Growth and Infrastructure Bill

Debate between Alison Seabeck and Mary Glindon

Monday 5th November 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Mary Glindon (North Tyneside) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Henley (John Howell), although he will find that I do not agree with his views on the Bill.

I have to agree with the Local Government Association that the Bill represents a blow to democracy and is at odds with the Government’s localism programme. As a former councillor and planning committee member, I fully appreciate the importance of the links between community decision making and planning. As democratically elected and accountable representatives, councillors are in the main fully aware of residents’ needs, concerns and aspirations in making decisions about how their area should be developed for economic and social benefit. Any legislation that would foster that accountability would be welcome, but in the months since the then Planning Minister, the right hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark), promised in March that the national planning policy framework would support growth and allow

“people and communities back into planning”,

quite the opposite has happened.

Instead of offering local accountability, the Bill hands decision making to the unelected Planning Inspectorate and hands increased powers to the Secretary of State that turn localism firmly on its head. In Battle Hill ward in North Tyneside, a ward in which I live and which I represented as a councillor, a planning application for 66 houses on a former school playing field was rejected by the planning committee at the beginning of March. To my mind, the planning committee’s decision was quite right.

The developers have appealed, and the council has now been advised that the appeal will be heard under the new rules and that objections made at the time will no longer be relevant. I wonder what the Minister thinks of that, as many of the objections were made by local people and related to the safety of a school access road becoming a general access road and the fact that some designated open space was being lost. Where is the accountability in that?

[Alison Seabeck]

I am listening carefully to my hon. Friend’s local experience and paralleling it with the experience of the hon. Member for Henley (John Howell), who said that an elderly lady said that planning was fun. Planning will hardly be fun if decision making is taken from local people, as in my hon. Friend’s case, and handed straight to the Secretary of State.

[Mrs Glindon]

I agree with my hon. Friend, and for the people of Battle Hill this will be not a fun experience at all but a very serious one that will keep their concerns going. That is exactly what the Secretary of State is doing with planning matters in the Bill, and it is why there is such great concern about his proposals.

Local councils, on average, determine householder planning appeals in fewer than eight weeks and non-householder appeals in fewer than 13 weeks. Currently, the averages for such determinations by the Planning Inspectorate are seven weeks and 17 weeks respectively. If the Planning Inspectorate is given additional responsibilities, as set out in the Bill, to take over the designation of failing councils and in setting the viability of affordable housing requirements, that could lead to further delays and worse decisions.

Moreover, by stripping a designated failing council—whatever that might be—of its powers, the Bill will enable developers to have their applications decided by the Secretary of State, without being reviewed by the local authority and with no right of appeal against the Secretary of State’s decision. No wonder the Local Government Association has misgivings about the Bill. There is nothing in it to say what criteria will be used to define a failing council, as has been said a number of times today. The LGA would, quite rightly, rather central Government gave support to councils that might have performance issues ahead of any intervention. I fully support the LGA in its premise that it makes more sense adequately to fund locally accountable decision making than to fund a quango, such as the Planning Inspectorate, to make such decisions.

It is well documented that planning is not the problem for growth. What is actually needed is investment to build houses and infrastructure, and the Bill does not provide scope for real growth. It will weaken the ability of councils to negotiate with developers on desperately needed affordable housing within local developments under section 106 agreements, with, as my hon. Friend the Member for Easington (Grahame M. Morris) and the shadow Minister have said, an estimated loss of the building of 35,000 affordable homes a year—a statistic that does not bode well for the 4,500 people on the waiting list of North Tyneside council.

With the Bill, the Secretary of State is reneging on his promise to let councillors and communities run their own affairs. May I say as an aside, Madam Deputy Speaker, that that undemocratic attitude is rubbing off on one of his favourites? The elected mayor of North Tyneside, who now, having only 12 members on a council of 60, with 43 Labour members and four Liberal Democrats, has at great expense to the people of North Tyneside engaged counsel to put a new interpretation on the powers of elected mayors, so that she can ignore the two-thirds majority rule. So our mayor, like the Secretary of State, has become something like a dictator, taking decision making away from the majority of democratically elected members and, ultimately, the electorate.

There are many more problems with the Bill, but the fact that it will make the planning process far less democratic and will seriously threaten future housing and infrastructure development, with no real growth—except, as the shadow Minister said, in the Secretary of State’s powers—tells me and, I hope, the House that the Bill should not get our support.