Greater clarity on transitional provisions needed, says BPF

Chancellor George Osborne said in the budget that the NPPF would be published on Tuesday.

The policy will contain a "presumption in favour of sustainable development", which states that where a council's local plan is "absent, silent or indeterminate", there is a presumption in favour of granting planning permission for all sustainable development.

"Greater clarity concerning the transitional arrangements is desperately needed, and it is crucial that local authorities receive significant support to get local plans in place," said the BPF.

The NPPF is the Government's new planning policy which aims to reform, streamline and clarify the planning system to make it more accessible to the public. The reforms will reduce over 1300 pages of current planning policy to around 50 pages.

The draft NPPF was published in July last year and has been the subject of public consultation and extensive scrutiny by Parliament's Local Government and Communities Select Committee.

The Government had previously announced that it would make transitional provisions, in its evidence to the Environmental Audit Committee last year.

"Our target, our deadline, for publishing the final version is not until April next year. Well before then we will, reflecting on the suggestions that have been made in the consultation, set out our transition arrangements, but you can be sure that they will not be to the detriment of any authority that is doing the right thing in putting its plan together,” the evidence said.

Planning law expert Richard Ford of Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind Out-Law.com, has said that not every part of the NPPF will necessarily take immediate effect.

"Clearly we await to see the detail of what 'comes into effect when published' means," he said. "The presumption in favour of sustainable development and large parts of the NPPF may come into force immediately, but other parts could be subject to transitional provisions to give local authority local plans and neighbourhood plans a little breathing space. We will have to see if this is a bit of spin or not."