Corporate report

The Planning Inspectorate Strategic Plan 2021-25

Published 20 October 2021

Applies to England

In 2020/21 we have shown our resilience in time of crisis.

For 2021/2025 we will play our part to help the nation build back better and deliver great services to our customers.

Our Strategic Plan centres on our new vision and outlines the objectives we will be delivering over the coming three financial years to make it a reality.

Our purpose, vision and values

Our purpose

Our purpose is to deal with planning appeals, national infrastructure planning applications, examinations of local plans and other planning-related and specialist casework. We share our expertise with our customers, communities, businesses, local and national governments to enable good planning outcomes.

Our vision

Our vision is to provide our customers with high quality, timely and efficient services that support the nation’s recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic by engaging, empowering and equipping our workforce and by delivering ambitious policy changes.

Our values

• customer-focused
• fair
• impartial
• open

View our flagship video

Planning Inspectorate - Fair, Impartial, Open

Our strategic context

What are the strategic challenges that set our vision, and/or opportunities to deliver against our vision?

There is a political drive to view the planning system as a whole: managing data and customer experience across the whole system rather than in silos; and to accelerate the pace of work – supporting Planning Reform and Project Speed.

Progressing our journey to improve customer-focus, we now have opportunities to act on insights (gathered from our Customer Service Desk Solution) to understand customers’ needs and experience and improve services.

We are facing a more competitive market for skills (including inspector, digital, data, commercial skills). We need to ensure we optimise use of skills, develop skills in-house (including further extending the pool from beyond LPAs and development of our professions), carry out outreach activities to ensure there’s a pipeline of talent, and free up inspector time through digitalisation of activities.

Our financial position is one where we anticipate having to find cost savings that would enable at least a 5% budget reduction (from 2021/22 baseline) by the 2024/25 financial year.

We have ambitions related to corporate social responsibility such as improving workforce representation, reducing inequalities, and responding to climate change by reducing our environmental impact. In response, we have made commitments – for example our part in Civil Service Reform; to contribute to UN Sustainable Goals (which include reducing inequality and environmental impact) and to fulfil our Public Sector Equality Duty.

Civil Service Reform is focused on modernising the service through investment in skills, increasing workforce representativeness, innovating to problem-solve with emphasis on data and technological advancement, achieving excellence in service delivery and managing change, and improving collaboration for achieving the best experience for service-users.

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is still being felt and learning since its onset is driving societal and economical change. It is also enabling different channels of engagement with our customers and offering opportunities to reduce environmental impact, increase wellbeing through work-life balance, increase diversity and inclusivity through more flexible working practices and potentially reducing geographical constraints for taking up employment opportunities.

The Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities sets priorities for the Planning Inspectorate each year.

These are currently:

• recovery and operational performance
• developing new digital services
• planning reform and project speed
• gender pay gap and diversity and inclusion strategy
• resources
• Spending Review Settlement 2021/22 and Future Planning

Our strategies

To turn our vision into reality, we will be focusing on delivery of three strategies. These are our Customer Strategy (equivalent to a service strategy and therefore our primary strategy) and two enabling strategies: Data and Digital Strategy and our People Strategy.

These are underpinned by a performance framework (strategic dashboard), five-year strategic workforce plan, three-year financial and change portfolio plans and a more detailed annual business plan as well as related organisational strategies and delivery plans.

Customer strategy

Our services must deliver great customer service for a wide variety of customers. The objectives below will ensure that every change we implement has a positive impact on our customers:

• we understand who our customers are, their needs and expectations
• we engage with our customers, build trust, make interaction easy, and proactively manage our relationship with them
• we use insights to drive and prioritise customer-focused change and innovation
• we have a customer-focused culture
• we continuously improve the timeliness of our decisions and recommendations
• we continuously improve the quality of our decisions and recommendations

Data and digital strategy

The future of the planning system will be digital and integrated. Our data and digital objectives will enable us to give our customers the data they need:

• we create an understanding of customer needs and use this to improve our services
• we use technology and data to make it simple for customers to engage with us
• we collaborate with sector partners, enabling data to move easily across the planning system, generating system-wide efficiencies
• we invest in new digital and data capabilities to rapidly adapt to changes in the planning sector and wider society
• we provide our people with the technology needed to deliver the ambitions of our customer strategy and enhance their working lives

People strategy

The expertise of our people is our greatest asset. The objectives from our People strategy aim to engage and empower our people so that they can deliver great decisions and recommendations for our customers:

• we have effective channels so that employee voice is heard across the Inspectorate
• we create a sense of belonging and inclusion among our people, with a more diverse and flexible workforce
• we ensure the Inspectorate is making better decisions to meet the needs of our customers
• we have effective leadership with the right skills in the right place at the right time
• we create professions to develop technical skills and enable career progression
• we create a positive Health, Safety and Wellbeing culture with the right behaviours, policy and processes in place

What will be different

Over the life of the Plan we will

• improve our data capture and analysis and will share our experience and insight across the planning sector
• develop our understanding of our customers’ needs and expectations of our services and build customer trust
• proactively update customers at defined casework stages and notify them when anticipating delays/issues
• continuously improve our services around customer data and feedback
• make our decisions and recommendations promptly and with consistency of timeliness (year-on-year improvement trend)
• maintain or improve the quality of our decisions and recommendations (from 2021 baseline)
• plan and deploy our resources efficiently, offering the taxpayer value for money
• invest in our people, benchmarking ourselves against the industry standard and work with and learn from other organisations
• improve our use of technology and data
• implement action plans to understand and reduce our environmental impacts

By 2025

• our customers report it is easy to work with us and are satisfied with our service. They will be able to track the progress of their case themselves online
• we will have aligned the way we operate to contribute to Civil Service reform and to actively support the reform of the planning system
• we will have grown our inspector resources and our data and digital capability while delivering efficiencies of around 5% of our annual budget. Efficiency savings will result from changes in our use of office space, benefits from developing our services, and changes in the way we work including our approach to travel. Our public-facing and internal systems will be effective, efficient, user-friendly and joined-up across the sector
• our data and digital capability will support managing customer expectations, planning for the future, and enable the Government to evaluate the impact of our decisions and recommendations
• our workforce will be diverse (representative of the communities we serve) and our organisation will be inclusive in ethos and in practice
• our working environment will be safe (with clear policies and procedures in place and people displaying appropriate behaviours) with high levels of reported wellbeing
• our workforce will be engaged, skilled, rewarded fairly and able to operate flexibly (location, working patterns)