Neighbourhood Planning Bill

Debate between Lord Jackson of Peterborough 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 Jackson]

I am fully supportive of, and sympathetic to, my right hon. Friend’s concerns about the 2016 Birmingham local plan. Nevertheless, as of March 2016, 216,000 homes have already been allocated in emerging and existing approved local plans.

[Mr Mitchell]

I am coming directly to that point, but let me go back to parsing, for the benefit of the House, what the Secretary of State said at the developers’ lunch. First, he said that this was a local decision. It is not a local decision; it is made by Birmingham City Council, which is one of the largest authorities in Europe, and the views of my constituents—100,000 residents of the royal town of Sutton Coldfield—have been completely blocked out. Our 2015 manifesto stated that we would

“ensure local people have more control over planning and protect the Green Belt”.

The action that the Secretary of State has allowed flies absolutely and categorically in the face of that. Entirely ignored are the 100,000 citizens of the royal town of Sutton Coldfield, virtually all of whom are totally opposed to the development. They have marched in their hundreds and protested in their thousands, and 11 out of 12 Conservative councillors have opposed the process.

We have the largest town council in the country. It is totally and unanimously opposed to the development, but it has not even been consulted. Will the junior Minister commit to going back to Birmingham City Council and suggesting—I do not think he has the power to force the council to do this—that common decency expects it to go back to the 24 elected members of the largest town council in the country, formally consult them and listen to what they have to say?

Labour has been trying to build around and emasculate the royal town of Sutton Coldfield for 30 years—it refers to us as “North Birmingham”—and, thanks to the Secretary of State, it now might well succeed. My 100,000 constituents have been totally and completely disfranchised. That is the very definition of the tyranny of the majority over the minority, and the Department and the Secretary of State have now made themselves complicit in this.

On the second point that the Secretary of State raised, neither the council nor the Department, and certainly not the inspector, has looked at the patently obvious alternatives. There could be a much more comprehensive regional approach, which the excellent Conservative mayoral candidate for the west midlands, Andy Street, has spoken up for. There are superb plans to build a Wolverhampton garden city, almost all of which would be on brownfield land, to provide 45,000 houses. There are small brownfield sites in Birmingham that have specifically not been included for consideration. We in Sutton Coldfield came up with the very reasonable proposal that there should be an eight-year moratorium on building 6,000 homes on the green belt while the other 45,000-plus were built on brownfield sites. That approach would enable the Government and the council to review the extent to which building on the green belt might be needed or acceptable. However, the proposal was rejected, without even any consideration by the inspector.

The Campaign to Protect Rural England made an excellent submission in February, which I sent to the Minister on 16 August. It made many excellent points that have not been addressed. I point out that when Birmingham was controlled by a coalition of the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, Tory councillors had plans to build the same number of houses as are now proposed by Labour-controlled Birmingham City Council, but without needing to encroach on the green belt. By definition, there are not even exceptional circumstances for building on the green belt, let alone “very exceptional circumstances”, which were the words used by the Secretary of State.

I accept of course that these are Labour plans, but Sutton Coldfield has been grievously let down. I believe that we were and are entitled to expect the protection of the Government, based on their manifesto commitment, and I am deeply disappointed that we have not been able to rely on that. The transport problems on our side of the Birmingham conurbation that will be caused by the development will be acute and horrific. There is no guarantee that the Labour council will spend the necessary money on infrastructure for these new builds. There was no proper consultation with the relevant health services and authorities, although the council was obliged to carry that out.

The Government have got themselves into a mess on the green belt by trying to face both ways at the same time. With this decision, they have massively shot themselves in the foot. My right hon. and hon. Friends will not trust the Department on issues involving the green belt, about which many of them are extremely sensitive, because of the ludicrous nature of this decision. Building more homes, which we all want, will therefore be much more difficult for the Department.

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[Mr Jackson]

I pay tribute to the neighbourhood plans being produced by volunteers in my right hon. Friend’s constituency and throughout our country. They do an excellent job and I support the policy four-square. My point is about opportunity cost: is this approach going to have a detrimental effect on the Government’s strategic housing objective, which is to deliver large-scale housing for people who need it? When we look at the age of people buying their first house and at the availability or otherwise of affordable housing across the country, we see that this proposal has the potential to undermine the authority of the local planning authority to meet wider, long-term strategic housing and planning objectives. These things are already in place via the emerging or adopted local plan. The proposal will inevitably give rise to conflict between the local planning authority and the neighbourhood planning bodies, with the possible perverse consequence that we will see the establishment of neighbourhood planning bodies merely in order to thwart development.

Let me move on to deal quickly with new clause 8. I used the correct word “moratorium” in respect of the use by the Minister of development orders. On the specific issue of five-year land supply, again, this proposal seeks to put a draconian policy in the Bill, rather than, as I suggested in my intervention—my right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs was generous in accepting interventions—waiting for a response from Government, by means other than primary legislation, to do as the LGA has suggested, which is to review the policy and look for a more consistent and better understood methodology for both developers and local authorities in respect of the policy under the current auspices of the national planning policy framework.

At the moment, we still have a robust system that tests the efficacy of five-year land supply through planning appeals and local plans. We should encourage greater incentives from local planning authorities. It is as well to make the point that, in some parts of the country, they lack the appropriate resources to carry out the proper work in that respect.

My final point is about amendment 28, which was tabled by my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield. I can understand the anger, passion and resentment that he articulated in his usual powerful way, but this is probably the most inappropriate amendment, because preventing payment of the new homes bonus when we already have strong protections in place for the green belt and other designated areas to prevent inappropriate development will have consequences.

[Mr Mitchell]

This may be my lack of understanding of planning matters, but can my hon. Friend explain how a Government who say they are committed to protecting the green belt then pay people a subsidy to build on the green belt, rather than paying them a bigger subsidy to build on brownfield sites, while protecting the green belt? Perhaps he can explain that conundrum.

[Mr Jackson]

My right hon. Friend makes a good point, but I am saying that we have less than benign financial circumstances and, were his policy to be followed, the city of Birmingham might lose £54 million in income through the new homes bonus. There are other ways in which we can toughen protections for the green belt, while allowing discretion for some exceptional sites. I made the point in my intervention that 216,000 homes had already been placed in emerging and completed local plans in the green belt by March. I accept that there is a problem, but I am not convinced that this amendment will sort the issue out.

In reducing the income stream and funding to local planning authorities, the perverse ramification may well be that those hard-pressed authorities cannot therefore put in the effort to properly manage well-funded speculative developers with their land grabs. There might also be an impact on rural housing schemes, which are very important and necessary for many of my hon. Friends.

For those reasons, I ask my right hon. and hon. Friends—I think they have already acceded to my request—not to push these matters to a vote. Ministers will have heard the points that have been raised on both sides of the House and will correctly identify methods to ameliorate the problems that have been raised.