Draft National Planning Policy Framework

Lord Cameron of Dillington Excerpts

Thursday 27th October 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Cameron of Dillington]

My Lords, I must first declare an interest as a farmer and landowner in Somerset. I would like to entitle my intervention “The challenge of change in the countryside”. The challenges include the fact that our rural population is growing by about 100,000 per annum, which is faster than the urban population, and, as indicated in a survey of a few years ago, that 80 per cent of people who live in urban England want to live in the countryside, although it has to be admitted that most of them are not quite sure about that once they get there.

This massive influx throws up both opportunities and problems. Inevitably, the problems include a lack of jobs and a lack of housing. In terms of jobs, it is important to realise that agriculture now provides less than 5 per cent of rural jobs. This means that the rural economy is mostly dependent upon manufacturing, financial services, retail and tourism. Rural tourism was worth about £16 billion per annum the last time I looked. In that context, we have every right to be proud of how we have planned our countryside over the years and centuries.

England—not the UK—is, I believe, the fifth most densely populated country in the world, with a population of 50 million. They are not all based in the south-east. The Peak District National Park, for instance, situated mostly in Derbyshire, has 21 million people living within one hour’s drive. This is a very good example because, in spite of this density, it has some of the most beautiful and cherished countryside on earth, which continues to provide an inspiration for our nation and a boost to our rural economy.

The boost to our economy from the beauty of our countryside is not only through tourism. The real economic success of our planning system is seen in the statistic that 66 per cent of all businesses started in rural England are started by incomers. That is a pretty staggering statistic. People want to come to the countryside and do their business, to live and work there, because it has kept its beauty. Furthermore, while farmers mostly look after our woods and fields, the maintenance of our villages and built environment very much depends on these incomers and their businesses.

Business is the lifeblood of the conservation of our countryside. That is the meaning of sustainable development in this context. Destroy our countryside and you destroy its economy. Destroy the rural economy and you destroy our countryside and its social fabric.

Moving very briefly on to the social fabric, I made a mental list of the challenges of change in the countryside. As you would expect, they include deprivation—which often goes unrecognised—housing, training, providing better services for the young and the growing proportion of elderly. Transport, too, is a key challenge. In my view, in planning terms, the problems all come down to the need, as far as possible, for each village to have its own provision of housing, especially affordable housing, and, above all, workspace. This would not spoil the countryside.

Every village needs to work out what they want their village to be like in 15 to 20 years’ time—not just what it will look like, or where development will be allowed to go, because it is bound to be a visual disaster and design does not matter. I will leave that debate to others. They must work out what services they want to survive, what they want in terms of work and play, what they want their kids to be doing. Do they want their kids still to be able to live there? That is what planning is about. It is not just about development control or even development management.

That brings me to the NPPF. What I have just enunciated is what it, along with the Localism Bill, purports to do. But does it? Frankly, that could be anyone’s guess. It is not a developers’ charter, as some have claimed. Indeed, in the short term, my greatest worry is that the genuine, responsible doers of our countryside and their communities will be so lost in the mists of change that the necessary housebuilding and entrepreneurial activity which we currently so desperately need will be temporarily checked by the new rules.

It is also my experience that the more locally one makes planning decisions, the greater is the resistance to change. This applies in particular to affordable housing, where it is almost always the villages that say, “No, we don't want cheap housing in our village”. That worries me more than anything else.

We need a helpful transitional process from where we are now to where we are going to get to. We also need encouragement—and perhaps financial inducements—for local planning authorities to produce their long-overdue local development frameworks, and also to produce faster advice and decisions. Sadly, a lot of the current problems lie in the fact that many planning departments have been cut to the bare bone and find it hard to cope with their workload. In a nation struggling to emerge from recession, this simply will not do. The Chancellor needs to be told.

My final point concerns brownfield sites. They cropped up several times in the debate two weeks ago. I agree that greenfield sites should be avoided when there is a brownfield alternative. However, it would be helpful in the countryside if the definition of brownfield sites could include redundant farm buildings that are more than, say, 15 years old. I refer in particular to the often asbestos-clad Dutch barns, piggeries and the like that are a blot on our landscape and are crying out for either demolition or for the site to be used for housing or workspace. This may be a step too far, but in many cases it should be possible to do a deal to transfer their brownfield print to the most suitable site for development on the farm in question in return for total demolition and the restoration of the original site to pristine countryside. I hope that under the new system we can in this way maximise the use of all our old, redundant farm buildings for both workspace and housing.