Localism Bill
Debate between Lord Berkeley and Lord Lucas(13 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord Berkeley
I have some worries about the whole concept. Many noble Lords have talked about what should and should not be on this list. It is a very good list, and the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, certainly deserves a lot of credit for putting it together, if that is the right word. But there is not so much in it about development. There is lots about sustainability, which of course I love, but my slight worry is that—notwithstanding the debate going on at the moment about the presumption in favour of development, which I am sure we will talk about later—if there is to be development, it has to be done in an environmentally friendly way but must also be reasonably cost effective.
A Treasury report was produced by Infrastructure UK last year. It said that the civil engineering developments in this country are probably 60 per cent higher than they are in Germany, and goes on to say that the labour costs are much the same. The conclusion that one should probably draw from that is that the difference is to a large extent taken into account with the complexity of planning. Of course we need to have planning but, as my noble friend said just now, if we go too far down that road it will be a lawyers’ bonanza and take a very long time and nothing will get built. In the end, we are in the end going to be competing with other European and world countries about what we produce.
It is useful to have a definition. I think that we need more in it about the development side, so that is sustainable. But we must also recognise that one of the benefits of having something like this in the Bill, and possibly the national planning policy framework, is that it enables us and other people to help to hold the Government to account. Governments in the past 20 or so years, ever since John Major apparently invented the world “sustainability”, have all paid lip service to sustainability and a green environment until life got difficult. We have the 80 per cent carbon reduction target. The last Government made some attempt to go towards them, and this Government are also making some attempt, but if you look to where they have got to, in my view, many people will think, “Thank goodness that we will have retired and may even be dead by the time it comes into force in 40 years’ time—so it does not really matter”.
Yesterday the Department for Transport announced a trial of longer lorries. That is great for the environment, is it not, and great for road accidents and the quality of life? There is need for much more joined-up government right across these things, and some clauses like this would help us to hold the Government to account. I believe that we can get growth and development in a sustainable way, and this is a good contribution towards it—but possibly putting it in the national planning policy framework would be easier, and we could have a much better debate about what should be in it.
Lord Lucas
My Lords, I find myself very much siding with the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, on this. Sustainable development is rather like well-being; it is a concept that we think we know when we see it, and occasionally we will try to pin down what it means in definitions like the one we see before us. But actually it means different things in different times and different places, and should do so.
The development of a nuclear power station, looked at on a very local scale, is completely unsustainable, but on a national scale it may be sustainable. So scale is very important. Likewise, something which on a national scale may be an undesirable policy may be just what a village needs in order to flourish.
Again, when you set out a definition like this, even without including design or spirituality, you find that in every individual instance bits of the definition do not apply, or apply in very perverse ways. How does one apply great chunks of this definition to, say, the siting of a sewage farm? There are bits of it that do not seem to hang in there at all under those circumstances—
Localism Bill
Debate between Lord Berkeley and Lord Lucas
Lord Lucas
My Lords, I have three amendments in this group. Amendment 151 is quite simple. I am interested in the Government’s views on how strong a neighbourhood plan will be. If someone has been left out of a neighbourhood plan and still wants to develop their property, will they have the same scope to go for a departure as they do at the moment, or will there be a strong presumption that the neighbourhood plan prevails?
Amendment 152ZB deals with the way in which neighbourhood plans intersect with development orders. A lot of planning permission goes through under development orders which, quite rightly, a district, a county or a borough will not have a particular interest in, but which a neighbourhood will have an interest in. Neighbourhoods are very interested in the way in which their local shopping streets develop, for example. Many things that can happen to a shopping street can happen under the general permissions given under a development order. I am interested in the way in which those two intersect.
Amendment 152 is a little more complicated than that. Rural and semi-rural parishes, where there is a lot of scope for development, will become wealthy—that is the wrong word; they will have a lot of money at their disposal as a result of this Bill. A typical parish will go round its residents and ask what they want and will also go round all the neighbouring landlords and say, “If we give you the sort of permissions you are looking for, what will you do for the community?”. That is the only way it can work, because if that did not happen, any landlord who had a deal to offer could upset the referendum by saying to people voting in it, “Why are you voting for this and giving Farmer Jones £1 million as a result of the development? If you had asked me, I would have said that you could have had £0.5 million towards the village hall, a new village shop or to subsidise the bus service and that I would require only £0.5 million if you put those houses on my land”.
