Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Debate between Lord Best and Earl of Lytton

Committee stage
Wednesday 22nd March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Best (CB)]

My Lords, I support Amendments 441, 443, 444 and 446 on the theme of short-term lettings, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, the esteemed chair of your Lordships’ Built Environment Committee, on which I am honoured to serve. I also support the amendments from the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, on data sharing and safety.

I share the worries relayed very forcefully in submissions to our Built Environment Committee over the loss of long-term rented homes because of landlords switching to short-term lettings—propelled not least, it seems, by a tax and regulatory regime that favours the latter. As the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, has said, our debate last Monday covered a lot of the issues that have been debated in our committee and are now the subject of these probing amendments. Noble Lords gave much support on Monday to earlier amendments that advocated a registration or licensing scheme—the two could look very similar. The Built Environment Committee favoured local discretion in introducing a national scheme locally, since some places have virtually no short-term lettings. It would be very bureaucratic to have a scheme applied there. The Government are also committed, as well as to a registration scheme, to taking a regulatory arrangement forward, and I hope that we can hear news from the Minister of a timetable in this regard.

In addition, there was support on Monday for the proposition from the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, and the noble Earl, Lord Devon, endorsed by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, and the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, for new use classes, which would enable planning powers to be used to control numbers of short-term lets in each local authority. The Government are consulting on that proposition, which personally I would favour; it deserves attention, alongside some tweaks to remove perceived incentives in the tax and regulatory frameworks, which currently appear to encourage landlords to end longer-term lets and switch to Airbnb-style short-term rentals.

I add to the debate one extra ingredient: the international dimension. In this digital age, the Airbnb phenomenon for accommodation, like Uber for transport and Amazon for retail, is ubiquitous and has caused concern in sectors in most other advanced economies. Many different regulations have been applied in other countries, particularly in tourist hotspots. A report from the Property Research Trust last year, Regulating Short-Term Rentals: Platform-based Property Rentals in European Cities, describes numerous efforts to face this challenge. Amsterdam has a strict permit system, with fines of about £20,000 for failure to comply. Barcelona has banned all short-term rentals, even in private homes. In Ireland, those areas of the country designated as rent-pressure zones have tough restrictions. In parts of the United States, such as San Francisco and Boston, only properties with the host living there during the stay are allowed to be operated as short-term lets. This international perspective demonstrates that we are not alone in facing this problem. We have a greater problem of scarcity of rented housing than most of our neighbours, which suggests that an effort to get to grips with the downside of short-term lets may be overdue here.

I have one final point. Amendment 444 reflects the Built Environment Committee’s firmly held view that new arrangements should not deter any home owners from letting spare rooms on a short-term basis. The current tax-free position, allowing up to £7,500 per annum, encourages the use of underutilised assets and brings extra income that can help with rising mortgage costs. The amendment emphasises the value of continuing that favourable tax regime for owner-occupiers in underoccupied homes.

I hope that the Government will be bold in following the lead of many other countries. We need to address the pain and disruption being caused in particular locations by the growth of short-term lets that replace badly needed longer-term rented homes. I support the amendments.

[The Earl of Lytton (CB)]

My Lords, I too support these amendments, particularly the lead amendment in this group, moved by the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, about the gathering of better data. I will try not to repeat what I said last time, other than that I have some skin in the game here in the sense that I jointly own properties that are let on assured shorthold tenancies, as well as short-term holiday let properties.

This is a multifaceted issue. Second homes may, at other times, be part-time holiday lets. Holiday lets may be for leisure trips one minute and for business purposes another, and they may alter from season to season. They may be for a couple of days at one point, or a couple of weeks or three months at another point. It is very difficult to make a one-size-fits-all assumption when you are dealing with short-term lets, holiday lets or even assured shorthold tenancies.

The platforms are also equally variable: it could be booking.com—a very common one—Airbnb, an owner’s own website, word of mouth, a card in the window of the local convenience store, or a repeat booking. They are all means of people getting in contact. I know this for a fact, because the only one that does not affect the properties that I am involved with is Airbnb as we do not use that platform, but I know lots of people who do. In respect of what the noble Lord, Lord Best, said, the thing about a platform such as Airbnb is its slickness and convenience for users—both lessors and prospective occupiers. That has really made it a benchmark worldwide phenomenon and has driven its operation and popularity as much as any wish to shift from one to the other.

