Neighbourhood Planning Bill

Debate between Lord Lansley and Lord Shipley

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

[Lord Shipley]

My Lords, I support Amendment 5, which contains an admirable list of the documents that a development plan should cover.

I shall speak to Amendments 7, 8 and 8A. Amendments 7 and 8A relate to the same issue in Clause 9 and Schedule 2. We had a longish discussion in Committee about the capacity of a county council to undertake the planning function where it was felt that a district council had not been fulfilling its obligations. I have thought very carefully about this and have concluded that Amendment 8, which stands in my name and that of the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, and to which support has been given by the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, seems a reasonable compromise. It provides a procedure that can be followed and it would probably command broad support in the country. Therefore, I hope very much that the Minister will feel able to accept Amendment 8, or at least come back at Third Reading with something similar.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, perhaps I may interject on this group, although not in relation to Amendment 5. I am sure that the noble Lord understands that, if one were to incorporate that amendment as it stands, one would in effect create in statutory form a small subset of factors which might and should be taken into account in determining a local planning authority’s strategic priorities but which in no sense encapsulated what those strategic priorities might be. The alternative seems to be to incorporate pretty much everything in the National Planning Policy Framework into a statutory provision setting out what the strategic priorities should be. I think that the legislation is right as it is: it is the job of the local planning authority to set its strategic priorities, and those should be set out through the consultation and then through any subsequent process of approval of the development plan.

However, I want to talk about Clause 9 and Amendment 8 in particular. I would have thought that the Secretary of State would invite a county council to take over the development plan process from a district council only in extremis. I cannot quite see how the Secretary of State could enter into such a plan other than in the most extreme circumstances. The county council is not in any shape to do this. I think that my own county council would be horrified at the prospect of that happening. If district councils are told that if they do not get on with it, this will happen, they will regard that as an empty threat. There is even a fear that if district councils which resisted completing their development plan process—there are very few of those because they know how important the plan is for the local community—thought that they could hand the responsibility over to the county council, that might be an attraction rather than a deterrent.

Therefore, I am not sure that I see the purpose of Clause 9. If the Government feel that they need a toolkit, including a measure that they could take in extremis, it must be set out as that. However, your Lordships will recall that Schedule 2 says that the Secretary of State can do this in circumstances where he or she,

“thinks that a lower-tier planning authority are failing or omitting to do anything it is necessary for them to do in connection with the preparation, revision or adoption of a development plan document”.

That is far too sweeping. So I apologise to my noble friend on the Front Bench, but I rather like Amendment 8. It helps because it sets out straightforwardly that this should happen where the development plan process is not making, or could not make, progress because there is no timetable or capacity and the authority is not trying to attract the necessary capacity. I do not think that Amendment 8 could be incorporated into the Bill, not least because it should include the words “in the view of the Secretary of State”; otherwise the questions of whether the authority had a satisfactory timetable, or whether it was thinking of inviting a district authority to do the job, would become completely open to argument. The Secretary of State must have the power, and it must be the Secretary of State’s view that the local planning authority is not doing what it ought to do by reference to a timetable or to alternative capacity.

In responding to this short debate, will my noble friend say that he will at least take this amendment away and look at it with his colleagues to see whether there is a mechanism—acceptable to the Government at Third Reading—for demonstrating that the Government would enter into a process of this kind only in extreme circumstances?

Neighbourhood Planning Bill

Debate between Lord Lansley and Lord Shipley

Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 6th February 2017 Grand Committee

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

I apologise for interrupting the noble Lord, but I am confused. I thought the Committee was talking about pre-commencement planning conditions—which are required to be discharged before the building commences—not other conditions that may have to be complied with during the course of building.

[Lord Shipley]

I do not know whether the noble Lord has read paragraph 26 of the report of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, but it says:

“We wanted to see some specific examples of pre-commencement conditions to help us understand the effect of subsection (5)”.


This was commented on by my noble friend Lady Parminter. The DCLG gave a list, setting out,

“details that developers have had to provide to local planning authorities before building works could begin”,

the first of which is,

“full details of a play area”.

I cannot see what the problem is with a builder telling the local planning authority where the play area will be and what will be on it. Secondly, there is a complaint—

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lansley]

It is not my job to defend what the DCLG is saying, but if that is treated as a pre-commencement planning condition then it would be objectionable. If it was simply a condition applied to the consent, to be pursued in the course of building, it would be perfectly okay.

[Lord Shipley]

As the noble Lord might understand, the problem is that once building has started it is much more difficult to get agreement on some of these details. The point that the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee has drawn to our attention is that there is nothing to prevent a builder telling us what the full details of the play area are planned to be. Indeed, if I was buying the property I might want to know that, because I might have children who would be interested in using it.

The details of all lighting on the development, including siting, design and lux levels, are seen as unnecessary pre-commencement conditions. They are not. As I mentioned, the installation of superfast broadband infrastructure is central to a housing development. There are others. I noticed,

“the full details of soft landscaping”.

Yes please: these are important. When a developer has sold all the houses on a site, it is much more difficult to get the soft landscaping put in to the standard that it should be. Also,

“precise location of bin collection points for specific plots”,

is seen to be an unnecessary pre-commencement condition. If you are living there, it may be that no one told you that you would have to take your wheelie bin 50 metres to the collection point because the bin lorry cannot turn round. Some of these are real-life examples. We need to be very careful when criticising local planning authorities for having set conditions that they think matter.

Because this is based on the complaints of housebuilders, will the Minister, when he replies in the letter we will be sent, copy in the replies to the letter the department sent to all the local authorities about these complaints to get their view on whether they felt builders’ complaints were justified? I very much hope that the department has taken on board the views not just of builders, but of the local authorities concerned.

