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Departments: Departmental Reorganisation

Volume 463: debated on Monday 3 September 2007

To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government what recommendations from the Lifting the Burden Taskforce her Department (a) has introduced and (b) plans to introduce. (152941)

The Lifting Burdens Task Force was established under the chairmanship of Michael Prater, chief executive of Nottingham city council, in July 2006. The Task Force’s remit is to identify which central Government information requirements on local government cause the most difficulty on the ground and which add the least value, and recommend to Government action to reduce such burdens.

The Task Force published its first report on Communities and Local Government’s functions Housing and Planning at the end of February 2007. The full Government response was published in May 2007. Following the report, we lifted the requirement on local authorities to report on the following Best Value Performance Indicators (BVPIs):

219a Planning: total number of conservation areas in the local authority area

219c Planning: percentage of conservation areas with published management proposals 214 Homelessness: repeat homelessness

The Task Force’s recommendations on reform of the planning system were broadly accepted and the responses to most were covered in the Planning White Paper published in May. We will consider the recommendation to remove prescriptive requirements for communication as part of the review of the General Development Procedure Order referred to in the Planning White Paper.

The Task Force published its second report in March 2007, and in response, we removed the requirement for local authorities to report on a further seven BVPIs or parts of BVPIs. We are considering further recommendations from both reports in the context of the new performance framework for local government and the national indicator set which will underpin it, to be introduced from April 2008.