Councillors voted to scrap Planning North, South and Strategic and run one 13-member committee from 31 October. What changes if you object.

Update, 27 September 2026: the vote result. Full Council agreed the change on 23 September, with one amendment. The new single committee will have 13 members, not the 11 in the report. Councillor Ashton moved the change from 11 to 13, it was accepted, and the amended motion was carried on a show of hands. An earlier attempt to defer the item to a later meeting was ruled out: the council has no October meeting, and November would fall after the law takes effect. This is taken from the council’s webcast of the meeting; the minutes are not yet published. The rest of this article, written before the vote, describes the report as tabled.

East Suffolk councillors vote tonight on scrapping the council’s three planning committees and replacing them with a single committee of 11 members. If they agree, the new arrangement takes effect on 31 October 2026, and a good deal of what the committees decide now will be decided by officers instead.

The vote is item 11 at Full Council, which meets at 6.30pm in Lowestoft and is broadcast live on the council’s YouTube channel. The report is ES-2927, Planning Decision-Taking, written by planning manager Joe Blackmore for Councillor Mark Packard, the cabinet member for planning and coastal management.

The council is not choosing to do this. It is complying with the Town and Country Planning (Discharge of Local Planning Authority Functions) (England) Regulations 2026, made on 15 July and in force from 31 October. The report puts the alternative plainly: Option B “would be to do nothing”, and from 31 October the council “would not be in compliance” and its planning decisions “would be unlawful”.

What the council is being asked to approve

  • Disestablish Planning Committee North, Planning Committee South and the Strategic Planning Committee.
  • Replace all three with one Planning Committee of 11 members, meeting monthly to decide applications and quarterly to handle strategic business.
  • Rewrite the scheme of delegation so that everything in Schedule 1 of the regulations goes to the Head of Planning and Building Control.

The committee has to shrink because the regulations cap a deciding committee at 13 members. The Strategic Planning Committee currently has 19, which the report says “would not be lawful after 31 October 2026”. Planning committee membership falls from 18 to 11, and the report says the only financial effect is “a small saving in the payment of councillor allowances”.

The council already delegates more than the national average

The reform is aimed at councils whose committees decide too much. East Suffolk is not one of them.

In the year to March 2026 the council received 2,193 planning applications and made 1,965 decisions. It delegated 97 per cent of those decisions to officers, against 96 per cent for England as a whole, and granted 92 per cent against 87 per cent nationally. The figures are the government’s own, in live table P134.

On those numbers, roughly 60 decisions a year currently reach a committee across the whole district, from Lowestoft to Felixstowe.

What must now go to an officer

Schedule 1 of the regulations lists the applications a committee may never decide. Among them:

  • householder applications
  • minor commercial applications
  • minor residential applications
  • applications for permission in principle
  • non-material amendments under section 96A
  • certificates of lawful existing or proposed use or development
  • biodiversity gain plans
  • approval of details required by a planning condition
  • prior approval applications

Schedule 2 covers most of the rest, including full planning applications that are not householder or minor, listed building consent, advertisement consent and tree preservation order work. Those are presumed to be delegated. They reach the committee only if two people agree: the “nominated officer”, which East Suffolk proposes should be the Head of Planning and Building Control, and the “nominated member”, the chair of the planning committee.

The listed building point, which matters more here than most places

East Suffolk is proposing to go further than the regulations require on one class of application. Three types of listed building work that fall in Schedule 2, and could therefore be referred to committee, would instead be delegated to officers in every case:

  • listed building consent applied for in tandem with a Schedule 1 application
  • any variation or discharge of a condition attached to a listed building consent
  • a standalone listed building consent for work to a dwellinghouse

The report’s reasoning is technical and hard to argue with. A barn conversion needs both planning permission and listed building consent. The planning half would be a Schedule 1 application and must be decided by an officer, so if the listed building half went to committee the two could be decided differently. That is described as “a serious risk of appeal losses, award of costs against the council, and potentially Judicial Review”.

The effect is still worth naming. On a coast of listed streets, in Woodbridge, Framlingham, Orford, Aldeburgh and Southwold, consent to alter a listed home will now be an officer decision in every case.

How a decision can still reach a public hearing

The council is keeping its Referral Panel, and the report says many other councils have dropped theirs. Under the draft scheme in Appendix B, three things send a Schedule 2 application to the panel:

  • the officer recommendation is contrary to comments from a town or parish council
  • the officer recommendation is contrary to comments from a ward member
  • the officer recommendation is contrary to comments from a statutory consultee

All three only count if the comments are made within the consultation period and raise material planning considerations.

