Localism Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Tuesday 7th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I do not doubt for a moment that my noble friend will do exactly that. I look forward to a stream of accepted amendments over the course of the next month or two.

I welcome this Bill. I share some of the reservations that noble Lords have expressed this evening, but I will not dwell on them, as I want to concentrate on my own points. The principle of the Bill—reconnecting people with place, and giving free rein to local choice in the context of a wider strategic vision—seems to be absolutely the right way to go. The Bill also contains a substantial shift in power and value from landowners to local communities, which is going to be an engine for change. Let me give the example of my local town in Hampshire, where maybe a dozen sites around it might be developed in a substantial way. When they come to make their local plan, they will talk to those landowners to see who will give them the best deal. With proper advice, they should be able to make some pretty cute bargains. The idea that the landowner takes 90 per cent and the community takes 10 per cent is history. We are going to see something much closer to equality.

In rural communities, there is real opportunity for development. We are going to find that landowners get used to receiving much less of the planning gain than they do now. It will be seen much more as a collaboration between them and the community that they are part of, with a lot of the gain flowing to the community. To my mind, this is as it should be, because the adoption of the burden which will be caused by the development falls on the community, and they deserve recompense for it. They should be in a position to absorb that recompense. It is also the way in which planning permissions for telephone masts, windmills, and other things which place a burden on the local community will be settled. It will not just be the landlord battling to keep everything for themselves; it will be very much a negotiation with the community, to say, “We want a better telephone service here; who is going to have the mast? We are going to share in the revenue from that”. I see a fundamental shift in the balance of power between landowners and communities, and I welcome that. I think that that is absolutely the right way to go.

I hope to make some substantial proposals on the back of that. I think we need an intermediate stage, between where we are now and a full neighbourhood plan. Neighbourhood plans are going to be difficult and controversial things to get to. They have got to be crowned by a referendum which can overturn all the work that has been put into them. Even in a relatively rural community it will be a chancy and difficult business. In the context of a city or a large town it will pose great difficulties, with very diverse communities, as both right reverend Prelates have said this evening. The whole question of how this works within a city will take a lot of careful working out. Therefore, I would like to see an intermediate stage in which the plans begin to become understood and are widely canvassed in the community, and in which it would be possible for the local authority to accept an informal plan as a material consideration in coming to its planning decision. That would be a much easier thing to put in place in cities. Getting to a point where a community is united behind a plan is years away. It would be great to create those communities in cities, but it will not be simple or quick. I would like to see something that will give the community a voice in its own affairs short of having to go through the whole rigmarole set out in the Bill.

Secondly, I would like to see a real emphasis on openness. Communities will have a great deal to gain from the Bill, and wherever there is gain on that scale there is the possibility of corruption. I would like to see it made absolutely clear that any transactions to do with a neighbourhood plan will be open and will remain open; it must always be clear exactly what has gone on. In that context I very much share the concerns of the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, about the abolition of the standards committees and the associated arrangements. Why should a citizen now have no redress against a bullying councillor? That is a very retrograde step and I look forward to addressing it in Committee.

We must be careful that neighbourhood plans are free from attack by all the influences and rules that we have allowed to grow up in the context of local authorities that are big and strong and capable of dealing with them. I refer to things such as strategic environmental assessments. No neighbourhood will ever be able to deal with that; the burden must remain at local authority level, and we must make sure that a neighbourhood plan cannot be attacked on that basis by anybody. There are very powerful collective interests, whether historical or environmental, which are well funded and capable of taking a neighbourhood plan to pieces if they are allowed access. They must be confined to local authority level. Their influence must be strategic and must observe the rules that apply to neighbourhood plans. We must not have a system in which a neighbourhood defending its plan can find itself suddenly faced with a lawsuit from an outside pressure group.

I will pick up many other things in Committee; I suspect that my noble friend will grow tired of seeing my name on amendments. Many points have been made all round this House that deserve to be listened to. We have eight days in Committee; it will not be enough.