I do not wish to detain the Committee any further, but the case for Clause 12 is no longer proven. As things stand, I do not think this can form part of the Bill any longer.

[Lord Lansley]

First, I apologise to the Committee: like my noble friend I was unable to attend the Committee last Thursday because I was abroad, but last Tuesday, while noble Lords were meeting here, I chaired a workshop that the Cambridgeshire Development Forum —once again, I declare my position as its chair—held with planning officers from Cambridge City and South Cambs councils. It considered a wide range of issues. I thought it important to talk to planning officers directly, not least to inform some of my contributions to our debates.

I want to speak because built into the structure of Clause 12—I address my remarks in particular to new subsection (5)—is the intention that best practice should be consolidated in a way that is likely to help us in our objective of building more houses more successfully and more speedily. What it comes down to is this: my colleagues on the forum and I spent a lot of time last year finding out some ways the planning process could be improved. Of 30 areas this was just one—it was not necessarily even the most important one, but it was important. There was a recognition among those in the development sector locally that there are issues with the way planning conditions are constructed. Conditions are imposed that are often non-compliant with the test that they should be imposed only where they are necessary and relevant to planning and to the development to be permitted, and where they are enforceable, precise and reasonable. None of us wants to end up with unnecessary appeals because of excessive or inappropriate conditions. That delays everything and increases costs for everybody.

I am prompted also by the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Shipley. He talked about conditions generally. Here we are talking specifically about pre-commencement planning conditions. There is a considerable problem, which I can see in the evidence the Government have given, in that if one has too many unnecessary pre-commencement planning conditions, the risk is that the discharge of those conditions will add to the delay. In fact, when one asks developers, as I have, it is often the issues associated with the discharge of those conditions that create more problems for development than agreement to them in the first place.

However, best practice is very clear. Joint working is what everyone should aim at, so as to reach the point where the committee making the decision can see what the agreement between the developers, the applicants and the local planning authority is likely to look like. It is a necessary part of informing members of the character of the decision they should be making. What we do not want is to allow some of the things that inhibit best practice—arising, for example, from planning officers’ inexperience. It was made clear that inexperienced planning officers simply load in conditions because they think that is the way to cover their backs. Experienced planning officers get their conditions right in the first place, so we want to encourage a process in which experienced officers negotiate and agree conditions with applicants.

We want to encourage applicants, which this legislation would do, to take the initiative and propose draft conditions. Obviously, those conditions should in large measure be standard conditions, and the structure of the legislation will encourage the use of such conditions, which should expedite matters. It will also inhibit the prospect of some of kind of last-minute ambush in the committee, because the conditions must necessarily be agreed with the applicant or the application must be referred back. If they are not agreed they can be refused, so I am not sure I understand the argument that authorities would be hesitant about refusing an application where a pre-commencement planning condition has been sought that is supported by planning policy in the NPPF. Why would they not refuse it when it is their job to pursue the appropriate response to an application that does not meet those criteria?

Housing and Planning Bill

Debate between Lord Lansley and Lord Shipley

Wednesday 13th April 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lansley]

My Lords, in making a brief contribution, I remind the House of my interest as chair of the Cambridgeshire Development Forum. In that context I will refer specifically to Cambridge. There was a concern in Cambridge that, if there was to be a definition of “high value” by means of comparison across the country as a whole, a very high proportion of the properties in Cambridge and South Cambridgeshire in particular would be likely to be treated as “high value”. I very much welcome the amendments that my noble friend the Minister has tabled in this group. They will enable the calculations to be undertaken and the agreement to be reached for a determination in each authority, taking account of all individual circumstances.

Of course, the measure is not mechanistic. Trying to argue that “higher” becomes mechanistic is simply trying to introduce rigidity where that is not necessary. The provision as amended would allow a determination to be made in relation to each authority, specific categories of housing or different comparators. It is deliberately flexible. I listened to the noble Lord, Lord Foster, on all the questions that he said need to be answered in order to proceed. But the point is that if one began to answer all those questions, one would take away from the Government and local authorities, working together, any flexibility to adapt to individual circumstances. In doing so, his proposed Amendment 61A—I cannot find it on the Marshalled List but I interpret from his remarks that it would leave out Clause 67—would take away the opportunity to realise value from the stock of higher-value housing and unlock new build for affordable housing in local authorities, support the right to buy and, by extension through the right to buy in housing associations, offer the additional opportunities for them to undertake new building.

A Select Committee in another place might well think that everything the Government want to do must be funded out of some taxpayer subsidy but the reality is, as we all know, that there is no such magic money tree that we can continue to shake to deliver all the objectives we want. I entirely agree with my noble friend Lord Deben that we want to build more houses. Frankly, realising value out of the higher-value housing stock that becomes vacant in local authorities is precisely the mechanism for this. That realised value can then be deployed with a multiplier effect to enable local authorities and housing associations, as a result, to build more houses. I thoroughly support that.

[Lord Shipley]

My Lords, before the Minister replies, I would like to be really clear about what is being said—in part, following what the noble Lord, Lord Porter, said a little while ago. I understand from what the Minister told us that there will be a further amendment at Third Reading on the matter of high-value homes. I would appreciate confirmation of that when she replies. Will the Government leave with local authorities enough money from the sale of higher-value homes to build replacement homes? That is what I heard the noble Lord, Lord Porter, say but that is not explicitly stated in the letter we received just before 3 o’clock this afternoon. I would just like to be really clear about that one-for-one replacement. One of our concerns in Committee was that there was to be a two-for-one replacement in London but not—in the Bill—a one-for-one replacement in the rest of England. I think the House would find it helpful to know exactly what the Government propose here.