I contacted a local estate agent down in the West Country—not one I use but I knew somebody in the place—and asked them what was happening with short-term lets as against assured shorthold tenancies, for example. They deal with a lot of such tenancies; they are one of the main agents in that area. I was told that, while there is considerable demand for assured shorthold tenancies—often 20 or 30 applicants for each—there were very few cases of an AST being terminated for the purpose of moving the property to a short-term letting. There was nearly always some other reason for ending the AST: it was a pot of money that the owner wanted to put into some other investment, such as extending another house or helping a child with a house purchase in another part of the country.

I do not know, therefore, how frequent this supposed transfer is. Organisations such as Shelter say that they have lots of people coming along saying that they have been kicked out because the owner wanted to do an Airbnb-type letting, but I do not know whether that is an essentially urban phenomenon—it may be—or more general. I just do not think that we have the data. That goes back to the point that the noble Lord, Lord Foster, made: we need better data.

I would worry about attempts to jump to conclusions about what we do here. I follow the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, the chairman of the wonderful committee of which I am a former member, but I worry about attempts to jump to conclusions, particularly because we have not had the results of the Government’s own thinking on this, and particularly when applying these user types to a range of properties that equally has a very considerable breadth—from a shepherd’s hut at one end through to a static caravan and to a permanent dwelling. Some may be suitable only for seasonal use: I think of the very large caravan parks that—“decorate” is the wrong word—“appear” in places such as the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park. I cannot say that I regard them as beautiful or a benefit to the environment, but they clearly fulfil a seasonal requirement.

There are some settlements—some seaside places and holiday hotspots—that are built on tourism. That is what they are there for, almost, and the fact that they empty themselves for parts of the year is not a particularly modern phenomenon. I remember when as children we used to go on holiday to a part of Cornwall on an annual basis, and just about every other house was advertising bed and breakfast. Those bed and breakfasts may have morphed into Airbnb, or a short-term let on some other platform. Noble Lords have mentioned that there are clearly problems associated with an imbalance of property uses, but as the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, confirmed—I raised this point on Monday —these are not consistent, geographically or by type. They tend to be associated with hotspots of one sort or another. We need to understand the dynamic.

The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, picked up on the point I made that we need to flesh out a great deal more what is happening here. If we do not know the purposes and drivers behind what is happening in any given instance then we are not going to get near to creating viable policies for the purpose. Let us make no mistake: this phenomenon is undoubtedly causing problems in certain areas. We had evidence of that in the Built Environment Select Committee when I was privileged to serve on it. What is required here is a degree of localised assessment, but based on consistent, nationally accepted data-gathering principles and analysis, so that we get a proper basis for dealing with this, and can look at and compare like with like and not be comparing apples with pears.

I entirely endorse Amendments 445B and 447, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Foster, because I know for a fact how very important safety is within a property, particularly where there is short-term turnover of occupancy and people are not particularly familiar with the property. It is absolutely important that they are safe, and that things such as batteries in smoke detectors are checked annually and that combustion appliances have proper tests and are serviced. They should be safe and safety checked at regular intervals.

The noble Lord, Lord Foster, referred to the business of trying to get at the data on this through council tax records. He is absolutely right that this is a pretty deficient way of dealing with it. I am going to tell a tale out of school here. My wife has written on numerous occasions to the billing authority in relation to a property that has been used for holiday letting for many years, saying, “Look, this is being used pretty much year-round as a holiday unit. Should it continue to be in council tax?” To which answer there came none, and why would there? Why would any clever finance officer of a local authority decide that he was going to forgo council tax—which he collects and keeps in his kitty, thank you very much—and be the collecting agency for business rates for central government, to be redistributed according to whatever the normal formula is? The noble Lord, Lord Foster, mentioned one area where the thing is skewed; that is a second area where there is a perverse incentive not to get things in the right slot.

It gets worse. Under the “check, challenge, appeal” process that business rates operators have to deal with when dealing with the Valuation Office Agency, someone has to formally claim the property for the purposes of being its agent before they can even get the process in train to change the assessment. That is not a sensible way of doing it either. We are completely at sea on this and really need to sort it out.

Tenant Fees Bill

Debate between Lord Best and Earl of Lytton

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 20th November 2018 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Lytton (CB)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 29. I entirely understand the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Grender. A number of individuals collectively forming “tenant” particularly occurs in London and other metropolitan areas. Those of us who inhabit the countryside tend to have single tenants in a building, rather than a system of sharing.

