Wiltshire Council is investing an extra £1m into its planning service to drive “faster decision making”.

The planning service includes teams that work on policies such as the local plan and officers that process planning applications.

This extra funding will be spent on more officers, which the council hopes will contribute to building a stronger workforce.

Delays during the Covid pandemic led to significant backlog of planning applications for many authorities.

Wiltshire Council reported difficulties in recruiting staff to fill vacancies at the time and, at one stage, it had almost 2,000 open planning applications.

According to the council, the service processes more than 6,000 planning applications each year.

Cllr Nick Botterill, cabinet member for development management and strategic planning, said: “Our teams work hard to provide a high standard of customer service across all the planning services we provide, from creating evidence-based policies that shape our communities, through to neighbourhood planning, enforcement and processing applications.

“However, it is clear that we need to make changes to the way that we provide our planning services to ensure that we process applications more efficiently and deliver the best possible service for our customers – and this extra £1m investment will do just that.”