Neighbourhood Planning Bill

Debate between Lord Best and Baroness Parminter

Report: 1st sitting: House of Lords
Thursday 23rd February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Parminter]

My Lords, with the leave of the House, in the unavoidable absence of my noble friend Lord Taylor of Goss Moor, I move the amendment standing in his name. The amendment introduces the principle of localism to the New Towns Act to enable the delivery of the highest quality new garden villages and towns by locally accountable elected local planning authorities rather than, as at present, any such development corporation being established on the initiative of a local authority and agreed by the Secretary of State.

Garden towns and villages are local solutions to the pressing need in so much of the country for homes, but by using the uplift in land values generated by development not purely to line the pockets of the few with fantastic wealth but to deliver great, thriving, 21st-century villages every bit as well served as the best historic communities. Already, 14 are being supported by Government, but the success of that programme will be greatly enhanced by the ability of local authorities to ensure quality by using the New Towns Act to guarantee that new garden villages and towns all meet the policy objectives of the Government. But local authorities will adopt this opportunity only if they know it is locally controlled. Local communities would accept no less. In the age of localism, why should they hand control of finances, planning, ownership of the land and its long-term value to the Secretary of State?

A similar amendment was moved by my noble friend Lord Taylor in Committee, where it received cross-party support. It also gained clear support and a positive response from the Minister at that time. Since then, we have had the Government’s White Paper, and the Government have made a clear and unambiguous commitment to localise the New Towns Act powers, exactly as proposed by this amendment. Mindful of the fact that this has cross-party support, I genuinely welcome that and beg to move.

[Lord Best (CB)]

My Lords, I have not declared interests during the course of the Bill so far, so declare that I am a vice-president of the Town and Country Planning Association and a vice-president of the Local Government Association.

In the debates on what became the Housing and Planning Act 2016, the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, and I jointly proposed an amendment, which the Government supported, to make it easier for new corporations to be set up to establish new settlements, along the lines of the old new towns but probably rather smaller—garden villages or garden towns they are sometimes called. This takes the story to its next stage, as the White Paper from the Government promises to do. It would allow local authorities to have significant influence over the new corporations set up to create new communities. Local authorities would be able to appoint the board and approve their budgets.

Sadly, without this kind of measure, a lot of local authorities will not think it worth while establishing new corporations for this purpose. This amendment would take away a deterrent to local authorities embarking on this road, fearful that the Secretary of State will dictate what happens in their area. It would instead replace the Secretary of State with the local authority having considerable influence over the new corporation.

Why are we making such a fuss about this? Why do we need these new settlements? From the perspective of local communities, in order to make sufficient land available for a five-year supply of all the new homes that we are going to need, you sometimes get the choice between 25 homes in 100 or 200 different villages or small towns, and one major development of 5,000 homes—perhaps not quite as much or perhaps a bit more—in one place. Apart from anything else, this means that instead of the hassle of having 200 local community groups opposed to the 25 homes in their village, you have one group. That group probably is opposed to the very large development, but at least the opposition to the development is concentrated in one place, instead of the development disturbing an awful lot of local communities. Putting a number of the homes that we need in one place is in itself helpful to local authorities and to their communities.

That is a negative. The positive is that having a properly planned new settlement or community, where you have a master plan that ensures that all the facilities that you need—transport, schools and the rest—are all in one place, is itself a really good way to try to achieve this enormous number of new homes which we know the country desperately needs to end housing shortages.

I can speak with a bit of experience here because one of my duties for nearly 20 years at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation was looking after the model village of New Earswick, created by our founder, Joseph Rowntree, in 1904. We can look back over 100 and something years to see whether a garden village really works. I can tell your Lordships that this kind of planned community of more than 1,000 homes, with two schools, shops and a wonderful arts and crafts folk hall and community centre, 100 years on, is the way that you get all the things that you need to build a proper, strong community, rather than packing in 25 more homes at the end of the village, which causes nothing but disruption.

This amendment would put local authorities more in charge and would therefore make it much more likely that we will see these new settlements and communities created in the future. I strongly support it.

