The head of the new national planning body would leave most decisions on planning applications to his staff, despite drawing £184,000 a year for a four-day-a-week role, he told MPs yesterday.

Sir Michael Pitt, who has been appointed as first chairman of the new Infrastructure Planning Commission, told MPs yesterday that his primary role will be coaching and mentoring the 35 other commissioners once the body is created in October.

In addition, Sir Michael, a former council chief executive, will put himself in charge of relations with “stakeholders” — national and local government — and spend time creating a governance structure for the organisation that will ensure it is fit for purpose, he said.

He told MPs: “I suppose it would be wrong for the chair to be highly [involved] in spending a lot of time on individual applications. It’s far less important than the other things.”

The body will not start making binding decisions until national planning statements on issues such as nuclear power have been agreed by MPs, which will take at least a year. However, the commission, which will cost £9.3 million a year, with £5 million in set-up costs, could be dismantled before then if the Conservatives win the general election. The Tories are committed to returning the commission’s powers to local planning inquiries.

Sir Michael will have at his disposal 35 other commissioners with an elastic number of staff and the power to call in consultants and advisers whenever necessary.

When MPs on the committee questioned whether he would be able to do this within budget, he replied that he was relying on the assurances of government officials that they had allocated enough money.

The Government pushed legislation through Parliament last year to create the planning commission as an independent body, which it hopes will speed up controversial planning applications, in particular those involving new nuclear power stations.

Sir Michael said yesterday that his independence will be constrained by the 200 pages of legislation that govern the commission’s operation, as well as by the national policy statements passed by Parliament. Its decisions will also be subject to judicial review. He urged MPs to judge his success rate on the number of these he won or lost.

Sir Michael admitted that there was little chance of preventing nuclear power companies and airport operators from using QCs when presenting their case in open session. He encouraged protesters, arguing against permission to be granted for big projects to put their case directly to the commissioners. “Commissioners should encourage protesters to give [their evidence] straight,” he said.

He admitted that the one-year target for all decisions could cause tensions, but he said that in certain circumstances the timetable could be extended. A committee source suggested that the MPs were likely to agree to his appointment, but felt he had set himself high standards to which the committee would hold him in the future.

Caroline Spelman, the Shadow Communities Secretary, said: “Taxpayers will be very angry that so much of their hard-earned money is being poured into a body that has no democratic accountability and will take planning decisions further than ever from local people.

“Under Conservative plans the commission would not exist and we would have greater democratic accountability over decisions at significantly less cost.”

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