Lord Greaves
Main Page: Lord Greaves (Liberal Democrat - Life peer)Growth and Infrastructure Bill
Lord Greaves Excerpts
Lord Rooker
My Lords, I have nothing to declare other than a spell as a planning Minister and the fact that I was never a local authority councillor. I think the Bill is very depressing. It is a bit like the situation over the past decade, when we have had an annual immigration Bill from the Home Office. “Immigration still rising? Get another Bill. It carries on rising? Get another Bill”. We are on the verge now of almost an annual planning Bill. “Less building and infrastructure? Get another planning Bill”. That seems to be the treadmill. This is probably the third planning Bill since I relinquished the responsibilities that I held briefly at one time. From that point of view, I am very depressed about it.
I do not think that any planning Bill in the past two decades advanced the cause of sustainable development or growth. That is my broad-brush answer. Have all the planning Bills had good intentions to modernise the system? You are too right that they have: every single one of them had that intention. Have the attempts to use the planning system for social engineering to create genuine mixed communities really worked? I have to say, honestly and in a broad-brush answer: no. Have all Ministers had good intentions to foster good design, respect local communities and work in partnership with local government? The answer is yes, all Ministers have been in that position. Did we obtain the Docklands development in London—with the tens of thousands of jobs that have been created in the past 30 years there—and create Brindleyplace slap bang in the middle of Birmingham, with the thousands of jobs there, or the new towns, by the aforementioned approach? No, we did not. The system did not work and failed the country. Will this Bill deliver these objectives? I do not think that it stands a chance.
I watched the Planning Minister the other night on “Newsnight”. I was reminded of one of my own speeches in this House as a Minister as he recited just how little of the land of England is developed. It is some 11% or 12% maximum. He used the same facts I did, probably briefed by the same officials as briefed me. It is a disgrace that, as far as I can see, he has not had support from senior government colleagues in his bald approach to putting the case for growth and extra building in a way that identifies the fact that we are not concreting over the countryside.
By the way, I do not equate this Bill with the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine. I might have made a mistake about this but I did not see the connection between the two. The noble Lord rightly asserts that local—or, more accurately, city—regions ought to be the bedrock. He does not talk about local authorities in that sense but about the city regions. The boundaries there are impossible to make out. If you look from above, from a helicopter, you do not see the boundary. That is his approach. This Bill does not deliver his approach. I do not think that it purports to.
I do not think you can allow the decisions to be made locally, with communities operating as super-parish councils. That is the reality. We are in a serious mess both on housing and infrastructure in this country. We have it locked in. I am not saying that there is nothing happening but we are getting less and less, and no one can see a way out of that. I do not think the status quo will work, but if we leave it to the present system the status quo will win every time. We will get less growth and will come back with another planning Bill. If there is to be progress, decisions have to be made for the greater good of society and not of particular local communities. I do not wish to fall out with the LGA but its briefing talks about democratically accountable, locally elected councillors. First, those councillors follow the Whip and, secondly, the ward councillors cannot vote on the issues relating to their wards anyway.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, it is a pleasure as usual to follow the noble Lord, Lord Morris of Handsworth. It is becoming a habit that I get put down to follow him and, as usual, I agree with what he has just said, which fits in, as far as Clause 27 is concerned, very neatly with what has been said by a number of noble Lords around the House speaking from different perspectives—the noble Lord, Lord Monks, my noble friends Lady Brinton and Lady Wheatcroft. I am grateful to my noble friend Lady Wheatcroft for the thought that only in the House of Lords could someone quote Tom Lehrer and expect everyone present to understand the reference and remember the song.
This is a very unsatisfactory Bill. It is interesting that, apart from the Minister’s introduction, it has not had a huge amount of enthusiastic support around the House. I call it an “odds and sods” Bill. Perhaps that is too rude for the House of Lords. In the old days, before Governments labelled Bills with soundbites and slogans such as “growth”, and actually said what they were, it would have been called the Planning (Miscellaneous Provisions and One or Two Other Things) Bill, which is exactly what it is.
I get very frustrated by it. Following the noble Baroness introducing Tom Lehrer, I wondered what I should do to remove my frustrations and thought that perhaps going shooting pigeons in the park might at least take some of them away. However, there are lots of enthusiasts for nature conservation, and even pigeons, around here who might chase me if I tried to do that so I will forget that thought.
I should like to apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Rooker—I am sorry he has just gone—for heckling him when he was speaking, which is a most un-Lordly thing to do but just shows the frustrations over this Bill. He was adamant that ward councillors cannot deal with planning applications in their own wards. I must live in a different universe from him because in December I was at a planning committee—a development control committee—at which not only was there a big planning application for housing in my ward but I moved the resolution that the committee then passed unanimously. So the world is not as the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, thinks.
