Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Lord Soames of Fletching and Nick Boles

Thursday 26th March 2015 Commons Chamber

[Sir Nicholas Soames (Mid Sussex) (Con)]

13. It’s all right—it’s not a difficult one. Further to my hon. Friend’s excellent and encouraging answer to my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Worcestershire (Sir Peter Luff), whose departure from this House we will all regret, may I point out that a company in my constituency, a very successful business called Technetix that I went to visit some time ago, drew to my attention the fact that it was having to recruit engineers from abroad because it simply could not find enough here. The figures I asked for in a question show that in 2004 5,630 electronic and electrical engineer graduates appeared, but that in 2013-14 only 5,500 appeared. The Government are doing a great deal and the call for inspiration is worthy, but we need to deliver many more people to engineering.

[Nick Boles]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. We have made good progress, but from an unbelievably low base, having taken over from a Government who told people they only needed to do media studies or some such waffle to have a good career. We are picking up from a disastrous inheritance and making good progress, and with his support I know we will make further progress in the next parliamentary term.

Localism in Planning

Debate between Lord Soames of Fletching and Nick Boles

Wednesday 17th July 2013 Westminster Hall

[Nick Boles]

My hon. Friend is exactly right, and puts the argument much better than I could. The Localism Act and the national planning policy framework attempt to achieve just that, replacing the previous approach of entirely denying local flexibility in how and where housing need was met.

It is right, briefly, Mr Hollobone, to give appropriately short shrift to the rank hypocrisy displayed by the hon. Member for City of Durham (Roberta Blackman-Woods). She was a Member and a supporter of a Government who introduced regional strategies that tried to impose eco-towns on constituencies such as that of my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke), and who introduced the Infrastructure Planning Commission, which had no democratic accountability at all. For her suddenly to pretend that she is now a localist rings pretty hollow.

I will move on to trying to persuade my right hon. and hon. Friends—I seek not to persuade the hon. Lady—that localism is not dead but in gestation. At the heart of the Localism Act is the idea that control is gained from having a plan. A plan that fulfils the criteria of the national planning policy framework puts those with the plan in charge, and their decisions will not be overturned. Decisions might be challenged, but no challenge will be supported by the Planning Inspectorate. It all rests on having a plan, and the difficulty faced by many hon. Members and their communities is where no plan is in place. That is why so much of the discussion has focused on the question of what weight can be attached to emerging plans.

I want to share with my right hon. and hon. Friends the difficulty of the position that some of them want the Government to take, which is the suggestion that an emerging plan should immediately be given substantial weight in any decision on a planning application. That could simply create the problem that every community in the country that wanted to oppose a development might start the process of working up a neighbourhood or local plan and then take their own sweet time about it. That would immediately create an opportunity for communities to block all development by simply saying that they were engaged in a plan-making process.

That is why there must be a sense that a plan has reached a relatively advanced stage before it can be given substantial weight. Such a position has not been established by policy or Government, but over many years in the courts, as has been pointed out. I know that many people here think that an easy solution would be simply to abolish the inspectorate, but I say to them that all such decisions would then be taken by judges in courts. Developers will not stop challenging local decisions that they think do not accord with local or national policies. They will simply challenge them in the courts, at much greater cost to the taxpayer and, I suspect, to the not much greater contentment of residents.

The critical thing is to engage in plan making. The reason why I urge my right hon. and hon. Friends not to give up on the process is the good news that plan making is happening at a speed and intensity that has never happened before: three quarters of all local authorities in the country have now published a plan, and half of them have submitted a local plan to the Secretary of State. Some 800 communities in this country are now engaged in some stage of neighbourhood planning, and several hundred of them have already had their plan areas registered. The first three neighbourhood plans submitted to an examiner and passed as sound have passed their referendums, which is the first time that a Government have said to local people, “You get a vote on whether and how you develop in your local area.”

The referendums passed not just by resounding margins, but on a greater turnout than for the county council elections taking place on the same day. In Thame in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Henley (John Howell), people turned out to the polls to vote on the neighbourhood plan and did not vote for a county councillor. Why? Because the plan matters to people. As has been pointed out, the plan contained proposals to build 775 new houses in one of the most beautiful market towns in one of the most high-pressured areas in the country.

[Nicholas Soames]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful case, and nobody doubts his commitment to seeing this right, but does he not understand that it is precisely the backing and energy that he expresses that renders it so deeply unsatisfying for councils that go to all this great effort when their plans are overturned by spiv developers trying to take advantage of a very difficult position?

[Nick Boles]

I entirely understand that. I might well wish that we were in a world where we could say to everybody, “You’ve got a year. Make as much progress as you can in a year, and nothing will happen in that year.” My right hon. Friend will understand that, given the level of housing need and the appalling record of housing delivery even during the boom—when, frankly, money, developer finance and mortgages were not a problem—it is simply impossible for us to impose that kind of moratorium. However, I can tell him that in a matter of days, we will introduce the planning guidance that we have long promised and that will address the issue of the weight given to emerging plans. We will make it clear that once a plan has reached the point that, first, it has become specific and, secondly, it has gone through a fairly substantial level of public consultation, it will become something of real materiality—to use the lawyers’ phrase—as a consideration in decision making.