Housing and Planning Bill

Debate between Baroness Young of Old Scone and Lord Shipley

Wednesday 23rd March 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)]

My Lords, I recognise that it is late in the day to be contributing to this amendment but I have put my name to an amendment in the very last group, so I am simply delaying myself getting home. I want to remind the Committee about the findings of the Select Committee on the Built Environment, on which I have the privilege to sit, and the very worrying evidence that we heard from planning departments across the country about their ability to recruit experienced professional planning staff and about their viability for the future.

I absolutely support the concerns about this proposal, and I think that Amendment 102D is well worth supporting as a safeguard in terms of the moral hazard issue, but I think that we also need to take account of the fact that at the moment there is a real shortage of suitably skilled and experienced planning staff. If we set up alternative economies in a commercial planning capability, we will find that local authorities are rapidly hollowed out in terms of their planning capacity. It is very close to that at the moment. They have next to no specialist planning skills in heritage, environment and other areas. They are finding it difficult to afford planning staff of their own. So in this proposition we need to take account of the viability of planning departments for the future if skilled and experienced staff are likely to be attracted towards a commercial planning capacity in a competitive sense.

We also need to think about whether we are trying to solve the right problem. There is a real issue about the quality and capacity of planning departments across the country. We saw in our work with the Select Committee impressive alternative models. Local authorities gathered together to create more critical mass and to allow themselves to maintain a range of specialist planning officers. These authorities had voluntarily contracted out their planning support to commercial organisations.

Importantly—and here I disagree violently with the noble Lord, Lord Deben, a rare event in my experience—the planning authority was very much in the driving seat. The worry I have about these proposals is that if you are paying a fee to a commercial provider of planning-support services you will expect them to be on your side. They will be professional and I hope that a quality-assurance process will be put in place to ensure that professional standards are maintained.

As the noble Lord, Lord True, said, the reality is that when you are in front of the jury you will have your man arguing your case, not the local authority’s man helping the local authority’s elected officers take a dispassionate look at what the decision in the public interest should be. As I say, I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Deben. I am a great fan of the planning system, which is one of the last genuinely democratic processes in this country. It is the responsibility of the local authority and the officers who support it to take a decision in the interests of the local community, balancing all the economic, social, environmental and other issues. I fear that if we do not handle this set of changes carefully we will find that we have tipped the balance too far in the direction of the developer.

[Lord Shipley]

My Lords, I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone. I have two amendments in about half an hour from now and I am conscious that we have reached a point where virtually all the issues around Clause 145 are being discussed. The noble Baroness has rightly identified that the balance is about to be tipped. I hope that the Minister, in replying to this debate, will answer the question posed by the noble Lord, Lord Beecham: what exactly is the problem that the Government are seeking to solve? Unless the problem is properly defined, the solution can ultimately give rise to a whole set of new problems that have not been forecast.

There is a real issue about being able to dissociate the democratic decision from the designated person who is writing the recommendation. This was put so well by the noble Lord, Lord True, who rightly defined that the process of making a decision is dependent on what the person who writes the recommendation actually says. It is a whole and a continuum. It is not a function separate from making the decision.

A further issue of major concern to me relates to what the noble Lord, Lord Deben, was talking about earlier. It is wrong in principle to privatise public regulatory services. That is now happening. There are issues around cost, as to whether it would be more expensive to go down that route, but the principle of a planning decision in practice being privatised is a major issue about which we must be very careful. A designated person who is writing a recommendation has to be independent and to be seen to be independent.

I have concluded that Clause 145 is now not fit for purpose and should be withdrawn in its entirety. If the Government can explain how they can bring it back at Report better than it now is, meeting the public interest test of independence, we might be willing to look at it—but at the moment I see no evidence base that convinces me that Clause 145 should remain part of the Bill.