Neighbourhood Planning Bill
Debate between Lord Herbert of South Downs and John RedwoodTuesday 13th December 2016
(7 years, 5 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Neighbourhood Planning Act 2017 View all Neighbourhood Planning Act 2017 Debates Read Hansard Text Amendment Paper: Consideration of Bill Amendments as at 13 December 2016 - (13 Dec 2016)
Nick Herbert
I am very glad to be pushed into a more moderate and Conservative position on this issue than the one I previously took. What I am focused on is ensuring that the Planning Inspectorate takes the right decisions should such developments be called in, and, more particularly, that local authorities take the right decisions in the first place. We should be minimising the number of appeals that have to go to the Planning Inspectorate because a wrong decision is made or because a decision appears to be in breach of national policy, and that means getting the national policy right. My contention is that national policy should give primacy to made neighbourhood plans, because these have been approved in local referendums.
John Redwood
Has my right hon. Friend also come across cases, which I am now seeing, where the local plan clearly has a five-year supply of land, but because it is concentrated in a major settlement—to concentrate the infrastructure and the development gain—an appeal can still be lost in another village, which naturally wants to protect itself because the development the local community agreed to was going to be concentrated in a new settlement?
Nick Herbert
Yes, my right hon. Friend makes the point very well.
The first way in which neighbourhood plans can be vulnerable to speculative development—even when it was thought that they would protect areas—is when there is not a sufficient five-year land supply in the local authority. The problem with that is that the five-year supply is not always properly in the hands of the local authority, but depends on the ability and willingness of local developers to build. Developers are undoubtedly gaming the system so as to secure speculative development applications and planning permissions, in a way that is deeply cynical and that is undermining the principles of localism and community control.