South Tyneside Council has been stripped of its power to decide major planning applications in its area because the government thinks it is not adequately performing its function. Applicants will be able to bypass the council, if they wish, and apply directly to the Planning Inspectorate instead.
A Designation Notice to this effect was issued to the council on 15 June by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) under the Town and Country Planning Act 1990.
It comes 15 months after the ministry blasted the council for failing to submit its new local plan on time, setting out among other things how it intended to meet its housing needs, as reported in North East Bylines.
As well as being late in submitting its plan, the MHCLG complained that South Tyneside had consistently failed to meet its housing targets – most recently by 60%.
Three appeal cases
The MHCLG said that in issuing the Designation Notice to South Tyneside it was taking account of planning applications in the two years to 31 March 2025 and subsequent appeals decided up to 31 December 2025.
South Tyneside Council told North East Bylines that three appeal decisions were relevant to the Notice. On 13 August 2025 the Planning Inspectorate overturned a council refusal of permission for up to 32 homes on the site of the derelict Whitburn Lodge pub in Mill Lane, Whitburn. Another relevant case was the demolition of the Simonside Arms and construction of 13 homes in Newcastle Road, South Shields, and the third was the construction and operation of a battery energy storage system at West Boldon..
A fourth case, involving plans for 202 homes at Cleadon Lane industrial estate, East Boldon, decided in January 2026, was marginally outside the relevant timespan but may have been in housing and planning minister Matthew Pennycook’s mind when he acted as the size of the development will go a long way to meeting South Tyneside’s needs as well as helping the government meet its 1.5mn new homes target.
Unreasonable behaviour
In the Whitburn Lodge case, the planning inspector awarded full costs to the applicant because the council “acted unreasonably” in preventing or delaying development which she said should clearly have been permitted, failing to produce evidence to substantiate each reason for refusal and vague, generalised or inaccurate assertions about the proposal’s impact unsupported by any objective analysis. The inspector described the delays as “quite frankly, ludicrous.”
Costs were also ordered against the council in the Cleadon Lane case because the council again behaved unreasonably due to delays and failure to produce evidence to substantiate their reason for refusal – though in that case the council later changed its mind and did not defend the refusal on appeal.
Now the housing and planning minister has evidently lost patience and written to the council to say: “The secretary of state…considers that there are respects in which the local planning authority…is not adequately performing their function of determining applications for planning permission for major development.”
Major developments in this planning context are defined as ten or more dwellings, or a site of 0.5 hectares or more where the number of dwellings is not known; creation of 1,000m² or more of non-residential floorspace; development on a site of one hectare or more, regardless of floorspace; or
mineral extraction or waste development (always classed as major).
Council statement
South Tyneside Council told North East Bylines: “We acknowledge the government’s decision to designate the authority under Section 62A of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 in relation to major development applications.
“However, it is important to note that this designation is based on a specific assessment period and does not reflect our overall long-term performance, which was well below designation level both in the two years prior to the assessment period and in the subsequent period to date. Furthermore, the council continues to perform strongly in terms of speed of decision-making and quality of decision-making on non-major applications.
“This demonstrates that our performance has been strong both before and since the assessment period, and that the data behind the government’s designation decision relates only to a very small number of cases where a limited number of appeal decisions had a disproportionate impact in terms of our quality of decision-making on major planning applications.
“However, we take this matter seriously, recognising the importance of strong and consistent planning decisions in supporting new homes, jobs and investment and are now focused on next steps and are already developing our action plan and will work closely with government and the Planning Advisory Service to ensure the designation can be lifted as soon as possible.”
Comment: another fine mess
Developers of major schemes such as these still have the option of applying first to the council but are now free to go straight to the MCHLG – in effect, the Planning Inspectorate. Given the government’s commitment to building 1.5mn new homes during this parliament, they are likely to choose the ministry in the expectation of a more sympathetic response. Whether that will turn out to be the case now that South Tyneside is under the control of Reform UK is not clear.
This is another fine mess that South Tyneside’s new Reform-led council finds itself at least partially responsible for clearing up. Tyne Coast College was hit with a Financial Notice to Improve by the Department for Education over the £95mn new campus in South Shields which the council is partly financing and on which it is pinning its hopes for town centre regeneration, as reported by North East Bylines on 23 May.
