Neighbourhood Planning Bill

Debate between Lord Kennedy of Southwark and Lord Porter of Spalding

Report: 1st sitting: House of Lords
Thursday 23rd February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Porter of Spalding (Con)]

My Lords, I speak in support of the spirit of what my noble friend Lady Cumberlege is trying to achieve. I have previously declared my interests in debate on the Bill, in being chairman of the Local Government Association and the leader of South Holland District Council. I said at Second Reading that I am not a fan of neighbourhood plans and nothing that I heard then or since would convince me that they are a good thing per se. But if we are to use a neighbourhood planning system, I certainly support the idea that when such a plan has been tested by the public whom it affects and by the local planning authority, and has been found to be in compliance with the NPPF, only in very extreme cases should it be overturned.

None of the proposals going forward, such as about training RICS inspectors to make sure they know what they are talking about, will suit what we need from this. We need an assurance from the Government that if the community goes through the pain of preparing a plan, that plan will be respected once it has been tested unless there is a major infrastructure need at a national level that would trump it. Revisiting how it is built will not give people any more confidence in a plan being respected once it has been done. The respect for the fact that it has been tested in public should be paramount. The Government really should decide whether or not they like neighbourhood planning and, if they do, they should find a form of words somewhere to insist that neighbourhood planning will be respected. I hope that my noble friend Lady Cumberlege does not press this to a Division because I would obviously go through the Lobby with the Government, on the basis that I do not think neighbourhood plans are the right thing to do anyway.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab)]

My Lords, I start my remarks by making my usual declarations. I refer the House to my register of interests and declare that I am an elected councillor in the London Borough of Lewisham and a vice-president of the Local Government Association. I too pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege, who has led on this issue with considerable skill right from the start of our deliberations. We are all grateful to her for that.

Everyone who has spoken, with the exception of the noble Lord, Lord Porter, has voiced support for neighbourhood planning. It is right for the Government to set out the policy and parameters—the broad aims of what they want—but it must surely be the job of the local community, local councillors, the parish and local planners working together to set out in the context of that overall policy what should happen locally. The noble Baroness’s amendment would do just that, with a number of sensible safeguards that should give comfort to the noble Lord, Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth. The amendment would place a duty on the Secretary of State to uphold neighbourhood plans, with the proviso that they can be overridden only in exceptional circumstances. The proposed new clause sets out clearly the responsibilities and how matters of national concern would not be frustrated by the neighbourhood planning process, which is a very important part to have in it.

Subsection (2) of the proposed new clause makes it clear that where it has been deemed necessary by the Secretary of State to override the local plans in the requirement to build additional homes, it must be done with regard to the local plan. Again this is a very sensible proviso, as surely we want any changes made locally to be done as sensitively as possible, and not to have some sort of fire sale where everything is up for grabs and no account is taken of the views of local people and the work that has gone into producing the local plan. It should not just be ignored in that respect.

Finally, subsection (3) of the proposed new clause makes it clear that it is the responsibility of the local planning authority, with the local community, to decide where it is best to have any additional required development. That is, as always, making sure the Secretary of State is setting out the broad policy parameters, but it is the local community, local councillors and the planning authority deciding the detail in the context of that broad policy aim.

I agree with many of the comments of the noble Earl, Lord Caithness. The noble Baroness made her case very well. I welcome the points made by the Minister in his helpful comments at the start of the debate, but I am not sure he has gone far enough. The noble Baroness referred to coming back at Third Reading. The Minister talked about policy and guidance and what they are doing in the department, but—perhaps he will come to this in a moment—I did not hear him say what, if anything, he will bring back at Third Reading. I look forward to hearing that.

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[Lord Kennedy of Southwark]

Before the noble Lord responds to that, could he also say a little about the reimbursement process? Who will do the reimbursing? Will it be the district council that has had a plan taken off it? How then does it agree any dispute over who pays what and how much it will cost? Who will arbitrate that? We may find that a district council is very cross to have a plan taken away from it and will then dispute the amount to be paid to the county council. It seems to me that the noble Lord has opened a can of worms.

[Lord Porter of Spalding]

Following on from that point, on the basis that district councils are not getting paid for carrying out the plan in the first place, it cannot possibly be them that reimburses a county council—it must be the Government. If the Government are now prepared to pay for planning, perhaps those districts that do not yet have a plan will consider asking their county council to take it on so that the Government actually pay for it.

Neighbourhood Planning Bill

Debate between Lord Kennedy of Southwark and Lord Porter of Spalding

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

[Lord Porter of Spalding (Con)]

My Lords, I hope your Lordships will forgive me but I have not spoken in this Room before. It is my first time and if what I say is right, it is right, but if it is wrong, it is wrong. I declare my interests as the chairman of the Local Government Association until June—I hope—and as leader of South Holland District Council. In terms of what we are dealing with today, I am one of the four people who drafted the National Planning Policy Framework, so I know a little bit about what is in it and I certainly know what the intention was. It was to deliver sustainable development in places in the country where it is needed in a way that the people living in the local area could accept, to ensure that we get the homes we badly need in the most timely fashion.

