New rules relating to Judicial Review will be brought in to force on 1^st July 2013, the Government has announced today. A key change is the cutting of the time limit for applying for a Judicial Review of planning decisions from three months to six weeks. In addition, the new rules will remove the right of an oral hearing if the written application is considered by the judge to be “totally without merit”, whilst a modest court fee will be payable for anyone seeking an oral hearing in person following a written judicial review application being turned down. These changes, whilst hardly revolutionary, are welcomed, as they have the effect of reducing the ‘at risk’ period from 90 days to 42.

Also relating to timeframes in planning, latest information from the Planning Inspectorate indicates that appeal times for Written Representations and Informal Hearings are taking an average of 21 and 22 weeks respectively with circa 88% of appeals of this nature determined within six months. The determination period for Inquiries is considerably worse, with the average time taken to determine a Public Inquiry currently coming in at 30 weeks and only 54% of Inquiries determined within the Inspectorate’s notional 6 month target date.

We have seen evidence of increasing delays in the initial processing of the appeal and the allocation of a start date. This is tending to take between two and four weeks. In the case of Hearings and Public Inquiries, much depends on the willingness of the main parties to schedule an early date. In this regard, mutually convenient dates need to be agreed between a period between 10 and 20 weeks from the start date. Accordingly, two main parties determined to proceed to an Inquiry as quickly as possible can be at Inquiry within 10 weeks of the start date but an uncooperative main party has the ability to delay the appeal process by as much as two and a half months. Our current estimates for appeals are tabulated below: