Neighbourhood Planning Bill

Debate between Lord Jackson of Peterborough and Lord Barwell

Ping Pong: House of Commons
Tuesday 28th March 2017 Commons Chamber

[Gavin Barwell]

I am obviously aware of the Greater Manchester spatial strategy. I need to be a little careful, for reasons I am sure the hon. Gentleman will understand, not to comment on the detail of that, because it may well end up on my desk. However, he raises a really important point. The Government are very interested in the wider application of the process that is happening in Greater Manchester. As he says, a number of individual local authorities have decided that rather than produce their own plans they will produce a strategy for the wider area. There is much to commend that in principle. However, if that plan is slightly more distant from individual local communities, it is important that there are mechanisms by which people can engage in the process and do not feel that planning is being done to them rather than their having an involvement.

[Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Gavin Barwell]

I will in a second, because I suspect that my hon. Friend has a very similar issue—potentially —in his area.

I will certainly reflect, in any regulations that we might bring forward, on what the issues might be when there is a wider strategic plan. If the hon. Member for Oldham West and Royton (Jim McMahon) wishes to talk to me informally about some of the things he has experienced, I would be very happy to have that conversation.

[Mr Jackson]

For once my hon. Friend is wrong, because I do not have a problem with my own devolution settlement. In fact, I am a sinner repenting: I was quite hostile to it, but now I think it is going to work out for my constituents in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough.

May I take the Minister back to the amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire (Heidi Allen)? Will he ensure that any guidance on the neighbourhood planning regime also takes into account strategic housing issues relating to projections of housing need and the strategic housing market assessment to which local authorities have to refer before they put together their own local plan? That is an important document and it needs to be robust.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Lord Jackson of Peterborough and Lord Barwell

Monday 27th February 2017 Commons Chamber

[Gavin Barwell]

Despite what the hon. Lady says, there has been a very warm reaction to the housing White Paper from right across the housing sector. I have spent the past week travelling around the country and holding meetings with housing professionals, including, interestingly, Labour councillors, who are very keen to get behind the Government’s agenda to build the homes that Governments of both colours, over 30 or 40 years, have failed to build.

[Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)]

For reasons best known to themselves, about two years ago Reading Borough Council and West Berkshire Council challenged the Government’s policy of assisting brownfield development via vacant building credit. Will the Minister update us on whether the Government are still committed to vacant building credit to release more residential homes on brownfield land?

[Gavin Barwell]

We are certainly absolutely committed to trying to get a greater proportion of the homes we need built on brownfield land. The White Paper sets out a huge range of different things that we will do to achieve that, but I will happily write to my hon. Friend about the details of the issue he raises.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Lord Jackson of Peterborough and Lord Barwell

Monday 16th January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Gavin Barwell]

We have in the past provided £100,000 of funding to Manchester for this work. I would be delighted to meet the hon. Gentleman. This is a critical area, and we need to drive out the rogue landlords so that decent landlords do not face unfair competition.

[Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)]

Peterborough City Council is just about to commence a selective licensing scheme to crack down on rapacious slum landlords and protect vulnerable tenants under the Housing Act 2004. Will the Minister keep under review the bureaucratic burden that falls on local authorities? The whole process, from start to finish, is not timely and takes far too long.

[Gavin Barwell]

I am very happy to give that undertaking, and to meet my hon. Friend if he wishes to discuss these matters in more detail.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Jackson of Peterborough and Lord Barwell

Tuesday 19th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Gavin Barwell]

Well, there we go. The hon. Gentleman is suggesting, with his customary eloquence, that we go even further than the hon. Member for Swansea West did. I think he is arguing that we should use the whole over-18 adult population as the basis for deciding the boundaries. Indeed, in an earlier intervention, he said that he had a significant number of asylum seekers in his constituency who, although they were ineligible to vote, still gave rise to casework.

There are many different proposals for ways in which we can develop these figures. My point about the hon. Member for Swansea West’s amendment is that we cannot come up with a definitive figure. We can start with the census and take into account the electorate, and we can then use other data sets to refine that information, but we cannot come up with an accurate figure.

My own view is that we should stick with the current basis, which looks at the published electorate, but that we should also take action to deal with under-representation, which affects certain parts of the country more than others. The hon. Member for Swansea West talked about poverty, and the hon. Member for St Ives (Andrew George), who has now left the Chamber, referred to work carried out by the Electoral Commission that showed that the transience of the population—the churn—was the key factor. There are certain groups within the population, including the black and minority ethnic community, young people and people who live in the private rented sector, that are much more likely to move frequently, and that is the main causal driver of this problem.

[Mr Stewart Jackson]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the difficulty in the past 15 or 20 years has been that the Boundary Commission has not been guided by Government regulations specifically to look at future population changes? That has been an important factor in making many, if not most, of the constituencies in this country out of date almost as soon as they are created.

[Gavin Barwell]

That cuts to the point of one of the amendments, which deals with the frequency with which we carry out the reviews. That is an important point, because if we had more regular reviews, they would be based on more recent data, and we would not see such dramatic changes. If we had a review every five years, we would not see significant changes in many of our constituencies.

Academies Bill [Lords]

Debate between Lord Jackson of Peterborough and Lord Barwell

Wednesday 21st July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Gavin Barwell]

First, I thank the hon. Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker) for being so generous in his speeches on this amendment and the previous amendment in allowing people to intervene and ask him questions. I appreciate that.

The amendment is further evidence of the dichotomy of the Labour party’s approach to education policy for primary and secondary schools. With capital, as has been discussed, the previous Government’s Building Schools for the Future programme was concentrated purely on the secondary sector, whereas their policy on academies was to have them in deprived areas at secondary level but not at primary level, even though many issues of educational under-attainment stem from performance at primary level. The list on the Department for Education website of schools in my constituency that have expressed an interest in the academy process includes Wolsey infant school in New Addington, which is an outstanding school, and St Mary’s junior school, which is not. Both of them serve highly deprived parts of my constituency. If Labour Members have the passion that they say they have about driving up educational standards in deprived areas, that ought to apply equally at primary and secondary level.

I do not wish to detain hon. Members for long, but I want to address the four main objections that have been raised regarding primary schools. The first objection was about size and whether primary schools would be able to cope with the responsibilities that come with academy status. Having looked at the schools in my constituency that have expressed an interest, I would expect a far lower proportion of primary schools than secondary schools to be interested in going down this route because of their size. However, there are large discrepancies regarding primary schools. In my local authority area there are a number of single-form entry schools, some two-form entry schools and a significant number of three-form entry schools. The picture is very different for a three-form entry school, such as the state school that my children go to, than for a single-form entry school.

It would be helpful if the Minister clarified the position on federations. The Secretary of State’s response to the shadow Secretary of State on Second Reading implied that applications from federations would be accepted. Clearly, that would be one way of addressing issues of size and scope. One concern that the Labour party has raised about academies is the fear that schools will stop working together, so it seems particularly perverse for the amendment to rule out the prospect of federations of schools applying for academy status and preserving those relationships that Members on both sides want to persist.

My main point about the issue of school size is that the legislation is, as several hon. Members have pointed out, permissive. Surely, we should trust head teachers, leadership teams and governors to judge whether their schools have the capacity to cope with academy status.

[Mr Stewart Jackson]

My hon. Friend has hit the nail on the head. It is better to have looser language in the Bill because, as the hon. Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker) knows, any issues of consultation in relation to the schools that seek to proceed along this path will be the subject of regulation and secondary legislation. Does my hon. Friend agree that it is better to have looser language in the Bill than to be too prescriptive, because that might, as the shadow Minister has said, lay individual schools, local education authorities and other bodies open to legal action further down the line?

[Gavin Barwell]

My hon. Friend makes the point far more eloquently than I can. At some point in the future, the shadow Education Minister might have the honour of being the Minister again, or even the Secretary of State, who will sign off the applications for academy status. However, the amendment would tell primary schools or federations of primary schools that they were not even allowed to make the case for academy status, and that is completely the wrong approach.