Inevitably, there has to be that kind of negotiation with all the local landlords. The neighbourhood plan, when it emerges, will be a document which results in a very substantial flow of funds from landlords to the community. In what way they will provide those funds, whether by permissions or by being prepared to build things for the community or subsidise things for the community, will be a total re-establishment of relationships between landlords and the community and a much more equal appreciation of sharing benefits and burdens of development. I reckon that you would probably get the planning game settling down at about 50:50 between the landlord and the community.
Incidentally, this will render entirely unnecessary the argument that we had a few days ago about the community right to bid. Most of my noble friends were worrying about relatively rural communities. They will be in a position to buy. They will have funds potentially sitting around to buy the cricket pitch. They will not be hanging around waiting to see whether they can raise money. They will be well off and have a great deal of flexibility where such things are concerned and anyone wanting to sell local property will start to think of the local community as being a place to find a purchaser. Under those circumstances, inevitably one gets into a position where there is scope for corruption. We have to be careful that that does not occur. In a small community, people by and large know each other's business: but everything ought to be open. It is essential that when one deals with these sums of money—hundreds of thousands of pounds—everything ought to be open for inspection, so that everybody can see what deals have been proposed by landlords, what the basis is for choosing particular deals that have gone into a neighbourhood plan and what deals have been cast aside. Nothing should be hidden, everything should be open. That way, at a neighbourhood level, we will have pretty good insurance against corruption.
Lord Berkeley
My Lords, I listened very carefully to what the noble Lords, Lord Greaves and Lord Lucas, said on this grouping. My conclusion is that the developer who offers the most money to the community will get his planning permission. It sounds like a Dutch auction, with very little to do with the sustainability arguments that the Committee talked about in the past two days. Perhaps I have got it wrong; I shall be very interested to hear what the Minister says in response.
Lord Lucas
I think that the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, is being entirely too untrusting of communities and of the structures in the Bill. First, the wider issues of sustainability clearly come in to the examination of the plan. A site on a flood plain, for example, which has been proposed merely because the landlord is prepared to offer 70 per cent of value rather than 50 per cent, will clearly not get through the process. Secondly, communities will make a judgment. Sustainability is a concept that has a meaning for a community that is not there in its wider application; it is how the community evolves and flourishes. There will be many aspects of that which will apply to individual sites and bear as heavily as the amount of money that may come out of the site.
Communities will take a sophisticated judgment on which plans they wish to have. They will be well aware of the advantages and disadvantages to them of putting a development in a particular location. Landlords will likewise be able to see, for example, that this is the obvious place to put houses and so they do not need to give the community as much. If the neighbouring farmer wants to have a development on his land and it is slightly more of an eyesore, he will be asking the community to accept a greater burden in having the development there, so the community will need a greater benefit. That is the fundamental of neighbourhood planning. Under the current system, the farmer gets all the benefits and the neighbourhood gets the burdens. Under this system, the benefits are shared. How great the burden is should be reflected in how great the benefit is.
Localism Bill
Debate between Lord Berkeley and Lord Lucas
Lord Berkeley
Can I just add to those comments? The noble Lord, Lord Taylor of Goss Moor, introduced some very interesting comments about how this might be taken forward, as did my noble friend Lady Andrews. The Minister mentioned the national policy statements. I welcome the fact that the national planning policy document is to be published very soon and that it might be debated in both Houses. What is the relationship between that document and the national policy statements, if and when and as they are developed? Furthermore, with any planning application that falls below the cut-off level for NPSs, the policy still has to take into account the relevant parts of the NPSs. Is that going to stay? What is the relationship between these two documents and the hierarchy? My noble friend suggested putting a basic definition of sustainability in the Bill. Maybe the Minister could put in the more detailed bits of these amendments in the NPPF and then we would see it all together.
Lord Lucas
I very much support what my noble friend Lord Taylor of Goss Moor said. It is terribly important for the neighbourhood planning parts of this Bill that sustainability should be able to be interpreted at that level. At the moment in Hampshire it is part of the local policy that there should be no development in the countryside. If that is allowed under the new system, it will completely wipe out all neighbourhood planning in Hampshire. The argument is that development should take place in towns, where it is more sustainable, but if one applied that nationwide we would choose the wettest, least attractive part of the country and put all development there. It must be possible to focus down on a neighbourhood and look at what is sustainable for that neighbourhood.