Town and Country Planning (Discharge of Local Planning Authority Functions) (England) Regulations 2026

Lord Evans of Guisborough Excerpts

Tuesday 30th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Evans of Guisborough (Con)]

My Lords,

“the days of Whitehall fighting devolution of power … are over for good”.

Those are not my words; they were the words of the right honourable Member for Makerfield in his speech yesterday morning. I understand that he may soon hold a position of power within the Government, and I wonder what he would make of these regulations that are placed in front of us this evening with their top-down, Whitehall-knows-best approach to local planning.

I chaired a planning committee for four years. I did five terms as a local councillor, and I know many of my noble friends and indeed noble Lords on all sides of the House—including the Minister—did good service in local government. I have a degree of déjà vu in talking about this again because I addressed this issue at Second Reading of the Planning and Infrastructure Bill last year when we first discussed this matter. One of the points that I made at the time was that relatively small planning applications can create precedents, which then mean that other buildings nearby can be developed in the same way; other pieces of land can be developed in the same way. A relatively small precedent can very quickly change the nature of a whole area of town or a whole borough; in particular, it can change the nature of our small villages and towns.

It is right that there is democratic input to that decision from people who are elected, rather than the decision being taken just by planning officers, who are there to provide guidance on the law and planning rules rather than direction to the committee. Furthermore, those of us who have been in local government know that quite often during campaigning we are asked about relatively small planning applications and controversial planning decisions, and what we are going to be doing about them.

Quite often, candidates campaign on those decisions. Of course, having campaigned, you have to recuse yourself from a planning committee decision; you cannot vote on it. At the moment, however, there is nothing to stop a person who has been elected appearing before a planning committee and making that case on behalf of their constituents. It is a very important role for elected members. Under these proposals, not only would a councillor not be able to do that, but there very often would not even be a committee for them to appear before.

When I chaired the planning committee at Havering, I was always very careful about keeping the public involved in what was happening. I knew that, for quite a lot of people, that committee was the only contact they had with the democratic elements of our local council. So the way that committee was conducted and the results that it produced reflected more widely on the whole organisation—not just on the elected councillors, but on the nature of the body itself and the way that it was seen by the public.

I was clear that the committee was basically a shop window for the council. What these proposals do, sadly, is take a shop window and turn it into an opaque window through which things are seen happening inside, but no one is quite sure what they are, and we leave the public to draw their own conclusions about it. In the current political atmosphere, that is quite a dangerous thing to do. The conclusions that people draw may not always be logical, and they may not always be fair to the people involved. This puts a lot of weight on our council officers as well, which quite often they do not want to have to take on.

My noble friends have dealt in detail with a lot of the inadequacies in the legislation. I had a fair bit I wanted to say, but I am mindful of the time and I promise the Whip that I will not run over. Still, I wonder—perhaps the Minister can explain it to us —how this set of regulations will pass the Makerfield test.