I have to disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Stunell, that neighbourhood plans were not seen by all of us as the route for making that happen. I personally objected to putting neighbourhood plans in, but that was not because I did not want development, it was because I wanted to see more development and I thought that neighbourhood plans would be a route to slowing it down. But the Government pursued them, so it is incredibly bizarre that if a neighbourhood plan or a local plan has been drawn up in compliance with the NPPF, the Planning Inspectorate is allowed—and some would say sometimes encouraged—to overturn it. The inspectorate should not be able to do that.

There are people outside this Room who think that the Planning Inspectorate has gone feral. It is not working to direction from the Government because it has individual planning inspectors working to their own direction for their own aims. It is important that the Government should insist on the supremacy of the public’s ownership of the planning system. If someone has gone through the pain of making a neighbourhood plan, even though I disagree with such plans in principle, if that is what the Government are intent on using as a way of encouraging development at the local level, once those plans have been tested in public by an inspector and are found to be sound and in compliance with the local plan, if one is in place, or at the very least in compliance with the NPPF, the Planning Inspectorate should never be allowed to overturn one of those decisions except on pain of some form of proper cross-examination by the Government.

We all know that even though the Secretary of State has signed off a planning appeal, it is very rare for the Secretary of State to be personally blamed for that appeal, because generally it does not get anywhere near them. If a neighbourhood plan or a local plan is in place and the inspectorate feels that for good strategic reasons it has to overturn it, there should be some insistence that the Secretary of State should actually take personal ownership of it so that people can be sure that there is political oversight of the bureaucrats working in the planning department. On that basis, I support the amendment in the name of my noble friend Lady Cumberlege.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark]

My Lords, the amendment proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Stunell, is one that I am obviously happy to support. As we have heard, the purpose of the amendment is to place in the Bill a requirement, when the Secretary of State has determined an appeal against a decision, that due weight has to be given by the Secretary of State to any proposals set out in the neighbourhood development plan or a post-examination plan. The noble Lord, Lord Stunell, said that his amendment is much softer and he hopes to get a more positive response from the noble Lord, Lord Bourne, when he comes to reply. The noble Lord also highlighted the issue where people have worked hard to put together a neighbourhood plan only to have it overridden by the Secretary of State, which is very much the point just made by the noble Lord, Lord Porter, as well.

Amendment 20 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege, seeks to give further strength to local development plans. If an application for planning permission is made to the local authority but is refused on the grounds that it is not in accordance with the local development plan, the assumption is that the Secretary of State will uphold that decision. It seems perverse that the Secretary of State would seek to overturn a decision which, as we have heard, is in line with the NPPF, so it is important that that point is made clear by the Minister. I hope that he will also respond to the points made by the noble Baroness in respect of localism.

I will leave my remarks at that but I may have one or two questions for the Minister when he comes to respond to the debate.

Housing and Planning Bill

Debate between Lord Kennedy of Southwark and Lord Porter of Spalding

Wednesday 20th April 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Porter of Spalding (Con)]

My Lords, strangely, I am going to speak against the amendment, because of the second part. I am not sure why this amendment is not linked to the one about the private sector being able to compete against local government to do planning. In my mind they should go together. There is no way that the private sector will pick up any planning applications if it is only allowed to charge the current fee structure that we as councils are allowed to charge. That is because in the last three years the taxpayer subsidy to planning has been £450 million. The private sector will not engage on that.

Without the second part being in there, it would allow local government to be put in the right place to prevent the private sector being able to take the work at a subsidised rate for itself. The risk seems to be that, when we get to that part of the Bill, private sector firms will be allowed to charge excessive fees and make money, safe in the knowledge that there will be an expectation that they will be more sympathetic to the applicant. I think a true level playing field would be one in which we charge full cost recovery and for those applications that are minor, where that would not be possible, there needs be a different mechanism. That is why I cannot support the amendment as written.

On the next amendment, on the retrospective planning application, again, we need some way to penalise serial offenders who wilfully abuse the planning system by not seeking planning permission in the right way when they first set out on their projects. Again, I am not sure how that should be worded in a way that will deliver it to best effect for everybody, because there will be genuine cases where some people simply were not aware that they needed to make a planning application. So any amendment must recognise that for me to be able to support it. As I have said before about any amendment that has “local government must” in it, there is no way I can support the third part of that amendment, where it says that we “must consult”. I do not think that local government ever “must” do anything. I think we should always “may” do something.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark]

My Lords, I have considerable sympathy for the amendment moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Gardner of Parkes. I regret that we were not able to get Amendment 116BA into the same group, as it covers the same issues. It makes clear that local authorities may recover their full costs in respect of the work they are doing on planning applications, which is the intention behind this amendment as well.

I think it is important that councils are able to set fees that enable them to recover their costs, or at least a larger part of their costs, in undertaking the work they need to do to ensure that applications are processed efficiently. This would, of course, mean that for larger developments developers would pay more, or more realistic costs, than someone who wants to build an extension to their home.

I agreed with the noble Lords, Lord True and Lord Porter of Spalding, when they said in Committee that it is probably going too far to allow councils to make money out of the planning application process, but it is right that they should be able to recover up to all their costs, which is the intention of my Amendment 116BA, which we will come to later. I am disposed to test the opinion of the House on that if the Minister does not make a reasonable offer in that regard before Third Reading.

The noble Baroness, Lady Gardner, made a compelling point on Amendment 116, to which the noble Lord, Lord Porter, referred. At my last planning committee meeting, I recall that a public house in Blackheath was seeking retrospective approval for the substantial changes it had made to the fabric of its building without planning permission. It obtained the approval. We made it very clear to the applicants how unhappy we were that they were there in front of us, but that was all we could do. They got their permission and paid the nominal fees. It would be good if such applicants could be made to pay a little more, given the work that we had to do.

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[Baroness Andrews]

My Lords, we had a very good and thorough discussion on the recovery of full-cost fees on a previous amendment. I want to draw attention to a few statistics to reinforce the case that my noble friend made and to point out that the flaw in the present system is that you cannot get speedy, authoritative and consistent decision-making at local planning level if the expert workforce is being run down and starved of resources. I have just a few statistics that pick that up.

The audit committee reported in 2014 that planning departments were taking the brunt of funding cuts—a reduction, in real terms, of 46% across the planning and development budget between 2010 and 2014. These are horrendous figures in the context of cuts of 37% in local authorities as a whole. How much deeper have these cuts been since 2014? In expert areas such as archaeology and conservation officers, there has been a drop of a third in local authority staff. In Lancashire the entire archaeological team has disappeared. How the Government expect local authorities to deliver a speedy, efficient and good planning service with this level of cuts is absolutely beyond me. Therefore, the only answer to building the capacity of local authorities to do what the Government so desperately want them to do, and to deliver a speedier, more efficient planning system, is to build the capacity of local authorities themselves, because development control is the fundamental business of planning authorities. There is an urgent need to reinvest in local authority planning services. Full-cost fee recovery can contribute to that.

I have one question for the Minister. In the previous exchange, I was not quite sure whether she believed the figure published by the Local Government Association—that there is a shortfall of £450 million to local authorities because of the difference between the cost they have to pay and the fees they receive. She talked at great length about the vitality needed to enable local authorities to do their job, but she did not address the question of the reality of what is happening on the ground. There is an absolute, logical and fair case for recovering full-cost fees, and I hope she will respond positively to it.

[Lord Porter of Spalding]

My Lords, I speak in favour of the spirit of what the amendment is trying to achieve, but against it because of the way it is worded. No one from a local government background would believe that it is right that we are unable to collect enough fees to cover the cost of the service, and it is not right that local taxpayers are subsidising the development industry to the tune of about £150 million a year—£450 million over the last three years. But the amendment as worded could have a quite negative impact on some areas. If a fully staffed planning team received only 10 planning applications in a year, the brunt of those costs would fall on those 10 applicants. That cannot be right. There needs to be a way for central government to get away from setting fees at an inflationary uplift. As welcome as that will be, it will be insufficient to get anywhere near cost recovery.

Given that the Government propose to put private sector competition into the space of a public sector monopoly, there must be a way to increase fees that works for local government, the local taxpayer and the private sector. I still do not understand why we are dealing with these amendments separately from the amendment that opens the door for the private sector to compete. At that point the Government will be sure that the fees local government charge are proportionate for the service being delivered in their area, because if local government charges too much, clearly, the private sector will take all the work. We need to find a way of getting that done but, from my end of the telescope, this amendment still does not deliver what needs to be done. I would love to able to support somebody who is clever at writing an amendment in a way that I am not.

Again, the word “must” has been used for local government. People should not put “must” in anything. Local government likes “may”, not “must”.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark]

Before the noble Lord sits down, I did put “may” in for the main part and then “must” for the consultation. I thought I was getting somewhere with the noble Lord. I think we should talk outside the Chamber—he may well be the right person to write this.

[Lord Porter of Spalding]

You should never have me write anything, because you will not be able to read it.

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I thank noble Lords for their comments and contributions. To respond to the noble Lord, I can confirm absolutely, for the avoidance of doubt, that planning authorities will not be able to charge one fee and private providers another. We do not intend to create two tiers within the planning system—it would be most undemocratic and unfair, generally.

The noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, asked about the £450 million disparity that the LGA found between costs and fees. I need to make the point that there will be differences between the efficiency and effectiveness of local authorities in delivering planning services. Some show that performance can be improved and costs reduced, and more should follow their lead. Authorities have done a phenomenal job in sharing services for many of their functions but have not moved quickly enough in doing so for planning services. I said that to the noble Baroness either earlier today or on Monday—the days have merged into one.

Amendment 116BA, as I said on a previous amendment, allows local authorities to go beyond cost recovery. We are absolutely clear that these services and other discretionary services should not exceed the cost of providing the service. I have been through the argument previously that what cost recovery means in practice, in terms of fee levels, varies from local authority to local authority. We want a highly efficient service, and there are real challenges up-front in doing this for some local authorities, but we want better-performing planning departments for better performance in terms of planning outcomes. I talked earlier about our proposals for tackling resource pressures in planning departments. I hope that noble Lords will not mind that I do not go through these again, and that with those words the noble Lord will feel able to withdraw the amendment.

Housing and Planning Bill

Debate between Lord Kennedy of Southwark and Lord Porter of Spalding

Monday 18th April 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Porter of Spalding (Con)]

My Lords, perhaps I may seek clarification that we are talking only about nominations to boards of RSLs and not nomination rights over where the tenants who occupy their homes come from. All those homes that were transferred under LSVT were transferred on the basis that the host council which decided to transfer would maintain its nomination rights. I appreciate that the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, is slightly conflicted by having to take an LGA position and an RSL position which are completely opposed to one another on this issue, but sometimes we all have to be Janus-headed.

My concern is not about who sits on the boards, because I think the RSL experiment has failed and I am not sure how many councils would want to be associated with it, but about the loss of nomination rights. Those LSVT units were all taken out of council control; they are not private sector homes—or they were not when they left. The Labour Government who did the transfers assured everybody that they were not being transferred to the private sector. If we are now saying that they are, we must at least honour the agreements under which they transferred. While I will support the Government on this, because it is not an issue I would want to die in a ditch over, I think that it is a lost opportunity. We should take all social housing off the public sector debt book so that we can borrow money against it to provide the homes that we badly need. There are 4 million under-sweated assets out there and we should all be able to do the same thing.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab)]

My Lords, I can see where the noble Viscount, Lord Younger, is coming from with these amendments and I agree with virtually all the comments that have been made in this short debate. As the noble Lords, Lord True and Lord Shipley, said, it would be helpful if the Minister could confirm that councillors could be appointed to boards if the board thought that appropriate. If you are appointed to a board, no matter what your position is, your duty is to that board and to ensure that the organisation functions properly.

As the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, said, it is good if local authorities and housing associations have a good working relationship, but if as part of the scrutiny process a council wanted to engage with a local housing association, that would be welcome.

Housing and Planning Bill

Debate between Lord Kennedy of Southwark and Lord Porter of Spalding

Tuesday 8th March 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark]

Of course, the properties are bought at the end of the day; that is what they are built for. That is an extraordinary comment from the Minister.

[Lord Porter of Spalding (Con)]

My Lords, can I declare all of my interests, although we might be here for ever? I am chairman of the Local Government Association, leader of South Holland District Council, chairman of South Holland homes, which is a community interest housing company. I am also a private sector landlord. One of our rural housing providers delivered six code level 6 homes for us about four years ago, which are the closest to real zero carbon. The zero-carbon homes that the Committee has spent the last hour talking about are not really zero carbon. There was no proposal to ever deliver proper zero-carbon homes in this country because they are far too expensive.

The code level 6 ones that we delivered a few years ago did not save people a few hundred pounds on their electricity bills; they generated a few hundred pounds. Once the feed-in tariff had been factored in through the solar panels and the wind turbines that were installed on the site and the way that they were built for carbon mass heat production, which maintained the homes at a standard 18 degrees, the tenants actually made money on those homes. So that is really good news. We built six of those, and that is really bad news because the same capital cost of delivering those six would have delivered 12 standard construction three-bedroom semis that we were also building on a similar site at the same time. The homes on the affordable site were built on rural exception sites. There was hardly any land cost in there and the capital cost of the physical build was almost twice as much as for the three-bedroom standard semi-detached properties.

We can talk all we like about a few thousand pounds being saved, but that is not an accurate figure and I do not know where that figure came from. Zero carbon costs considerably more than £3,000 a unit. Even if you only put a 4 kilowatt solar system on your house that would be at least £6,500, and that would generate probably enough electricity to run your lights during the day when you do not need them.