Neighbourhood Planning Bill

Lord Taylor of Goss Moor Excerpts

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

[Lord Taylor of Goss Moor (LD)]

My Lords, I should first draw attention to the register of interests. I am a director of some development companies. I also run my own consultancy around this area and work in advising government, and have done so for successive Governments. I work with students who are doing planning courses for both the University of Cambridge and the University of Plymouth. For the first part of what I want to say on neighbourhood planning, however, I should perhaps most importantly draw attention to the fact that I am also president of the National Association of Local Councils.

The overwhelming majority of neighbourhood plans that have been brought through the system—some 90%— have been led by parish councils, though they actually represent quite a small proportion of the population because they do not represent the urban communities. This is a fault which past Governments said that they wanted to address and it should be addressed, because that very local form of direct democracy is important. I would like to see many more parished, and I know that the national association believes it would be important to have that. If the Government want to see neighbourhood plans developed in many more areas, they would see it happen by parishing many more communities. They will see it conducted effectively and democratically, and then have bodies that can be guardians of those neighbourhood plans, as well as receiving the benefit in a proportion of CIL payments and having a democratic process for delivering community improvements that can be funded in that way.

I very much welcome the introduction of neighbourhood planning. It reflects ideas I had about empowering communities to deliver affordable housing to meet local needs back at the time of the Living Working Countryside review, which I conducted for the then Government in 2008. It has been immensely valuable and hugely important. Perhaps the thing that is most satisfying from my point of view is that I argued then that, if you empower communities to meet local needs, they will step up to the mark and deliver more, not less, and that has been the experience. It was really brave of the coalition Government to introduce that, and I am very pleased to see the present Government continuing on that path and making the system more effective.

I chair my neighbourhood plan steering group. I am delighted to say that we have now got it through the examination process, so the examiner has given the thumbs up. We are now in the process of the examiner putting through some tweaks in collaboration with the council. I hope that soon we will have a referendum, and I live in a certain degree of fear at night that we might be one of the few—I think there is only one so far—areas that does not get through the referendum. Given the amount of community engagement we have had, I hope we will do it.

The neighbourhood plan in our very small, poor community—it is quite unusual in that respect, as it is not the middle-class community that many are but a very poor, working-class community—will be transformative for the community. It will mean more development, and it will take traffic out of the village if we see all the things enabled by that development. It will be genuinely transformative, and it will enable big increases in local employment as well.

Some people with expertise—officers from the Environment Agency and a former council housing officer, who had done some development in his own right—happened to live locally and were involved. Other members of the community might not have had those kinds of backgrounds but were enormously knowledgeable about the community itself and its needs and were brilliant at the local engagement. Perhaps most importantly, the vicar of the parish was a wonderful deputy to me.

With all that expertise and my input, the process was much longer than I thought I could make it be, even with my experience and background. That is because the stages and processes are, frankly, just very lengthy. I am really sceptical about whether they are all necessary. I am glad to see some speeding up happening through what the Government are doing. To be honest, at the final stages the will to live was slightly lost on the committee as it got into the bureaucracy and the months of waiting for responses. There was a certain degree of lost interest. Admittedly, we got the plan through, so the committee is not having to fight any big battles, but it is a really long process.

The thing that really worried the steering group all the way through, and which certainly would have destroyed its confidence, had it happened, was the risk of developments being brought forward quickly to get them through during the long process when the neighbourhood plan had some, but not much, weight. The proposal in the Bill to give much clearer weight at an earlier stage, particularly once the plan has been examined, is important, but I would like to be clearer about how that weight is gathering. I think that attempts to get larger, poor-quality schemes through the line should be very robustly fended off by councils on the grounds that neighbourhood plans are being developed, particularly where the plan is demonstrably pro-development and going, even in draft form, beyond what is required by the local plan. It is really important that plans are defended and that Ministers are very clear that that should take place. I hope these debates will allow Ministers to put on record some very strong comments in that regard. Of course, neighbourhood plans can also be used as a delaying tactic and as a way of trying to avoid development, but this is for those plans that are robustly being carried forward, that can demonstrate consultation and that are, as they usually are, going beyond what is required by the local plan.

