Environment Bill

Debate between Lord Horam and Baroness Parminter

Report stage
Wednesday 15th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Horam (Con)]

I agree with my noble friend Lord Deben and will just extend what he says. Essentially, his point is that we cannot ask Defra, which has a narrow remit, to take the integrated and across-the-board view that is necessary.

We also need to take into account the pressures on land—population, for example. As the noble Baroness said in her opening remarks, the population projections over the next few years from the Office for National Statistics are very considerable; we are talking about an extra 7 million people over the next 10 or 15 years. These are the sort of pressures we have to take into account when we look at land use. Although I am sympathetic with her point, we have to consider this properly, systematically and rationally.

No one wants the land to be ill-used or underused. None the less, the practicalities of the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, and my noble friend Lord Deben’s view about the wider nature of this issue mean that this amendment is deficient.

[Baroness Parminter (LD)]

My Lords, I rise very briefly to say that we support the intent of this amendment. Given the competing demands on land in our country, we believe it is time for a national framework. If it works in other parts of the continent and in other parts of the United Kingdom, the time has come and we would support it.

I fear the Minister will say that, for a number of reasons, he is not able to accept it. I therefore applaud the noble Baroness for her campaigning on this over many years and the fact that she has put together a proposal for an ad hoc House of Lords Select Committee on this. I certainly support that. I think it is an incredibly important initiative, and I hope other Peers will support that proposal so that this issue can be taken forward in a broader way.

Neighbourhood Planning Bill

Debate between Lord Horam and Baroness Parminter

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 31st January 2017 Grand Committee

[Lord Horam (Con)]

My Lords, I will comment briefly on Amendment 64 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter. We all understand and sympathise with her point about the time and effort put in by volunteers. In cases of which I am aware, it is very often a very small number of volunteers who really drive it. They find it difficult to pull in people from the wider community. They have to work very hard to get any real response. This is my problem with the wording of the noble Baroness’s amendment. She talks about plans within an area,

“covered by a made or emerging neighbourhood development plan”.

“Emerging” is the crucial word. She then defines an emerging neighbourhood development plan as one,

“that has been examined, is being examined, or is due to be examined, having met the public consultation requirements necessary to proceed to this stage”.

In other words, it is very embryonic. We do not know what the final view may be.

To give an example, I know of a neighbourhood plan in the north-west of England where two or three people in the parish have got together some but not a lot of information about housing and development plans in their area—as much as they can find without much help. They then decided to hold a public meeting. They leafleted their entire parish and brought people together. Inevitably, although people said that they were interested and declared their concern, usually about the housing aspect, the people who turned up to the meeting were few in number, despite a large amount of effort. The people I am talking to became worried and said that they must broaden the consultation to community groups, which would take some time to get around to all the people they felt they should see. They thought they should make another effort at consultation, which might be attended by more people. They reckon that all this will take a year before they have a clear idea of what residents in their area want.

What is the amendment talking about? What stage of the planning and gathering of information is the noble Baroness talking about? It sounded to me as if it was early in the stage. What worries me about that is we do not necessarily know whether the initial ideas will be the same as the final ideas that come out of that prolonged process. Will she explain that to me?

[Baroness Parminter]

If I answer that question, perhaps the noble Lord might say, if I were to change my amendment to “post-examined”, whether he would be prepared to accept it. There is a debate about what is the appropriate time to give due weight to the emerging plans. The Government have moved back. We obviously have a different Minister now, but during the consideration of the Housing and Planning Bill the Government were not talking about post-examined plans. They realised that we need to add protection from an earlier point in the process.