Thinking of local government, I declare my interests in full—a habit I have as a local councillor, where the rules seem to be stricter than in your Lordships’ House. I am a vice-president of the LGA. As I have already said, I am an active member of Pendle Borough Council; I am “portfolio holder for planning policy”, whatever that may mean. I am an active member of committees on and a patron of the British Mountaineering Council. I am a member and patron of the Friends of the Lake District, and a member and vice-president of the Open Spaces Society. At least I now have those on record for the rest of the Bill.
I am concerned about Bills such as this, which seem to be the result of a circular that goes around to different departments saying, “We are putting this general Bill about growth and infrastructure forward. Have you anything lying around that you might like to put into it?”. There are two or three Bills of this nature going around at the moment. They can lead to unintended consequences and unexpected outcomes. The departments put forward what I might call one-off wheezes which have not been properly thought through in the context of the legislation of which they are part. There is no underlying structure or philosophy about it; they are just put forward and can have unintended consequences. The outcomes of the Bill might be like that.
They can also, if we are not careful, undermine the basic principles and structures that lie behind legislation, areas of government and government policy. We see that in this Bill. We see it in the planning system. We spent a huge amount of time discussing the passage of the Localism Act 2011; many noble Lords in the Chamber today were involved in it. Whatever many of us thought about the outcomes—some very good, some perhaps not so good—they were nevertheless based on the philosophy of how the planning system should work. Now we are putting it into practice to see if it will work.
However, what we have here is ad hoc, hotchpotch messing about with bits of the planning system, some of which seems to completely contradict the philosophy behind the Localism Act. We have changes to planning rules and regulations proposed for national parks, removing requirements on the Secretary of State to have special regard to conservation and the environment in national parks, done on an ad hoc basis. If the Government want to change the way national parks work to make them more growth-based, perhaps they should change the philosophy and the ideas behind it and let us have a national parks Bill under which we can discuss that properly across the board. Some of us would be very unhappy about it but we could nevertheless discuss it. Bringing one-off measures such as this forward, which may then be cited as a precedent—“We did that for that and it was not too disastrous, so we can do it for that and a bit more”—is not the way to get coherent legislation.
The proposals for town and village greens suffer from the same problem. There are clearly problems in some places. It is ludicrous that somebody can apply to register a town or village green on a piece of land which already has housing built on it. The whole procedure for registering town and village greens is, in my view, too legalistic and overbureaucratic. However, just bringing forward a one-off proposal which seems to solve a small-scale problem is not how to make quite significant changes to the whole regime set out in the Commons Act 2006. It is not the way to do legislation.
Noble Lords have referred to Clause 1 and the way in which naughty or inefficient councils might be designated so that people then have the option to make direct planning applications. Quite apart from the principle behind this, with which many of us are obviously not happy, all sorts of practical problems will arise which we have to look into very carefully in Committee. The local authority will need to keep a planning department because some planning applications will go to it, so presumably that department will get less cost-effective and efficient. We have not been given any proper figures on the cost to government of boosting the Planning Inspectorate. There is the question, for example, of pre-application discussions with applicants. Who will do those? Will it be the local planning authority? Will it be the Planning Inspectorate? Who will be responsible for that? Will it be the local planning authority up to some stage, and then, when people say, “Oh, we are not getting very far with that lot”, will it move to the Planning Inspectorate? Perhaps everything will have to start again.
Where the local planning authority has to do work, on behalf of the Planning Inspectorate or otherwise because the application has gone there in the first place, will it be reimbursed for that? Where will the planning applications fee go? It all seems to be a very messy sledgehammer to crack a nut, with lots of unintended compromises. If nothing else, we in the House of Lords have to probe properly the workability of it all, in the way that the House is very often so good at.
On Clause 8, on electronic communications, I am concerned about why these large cabinets are required and why the electronics industry, which is miniaturising everything at such a huge rate, still needs these cabinets which are the size of a big wardrobe. That kind of practical thing, in addition to all the other important points that have been made, must be sorted out.
On towns and villages, under Clauses 13 and 14, there is a perfectly acceptable way of doing exactly what the Government want without driving a coach and horses though the very principle of the Commons Act and the registration of greens. There is a lot of misunderstanding about greens. They are not a planning designation. It is not a matter of deciding whether it is a good idea or not, it is a matter of fact. It originally came from prescriptive common-law rights acquired over time, which were first codified in the Commons Registration Act of 1965, and then most recently in the Commons Act 2006, of which some have a blessed memory. If we are to disrupt that whole system, we should do it very carefully. On the other hand, the Government said that they wanted to align the commons registration system with the planning system where there were planning proposals. That is absolutely sensible. It can be done, and a consequence may be that the town and village greens registration system can be made more efficient. However, the way in which it is being done in the Bill abolishes people’s rights, rather than aligning them with the planning system.
I will certainly be making proposals in Committee that I hope the Government will at least consider and discuss sensibly. I look forward to the Committee, along with everybody else.