Planning Performance Agreements: when a PPA is worth signing

A planning performance agreement is a project management contract between an applicant and a local planning authority. It sets out who does what, by when, at what cost, from pre-application through to decision. It buys you named officers, a timetable and a forum. It does not buy a permission, and any council offering one that implies otherwise is offering something it cannot lawfully deliver.

For a major scheme with a real programme, the arithmetic usually works. For a scheme of twelve houses in a district authority with one development management team, it often does not.

What a PPA is and why councils offer them

A PPA is voluntary on both sides. It sits alongside the statutory process rather than replacing any part of it, and national guidance encourages authorities to use them for larger or more complex proposals.

Councils offer them for a practical reason. Discretionary services can be charged for, so a PPA lets an authority recover the cost of the officer time a large application consumes, and in some cases fund a fixed-term post or buy in specialist advice it could not otherwise afford. That is the honest commercial basis, and it is worth understanding because it tells you what you are buying.

What the applicant gets in return is predictability. A named case officer, a named senior officer above them, an agreed meeting rhythm, an agreed list of documents, and a date for the committee. On a scheme where every month of delay carries a finance cost, predictability is the product.

Typical content

Most agreements cover the same ground, and the drafting differs in how specific the milestones are.

• Scope: the site, the proposal, the application type, and what is inside and outside the agreement.
• Named individuals on both sides, with deputies, and a named senior officer for escalation.
• A meeting cadence, usually monthly, with agendas and minutes and who writes them.
• A timetable of milestones, from pre-application submission through to committee date.
• The information schedule: which documents the applicant will provide and when, and which technical consultees the council will engage and when.
• Fees and how they are calculated, with a payment schedule.
• Review, variation and termination provisions.
• A statement that the agreement does not fetter the authority's discretion or predetermine the outcome.

That last clause is not boilerplate. A PPA cannot commit officers to a recommendation, cannot bind a committee, and cannot promise a decision date that overrides consultation requirements. Anything that reads as though it does is a problem for the council rather than a benefit for you.

Push hardest on the information schedule. Most PPAs slip because a technical document arrives later than the timetable assumed, and a schedule that names each document, its author and its date turns a vague programme into something you can manage.

How a PPA interacts with the determination period

The statutory determination period still applies. A PPA does not extend it by itself, so most agreements are paired with a written extension of time under the procedure order, agreeing a longer period for determination.

That pairing matters for how the council reports its performance, because applications determined within an agreed extended period are treated differently from those that overrun. It is also the mechanism that lets an officer take the time a complex scheme needs without the authority facing a non-determination appeal. Our note on extension of time agreements and the eight week clock sets out how the written agreement works.

Keep the two documents consistent. A PPA milestone showing a committee date in March and an extension of time expiring in January is a common and entirely avoidable mistake.

You retain the right to appeal against non-determination once the agreed period expires. Signing a PPA does not remove it, though using it mid-agreement effectively ends the relationship.

Costs and how councils publish them

Charging bases vary. Some authorities quote a fixed fee by band of development, some charge officer time at published hourly rates with an estimate and a cap, and some do both, with a fixed management fee plus time for specialist input.

Ask for four things before signing. The published charging basis, so you can see the rates are the council's standard ones. An estimate broken down by workstream. Whether external consultancy costs, such as an independent viability review, sit inside or outside the fee. And what happens to the money if the application is withdrawn.

Independent viability review deserves particular attention, because it is commonly the largest single line and it is usually commissioned by the council at the applicant's expense. Where a scheme will involve a Viability Assessment, agree the review arrangement in the PPA rather than discovering it at month four.

When a PPA does not help

Three situations recur.

Where the difficulty is a policy objection rather than a process problem. A PPA gives you meetings, and meetings do not fix a scheme that conflicts with an adopted allocation. Better to resolve the policy position first, using the local plan evidence base, and our explainer on local plan review and housing land supply is the place to start.

Where the authority does not have the staff. A PPA funded post takes months to recruit, and a named officer who leaves takes the relationship with them. Ask directly how the council will resource the agreement and what happens if the named officer moves on.

And where the application is not actually complex. Below a certain scale the process overhead of monthly meetings, minutes and milestone reporting costs more in consultant time than it saves.

Governance, and what happens when milestones slip

Agreements are usually signed by the applicant or their agent and by a head of development management or equivalent. That signature commits the service to a way of working, not the council to a decision.

Milestones slip on both sides. What separates a working PPA from a decorative one is what the agreement says happens next: a review meeting within a set number of days, a written explanation, a revised timetable agreed in writing, and escalation to the named senior officers where the revision is not agreed.

Record every slip and its cause in the minutes, including the ones on your own side. If the application later goes to appeal, or if you are negotiating a fee refund, the minutes are the evidence, and they are far more persuasive than a recollection of who was late.

One honest caveat. A PPA is only as good as the two people running it, and no amount of drafting fixes a relationship that has broken down. If the monthly meetings stop being useful, say so early and use the escalation route rather than waiting for the timetable to fail.

Enter your site postcode on PlanScope to see which of the 66 report types your scheme is likely to need, then build that list into the PPA information schedule.

This is general guidance and not legal advice. Check the position with your local planning authority or a qualified professional before relying on it. PlanScope provides AI-assisted draft reports for planning applications. Reports should be reviewed before submission. We do not guarantee planning approval.