Neighbourhood Planning Bill

Lord Stunell Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 17th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Renfrew, and I associate myself with his remarks. He and I are both members of the All-Party Parliamentary Archaeology Group and it has been of great interest to follow this aspect of the planning system in that forum.

I served as a Minister in the Department for Communities and Local Government. Indeed, I was one of the two Ministers who stood at the Dispatch Box to steer the Localism Act 2011 on to the statute book. It has been very good to hear the praise handed out for the neighbourhood planning concept, which is included in that Act. I have very recently become a member of the Marple Neighbourhood Forum, which had its inaugural AGM on Saturday. It aims to publish a plan for the community of Marple in my former constituency, with a view to a decision being taken in 2019. I say to my noble friend Lord Greaves, who is in his place, that it is not a parish council area; this is not exclusively a parish domain.

The Localism Act introduced neighbourhood plans as a concept and set out the mechanism for delivering them. The concept had critics at the time—I thought, perhaps a little unfairly, that most of the critics wished they had thought of it first. It had some welcome moves forward in the Housing and Planning Act 2016 and there are some further proposals in this Bill that, broadly speaking, I welcome. One of the big fears of Ministers in introducing neighbourhood plans was that they would be open to sabotage by local planning authorities, councils and councillors hostile to the idea of losing control of the planning function.

Equally, there were fears that there would be lethargy and torpor in carrying through the processes that were necessary to institute a neighbourhood plan. Some of those concerns were addressed in the Housing and Planning Act and in some of the related statutory instruments. In this Bill there are some further safeguards against interference in neighbourhood plans by other people. That is good—but of course we now see that the sabotage is coming not from local planning authorities but from inspectors appointed by the Secretary of State and, indeed, the Secretary of State himself. Seven years on from 2010, when we were discussing these matters in the department, the wheel has turned and it seems that Whitehall is slowly, silently and insidiously trying to make neighbourhood plans subsidiary to, or trivial in relation to, the factors to be taken into account in approving planning policy and in meeting ministerial targets.

The public perception that I inherited as a Minister in 2010 was that there were basically three steps in the planning process: the developer proposes, the community opposes and the planner imposes. The neighbourhood planning system is intended to break that combative and confrontational way of deciding how communities should be shaped. I do not see much wrong with the new proposals in the Bill relating to neighbourhood plans but there is something missing: a much stronger presumption that neighbourhood plans, duly adopted, trump rogue planning inspectors and strongly inhibit the Secretary of State from being tempted to back rogue planning inspectors, so that we see no more cases of a Secretary of State deciding to override a neighbourhood plan.

I hope that we will have the opportunity to debate this issue and to correct the weaknesses in the system that have now been exposed. Failure to do so would leave many local communities disillusioned and cynical about the value of pressing ahead with a neighbourhood plan. If they are seen as simply being diversionary activities to keep communities out of the way—toys for children to play with while the high-ups and grown-ups in Whitehall make the real decisions—the whole neighbourhood planning process will fall into complete disrepute. I hope to hear a very robust denial of any such intention from the Minister and a commitment to give due consideration to a well-framed amendment at a later stage that will safeguard the integrity of the neighbourhood planning process from the depredations of Whitehall.

The second matter I want to draw to your Lordships’ attention is the Bill’s proposals on pre-commencement planning conditions. I associate myself with the remarks of my noble friend Lady Parminter in relation to neighbourhood plans and, in particular, what she said about sustainable homes and the need to have carbon-compliant housing. I simply flag up that whenever Ministers seek to justify clipping the wings of local planning authorities, they always cite improved efficiency and speed, and they always say in mitigation to the critics that it will be quite all right because it will still be lawful to have conditions designed to deliver sustainability in accordance with the National Planning Policy Framework—the NPPF. Indeed, I heard the Minister say exactly that when he introduced the Bill today.

I have a cautionary tale about the NPPF. Back in the department, the first version of the NPPF was produced, but it could not be sent out to the public without the Whitehall write-round—which means that a document has to be signed off by every other department in government. It came back with big red marks all over it from the Treasury. There was a big row inside government—I have not written my memoirs but one day I will—about the NPPF being rewritten by the Treasury. It went through a couple of rewrites and bounces before it came out—and the first version that the public saw was heavily doctored by the Treasury.

Your Lordships may have forgotten that that led to a furious row. For instance, millions of people who belonged to the National Trust wrote to their MPs—and, no doubt, your Lordships—and there was a great deal of backtracking by the Government. Eventually, the current NPPF was published and it is now widely acclaimed as being a very good document that encapsulates exactly what everybody thought in the first place. It bears a remarkable resemblance to the draft document that DCLG officials and Ministers first produced. For what it is worth, I have the relevant copies in a file. A pointless row over the NPPF was triggered by the Treasury’s lack of simple understanding of basic planning principles, lack of common sense and lack of knowledge or application of human psychology. I strongly suspect that the changes to the pre-commencement planning conditions have come from the same stable.

One way Ministers could alleviate my suspicions would be to welcome the amendments that my noble friend Lady Parminter referred to, which we hope to bring forward at a later stage, to require local planning authorities to put conditions on the energy performance of new buildings, which would allow a meaningful step towards zero-carbon homes and making the Paris agreement a realistic target and option for the United Kingdom—in other words, to fight off the Treasury and have pre-commencement planning conditions imposed for good, sound sustainability reasons by local planning authorities, which is exactly what the huge majority of them currently do and should be allowed to go on doing.