A separate committee call-in survives too. Within the 21-day consultation period, if the town or parish council and the ward member both take a position against the officer recommendation, every committee member is emailed the case, the responses and the likely recommendation. Any one of them then has five working days to ask for a hearing, and must explain how the case is of significant public interest or significant environmental impact. If nobody replies in five working days, the decision is delegated automatically.

None of it is a right. The panel is advisory, the gateway test is applied by two people, and the report confirms that where the officer disagrees with the chair, the officer’s view is recorded in writing and the officer decides the route.

Key dates

Key dates for the East Suffolk planning committee changes Timeline: regulations made 15 July 2026; Full Council votes 23 September 2026; Strategic Planning Committee's last scheduled meeting 5 October; Planning Committee North's last scheduled meeting 13 October; Planning Committee South's last scheduled meeting 27 October; the new single committee and the new rules take effect 31 October 2026. From three planning committees to one Dates from the East Suffolk Council report ES-2927, the regulations themselves, and the council's own committee calendar 15 July 2026Regulations made. They come into force on 31 October 23 September 2026Full Council votes on the new single committee, 6.30pm 5 October 2026Strategic Planning Committee's last scheduled meeting 13 October 2026Planning Committee North's last scheduled meeting 27 October 2026Planning Committee South's last scheduled meeting 31 October 2026New rules bite. One committee of 13 members (amended from 11) Graphic by Suffolk Coast News
Graphic by Suffolk Coast News. The three committees' last scheduled meetings are taken from the council's own meeting calendar; what happens to dates already in the diary after 31 October is not set out in the report.

Planning Committee South was due to meet yesterday, 22 September, but the meeting was cancelled. Its next date is 27 October, four days before the change.

What went to committee last time

The last Planning Committee South meeting that went ahead was on 25 August, and it is a fair picture of what a committee on this coast actually decides. It heard three applications. Every one of them was there because the council or one of its own staff was the applicant:

  • DC/26/1113/VOC, the former Deben High School, Garrison Lane, Felixstowe. A variation of condition on the Deben Fields development, covering roofs, solar panels, green roof area, drainage and the cricket pavilion’s opening hour. It came to committee, the minutes record, “as East Suffolk is the owner and applicant”.
  • DC/26/1450/FUL, 46 Priory Court, Nacton. A replacement front door, steps and handrails on a static caravan. It went to committee because “the applicant is a member of staff at East Suffolk Council”.
  • DC/26/2155/FUL, South View, Lower Road, Westerfield. A single-storey rear extension and a garage conversion, taking a three-bedroom house to four. Again, a staff applicant.

Under the new scheme all three would start as officer decisions. Regulation 6 lets a nominated member and nominated officer agree to refer an application where the council, a member or an officer is the applicant, but the automatic trip to committee goes.

What councillors have already said

The August minutes also record the committee being briefed on the new National Planning Policy Framework published on 17 August, and the reaction ran straight into the delegation changes.

Councillor Daly said “this stronger national control was a worry to all of us”, that “the centre was taking control and it was undemocratic”, and that “it was taking away the local voice”. Councillor Hedgley agreed. Councillor Ninnmey said smaller parishes were concerned, that “development of 5-8 houses is significant for them but we won’t have a voice”, and asked when training would be provided. The planning manager replied that training would cover both the framework and the legislation changes, and would happen before 31 October.

An equality impact assessment has been done and found no equalities impact. The report notes there is no requirement to consult on any of this, because “compliance with The Regulations is a matter of law”, and that the right to comment on an individual planning application is unchanged.

What it means for you

If you are applying for a small extension, a change of use in a shop, a lawful development certificate or a handful of houses, your application will be decided by an officer, and after 31 October that is not something a councillor can change.

If you want to object to something and want it heard in public, the route is narrower and it is now entirely about timing:

  • Comment inside the consultation period, which runs 21 days. Comments after it do not count as a referral trigger.
  • Get your town or parish council and your ward councillor to make the same point, in material planning terms. It is their formal responses, contrary to the officer recommendation, that trigger the panel and the call-in.
  • Expect a decision in five working days. Once the call-in email goes out, committee members have five working days to ask for a hearing. Silence means the officer decides.
  • Speaking rights at committee are not affected. What changes is how a case gets to the committee, not what happens when it is there.

If the vote goes through tonight, the first applications decided under the new scheme will be those determined from 31 October. We will report the result.

Related: planning and the Local Plan on the Suffolk coast, council tax bands and bin collection days.