Queen’s Speech

Baroness Thornhill Excerpts

Monday 17th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Thornhill (LD) [V]]

My Lords, this has been a wide-ranging and fascinating debate, and my contribution will focus solely on one aspect of the much-heralded planning reforms: public engagement, or the lack thereof.

I am certain, judging by the controversy stirred up by the release last August of the Planning for the Future White Paper and a wide range of ongoing consultations, that this will be one of the most contentious Bills of this Queen’s Speech. There will be ample time to dissect the Bill when it eventually comes before us, but I have huge concerns that the Government are taking neither the public nor their own MPs with them on this important journey to solve our housing crisis, and thus they are probably doomed to failure.

I have noted in the press over the last week that MPs from the shire counties are already organising to oppose these reforms. The Government have already caved in to these MPs by scrapping the algorithm that produced the new targets, so they got some reduction in their targets, while urban areas saw theirs increased. In Watford, ours have been tripled in recent years, resulting in our oven-ready local plan having to be scrapped and started again.

In my former position as an elected mayor, development was a very real and constant worry. Sadly, development management meetings were usually acrimonious, with the anger and bewilderment of the public evident. Their main cry was: “Why don’t you just say no?” As we all know, councils cannot “just say no” to government policy, yet, as was shown in the recent local elections, councillors of different parties and in different parts of the country are being punished at the ballot box for what is seen by their electors as overdevelopment.

Planning by appeal is not a sign of good governance, but it gets you on the side of the voters, with cheers at the planning committee, only for hopes to be dashed as inspectors overturn the decisions on appeal. Currently, about a third of appeals go in the developers’ favour, which in the Government’s eyes means that too many schemes are being refused that should be approved. Presumably it is to avoid that there are also plans to penalise local planning authorities when they lose appeals.

The planning reforms will further dilute democratic involvement. We believe that they are being introduced precisely because public engagement is difficult and challenging, and so the Government are finding ways of bypassing it altogether without actually saying so. Where are the plans to change this confrontational narrative and to press the need for more homes and for more appropriate housing, such as social housing, supported housing and homes for the elderly?

The reforms will mean that the future focus of local engagement in planning will be at the local plan-making stage, so communities will not be able to influence applications as they do now. Good councils already do this up-front consultation, so there is plenty of evidence that, while working closely with communities in the early stages can be positive, it does not preclude massive protest when a detailed application eventually goes in. It is doubtless this that has led to the Government’s presumption in favour of development in the zoning proposals. There is ample evidence that zoning has not worked in planning previously, so where is the evidence that it will work now?

Development within growth zones will receive automatic outline consent, while renewal areas will have presumption in favour of development. As a result, there will be no opportunity for either public consultation or assessment by local authority councillors or officers. According to the White Paper, public involvement will be limited to

“detailed matters to be resolved”,

rather than on a particular building or development and whether it is appropriate in its local context. This, alongside proposals for faster decisions on planning applications, and further expansion of the controversial permitted development right, leaves far less room for local input into individual decisions and is an erosion of democracy within the system.

Finally, development is always bound to be controversial. People are never likely to be thrilled that the attractive fields that their garden backs on to are to become a housing estate; nor that low-rise town centre offices are to be demolished to make way for something much taller. But, as things stand, we have a broken national conversation about development in which local authorities, planners and councillors feel as though they are everybody’s scapegoats, whether for building too little or too much. If the Government are serious about solving our housing crisis, they must first convince the public that there is one. That key issue is ignored in this Queen’s Speech.