Housing and Planning Delivery Grant

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Communities and Local Government (Baroness Andrews)
My honourable friend the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State (Iain Wright) has made the following Written Ministerial Statement.

I am today announcing the final allocations of the second tranche of £90 million of planning delivery grant (PDG) for 2007-08. The grant is paid to local authorities to support improvement in the delivery of planning services. Over the period 2003-08 the Government will have made available a total of £605 million through PDG which has played a significant part in raising the profile of planning, providing additional resources for both development management and plan making, and incentivising improvement in performance against a background of a rapidly increasing number of planning applications.

The total PDG for 2007-08 amounts to £120 million which has been paid in two parts. The first tranche was paid in May 2007.

The grant is performance related. The aim is to enhance resources for the planning system in a way that drives performance improvement and ensures effective delivery of our objectives for sustainable communities.

Grant allocations are not ring-fenced and authorities have complete discretion in the way they spend this money. However, to encourage investment for the future, 25 per cent of the total grant paid to any individual authority must be spent on capital. The remaining 75 per cent can be spent by the local authority on resource or capital budgets.

A copy of the determination and a table showing the local authority allocations is available in the Libraries of the House.