The second problem we had was resources. We are not a rich community. There was not a series of local QCs available to operate for us, although I was able to get one to give some advice to me because of my contacts. They were not living there in the community. We were entirely reliant, in that very poor, small parish, on the locality funding that the Government made available. When we first launched, the money had run out, so for the first few months we had to operate without any such support. At later stages, we needed a strategic environmental appraisal as well as a sustainability appraisal. Those are vastly expensive things to do. We attempted the sustainability appraisal ourselves at first because we were told it could be done without expertise, if you followed the right tick-boxes. Frankly, even following the right tick-boxes was not going to do the job, and it would have been a very poor job anyway. We were able to access funding, but it was incredibly important that that funding was there, as we also relied on that funding for the very extensive community engagement with door-to-door delivery of leaflets. We could deliver the leaflets, but design and publication, particularly publication, is a costly process and needed resource.

This is a brilliant scheme, but there are 10,000 parishes and only 2,000 neighbourhood plans. There are many more communities beyond the parishes that could be bringing them forward. Neighbourhood plans are a bit like care in the community. They are a great proposal, but they are not a saving. Localising things needs resource at the local level, and there is only so much that can be done. Really clear funding support on a long-term basis is critical. I note that neighbourhoods can gain from the CIL, but if there is no CIL, they cannot gain financially from the housing they deliver. It is important that, one way or another, mechanisms are in place to make sure that parishes get that support. I also think that the Government should be looking at the gains they are making in the development process in delivering housing with neighbourhood planning and should be thinking about some of that resource going to funding those neighbourhood plans. A virtuous cycle should be in place, as it would make sense.

I now turn to the other key part of the Bill, which is on the CPO. I am very pleased to see the Government making reforms to the CPO system. It is outdated and complex. The most important thing is that the Bill makes it clear that people cannot expect to gain enormously financially from changes that are made possible through the CPO process. If land is not carrying huge value and development becomes possible, landowners should be able to get proper compensation and in practice— because the CPO is almost always not required and is actually a process of negotiation—they will get more than that.

I did some work for the Government on new towns and villages, and the Government adopted a policy last March. I am delighted with the progress with that policy and to see 14 new garden villages coming forward which, with the new garden towns, will enable some 200,000 homes to be delivered with a degree of real community engagement and support. That will roll forward for more. The key thing about them is that they deliver really high quality.

The core reasons for the process for garden villages and towns is that, first, it enables them to be located in a way that is more sensitive to existing communities—which means that you are not just ringing every town and village with endless bland estates—and, secondly, you are able to use land that does not already carry huge value and you therefore capture much of the uplift of land value, which comes through permission for development, to deliver services, shops, pubs and place-making quality and better, cheaper homes than would otherwise be possible. You therefore reduce a lot of the opposition to development. That opposition is precisely because development is too often so poor. This is about quality, but to deliver that we either rely on landowners and the planning system to deliver high quality or, in some cases, local authorities coming in to acquire land and to take a leadership role—in partnership with the private sector in the modern world, not distanced from it—and hopefully in partnership with the landowners. But that opportunity is needed on occasion, and the CPO powers here make that clear.

Changes in the last Bill enabled local authorities more easily to bring forward new town and village proposals by that route, but I hope that this Bill will be an opportunity to look at whether we might also give them the powers, which are currently very much in the hands of the Secretary of State, to take the decision to set up and appoint the board and then have complete control of every penny of expenditure. If local authorities want to create new, small-scale communities to meet their local needs, and want to set up a development body to manage them, they ought to be able to do that at a local level and take local responsibility. The Secretary of State has a role in the process of setting it up in any event, but I do not think the Secretary of State needs, or would actually wish to have, that kind of day-to-day control. That is the story of the New Towns Act as it was in the 1950s and 1960s; I do not think it is the story of the world of neighbourhood planning and local democracy and engagement, which the Government are, I know, extremely committed to. I may probe that a bit later during the progress of the Bill, and I hope others may as well.

The bottom line is that we have seen enormous progress. The NPPF is not perfect but it is an absolutely huge step in the right direction. I look forward to the Government’s response to the CIL review, the local plan review and the NPPF review, which I hope we will see before too long, along with the White Paper. I hope we will have the opportunity for a bigger, broader debate in due course on the back of that about how we deliver the homes that we need at the scale that we need and with the quality the British people deserve. Frankly, too often at the moment, they are still not getting that.