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One in five UK planners is intending to leave the field or retire in the next three years, exacerbating a shortage that the leading trade body warns will put at risk the government’s target of building 1.5mn homes by 2030.
Ministers have outlined plans to build a generation of new towns as part of a growth agenda. But the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) has warned that an ageing workforce and an exodus of public sector planners to private developers will affect local authorities’ capacity to make decisions and sign off on projects.
About a fifth of planners said they intended to either leave the profession or retire in the next three years, while nearly two-thirds said their teams lacked the capacity to meet demand, the trade body’s survey showed.
Roughly 85 per cent of local authorities had at least one staff vacancy and were struggling to meet demands while most had more gaps, the RTPI said.
Although the number of planners employed in the UK remained relatively steady between 2010 and 2023, about a quarter left over that period for the private sector, which often has bigger teams and can “produce wider evidence”, said Victoria Hills, chief executive of the RTPI. Planners for public sector authorities earn between £40,000 and £50,000 compared with about £80,000 for private developers.
The findings come as the planning and infrastructure bill goes through parliament with the intention of speeding up planning procedures and “getting Britain building again”. But the RTPI said any new legislation needed to come with proper resources.
“The private sector is generating lots of applications for developments but there isn’t the capacity in local government to take them through the process and identify the impact, whether it’s flooding, noise or the environmental effect,” said Hills. “None of the system works if you don’t have the capacity in local government.”
The planning industry has been hit by local authority budget cuts since 2010. The government this year also decided to reduce funding for planning apprenticeship schemes for young people aged over 21, while the financial crisis in universities has led to several planning courses being discontinued.
The RTPI is lobbying to have the apprenticeship funding restored and estimates that the profession could lose 200 planners a year because of the cuts to the schemes, most of which are carried out by local authorities.
“Delivering 1.5mn new homes and starting on 150 nationally significant infrastructure projects will be tough without adequate funding and training for local authority planning services, and without a variety of accessible routes into the profession,” said Hills.
Total expenditure on planning, including development management and other planning policy, in England had fallen by 16.6 per cent since 2010, the RTPI said.
In a further setback to the government’s housebuilding targets, official data from the ONS this month showed that the number of people employed in construction had fallen further this year and was at its lowest level in almost 25 years, largely because of the slowdown in homes being built.
The Construction Products Association, a trade body, said employment in the construction industry was expected to fall further over the next 12 months. It said this was because of the subdued level of demand for housebuilding, the rise in employers’ national insurance contributions as well as a high degree of uncertainty for businesses in the lead-up to the Budget.
Noble Francis, economics director of the CPA, said: “Building what we built even just a few years ago is going to be very difficult, never mind the government’s fanciful targets over the next five years, despite its moves to ease planning.”