Has the Welsh Government conducted any formal assessment or workforce planning to determine how many qualified planners are required to meet the First Minister’s priority of accelerating planning decisions to grow the Welsh economy?
Ensuring that Wales has enough planners with the right skills in the right areas is fundamental to the delivery of our policies. I have recently commissioned the Royal Town Planning Institute to undertake a piece of work on ‘workforce planning’. It will provide a detailed picture of the capacity, resource and skills situation across public sector planning services. The report will be published in the summer. This is an important piece of research that will enable us to develop a strategy to improve the capacity and resilience of our planning services and will ensure our resources are directed to where they will have the most impact.