Housing and Planning
Business of the House
12:38 pm
Eric Pickles (Secretary of State, Communities and Local Government; Brentwood and Ongar, Conservative)
We have recognised that section 106 agreements and existing planning permissions are often part of the same thing, and that it takes a bit of time to get work on big sites together. We are expecting an increase in the number of applications anyway, so it would make no sense to increase the number artificially. We therefore took the decision at the beginning of the summer to extend existing permissions, which was a sensible and pragmatic thing to do.