Levelling up secretary Michael Gove has told Vale of White Horse District Council to improve its planning performance or it will be placed into special measures.

The government minister has written to the chief executives of nine councils and one national park authority after each failed to decide enough planning applications in time.

He said the performance showed "poor quality service to local residents" and deterred investment into the local housing market and wider economy.

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The council has until June to demonstrate improved performance before special measures are introduced.

The Vale’s planning department was below performance thresholds for both non-major and major planning applications over a two-year period up to September 2022, although a spokeswoman said recent improvements meant it "would not be reasonable" to be designated as underperforming.

Between October 2020 and September 2022, the council’s planning department decided on 66.6 per cent of non-major applications and 59.2 per cent of major applications within eight weeks or an agreed time period.

This is below the government’s performance threshold of 70 per cent and 60 per cent respectively.

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If the council slipped into special measures, it would allow applicants to send planning applications directly to the planning inspectorate rather than the council until Mr Gove is satisfied that acceptable performance can be, or has been, achieved.

Mr Gove recognised the council had improved its performance.

But he said: "I want to be clear, however, that I expect the performance of the planning service to exceed our performance thresholds and stay above it consistently."

Mr Gove said he would monitor its performance closely and "will not hesitate" to designate the council if performance fell below the required threshold.

A council spokeswoman said: “Our speed of determining applications temporarily dipped below the required rates during 2021.

“We quickly identified this as a risk and proactively commissioned a Planning Advisory Service (PAS) Review and a Peer Review.

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“This helped us identify the root causes and develop an improvement action plan.

“We implemented a series of immediate actions from the PAS review, which had immediate benefits from mid-2022.

“We continue to liaise with PAS and our determination speeds are now consistently above the required targets set by government for both major and minor planning applications.

“Part of the action plan was to consider reviewing our IT system and the council has committed to implementing significant investment in IT as part of a wider internal transformation programme of our planning service.

“This will help ensure our processes are more robust, flexible, efficient, and future proof.

“We have written to government to explain our position and why it would not be reasonable for our council to be designated as underperforming.

“We will keep this under constant review, and report back to the government again in June to highlight the significant improvements we’ve made.”

The other councils written to by Mr Gove include Calderdale Metropolitan Borough Council, Cotswold District Council, Epsom and Ewell Borough Council, Guildford Borough Council, Hinkley & Bosworth Borough Council, Pendle Borough Council, Portsmouth City Council, the Peak District National Park Authority, and Waverley Borough Council.