A SHORTAGE of planning officers could jeopardise efforts to tackle the housing crisis, Unison warned today.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced that the government will spend £39 billion on social and affordable housing in her spending review last week.

The government has pledged to recruit 300 extra planning staff across English councils, but Unison says that local authorities will need almost three times as many extra workers.

Freedom of information data collected by the union shows just one in five (21 per cent) planning departments in England are currently fully staffed.

In the Autumn Budget, £46 million was earmarked to train and recruit planning officers, but Unison says that this won’t even provide one new member of staff per council.

In a separate survey of planning officers, 81 per cent said that low staffing means delays to new homes, shops, schools, roads and other projects.

Three-quarters said that their council reduced the number of officers over the past five years.

Emma (not her real name), a planning officer at a council in northern England, said: “Workloads are through the roof, staff feel burnt out and experienced colleagues have left. 

“It follows years of cuts. My team had seven officers and now there are just four.

“Developers are more aggressive. They cite housing targets to push through residential schemes for approval, however poor or unsuitable they might be.”

Unison general secretary Christina McAnea said: “Local planning teams have been hollowed out by a decade and a half of cuts by successive Conservative governments, yet staff still handle around 350,000 planning applications each year.

“If there’s any hope of hitting the 1.3m housebuilding target, central government must provide the extra resources to recruit and retain staff.”

A Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government spokesperson said: “Despite inheriting the worst housing crisis in living memory, the government is taking decisive action to speed up planning and build 1.5 million homes through our Plan for Change.

“The recruitment of 300 additional planners is just one part of this, alongside investing £46m of funding from the Autumn Budget to boost council planning capacity and enabling local planning authorities to cover their own costs through planning fees.”