Neighbourhood Planning Bill

Debate between Lord Herbert of South Downs and Andrew Mitchell

3rd reading: House of Commons & Legislative Grand Committee: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Tuesday 13th December 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Andrew Mitchell (Sutton Coldfield) (Con)]

Will my right hon. Friend just expand on that point? Why is he no longer in favour of abolishing the Planning Inspectorate? In my experience in Sutton Coldfield, it adds precisely nothing to the process.

[Nick Herbert]

I am very glad to be pushed into a more moderate and Conservative position on this issue than the one I previously took. What I am focused on is ensuring that the Planning Inspectorate takes the right decisions should such developments be called in, and, more particularly, that local authorities take the right decisions in the first place. We should be minimising the number of appeals that have to go to the Planning Inspectorate because a wrong decision is made or because a decision appears to be in breach of national policy, and that means getting the national policy right. My contention is that national policy should give primacy to made neighbourhood plans, because these have been approved in local referendums.

--- Later in debate ---

[Nick Herbert]

My right hon. and learned Friend puts the point incredibly well. That is exactly how developers are able to game the system and why the way in which we calculate the five-year land supply is fundamentally flawed and is giving rise to this injustice. The loophole has to be closed, and I very much hope that the Government will do so.

[Mr Mitchell]

I apologise for troubling the House twice in one day, not least since I only very rarely intervene in this area of public policy, but in Sutton Coldfield we are absolutely astonished and mystified by the Secretary of State’s unwise and illogical decision to lift the stop imposed by his predecessor on the plans from Labour-controlled Birmingham City Council to build 6,000 new houses on Sutton Coldfield’s green belt. I should make it clear that we are strongly in favour of building more homes in Sutton Coldfield. My excellent local councillors—11 out of 12 of them are Conservative—have consistently sought to ensure that, where appropriate, we build new homes, because we are conscious that we want our children and grandchildren to benefit in the same way as my generation has, but those homes have to be built in the right places.