Infrastructure Bill [Lords]

Debate between Lord Soames of Fletching and Lord Herbert of South Downs

Monday 26th January 2015 Commons Chamber

[Nick Herbert (Arundel and South Downs) (Con)]

I will be brief, to allow other Members to speak. We clearly need more time to debate major Bills such as this on Report. It does us no credit that we have insufficient time.

I rise to speak to new clauses 12 and 20. New clause 12 is supported by more than 20 of my right hon. and hon. Friends and would abolish the Planning Inspectorate, and new clause 20 would create a new community right of appeal against adverse planning decisions.

I believe that the Localism Act 2011 was one of this Government’s most important pieces of legislation. It gives communities power, and the provisions on community assets are one example of that. I welcome the Government’s proposals to strengthen those provisions so that pubs may be protected, which is a sensible way forward. I also welcome the development of neighbourhood plans, which, as the Minister said, are now proceeding well, with community support, including in my constituency. They give the local community the power to decide where developments should go.

However, that plan-led system can sometimes be a developer-led system, which is not what we want. Localism can be undermined, especially by decisions of the Planning Inspectorate. In a good report issued before Christmas, the Select Committee on Communities and Local Government said that it had received a great deal of evidence that the national planning policy framework

“is not preventing unsustainable development in some places”

and that

“inappropriate housing is being imposed upon some communities as a result of speculative planning applications.”

Such speculative applications, put in against the wishes of communities drawing up neighbourhood plans, are particularly damaging. Developers know that they have an opportunity to get permission for sites that they would not get permission for were the neighbourhood plan to go through. Too often, the Planning Inspectorate either upholds on appeal a local authority’s decisions to decline those applications or terrifies the local authority into submission, so that it gives permission because it knows that otherwise it would lose an appeal and would have to spend a great deal of money on doing so.

[Sir Nicholas Soames]

I entirely agree with the thrust of my right hon. Friend’s argument. Does he agree that it is immensely discouraging to communities trying to make local plans when their wishes are ridden over roughshod by the Planning Inspectorate?

[Nick Herbert]

I strongly agree with my right hon. Friend, who has been tireless in promoting the interests of local communities against such developments in his constituency.

The first problem is the Planning Inspectorate upholding or encouraging speculative applications. The second is that the inspectorate is interfering with local plans drawn up by planning authorities. The Conservative party’s manifesto at the last election stated:

“To give communities greater control over planning, we will…abolish the power of planning inspectors to rewrite local plans”.

That is exactly what we should now do, but the inspectorate is rewriting local plans. It is raising housing numbers in my constituency to beyond the level set out in the south-east plan, and it is causing delay at a time when responsible authorities are planning for a great number of houses—40,000 in the district council areas that cover my constituency, where there are 7,000 unbuilt planning permissions in one authority alone.