Housing and Planning

Lord Barwell Excerpts

Thursday 6th September 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Pickles]

That is a specific area that I know, and a lot of those spaces around Leeds bring their communities together, which is important. My hon. Friend’s question raises the problems that we have had, because Labour gave planning such a bad name that it has been difficult to regain the British people’s trust in the system over the past two years. I hope that, building on the national planning policy framework, the new measures will lead the British people to understand that planning is on their side.

[Gavin Barwell (Croydon Central) (Con)]

I warmly welcome what the Secretary of State said about the green belt, town centres and the temporary waiver of unrealistic section 106 agreements. However, if we have done everything we can to remove developers’ excuses for not developing, why does it make sense to allow them to extend the duration of existing planning permissions?

[Mr Pickles]

We have recognised that section 106 agreements and existing planning permissions are often part of the same thing, and that it takes a bit of time to get work on big sites together. We are expecting an increase in the number of applications anyway, so it would make no sense to increase the number artificially. We therefore took the decision at the beginning of the summer to extend existing permissions, which was a sensible and pragmatic thing to do.