I have absolutely no problem with the idea of ensuring that landlords are not overcharging beyond reasonable cost. My concern is that this is beginning to look like micromanagement of the letting process. The question is, “reasonable” by whose standards? For instance, a group of tenants—perhaps four of them—decides to take on a property on a two-year term. Let us suppose they collectively decide that they want to finish the tenancy after one year and want to move out in the run-up to Christmas, which is known to be a difficult time for the letting market because things tend not to get going again until into the new year. By whose standards would “reasonableness” be measured? Would it be by reference to the tenants, who, after all, have agreed to take on the property on a two-year basis and wish to terminate after one year; or by reference to the reasonable costs the landlord would run up in that process? All sorts of things hang on that—for example, rent voids and running costs such as heating and security while the place is unoccupied, were that to happen.

I appreciate that things get more difficult when you have a number of tenants and one wants to go, because that creates a dynamic which, as the noble Baroness rightly said—and has said previously—affects the other occupants. It would be really undesirable if landlords responded by simply deciding not to agree to early termination. That would be the worst of all possible worlds. As a private sector landlord, I have never used that other than when someone wants to terminate at short notice and before the property can reasonably be re-let. That tends not to happen in the high-pressure circumstances of inner-London shared residential, but with a freestanding property in the countryside, where things are quite different. The Bill will apply across the nation.

I counsel a little caution here, and perhaps the Minister would care to comment. If the culture creeps in whereby no early termination of a lease is possible or will be agreed, we will be back here later with another measure to say that landlords must provide that facility. I do not see this as necessarily being the endpoint, and I should like to tease out that issue to give some closure on what we are doing with residential landlord and tenant. Hopefully, the situation can stabilise so that everyone will know where they are for, at any rate, the reasonably foreseeable future.

[Lord Best (CB)]

My Lords, it is worth underlining that this part of the Bill is an important measure to prevent what is a pretty common abuse, which is, when there is a change of tenancy, at little or no cost to the landlord, the agents involved making serious amounts of money, which the Bill would prevent them doing in future.

At Second Reading, I cited an illustration from my last intern, whose sister was taking her place in a flat share of three. Each of them, on entering the flat, needed to pay the agent a fee of £275 for the privilege of signing up. When one of the occupiers left and was replaced by her sister, the outgoing one was charged £250 for termination of the tenancy agreement and her sister, who was moving in on the same day with her packed suitcase, was charged £275 as a new tenant. The agents got £525 for this transfer from one sister to another. The landlord received exactly the same amount of rent, because there was no discontinuity in the rent paid.

In such circumstances, paying £50 as a takeover fee for the privilege of signing a photocopied document when one person moves in in place of another sounds quite enough. The guidance may be the best place to put this, but the test must be whether the landlord has suffered a loss of rent. If there is no such loss, surely the £50 should kick in as the maximum which the agents can take. One can understand the need to compensate if there has been a loss of rent because of a gap when one tenant has moved out and no new one has arrived. Otherwise, £50 sounds like a maximum not a floor.

Tenant Fees Bill

Debate between Lord Best and Earl of Lytton

Monday 5th November 2018 Grand Committee

[The Earl of Lytton]

My Lords, I am very pleased that these amendments have been tabled. They enable me to make one or two comments. On Amendment 2 on transferable deposits, moved by the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, what he has set down might make for an awkward arrangement requiring quite a raft of safeguards so that landlord one can transfer a tenant’s deposit out of their account into the account of landlord two, which, as I see it, is what happens.

I am a practising chartered surveyor. Those involved in residential property management have to accord with all sorts of professional regulations, including rules on holding clients’ money. Tenants’ deposits would certainly come in that category. They have to be very punctilious about what they do and very transparent about the process. I know that not every agent or, for that matter, landlord holding a deposit is a member of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors. It might be different if they were, but that will never be likely. I am saying that there are two parallel sets of requirements. It will be interesting to know what discussions or information had been obtained from others such as ARLA on this sort of transfer, how it would be documented and how we would ensure it was seamless.

The noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, raises a valid point. For tenants to have to wait for a deposit to come back to them and to pay another deposit at the same time—in other words, a double overhead—is awkward, but other things lurk here. The noble Lord, Lord Shipley, mentioned one, but there is the other question of whether any unpaid services and outgoings lurk there. Sometimes these do not come through for some particular period. Noble Lords will know from dealing with utility companies and this sort of thing, including some of the cut-price ones, which seem extremely difficult to deal with at times—no names mentioned here, though—that it can be quite difficult to make sure that you have closure on the amount of money for which a tenant might be responsible. There is an issue relating to the period to which the amount might apply. That might depend on the circumstances, such as whether it was a furnished or unfurnished letting, or fully equipped as well as being furnished. Obviously, the amount of damage that can be done and what might become apparent would not necessarily be known until right at the end of the lease. While I am pleased to confirm from my experience that the majority of tenants have been absolutely excellent people, the odd ones are feckless, overload electrical systems and do other damage that is not immediately apparent.

I wish there was a better way of dealing with this. I can see where the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, is coming from. It is a valuable thing to raise because of the rigidity it creates within the tenant cohort. We should be doing things to make sure that there are not those rigidities because that, in effect, is a barrier to them renting property in the first place. However, I see a number of technical difficulties with the amendment. I hope that the Minister will comment on some of them.

[Lord Best]

I support the amendment on transferable deposits. It is an absolutely commendable concept. How can people possibly find a second fat deposit when they have not had the first one back? This proposal would be a really helpful move, and I hope the Minister will take it very seriously and look at it in some depth.

On the question of a six-week, five-week, four-week or eight-week period, I was impressed by the Citizens Advice survey, which indicated that only a very small percentage of tenants—2%, I think—did not pay their last month’s rent, the deposit being absorbed or used for that purpose. However, I asked Citizens Advice about its survey and discovered that it was exclusively of tenants. I suspect that the percentage might have been different if it had been a survey of landlords or agents. This is bad news for landlords but I am told by agents that, naughty as it is, a lot of students will not pay the last four weeks’ rent because they fear that there will be a big dispute about their deposit at the end. Especially if the student has come from overseas and is returning, they will have no trouble over the deposit because they will instead have withheld their last month’s rent. I suspect that landlords would always be very hostile to the idea of a limit of just four weeks’ rent when students behave like that.

Local Government Finance Bill

Debate between Lord Best and Earl of Lytton

Tuesday 3rd July 2012 Grand Committee

[The Earl of Lytton]

My Lords, I am thinking about the current process of recording hereditaments, as they are known, in the local rating lists. I call to mind that as a result of the riots last year, one or more commercial premises were totally destroyed. As I understand it, there is a vacant site awaiting redevelopment that is described as a shop and premises, and it is in the list at £1. The Prime Minister had in fact said in the wake of the riots that properties with damage would be taken out of assessment altogether. Now, there is a little wrinkle here. If a site remains in the assessment, effectively as a cleared site, but is still called a shop and premises or a department store and premises, or whatever it was, at a £1 rateable value then it is still in the list. When it comes back into the list again as a refurbished property, it will be at whatever the level is of the new premises. If it was a redevelopment process—not riot damage or anything like that—in which the local authority was a key player, the question is whether it stands to be disenfranchised because the hereditament has not been taken out of the list altogether and is not therefore really a new entry in the list. It is a revaluation of an existing one.

This might be looking for trouble where there is none, but I want to be very careful. As I made clear both in the debate on the Queen’s Speech and at Second Reading of this Bill, there are a number of little wrinkles creeping in because of the way in which Treasury policy now appears to influence the work of the Valuation Office Agency in handling the entries in the valuation list. I want to be absolutely sure that by dint of this business of not taking things out of assessment when in fact they probably should be, we are not going to find that we have disenfranchised the authority from that gain in rateable value, which is undoubtedly the work of its own hands.

[Lord Best]

My Lords, I think I should withdraw this before we get any deeper.

Localism Bill

Debate between Lord Best and Earl of Lytton

Wednesday 14th September 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Best]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a member of the standards committee of Westminster City Council and as president of the Local Government Association, but I do not speak in either of those capacities. I just wanted to add, from my knowledge of the Local Government Association, that if there is to be a code of conduct—and the arguments for that have been very well put by noble Lords—I believe that the Local Government Association is extremely well equipped to draw up an entirely sensible code and to gain the approval for this from all local authorities. I, too, look forward to hearing the Minister’s ideas for taking this forward.

[The Earl of Lytton]

My Lords, if your Lordships will excuse a slight déjà vu and second time round, which I know is a trifle out of order, I will now, with the benefit of the excellent introduction given by the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, to Amendment 175, drill down a little bit into the issues that I think are important, which specifically focus on parish and town councils.

