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Notes
The pressure that the government puts on English local planning authorities to improve their development control performance, measured by the percentages of applications of particular types determined within specified periods, is considerable. For 2003/04, the government had ‘set standards’ (that is to say, required them to achieve a minimum performance level set by the government, with the threat of intervention if they did not meet these standards) for 90 local planning authorities seen as having performed poorly during 2001/02, which is nearly one-quarter of English local planning authorities. Interviewees for this project would have been very conscious of this pressure, because three of the five authorities employing our interviewees are amongst those set standards (ODPM, Citation2003d). They would also have been very conscious of the role that development control performance played in their allocation of PDG, because it was the basis for the 2003/04 allocations and would still be “the main basis of grant allocation” in 2004/05 (ODPM, Citation2003b).