Neighbourhood Planning Bill

Debate between Lord Stunell and Baroness Cumberlege

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 31st January 2017 Grand Committee

[Baroness Cumberlege (Con)]

My Lords, I start by declaring an interest: I have a legal case concerning a planning application pending at the moment. I have taken advice from the Clerk of the Parliaments and been told that the sub judice rule does not apply in my case.

We had a very interesting and wide-ranging debate at Second Reading. I thank my noble friend the Minister for his introduction to the Bill on that occasion, and for his courtesy and his very thorough winding-up, in which he undertook to inform noble Lords of the process he wanted to work through. He said he wanted to be inclusive. He has certainly been so until now, and I am sure he will be in future.

The Bill reflects the very foundations of society. It is not just about building houses, although they are very much needed; it is about building homes, strengthening communities and ensuring that we create better lives for future generations. As my honourable friend Gavin Barwell, Minister in the Department for Communities and Local Government, has said:

“Done well, with genuine local consent, garden villages and towns can help tackle the housing crisis. They can be preferable to what is currently happening in too many parts of the country—poor quality developments plonked on the countryside, in the teeth of local opposition and in defiance of good planning principles”.


He is absolutely right. Developments plonked in the countryside without a community infrastructure have no soul and are uncared for, unloved and unalterable. Through my amendments I seek to mark a real change: good planning with tight boundaries that is less top-down and gives more respect and power to local people.

It is the duty and the right of the Secretary of State and Ministers to establish a policy and set the types and numbers of houses to be built in each planning area. Thereafter it is for the local planners to decide how best to deliver these policies in conjunction with people who know their neighbourhood intimately. No Government can understand the nuances of every local authority. Local people must be allowed to build communities and that takes time and skill. My amendments, therefore, are based on trust—trusting people, respecting people and enabling those people who know their beat best.

We are beginning to trust people in the health service with personal budgets and we know they work. We are trusting parents and schools to define their own standards. We must do the same for planning. Just houses without integrated communities are at risk of becoming drug alleys, and of contributing to family breakdown, crime and despondency, which have huge costs for people and those who try to deal with the devastation left behind.

My proposed new Clause 1(1) places a duty on the Secretary of State to uphold neighbourhood development plans, which can be overridden only in exceptional circumstances of national importance. The purpose of my amendment is to delineate between the responsibilities of central government and those of the local planning authorities. The Secretary of State is responsible for strategy and local authorities for implementing the strategy. There is huge danger when these two roles are confused and the Secretary of State and the department start to meddle in the detail of something of which they know little. I am not criticising them; they are not equipped to understand the nuances, history, thinking and understanding of local communities. Surely that is what localism and neighbourhood planning are all about.

In proposed new subsection (1), I conclude that the Secretary of State should be able to intervene in matters of national importance; that is, to prevent neighbourhood plans being used to frustrate national schemes. These include, very topically, HS2, airport expansion, major highways or rail schemes, military necessities and so on.

Proposed new subsection (2) would place on the Secretary of State a duty to ensure that local planning authorities have sufficient resources to enable them to own, implement and defend neighbourhood plans. Drawing up a neighbourhood plan is costly. It is costly to the makers of the plan—who are frequently volunteers—as they can spend an inordinate amount of time drawing it up. Those in work lose financially. It is also financially costly to the local planning authority, since the Bill introduces a new procedure for making modifications. This will require additional guidance from officers and a new examination, which will place an additional burden on local authorities. Every time a parish or town council seeks to make changes, the planning authority will be expected to review the plan, provide guidance and take it through another examination. So far, costs have not been assessed in terms of the modification which some neighbourhood plans will require. Perhaps this is something we shall address through regulation or the promised White Paper, which we are told we will receive before the next stage of the Bill.

On top of this, costs for planning appeals can range from £10,000 to £50,000. The neighbourhood plan is owned by the local authority and, on occasions, it will have to defend the plan with its associated costs, including fighting planning appeals. Developers make no secret of poaching the best staff from local planning authorities and paying them more. Planning authorities struggle and are wrong-footed, unable to cope with the demands of developers. This is detrimental to good planning. Good-quality planners must be better paid.

I turn to proposed new subsection (3). As I explained, there can be situations where—regrettably, but with good reason—the Secretary of State finds it necessary to override a neighbourhood plan. Even so, he or she must have regard to the policies in the plan. If it is necessary to vary the neighbourhood plan, it may be to provide more houses than originally anticipated. This should not be a free for all among developers. The planning authority should instruct the neighbourhood plan makers to make the required provision and ensure that this is done legally and correctly in the interests of the community. This may mean considerable modification to the neighbourhood plan. In our case, there are a number of policies in the plan but, particularly, the requirement of a break between parishes, no more five-bedroom houses, no street lighting and the incorporation of opportunities for employment. I could go through these, but I shall not because of the time I have already taken.

I want to mention one policy because it goes across a lot of neighbourhood planning. Employment is one of the policies in our plan on which we are very keen. We need employment. In the Second World War, our lanes were turned into roads. We have had no improvements since the first tarmac was laid. We excel in congestion and pollution. Trains are so full that you cannot get a seat—and that is when they do run. The policy was refused because we do not have a square on the map saying “industrial estate”. We want employment threaded throughout the community, such as in Poundbury in Dorset. Dorset Cereals and other employment gives Poundbury a sense of purpose and pride. We need diversity and we want the Secretary of State for Communities to be exactly that, not the Secretary of State for dormitories.

Proposed new subsection (4) recognises that when the Secretary of State overrides the neighbourhood plan it is the responsibility of the local authority, working with the local community, to decide where the most appropriate sites will be for additional development. The people who formulated the neighbourhood plan have scrutinised every aspect of their community, through consultation and data collection. It is respectful and prudent for those people, in consultation with the local planning authority that advises them, to decide where best to build additional houses, and when they should be built within the time set up to 2030, unless specifically directed towards another date.

It must be recognised that if a neighbourhood plan is overridden, 10 other changes to it may be necessary, commensurate with the degree of change. Simply accepting a planning application that happens to be submitted, which may or may not have any synergy with the neighbourhood plan, is not generally compatible with good planning. That is what the Minister, Gavin Barwell, has conceded. The Government and Whitehall cannot appreciate intimate details of a community’s life. When Governments or inspectors think they know best, there is huge annoyance and resentment. Again, people will do a better job when their decisions will be more respected.

I hope my noble friend will consider these points, that he and his officers will see some merit in them, and that we can come to some agreement on how they might be incorporated in the passage of the Bill. I very much look forward to his reply. I beg to move.

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

I declare an interest as a member of a neighbourhood forum in an unparished area at an early stage of development. I will speak very much in support of what the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege, said today and at Second Reading in her very eloquent presentation of the difficulties her area faced.

The balance has tilted from the need to defend local plans and local communities’ building plans from the activities or, sometimes, inactivities of local planning authorities; they also need to be protected from what happens as a result of the interference of inspectors and the Secretary of State. In that sense, Amendment 1 from the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege, is at the hard end—rather surprisingly, she is the hard cop—and my Amendment 5 is a rather more modest proposal. Again, perhaps unexpectedly, I am the soft cop.

I am strongly in favour of the presentation she made and the amendment she has moved. I, too, would be very interested to hear what the Minister has to say by way of explanation for the interventions that have taken place so far and which run the risk of undermining, at a national level, the credibility and popularity of neighbourhood plans that we can see at present.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Stunell]

My Lords, I start by apologising to the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege, for suggesting that she was a hard cop. The apology is made slightly less sincere because she finished her remarks by saying she intended to hold the feet of the Minister to the fire. If that is the sign of a soft cop, I would not want to meet a hard cop.

My point was more that the new clause proposed by the noble Baroness was draconian in its requirements on the Secretary of State. Mine is much more of a light touch. This may be because I am indeed soft, having been a Minister in the department myself. As I said to the House at Second Reading, Bob Neill and I were the two Ministers in the House of Commons who steered the Localism Bill on to the statute book and through Committee there. I remember seeing the first version, which was named very imaginatively by the civil service draftsman as the local government (no 2) Bill. We now know it much more accurately as the Localism Act.

In respect of planning, the then Bill was born out of a realisation, which did not require a great deal of research to establish, that practically nobody in the general public and very few councillors ever participate in the drawing up of what used to be a unitary development plan or a local planning authority’s local plan. The level of engagement is very low. Consequently, when proposals come forward for development, it goes into a three-stage process: stage one, the developer proposes; stage two, the community opposes; and stage three, the planner imposes. This confrontational model is very destructive of public trust in the whole process. It builds in delay; it makes the whole process far from frictionless and very difficult indeed. The whole starting point of the neighbourhood planning proposition in the Act is to turn that round and put the community in charge of what goes on so that you have positive, community-based planning and not negative, developer-imposed outcomes.

At the time that the legislation was drawn up, the major concerns—echoed in some of the things said today—were that local planning authorities and local councillors would be hostile to the loss of some of their power and influence in the system, and that they would seek to frustrate or prevaricate when neighbourhood plans were developed. A lot of the provisions of the Localism Act relate to that. Several mentions have been made of external examiners. There was a strong lobby from local government planners that they should be the people who examined neighbourhood plans. Ministers were sceptical about that, believing it would be a powerful lever which malign influences in a district council planning authority could use to completely negate what a neighbourhood plan should be.

