Housing and Planning Bill

Debate between Lord Deben and Lord Greaves

Wednesday 23rd March 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Deben (Con)]

My Lords, I do not wish to repeat the concerns I have had for some time over the amount of information that is available about this Bill, the regulations and the like. We are debating the Bill in these circumstances and therefore I remind the House what the planning system is for. It is a disagreeable necessity. We have to have it because you cannot have a circumstance in which the unlimited, private ownership of land has an effect on neighbours and communities. It is not about land owned by the local authority. The owner owns the land. Whenever I hear planning discussed by the parties opposite, I am fascinated because you might think it was owned by the local authority and that it should come back to the fact that this is a local authority matter.

The House has to recognise that there is an international agreement on human rights in which property is a basic human right—not only under the United Nations, but under the European Union of which I am sure we shall remain a full and active member, even though there is such nonsense spoken about it by the Brexit people. I am not getting on to that, of course. Even if they do not like the European Union, they are stuck with the United Nations human rights declaration, which we signed.

I happen to care about the right to property. It is basic in a community. It is basic for democracy. If you want to destroy democracy, the first thing you destroy is the right to property because it gives people independence. It enables them to stand up against government; it enables them to put two fingers up to a local authority if that is what it thinks. Yet, when I hear a debate like this, I understand precisely why I am on these Benches. Very often I find myself arguing not entirely on the side of the Government. However, I have been very much reassured, by the speeches of the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, and particularly of the noble Lord, Lord Foster, and I understand why I am not a Liberal Democrat. It is because they are neither liberal nor democratic. That is the reality.

All the Government are suggesting is that it would do local authorities a lot of good to recognise that this is not a little bit of business which they do themselves in the way they want to do it. It is something which should be open to public concern and public alternatives. Of course, we can produce all sorts of scare tactics about what might happen and what people could do and all the things that might arise. What we are really arguing in the amendment is that we should not try anything else—there should be no opportunity for alternatives and no one ought to deal with this. Why? Because local authorities do not like it and because that well-known organ of democracy, in which I declare an interest as an honorary vice-president, the TCPA, does not hold with it.

The TCPA does not hold with a lot of things, mainly because it is still burdened by the memory of that dreadful old man, Ebenezer Howard—still thinking in the past, not understanding that we are in a world in which people do not expect there to be one provider or just one lot of people to go to. Today people expect that we test it all the time. The noble Lord, Lord Beecham, went through a whole list of things, but in every one of those cases the nationalised provider is a lot better because there is an alternative. There are better prisons because they do not all have to be done in one way. Even when you have failures, the fact that there is an alternative is crucial in a democracy and crucial for the efficiency of the national system.

I come to the nature of planning. I cannot believe that there is anyone in this House who thinks that the planning system works well. That does not mean to say that an alternative would be better; sometimes planning may be thought of as Churchill thought of democracy—that it is a thoroughly bad system, but there is not a better one. Sometimes I think that that is the best definition of planning that we have. I have declared my interest and my pastimes; although I shall certainly not be involved in anything that may come out of this, I try to help people to produce sustainable buildings. One business with which I have an association tries to make buildings better, more sustainable and energy efficient. But in the course of that, I have to deal with planners, and we have very great difficulties sometimes. There was the lady who said to one of my constituents who wanted to have the next-door very small, knobbly and unimportant field as part of his garden, “You don’t need a bigger garden—therefore you won’t get the right to use it as a garden”. That is ludicrous, to have to ask planning permission to turn a field into a garden. I can think of nothing more ridiculous than telling people that they have to get planning permission to do with their own land what most of us would like them to do, which is to turn it into a garden. But no—that is one of the things, because at some stage some local authority thought that it would be better telling people what to do with their land than people can do themselves.

[Lord Greaves]

The noble Lord is very entertaining although I am not sure what his speech has to do with this Bill. But if a local authority requires planning permission for the conversion of a piece of a field into a garden, that is precisely because government regulations in the general development order, or whatever it is now called, require that to happen. If the planning system is not working well—and every time I get a chance to debate planning anywhere, including in your Lordships’ House, I announce it to be bust, because I believe that it is bust—it is almost entirely the fault of the national Government and detailed national rules and regulations, which tie the whole thing down.

[Lord Deben]

I am so pleased that I tempted the noble Lord to intervene at that stage, because I can now tell him that I tried to change the law on that when I was the Minister, and who opposed me? Every blooming local authority—they were the ones who demanded to keep this power and said that it was so important. So I want us to come back to what the Government are asking. This is entirely relevant. I am glad that it is amusing to the noble Lord, but I believe it to be central to the amendment. The Government propose that we give the Secretary of State the power to see whether there are alternative ways in which to handle something that, in the noble Lord’s words, is in many ways bust. That is what he says, but if it is bust, would not it be a good idea to see whether there are ways of unbusting it? This is one of the suggestions.

