Neighbourhood Planning Bill

Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville Excerpts

Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 6th February 2017 Grand Committee

Moved by

[Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville]

49A: After Clause 12, insert the following new Clause—
“Public land registerRegister of public land
(1) Every local planning authority must keep a register of all public land in its area, for the purpose of identifying land in their area which could be used for development.(2) The register must be kept in such manner as is prescribed by the Secretary of State by regulations made by statutory instrument.”

[Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville (LD)]

My Lords, Amendment 49A would create a register of public land. Quite properly, local authorities are required to compile and keep an up-to-date register of brownfield land within their area. This ensures that the land is reused in an orderly manner for housing development. Most of the land is brought into use without too much difficulty, but occasionally it may be contaminated and require additional and expensive work to bring it up to a suitable state for housing. Given the extreme shortage of suitable land and the enormous pressure for housing in the country, it seems sensible to bring all the spare land in an area into use as quickly as possible. Requiring local authorities to compile and keep up-to-date registers of public land within their boundaries would mean that they would have an accurate picture of where the land is and whether it is being used productively or is just lying fallow. They can then work with the relevant agencies to bring the land into use for housing.

I shall give the example of a Royal Marines base not a million miles away from where I live but in a different local authority area. This base has been in the community for some considerable time, but recently the MoD decided to close it and move the personnel elsewhere. Here is a perfect site for housing. All the infrastructure, including water, sewerage and electricity, is in place, as well as a decent internal road system. There is unlikely to be a gas supply, given its location, but I could be wrong. No doubt some of the infrastructure would need to be updated, but the site would be much more preferable to digging up a greenfield area. That is just one example, but there will be others involving other agencies such as the NHS. Some of this publicly held land will not be as visible as a military base, but it could nevertheless be released for housing. Some of these parcels of land will be small, but could accommodate half a dozen houses, while others will be larger and suitable for 300 to 400 homes. The land supply shortage in some areas is so desperate that it really is time that all possible avenues were explored fully.

Local authorities with housing provision responsibilities are the logical and obvious partners to compile and keep up to date a brownfield register in order to be able to act quickly when redundant land becomes available. I realise that this amendment will not find favour in all quarters, but I look forward to the Minister’s response. I beg to move.

[Baroness Pinnock]

My Lords, the purpose of Amendment 49B in my name is to draw attention to and, if possible, seek a remedy for the significant delays and difficulties in getting some brownfield sites developed.

Brownfield or previously used land is well defined in the National Planning Policy Framework. The definition includes a wide range of previous uses. Some of these sites pose no particular problems or costs for developers. The sites I am concerned with are those that have suffered considerable contamination as a result of an earlier industrial use in a less-regulated age. Remediation of these sites can be very costly and a big disincentive to developers. There are a great number of brownfield sites. The CPRE research in 2016 estimated that these cover an area sufficient for 1.1 million homes. Those figures may be disputed but that is not my point. My point is that there are demonstrably large areas of previously used land available for development, many of them with current planning permissions, but the sites remain undeveloped.

Using brownfield land has a double benefit. It saves greenfield sites from development and uses existing derelict land in urban areas. This derelict land often attracts problems other than the visual depression it can bring to an area. I am probably one of the few people in this Room who actually lives near some derelict land. I can tell you, it is something we have been trying to resolve for years but cannot because it is heavily contaminated. When the Bill was debated in the other place, Andrew Mitchell MP raised this very issue and hoped that it could be addressed before the Bill’s passage was concluded.

The question is: how can brownfield sites be effectively prioritised? The Royal Town Planning Institute report of last year said:

“Previously-developed brownfield land in built-up areas must continue to play a vital role for a range of purposes including housing. But a ‘brownfield first’ policy will fail to deliver its full potential if there is insufficient available funding for the treatment and assembly of land. New proactive remedial programmes are needed to remove constraints on development and to make places where people want to live which are accessible by sustainable modes of transport”.


Unfortunately, the Government are currently providing disincentives for brownfield development. Not only is there a lack of support for remediation but there are incentives for developers to use greenfield sites, such as the five-year housing supply rule, which enables developers to cherry pick greenfield and green belt sites while ignoring brownfield sites.

