Growth and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Taylor of Goss Moor Excerpts

Tuesday 8th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Taylor of Goss Moor]

My Lords, I should first declare my interests. I chair the National Housing Federation, the voice of housing associations in England. I also chair the strategic partnership of the private sector with Cornwall Council and the Homes and Communities Agency charged with delivering eco-communities in the St Austell area. Further, I make the case for good planning and sustainable development in various fora, not least to the previous Labour Government on their review of rural planning in relation to housing and business, and more recently the current review of planning guidance for the Government, which I also chair.

However, my real interest lies in meeting the needs of the people of this country, in particular families and the next generation of people who need homes that they can afford and that meet their needs in the places where they live and work. This means that I have a deep interest in great planning because I believe that it is through planning that we will deliver homes in ways that meet our environmental needs and acknowledge the sensitivities of villages, market towns and other communities which do not want to be wrecked by poor development. That means that I am a strong believer in planning, not as rationing, a tick-box process of approval, or an endless argument over the next 50 houses, but as a way of raising our eyes to meeting the needs that we see coming over the next one or two decades in far more imaginative ways than that.

As we heard earlier, the origins of planning, such as the garden city movement and the 1945 Act were not about rationing. I am not one of those who believe that our planning system is not at fault; we have had a system of rationing and not one of great design and place-making, by and large. That is why I strongly welcomed the NPPF and, along with many other individuals and organisations, participated in trying to get it right. I am delighted that right across the board, organisations that had in many cases expressed great concerns about earlier drafts of the NPPF, welcomed the product that was delivered. I am talking about those concerned about the environment, great planning, development and the delivery of housing. I see the NPPF as an essential compact between local communities and national policy. The national policy is clear: we need to meet the needs that I have described and to do so in a way that is sustainable. It must unlock both economic growth and the need for homes. The compact is that it then requires local communities both to assess that need locally and decide how to meet the need locally.

It was sometimes misunderstood in the early days that localism was somehow about local authorities doing whatever they wanted; if they did not want to have development, they did not have to have it. But they have to meet the needs of their community, which must be right. They assess it and are given the responsibility of delivering on it. We are at a crucial stage in this process because many local authorities have resisted the scale of development to meet their needs. It is always unpopular to deliver new homes to those who already have a home. A lot of people do not want development if they are okay, but increasingly even they are saying that their own children are being priced out of a home. They see that the person serving them in the shop or working in the school cannot afford a home in their community. We have seen a transformation of attitudes in many villages and we are starting to see that transformation in many market towns, too. However, they still want a development that works, is well designed and does not ruin what is there already. I believe that the NPPF describes that extremely well. We have to see that now delivered in the local plan-making process, but I am not yet convinced that all local authorities have either understood their responsibilities or seized the opportunities for great planning that is implicit in that policy.

My question is: does this Bill help to deliver those things that I have just described at this crucial stage in the NPPF process? There I have doubts in part. Let us be blunt; I have been here for most of the debate and I do not think that anyone has yet said that this Bill was produced and cobbled together with all sorts of things to fill a gap because Lords reform was not in front of us. There was a space in the agenda and things were cobbled together, some of which are hugely useful—stuff that might not have happened otherwise, and I shall come on to that. Other things would frankly have been better kept in the box. They would have been had there not been this big gap and a space, which I shall come to, as briefly and as quickly as I can.

If Clause 1, referring to poorly performing councils, were so crucial we would have seen it before. The reason why it is not so crucial is because the powers are already there. Undue delay gives the right of appeal; bad decision-making can be called in, as can issues of national importance. The powers are broadly there, so what is this about? It is clearly about a big stick to wave around and threaten councils, saying, “You have to get on with the tasks outlined in the NPPF”. Ministers, of course, are also saying, “It will hardly apply to anyone; in fact, we hope that it won’t apply to anyone at all”. So, it is just a bit of flag waving, if we believe that; or it is a complete reversal of the process of localism that the Government have set out, which I supported, in the NPPF.

