Planning Reform

Debate between Andrew Bingham and David Heath

Wednesday 8th January 2014 Westminster Hall

[Andrew Bingham (High Peak) (Con)]

Perhaps my hon. Friend’s constituents are like mine. It is not nimbyism and they are not against development per se. Does he agree that it is all about a sense of proportion? Things seem to be out of all proportion, which is what is causing concern.

[Mr Heath]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. Let me come on to where I think things are going wrong. We have a free-for-all at the moment, an avalanche of applications that are opportunistic in nature, because the local plans have not been agreed.

The Minister has said on a number of occasions, “Well, it is up to local authorities to have their plans approved.” He is right—of course it is up to them, and everyone understands that, but he underestimates the difficulties and the extent of the changes in the process. The early adopters of local plans had an easy time. Some of the local plans, which the Minister can look at in his office, are paper thin and would never get through the process now, but because they were done right at the start, they went through. The smaller rural district planning authorities in particular are now struggling with an extraordinarily cumbersome and complex process.

Let me deal with some of the issues that are bedevilling that process. The key is the five-year supply, which I have mentioned. There is a lack of definitive guidance on how it is to be calculated. There was a clear promise from the Department for Communities and Local Government that definitive guidance would be produced in August last year, but it has not appeared. Two things are happening as a result. First, planning authorities are struggling to understand exactly what is required. Secondly, plans are being picked apart at planning inquiries by clever QCs, who are going back to the first principles in the planning framework and using those to override any sensible local decision making.

There are tensions within the system. Historically, census figures have been used, but it now seems as though economic aspiration is a key factor. Economic aspiration is fine, except that if it does not come to fruition, an area is left with the houses but not the jobs, which does not make sense.

There is also the fundamental problem that housing supply is effectively determined by the house builders themselves and what they say they will be bringing forward in a particular year. Let us not kid ourselves: there are a limited number of national house builders that effectively have an oligopoly of supply. They are coming forward with figures that might look all right on paper, but the house builders will build only when the margin meets their requirements, and the profit margin on those developments is relatively high. The Government might wish to see more houses built—I certainly do, as we desperately need them across the country—but developers are interested in banking development land rather than building when their marginal profit is not at its greatest.

As a result, we have perverse incentives for developers to acquire permissions but not develop the projects. We have what are called technical starts, where developers will put in a road and say, “We have started that project, but we are not actually going to build any houses yet—we will leave that for the moment. Meanwhile, let’s get on with our next application for the next bit of land that we see.” That can distort the entire local plan and what emerges from it.

The second key factor is the weight that the emerging local plan has in planning inspectorate decisions, as it is developed, consulted upon and submitted to the Department. The Minister said to me in the House a few months ago that the plan has weight, but that is not evidenced by the decisions taken by planning inspectors, who are not working on the basis of ministerial aspiration but of regulations—quite rightly, as that is the only basis they can work on—which require them to look at different criteria. We are therefore seeing inspectorate decisions that do not match the desires of local communities for local planning.

I have to say to the Minister that, when we are talking about large conurbations, sometimes it really does not matter which bit of land is developed—there is capacity for spread, so if one development comes on, it is possible to deselect another bit of land to bring everything back into kilter—but when we are talking about small market towns and rural areas, the topography does not allow for that. If the wrong bit of that sort of community is developed, it does not help to deselect what would have been the right bit for development. Deselection does not work.

There is another aspect concerning the inspectorate that I shall mention in passing: the perverse decision, which has been evidenced more than once now, that because a particular design of building is right in one place, it will necessarily be right anywhere. As a result of that, we have lost the sense of the vernacular, which is key to good planning. We should be able to ensure that the buildings in a particular area suit how buildings in that area have been built historically and fit with the urban or rural community landscape. Instead, the same model of house is relabelled in different parts of the country: in Somerset, they would probably call it a thatched cottage, despite the fact that it is an executive four-bed home, whereas in the north it would be called the Ullswater model or something like that. It is nonsense. Such decisions show whatever the visual equivalent is of having cloth ears.

I have a number of modest requests for the Minister. First, I want emerging local plans that are on the point of publication to have real weight in the planning process—to have what is called materiality. That is simply not the case at the moment. If he wants that to happen, he has to make it happen by regulation—to instruct planning inspectors that they have to give the plans real weight and back local councils in doing the right thing. That is the whole principle of localism.

Secondly, the Minister needs to provide definitive guidance on the five-year supply, to show exactly what is to be taken into account and how it is to be calculated. He must not leave it to clever QCs representing house builders to determine what is right for a particular local area. That is not localism, but an absolute divorce from it. Until we have that clear guidance, I do not believe the situation will improve.

Thirdly, we need to give real weight to the views of parish councils. That is a gap in the new legislation. At the moment, they are virtually non-people, and do not have the locus they should have in planning decisions. I recently read a speech by the Minister about the importance of neighbourhood plans. We went down that road with the previous Government and their village plans.

I have 135-odd villages in my constituency, and many of them spent months and years of really hard work on developing their village plans, thinking that what they were doing would affect future planning decisions and ensure that what was built matched needs and locality. The reality was, of course, that those plans were completely ignored. I am worried that neighbourhood planning will go down exactly the same road. Indeed, people are now so cynical that they might not engage with neighbourhood planning in the first place, because they do not believe it will have an effect. Unless we can show that it will bring a real improvement to local planning decisions, people will not engage.