What do we get? Not a series of suggestions about how we might refine it, improve it, make the tests rather better or come forward with various suggestions about how the various pilots might be carried through. Instead, we get an onslaught on the basis that the only people who can do this are local authorities or public bodies. The Government have produced something which is worth trying. If it does not work, we have not done anything bad. If it does work, we have learned something. The worst thing in politics is to say that we cannot do something because we have not done it before, that we cannot do something because it will not work or that we cannot do something because we do not want to try. This is the moment when we ought to say that we may be a very old House and many of us in it may be very old, but at least we are young enough to recognise that it would be a good thing to have a go at something different.

Housing and Planning Bill

Debate between Lord Deben and Lord Greaves

Thursday 17th March 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, I beg to move Amendment 89AZC and shall speak to the rest of the amendments in this group.

This is about the Secretary of State’s default powers as part of the plan-making process. The Bill introduces a new Section 27 of the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004. New subsection (1) explains that this section applies if the Secretary of State,

“thinks that a local authority are failing or omitting to do anything it is necessary for them to do in connection with the preparation, revision or adoption of a development plan document”.

The rest of it sets out what the Secretary of State can do, basically by taking over the process and doing it himself or herself. This amendment is about new subsection (5), which says that when this development plan document has been produced and published, either by the Secretary of State or the local planning authority, the Secretary of State has the choice of doing three things: first, to approve the document, or approve it with modifications; secondly, to,

“direct the authority to consider adopting the document by resolution of the authority as a local development document”,

which is the normal process that would take place if the authority was producing the document; or, thirdly, to reject it.

The purpose of the amendment is to put the decision as to what to do with the document—adopt it, adopt it with modifications as allowed or reject it—firmly in the hands of elected local councillors. The purpose of this clause is to say what happens when the authority, as a corporate body, is not doing what it should through its staff and so on. Surely the decision on whether to adopt ought to revert in the end to elected local councillors, even if the Secretary of State has taken the process of producing the document out of the authority’s hands because it has not been doing it right. It is as simple as that: a matter of local democracy.

[Lord Deben (Con)]

My Lords, the argument of the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, superficially sounds extremely attractive but I have done this job and I say to him that it really does not work like that. The truth is that the Secretary of State will use these powers only when they are utterly necessary. The last thing that he or she will want to do is to get into the mixture of arguments and local issues which this amendment is bound to cause. But there has been such a history of difference in the willingness, or indeed the ability, of local authorities to get on with the business that it is necessary to have this intervention power. After doing all the work and getting it sorted out the idea that you could then hand it back to the local authority, which you have intervened on only because of its incompetence, uselessness or sheer downright intention not to act, seems a bit loopy, to be honest. It would mean going back to the very same people and telling them that they had the opportunity to decide whether the Secretary of State had done the right thing. The answer is that you would use this power only in very extreme cases, and in those cases the last lot of people who you would want to come back to are in that sort of local authority.

[Lord Greaves]

Perhaps I can answer that before the Minister replies; I know that he may agree with the noble Lord, Lord Deben. The noble Lord, Lord Deben, seems not to understand that there is often a considerable difference between, on the one hand, the bureaucratic competence—I use that word in all its uses as there may be a lack of resources, a lack of professional ability or whatever—and, on the other, the ability of elected councillors to make a decision on the basis of a report and the evidence put in front of them. They are two quite separate things.

Growth and Infrastructure Bill

Debate between Lord Deben and Lord Greaves

Tuesday 22nd January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, I apologise that I missed the speech by the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie. He was moving an amendment that is very similar to my Amendments 7 and 26, which are in this group. I am sure that I agree with everything that he said about Amendment 3, since in effect it says almost the same thing as my Amendment 7, so I will say no more about that.

I want to say something briefly about national parks. There are two issues here. One concerns planning applications that may not become relevant applications and are therefore referred to the Secretary of State, as in the noble Lord’s amendment and my Amendment 7. My Amendment 26 says that authorities that may not be designated should include,

“a national park authority or the Broads Authority”.

The helpful information that we got about the number of major applications in the past year shows clearly that there are not very many in national parks. I think that the Minister referred to this; in some cases, the figure is as low as two. The statistics there could very easily be distorted.

However, there is more than that. National parks are very special places that have been designated for very special reasons. The national park planning authorities are already different from ordinary local planning authorities. They are not the ordinary district councils; they are the national park authority, which is a planning authority in its own right. A substantial proportion of the members of national park authorities are already nominated and appointed by the Secretary of State; I think it is the Defra Secretary of State, but is definitely a Secretary of State.

