of conduct in administering planning policy both on national and local level. The nation planning policy framework is supposed to ensure a fair and holistic approach to what is acceptable, and yet we have found and demonstrated the results to be very different across the region.
We also have noticed differences in attitude, response times and quality which we are looking at quantifying also. We have been preparing and submitting plans for planning permission across all 5 councils for a number of years and have first-hand experience of how very different they can be.
* We searched across the West Yorkshire region council such as:
- Calderdale for Brighouse, Halifax, Elland.
- Kirklees for Huddersfield, Dewsbury, Batley, Birstall and Birkenshaw.
- Wakefield for Pontefract, Castleford, Knottingley, Featherstone and Normanton),
- Bradford for Bingley, Ilkley, Keighley and Shipley.
- Leeds city itself.
Each council had data posted online as to all submitted applications and their verdicts, at which point we were able to collate this data, quantify it at scale, and then calculate the specific rates of all applications for the 2020 year so far.