Housing and Planning Bill

Debate between Lord Best and Baroness Parminter

Wednesday 20th April 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Parminter (LD)]

My Lords, in Committee there was widespread support for the measures of both this Government and the coalition Government to devolve powers to local communities, particularly through neighbourhood planning. We know that neighbourhood planning delivers more homes—the Government’s own figures confirm it—so how can it be right for local people to have no redress when a planning application is approved which drives a coach and horses through everything they have worked tirelessly to achieve in their neighbourhood plan?

The Minister confirmed in Committee that 1,800 neighbourhood plans had come into the early stages of development and that about 120 had been brought into force, but the total number that we could be looking at is 9,000. Why, bluntly, should local people go to the effort of producing a neighbourhood plan if such plans can be ignored when councils make decisions on planning applications and the opportunity to challenge is through costly judicial reviews?

The Minister said in Committee that this amendment was not necessary because the Secretary of State can recover planning appeals, but at that stage I highlighted three things. First, that power applies only when the permission has been refused by the local authority and subsequently taken to appeal. Secondly, it applies only to major applications while, particularly in rural areas, it can be the smaller sites of up to nine homes which need very careful planning to ensure that we get those types of development which have the support of local communities. Finally, the recovery available to the Secretary of State provides no protection for communities when the permission has been granted by local authorities contrary to a neighbourhood plan.

This amendment, in my name and those of the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy of Southwark, and my noble friend Lord Taylor of Goss Moor, creates a limited right of appeal. I am sorry to see that the noble Lord, Lord True, is not in his place today, but we debated this point in Committee. This is a limited right only for parish councils and neighbourhood forums, not for individuals, and it would enable them to appeal against the granting of permission only for new housing that conflicts with their made or well-advanced neighbourhood plan. It is a limited right supported by the House of Lords Committee on National Policy for the Built Environment, on which I was privileged to serve earlier this year, and by the CPRE, Civic Voice and NALC, three organisations that do so much to ensure that more people are involved in planning, helping to ensure that we get consensus around planning and thus help us to deliver the additional homes that we know we need. I beg to move.

[Lord Best (CB)]

My Lords, I support this amendment, to which I spoke at greater length in Committee. I shall summarise my earlier points. This proposal for a parish council or neighbourhood to be able to appeal against a planning approval that cuts across an emerging neighbourhood plan was raised in the other place by Nick Herbert MP, with support from Sir Oliver Heald MP and Andrew Bingham MP, all Conservative Members, whose views were shared by Dr Roberta Blackman-Woods MP for the Opposition. Mr Nick Herbert said,

“speculative developers try to get in applications ahead of the completion of neighbourhood plans or even after they have been completed … either they are upheld by the local authority, which is fearful of losing an appeal, or the developer makes an appeal that is upheld by the planning inspector. The development is then allowed to go ahead”.

This totally undermines all the hard work of the volunteers who have spent endless hours gaining support for the neighbourhood plan before, to quote Sir Oliver Heald, it is,

“trashed by an application by a speculative developer ”.—[Official Report, Commons, 5/1/16; col. 222.]

This is a deficiency in the otherwise sensible arrangements for neighbourhood forums and plans which were devised and introduced by Greg Clark, now the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government.

I have declared my interest in the excellent neighbourhood plan for the Cerne Valley in Dorset, where I own some land within the area covered by the plan. I followed the progress of the local volunteers who brought together this neighbourhood plan from the summer of 2011 until its approval in a public referendum on the plan in January 2015. The nerve-racking hazard facing all the local people involved was that their hard work was at risk from a developer putting in an application which in no way accorded with the emerging neighbourhood plan. Had this happened, neither the parish council or the neighbourhood forum would have had any way of appealing and the council itself would not have been able to use the neighbourhood plan to determine the planning application until the referendum on it was done and dusted. For all the 1,800 neighbourhood forums currently preparing neighbourhood plans, and all those to come— the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, tells us that 9,000 could come down this route, and I hope there will be many more—this amendment would overcome the problem.

If the Minister wanted to modify this amendment so that the neighbourhood right of appeal applied only once the emerging neighbourhood plan had reached a later point in its progress—as was suggested earlier by some noble Lords—I feel sure that this would be acceptable to the proposers. I hope that the Minister will indicate a move in this direction. I support this amendment.