Of course, there were fierce criticisms of the whole proposal, principally—I heard this a lot—that it would be simply a nimby’s charter which would frustrate all development. I am absolutely delighted that the statistics show that in fact the neighbourhood plan areas designate more housing in more appropriate places than the local plans in the relevant areas set out. The Housing and Planning Act strengthened and protected the neighbourhood planning process, building on the experience learned from the first few. This Bill does more, which is welcome, to make sure that at the local democratic level neighbourhood plans get a fair wind and are supported. I approve of all that. It is the way to go.

As I said at Second Reading, that in turn reveals something else happening. I am indebted to my colleagues at the Local Government Association—I do not have to declare an interest as a vice-president—who were kind enough to send me a link to the Sussex Express of 30 November last year, the headline of which is: “Councillors resign in protest against overturned planning decision”.

This is a reference to a decision of the Secretary of State where, according to the report, he approved a case in relation to 50 five-bedroom houses over the heads of the neighbourhood plan and Lewes District Council, which is the local planning authority. It is hard to judge from the newspaper report whether there were exceptional circumstances, but one thing we can say is that that decision in itself makes no strategic impact at all on the delivery of 1 million homes by 2020, which is the Government’s strategic objective for housing growth. However, we can say that it will have a deep strategic impact on neighbourhood plans.

In seven years we have gone from a position where Ministers in the department were doing all they could to defend neighbourhood plans from the predations of what were seen to be hungry local authorities reluctant to give up any power or influence to a situation where the Secretary of State is stepping in. We now find local planning authorities, in this case Lewes District Council, trying to prevent the Secretary of State from sabotaging neighbourhood plans. The problem here is that it is not just an individual plan that is affected. I do not particularly expect the Minister to be briefed on that case or even willing to talk about it. However, there is the risk—beyond the risk, the certainty—that cases such as this will undermine the whole concept of neighbourhood plans.

What is the point of working for two and a half years on a plan, getting it examined and signed off, if what then happens is that inspectors treat it as being of no account and the Secretary of State dismisses it out of hand? So I ask the Minister to come back to us or perhaps write to us and list the number of cases where the Secretary of State has issued a decision which overruled a neighbourhood plan. How many are there? If there is one, that is too many. If there are 10, it is a disaster. If there are 70, we might as well tear the whole thing up because the word will go round and nobody will trust the process and we shall go back to the confrontational model of proposes, opposes, imposes, which is exactly what the whole thing is designed to avoid.

What would Amendment 5 do? This is where I am the soft cop. Compared with the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege, it is very mild in its imposition on the Secretary of State. It says that when something comes in front of the Secretary of State, he or she shall have particular regard to neighbourhood plans which cover any part of the site being considered. That ought to be a wake-up call for the Secretary of State but it should and will be a wake-up call for the people I described at Second Reading as the rogue inspectors. The fact is that there is a planning establishment which just does not believe or trust in local communities taking decisions—these can properly be taken only by people who have university degrees in planning and 25 years’ practical experience of delivering it in local authorities. That arrogant approach is putting at risk a way of handling planning which will answer a problem that has been with us since 1947: the complete lack of trust that the normal person in the street and the average community has in the way that the planning process is supposed to work.

I very much hope that, given that I have come here wearing my velvet glove and that I have put on the table an amendment which is very modest and minor in its imposition on the Secretary of State, the Minister will take it as a very clear signal that unless he addresses this problem explicitly in the legislation that we are dealing with, the whole project will unravel and the whole strategic direction of the previous Government—and, as I understand it, of this Government—to turn planning into something that works with and is done by communities will be thrown away in a professionalisation of decision-making, which we have surely grown out of. I beg to move.

[Baroness Cumberlege]

My Lords, as has been referred to, my Amendment 20 is in this group. If we are serious about local people planning their local communities and making neighbourhood plans, we have to make it really plain in the Bill that we uphold the Localism Act. Where planning inspectors or the Secretary of State overrule a neighbourhood plan, we witness utter desolation among decent and honest people, who are often the leaders in their local community. In my area, six out of 10 parish councillors resigned as a result. I am concerned, as is the Local Government Association—I declare an interest in that I am not a vice-president of it and never have been, although I have great respect for the association—that the Bill would give the Secretary of State more powers to intervene in the local plan-making and plan-revision process.

We should have a much more conciliatory way forward. I am seeking a sector-led approach that would resolve the blockages. Such an approach would be much more beneficial in the longer term than the imposition of a plan. Having the Secretary of State or inspectors making decisions does the reverse. If we believe in localism, we should support the people making such neighbourhood plans. I fear that very often we do not and I do not think that the Bill is strong enough in ensuring it.