If this is about timeliness, it is simply unnecessary. If it is about bad decisions, I am not convinced that nationalising it is the way to go. I believe that there may need to be special measures with some councils of all sorts, but one of the biggest special measures is the process of adopting a local plan. They have to persuade people that that local plan is right and if they do not, the principles of the NPPF—the presumption in favour of sustainable development—kick in anyway. One has to ask whether this is really necessary, much as I understand the bit of flag waving that may lie behind it.

However, I believe that Clause 5 is needed; it provides that the information requested should be relevant and necessary to the decision. I feel very strongly about this. The planning guidance review I conducted meant wading through 7,000 pages of an almost entirely out-of-date, wildly contradictory and in many cases unnecessary layering of guidance within which were absolutely essential pieces of guidance. One of the key things said by the group as a whole—which included people working within the environment to those working on housebuilding—was that we need to help both developers and councils with issues of proportionality. There is concern in local authorities to ask for as much information as possible to ensure that their appraisals and assessments cannot be challenged at judicial review, but equally, large developers can layer on all sorts of appraisals because they can afford to do so. They are applying for supermarkets all over the country and can defray their costs, knocking out the medium-sized guys and the local builders who cannot afford to do that. They ratchet up the requirement because if they have done it for their supermarket proposal, or housing development, somebody else will do it for theirs. Talking about what is proportionate and reasonable is essential. I am not certain that it needs to be in legislation; it could be in guidance, but I am prejudiced as I have just done all that work on guidance, so I would think that. Nevertheless, I think that that principle is right.

We then come to Clause 6 on the modification of Section 106. Time is running out, so I shall try to be quick. The first essential point is that we should not see affordable housing as somehow the bit at the end after we have done everything else. Why is affordable housing more arguable or negotiable than the transport, density or all sorts of other requirements that may have been put on the development, and now CIL too? Affordable housing is not somehow the residual. If there is a residual, it should be the profit to the landowner who has benefited from the planning permission and the huge escalation of the value of the land. Of course, we are talking about deals that have been done, and the first thing that should happen is that the deal should be looked at by the developer. If it is an option, the option should be renegotiated. I accept that in some cases we need to look at this again, but it should be drawn more widely than simply Section 106 affordable housing. Unlike the private sector, housing associations do not hold land banks. Some of the demands for affordable housing were excessive and unrealistic, but if we surrender it in a blanket way we do not have a way of making it up.

I have two suggestions. The Government announced, at the same time as this, some hundreds of millions of pounds to make up the shortfall in the housing that is lost. Why is that not the first stage rather than the option of appeal and trying to get out of the obligation? Why is the HCA not the first port of call for a discussion on whether it should use some of the hundreds of millions of pounds to help the developer unlock the site and deliver the affordable housing he agreed to in the first place, not least because that is what the community was told it was getting? The land may have been released specifically because there would be affordable housing. We should start with the HCA which can assess viability. It would be better at assessing viability in PINs as the HCA negotiates on sites all the time. Only then should there be the right of appeal if the developer is not happy, but they should lose any offer that the HCA may have made for money. You can have the money to deliver your affordable housing, if you have persuaded us of it, but if you appeal you will lose the offer. That way, we will not have the hold-up that is likely to occur with appeals happening all over the country.

The village green change is important, but I made a recommendation on this in the Taylor review in 2008 and have to ask whether it would be better to have a simple weeding out at the first stage when village green applications are made as to whether they have a reasonable case before going through the whole process, rather than the trigger of an application. My worry about the trigger is that many communities will only realise at the point of an application that their community land, which they have accessed for years, is under threat. However, worse than that, this policy may trigger a whole lot of village green applications to go in, on the possibility that there might later be an application for development on the site, in which case PINs and the Government will be entirely bogged down in the process that they have just invented in a counterproductive way. I have many other things I could say on this subject but I will stop there.