To explain this, and my comments, it is necessary to go back to Section 53 of the Local Government Act 2000, which states at Section 53(1) that,

“every relevant authority must establish”,

a standards committee. However, Section 53(2) exempts parish councils from that duty. Why? For the very practical reason that the mandatory creation of 9,000 dedicated parish council standards committees across the country would be something of a nightmare, as well as a very considerable duplication of something that is already done via the standards committees of principal authorities. This would be disproportionate and unaffordable, especially to very small parishes. Parishes currently utilise the district and unitary authority standards committees to avoid just this problem and I am not aware of any suggestion that this does not work tolerably satisfactorily.

Paragraph 11(2) of Schedule 4 to the Bill removes the parish exemption. Therefore, the use of principal authority committees is lost and, as I see it, this gets us back to this mandatory appointment of the 9,000 parish committees. In fact, this creation of a mandatory committee would be a first because there is no other measure that obliges parish and town councils to create any committees. This would be something of a novel departure. I felt that that was not good, and so my Amendments 166 to 169 were intended to prevent that happening.

What happens at parish and town council level, as the tier that stands to be a major beneficiary under the process of localism espoused in this Bill, is of course very significant. As the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, has pointed out, this tier will potentially wield far greater powers, command much larger resources and have custody of greater amounts of taxpayers’ money and assets on behalf of the communities. The public generally will expect a seamless, effective and enforceable regime of standards, particularly given what we have all read in the media in recent months and years. In answer to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, parish and town councils need to raise their game and this is going to take a little bit of time. I do not think that we can expect an instant fix.

I support the principle of clear, proportionate and enforceable standards that apply at parish and town council level. The National Association of Local Councils supports it. Together, we regard it as the basic hallmark of integrity and coherence, and indeed as the basis of public confidence in local government at all levels.

Therefore, I am extremely pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, has tabled Amendment 175. I very much support it in its entirety and I can confirm that the National Association of Local Councils does as well. The fact that the amendment restates the Nolan principles is itself particularly welcome, and I do not think that anyone could argue with that. After all, we all sign up to principles that look like that when we take the oath or affirm on entering this House. However, sometimes I think that the rather basic aspects of motherhood and apple pie come in with the recitation of these Nolan principles. I know that a lot of this is contained in regulation elsewhere, but I do not think that it is to be found in any Bill and it is about time that it was stated. Sometimes one has to state these basics to avoid the problem of constantly trying to rewrite and amend legislation. You need an anchor point to go back to.

The amendment opens up a broader issue of how minimum levels of standards should apply, the manner in which they are to be observed and, ultimately, the criteria for their enforcement. It is all very well having standards but there has to be an enforcement process. If I have one slight objection to Amendment 177, it is that it appears to make standards committees mandatory for every relevant authority. As I see it, a relevant authority would, in this context, include parish and town councils, so we get back to the 9,000 committees that I am trying studiously to avoid.

Having realised that there is a general problem, the Government have tabled a series of their own amendments, which will come up later—Amendments 181 to 187. Although I have some reservations about those amendments—in some places they go too far and in others they do not go far enough—it is none the less a welcome affirmation that something needs to be done.

I finish by making a few suggestions about how I think standards should operate in practice for parish councils. First, they need the oversight of a standards committee, much as at present, and I think that we have to re-establish that. Secondly, the time has come for an accepted base line of generic standards to be stated in legislation, as I said earlier. I think that those standards need to be consistent across the board—throughout large and small parish and town councils. I do not think that we can get away from a need to have a consistent approach. They need to be based on a requirement both to register interests and to declare them at the appropriate moment—not one or the other. The requirement must not be weak or full of loopholes. Any family business or other interest—whether personal or relating to an associate and within a defined proximity which should be neither too narrow nor too wide—needs ultimately to be declarable. Just because a pecuniary interest has to be declared, I do not think it follows that the person declaring it should thereby be immediately excluded from all further discussion. He or she may be the one person who can throw some light on a complicated issue. However, I accept that it is almost certainly not appropriate for them to take part in any vote on the matter. I suspect that here a little discretion needs to be vested in the chairman, probably backed by some sort of standing orders. I just leave that in park for the moment.

A disproportionate cost in any of the administration of this is going to be a considerable enemy. As I pointed out yesterday in conversation with the Minister, undue complexity is the smokescreen for sharp practice, and I think that we want to avoid both those pitfalls.