To take functions such as major planning applications away from the national park authority, in these very special places with their very special landscapes, and put them in the hands of a different Secretary of State —the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government—with a quite different agenda risks the balance of decision-making on these applications in national parks, shifting away from the importance of nature and landscape and towards development. Clearly, there always has to be a balance in every sort of area and national parks have to have development, but the criteria on which planning applications in national parks are assessed and decided are materially different from the criteria in much of the rest of the country. That is why they have been designated as national parks. The national park authorities have the responsibility for looking after those parks and for ensuring that those criteria are applied, in the interests not just of the landscape but of the people who live there. To take that away from them on technical operational grounds, based on the proportion of planning applications that were dealt with and determined within a two-year period or on other similar criteria, would be quite wrong.

This proposal is causing great alarm among the people who care for and about national parks, and I hope that the Minister will make it clear that they are not to be designated under any circumstances—and, preferably, will do so in the Bill.

[Lord Deben]

My Lords, on this occasion I hope that the Minister will not accept any of these amendments because they do not stand up at all. As she knows, I am not happy about this clause, but the national park authorities have one of the worst reputations when it comes to dealing with applications—we cannot avoid that; when I was Secretary of State I had a constant stream of particular authorities that were quite unable to do these things properly—and the idea that somehow or other they should be put aside seems to be unacceptable. If, as we are beginning to understand, the criteria are largely those of speed, it would do the national parks quite a lot of good to get their answers in rather more quickly than they do at the moment. The idea that they have to be slower than anyone else is not an acceptable position as far as national parks are concerned. If we accepted the quantum of these amendments, there would hardly be any application anywhere in the country that would not find itself in one way or another touched by one of the designations that we are talking about.

We ought to concentrate on the issue that really matters, which is how we make the clause work in a sensible and transparent way. That is what we have been pressing for, and to try to avoid its implication by putting a series of designations outwith it does two things that are dangerous: first, it would remove any value that the clause might have, and, secondly, it would detract from the things that we are trying to say elsewhere. I want a regime that can work properly wherever in the country it is applied. I hope therefore that the Minister will not accept these amendments but that she will recognise that the reason for them fundamentally is this unhappiness with the uncertainty of the basis upon which this clause is going to be imposed.

If everyone were happy about the objectivity, correctness and clarity of the basis on which a planning authority will be designated, there would be much less of a problem. It is the unhappiness with that which lies behind most of our concern. If the Minister could put that right, I think most of us would accept that within those contexts it is perfectly reasonable to ask the planning authority of a national park to do its job within a reasonable amount of time. If it has only two planning applications a year, then obviously no Minister is going to say, “We’re going to apply the 30% rule”—I am not sure how you would apply that—and I am not too upset about that; it does not worry me too much as long as it is in the context in which all these things are dealt with in an objective and manifestly properly constituted way.

Localism Bill

Debate between Lord Deben and Lord Greaves

Wednesday 12th October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, I am grateful for that extremely helpful reply from my noble friend the Minister. I am particularly grateful to her for reiterating that the Government believe that sustainable development is built on three pillars—economic, social and environmental —and that balance is required to resolve this matter. That is crucial. I included the statement of existing government policy in the amendment but I certainly accept that it may not be appropriate to include this detail in primary legislation. Nevertheless, I commend the principle of the three pillars and balance to the Government. I hope that they will build that into whatever solution they come up with. As the Minister and other noble Lords have said, the problem we have when moving amendments and deciding what form this Bill should be in when it leaves this House is that it is running in parallel with the national planning policy framework. The question of sustainable development is one of the key areas—probably the key area—which links the planning aspects of the Bill with the NPPF. We are shortly going on to discuss a further amendment which would do it more overtly, but regardless of whether that is to be done, the link exists and is fundamental and a lot of the concern about sustainable development has arisen, as many noble Lords have said, from the wording in parts of the NPPF.

I am extremely grateful for the astonishing amount of experience, knowledge and common sense which noble Lords have contributed to this debate. The noble Lord, Lord Jenkin of Roding, said that the problem with sustainable development is that, “It means what I want it to mean”. That is indeed the problem, but, despite that, the words “sustainable development” now litter legislation, particularly planning legislation. They also litter the Bill: the Minister’s little amendment tagged on to this group adds a requirement of neighbourhood development orders to promote sustainable development. It is normal practice in all legislation that when a Government use a term such as this it is defined in that legislation. It is normal practice precisely because the people taking action under the legislation know what it means and the courts can look at it, define it and interpret it. All Governments since, we now discover, my noble friend Lord Deben invented the term “sustainable development” for John Major—

[Lord Deben]

What I said was that that was the first time it was mentioned by a Prime Minister. It was well around in those days. I would certainly not claim anything other than being a mere conduit.