Sutton Planning Committee Loses Most Decisions on 31 Oct

From 31 October, Sutton’s Planning Committee will not be allowed to decide most planning applications, and residents will lose any automatic route to getting one heard in public.

The change is national. The Town and Country Planning (Discharge of Local Planning Authority Functions) (England) Regulations 2026, SI 2026/854, were made on 15 July 2026 and signed by the housing minister Matthew Pennycook. They apply to every local planning authority in England.

Sutton Council confirms the effect in its own words. A report going to the Housing, Economy and Business Committee on Tuesday says there are “changes coming into force after 31 October 2026 that will significantly limit the number of applications that can be determined by the Planning Committee”.

What an officer must decide

Under regulation 4, a council “must make arrangements” so that everything in Schedule 1 of the regulations is decided by an officer. There is no discretion, and the council is barred from limiting how the officer decides it.

Schedule 1 covers the bulk of what an ordinary household or small builder applies for:

• householder applications
• minor commercial applications
• minor residential applications, meaning between one and nine homes on a site smaller than half a hectare
• prior approval applications, and requests for a decision on whether prior approval is needed
• certificates of lawfulness, existing and proposed
• permission in principle
• non-material amendments under section 96A
• reserved matters, unless the outline permission was for 500 or more homes or 50,000 square metres of floorspace
• biodiversity gain plans
• applications to vary conditions where the original permission was itself a Schedule 1 permission

What can still reach a committee, and how

Everything else falls under Schedule 2: applications for planning permission that are not householder, minor commercial or minor residential; listed building consent; advertisement consent; consent under a tree preservation order; retrospective applications under section 73A; and reserved matters on very large outline permissions.

Those go to an officer by default. Regulation 5 allows them to reach a committee only if a nominated member and a nominated officer both agree that the application raises either:

• “one or more issues of economic, social or environmental significance to the local area”, or
• “one or more significant planning matters having regard to the development plan and any other material considerations”

Two people, in other words, and both of them have to say yes. Where the council, a councillor or an officer is the applicant or has an interest, regulation 6 sets up a similar gateway with no statutory test attached.

Nothing in the regulations creates an automatic referral. There is no trigger based on the number of objections received, and no free-standing right for a ward councillor or a residents’ group to send an application to committee.

The practical effect is already visible in Sutton. The council granted a change to the former Argos scheme at 219-227 High Street on 2 September; the register records the decision level as “delegated”, meaning an officer made it. You can read what was approved in our report on the former Argos site.

The committee size cap

Regulation 7 says a committee determining an application must not have more than 13 members. Sutton’s Planning Committee currently has 10 members plus six named substitutes, so it is inside the cap and does not need to shrink.

What Sutton has to do before then

The council has to nominate the member and the officer who will hold the gateway, and amend its constitution to match, before 31 October.

Full Council meets on Monday 19 October at 7pm. That is the last scheduled meeting of the full council before the regulations take effect. The Planning Committee itself meets on 7 October and again on 4 November, the first time under the new rules.

The Secretary of State must review the regulations and publish the conclusions by 31 October 2028.

The Local Plan is moving too

The same report sets out where Sutton’s Local Plan has got to. The draft plan was out for consultation between 18 June and 31 July 2026. Officers are now preparing to send it, with every consultation response, to the Planning Inspectorate.

A report will go to Full Council in the autumn seeking authority to submit, ahead of a national deadline of 31 December 2026.

What it means for you

Commenting on an application still matters, and still counts. An officer has to take material objections into account in exactly the same way a committee would, and the decision can still be challenged at appeal or by judicial review.

What changes is the room. From 31 October:

• if your objection is to a householder extension, a small block of flats or a prior approval, no committee can hear it, whatever the strength of feeling
• if it is to anything larger, the only route to a public hearing is to persuade the nominated member and the nominated officer that it meets the statutory test, so an objection that spells out the economic, social, environmental or planning significance is worth more than one that does not
• weight of numbers alone will not book a committee slot

For comparison, the borough’s most contested recent case did reach a public committee. Beddington Farmlands drew 65 representations, 61 of them objections, and the Planning Committee resolved to grant it on 2 September.

We list what is in the system each month on our Sutton planning applications page.

Sources

• The Town and Country Planning (Discharge of Local Planning Authority Functions) (England) Regulations 2026, SI 2026/854, made 15 July 2026, in force 31 October 2026
• London Borough of Sutton, Biannual Performance Monitoring report, Housing, Economy and Business Committee, 15 September 2026
• London Borough of Sutton, Planning Committee membership and meetings calendar