I fully agree with the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, that standards in our procedures need to be enforceable and have sanctions that mean something. That said, I think that making a failure to register an interest an automatic criminal offence, regardless of circumstances, goes too far. I accept that some types of sanction will need to be subject to a right of appeal and I can see why Amendments 178 and 179 have been tabled in that respect. However, I enter a plea: can we keep all but the most exceptionable lapses out of the courts while retaining effective measures to ensure that an elected member complies? I have a pathological fear of things being tied up in court proceedings.

At present we have a statutory code made under regulations under the 2000 Act. I have not heard anything to suggest that this code is considered to be a bad one, but I accept that the imposition of a code by the Secretary of State sits ill with the ethos of the Bill. However, getting rid of the code in the interests of non-centralism, if I can put it in those terms, does not of itself make for the advancement of localism. We need to preserve what is good, even if it has somehow to be rebranded. Parliament should set the basic criteria for standards, of course, and that is the point being made here, but it does not need to make the detailed rules. I sympathise with the Government not wanting to hand down prescriptions from on high. We will not necessarily get a perfect solution, which touches on something mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, but with a bit of collective thought we can probably get somewhere quite close to it.

My final comment concerns one of detail in respect of Amendment 177. In so far as standards committees have under their consideration the affairs of a parish or town council, I would like it to be understood that in the interests of fair representation, at least one member of that committee should be from another parish council within the same district. If I have forgotten anything, I hope that others will pick it up, but I have said quite enough for an intervention and a half.

Localism Bill

Debate between Lord Best and Earl of Lytton

Thursday 30th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Lytton]

My Lords, as I explained to the Minister earlier today, I think that Amendment 128E has largely covered my amendment. However, like all amendments, there was a supplementary purpose lurking behind it, which was to try to probe the wider interaction between the facility of referendums generally, especially in their cumulative effect—the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, who is not in his place at the moment, touched on that a few minutes ago—and the wider family of the statutory functions of local authorities. It is instructive to note Amendment 128C relating to transport.

I have lost count of the number of times that the burdens on local authorities on the one hand and the need to get at the authentic voice of people on the other have been referred to in this part of the Bill. We are considering the effects for a democratically elected representative body whose functions might not work terribly well, or be effectively discharged, if a referendum is imposed. The Bill cannot be all things to all men. We have to have a balance between vox populi on the one hand and the effective administration of local government on the other. That balance needs to be explained.

I hope that the Minister will be able to elaborate on some of these points, but I certainly think that there is an issue here, which was touched on in earlier debates in Committee. We need to be clear to what extent people within a community should engage with the representative and democratic processes of those who are set up to represent those community interests as opposed to reaching for some bypassing measure in the form of a referendum.

[Lord Best]

My Lords, Amendment 128B is in my name. I do not think that we have given the Government enough credit for the amendment that we heard of earlier today, because that seemed to me to satisfy, if not entirely—I want to dwell on that—a good deal of the misgivings that we have had about referendums applying to the world of planning. We now have an amendment that will mean that planning applications are taken out of the reach of petitions and referendums. That is an enormous difference from where we were yesterday. I want to place on record my appreciation to the Government for taking that forward. It means that another laboriously prepared speech of mine is now redundant, but the amendment is extremely welcome.

Our hesitations about where we have got to are as follows. We understand that discretion is there for local authorities not to go ahead with referendums if there is a statutory process that gives members of the public opportunities to make representations and a statutory right of appeal or of investigation through a review. However, although that clearly applies to individual planning applications—great stuff—does that apply to all of the processes of preparing local development plans? I think that it must cover the preparation of the local development frameworks. If it did not cover the local authority preparing its local development plan, that would be disastrous. Throughout local government, we are already way behind in getting those local development frameworks undertaken. The abolition of regional spatial strategies means that we will be in limbo if local authorities do not have their own local development plans. We must get on with that. It would be incredibly difficult for the Government to pursue their growth agenda and do the good things that they want to do in terms of the development of renewable energy and the development of new homes if the threat of referendums was hanging over the creation of local development plans.

Beyond that, there are supplementary planning documents. They may not have the full panoply of examination in public and independent inspection in all cases. For removal of doubt, it would be better to have an amendment such as that in my name or in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, that takes the whole of the planning scene out of the referendum process. If we cannot, can we at least have firm reassurance that the process of producing local development plans, with the supplementary elements that go with them—the whole of that process—will be excluded by this excellent amendment?