Bromley's planning committee is about to lose 88% of its caseload. Here's who decides your scheme instead.

From 31 October 2026 the national scheme of delegation applies in Bromley, as in every English planning authority. Applications for 1 to 9 homes on sites under half a hectare, householder applications and minor commercial schemes must be decided by planning officers. No committee, no councillor call-in, no exceptions.

In Bromley that is not a marginal change. Of the committee decisions in our archive over the last twelve months whose application type is classified, 88 per cent (35 of 40) were exactly these minor and householder applications. Under the new rules, almost everything Bromley's members debated last year would never have reached them.

What still gets a committee

Major schemes, departures from the development plan and applications a chief planning officer and a nominated member jointly certify as significant can still be heard, by a committee now capped at 13 members. Our archive of Bromley committee behaviour, every evidenced decision with the council's own resolution wording, remains the record of how those members vote when the big cases come.

What replaces the committee for everyone else

A named case officer. And officers differ. Across London we measure persistent differences between officers on approval rates, conditions attached and Section 106 posture. In Bromley, [OFFICER-STATS BLOCK — insert from case_officer/officer_signals: officers active in Bromley, approval-rate spread, median condition count] (numbers to be pulled and verified before publish).

For anyone promoting a small scheme in Bromley the practical consequence is simple: the political risk is gone, the human risk is measurable, and it is measurable in advance. Before you buy the site or fix the design, you can know whether your application is officer-decided (for 1 to 9 homes it is), and what the officers deciding schemes like yours in Bromley have done before.