To ask the Minister of the Environment to detail the average time it takes to process and approve a planning application locally compared to the the time it takes to process in England; and for his assessment of these timeframes.

Following the transfer of planning responsibilities to local government on 1 April 2015, my Department introduced three statutory planning performance indicators for councils. These cover the processing of local and major applications and enforcement cases. The first quarterly planning statistics bulletin, which was published in November 2015, highlighted performance of councils against the three statutory planning indicators for the first three months of the new two-tier planning system (April – June 2015). This showed that the average processing times to decide major applications was 37.6 weeks across all councils, and 19 weeks to decide local applications.

The time spent processing a planning application in NI cannot be directly compared to the time spent in England, or other UK jurisdictions, as they all have different systems in relation to processes such as validation, neighbour notification and advertising etc. Planning performance in England is officially reported in a way that reflects their own particular system and processing targets and hence is not comparable with NI figures.