Neighbourhood Planning Bill

Antoinette Sandbach Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons & Money resolution: House of Commons
Monday 10th October 2016 Commons Chamber

[Antoinette Sandbach (Eddisbury) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire (Kit Malthouse), who made important points about the local development plan process, as did my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) and my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin). My constituency is a tale of two halves. The half that is in the Cheshire West and Chester Council area is protected by a local development plan. The numerous beautiful areas in my constituency that have put their neighbourhood plans in place have a protection that is not afforded to the other half of my constituency, which is in the Cheshire East Council area. Without an LDP, the neighbourhood plans do not have the same legal status. I join other hon. Members in urging the Minister to ensure that neighbourhood plans carry full protection and force.

I agree with the suggestion for an incentive. When Cheshire West and Chester Council was run by Conservatives, a proportion—10%—of the new homes bonus automatically went to the local parish council to allow it to improve amenities. I urge the Minister to consider putting that proportion in the Bill, because it allowed my local communities to make improvements to their area when they could see a direct result from new housing. For example, Tattenhall in my constituency would have used the money to build six homes for rent for local people in the agricultural community—they would have been permanent protected homes available for young people, allowing them to stay in their farming communities. Unfortunately, the council has switched to Labour control, and has swiped the whole of the new homes bonus. It will not now go to my local communities that are bearing the brunt of the housing development.

I, too, have a string of pearls in my constituency—wonderful villages such as Bunbury, Audlem, Tattenhall, Malpas and Tarporley, which developers are desperate to develop. It is vital that those communities that accept housing see a direct benefit from it. I urge the Minister therefore to consider allocating a proportion of the new homes bones to those communities. Ten per cent. is not unreasonable, and would give an incentive to people to accept development.

On the impact on infrastructure, the Minister has heard many Members of Parliament say the same thing. A recent planning decision exempted doctors’ surgeries and schools, which are statutory services, from section 106 agreements and leveraging funding from developers. This is an ideal opportunity to deal with that and allow the developers to contribute to the additional infrastructure costs that otherwise fall on the local council.

Finally, I urge the Minister to crack down hard on developers who repeatedly put in applications against neighbourhood plans, knowing that they are acting against an adopted neighbourhood or local plan. If planning permission is turned down by the local council, and the developer appeals unsuccessfully and is turned down again, I urge the Minister to consider penalty costs against them. A third of those costs could go to local councils; that could contribute towards alleviating the legal costs that they incur trying to fight these appeals. Another third could go to his Department to provide the resource that is needed for it to look at those appeals, and the final third could go to the Treasury to deal with the infrastructure impact of other developments. That would be a real win.

I urge the Minister to look at that in the Bill, because my constituents are frustrated when they see a planning process in which developers have deep involvement. They think that it is an unfair fight, with no incentive for councils to appeal against decisions or stand up to what they regard as bully developers. Not all developers are the same—we have many good developers in Cheshire—but the feeling among local people is that they are fighting a tide of applications that are swamping them. Some form of disincentive to tackle those repeated applications would, I hope, go some way towards discouraging that type of behaviour.