The further consequence of the costs of land remediation is that when the land is developed, obviously the costs are greater and so developers are able to argue that any planning gain for the local community is not financially viable. Therefore, affordable housing is lost on those sorts of sites—the very sites where, often, affordable housing is needed. I ask the Minister to respond positively to this plea on behalf of areas across the country, including my own, where land values are lower than in the south-east and where, therefore, the costs of remediation can be prohibitive to development.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

My Lords, I thank noble Lords who have participated in this debate on Amendments 49A and 49B, particularly the noble Baronesses, Lady Bakewell and Lady Pinnock. The amendments cover two important areas.

On the new clause inserted by Amendment 49A, I agree with the noble Baroness that there should be transparency around land assets held by public bodies. Public bodies must be accountable for the assets they hold, and where land assets are no longer required to support the functions of the body, they should be released so that they can be put to good use, including the provision of much-needed new homes. I can reassure noble Lords that the proposed new clause is not required. A great deal of work is already under way to ensure that this transparency exists, and it may help the Committee if I briefly outline the measures that are either in place or being put in place.

First, information on government land assets is already made available through the Cabinet Office electronic property information mapping service, e-PIMS—that trips off the tongue. This feeds the Government Property Finder website, where anyone can search to obtain a list of government land assets locally, regionally and nationally. Where land is made surplus for development, the e-PIMS system also makes this clear.

Secondly, for land owned by local authorities, the Local Government Transparency Code 2015 requires local authorities subject to that code to publish, on an annual basis, details of all land and building assets, including undeveloped land. In 2016 we consulted on updating the transparency code. We proposed that in addition to the existing data on land and property assets published by local authorities, they should also publish, on e-PIMS, the extent of the land in hectares for each piece of land; whether that land is surplus to requirements; whether there are current or future plans to release the land for housing development; if there are plans to release the land for housing development, what the current planning status is; if there are plans to release the land for housing development, how many homes can be accommodated, and, for properties of 10,000 square feet or larger, the floor area of that property, the number of floors and the number of car parking spaces it has. We are carefully considering the responses we received and will be responding to the consultation in due course.

Thirdly, nearly three-quarters of local authorities in England are now part of the Cabinet Office and Local Government Association’s One Public Estate programme. This is expected to grow to 95% in 2018. The One Public Estate programme brings together public bodies across a local area seeking to unlock the value in land and property assets for better local services, efficiencies and local growth. In doing so, land that is made surplus can then be released. A condition of membership of the One Public Estate programme is that local authorities and their public sector partners must upload their land asset data to the e-PIMS system. Work is already under way to bring central and local land data together in the e-PIMS system. This will make land asset data across the public sector readily available to anyone in a single place, rather than having registers held by individual authorities. I hope that this reassures noble Lords that the Government are committed to ensuring transparency in the use of land assets and appropriate release across the public sector, and that they have a clear plan to make that happen.

Amendment 49B, in relation to brownfield land, is in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, and was spoken to by my noble friend Lady Cumberlege and the noble Lord, Lord Beecham. He cited the example of Greenwich. A development corporation is involved across the river as well—I am sure that the London Borough of Lewisham will have something to say on that, but I will move swiftly on.

I think we all agree that previously developed land, more commonly known as brownfield land, has an important role to play in delivering much-needed new homes. The Government remain committed to ensuring that 90% of suitable brownfield sites have planning permission for housing by 2020. That is our stated policy, but I appreciate that the noble Baroness is looking for more concrete action, and I will be moving on to that.

The Government already have a strong policy framework in place to encourage the reuse of brownfield land. We are also developing further policy measures in regulations, which will help unlock housing being built on suitable brownfield sites and maximise the number of dwellings built on brownfield land. It is an appropriate mechanism, as noble Lords have mentioned, in order not to have to build on the green belt, which of course we do not want to do and is not anticipated. That is why building on brownfield land is so important.

Paragraph 111 of the National Planning Policy Framework asks local authorities to encourage the reuse of brownfield land if it is not of “high environmental value”, and planning guidance reinforces the expectation that local plan policies should reflect the desirability of reusing brownfield land. Furthermore, in December 2015 our consultation on national planning policy sought views on proposals to create a presumption that brownfield land is used unless there are clear reasons why not. This consultation also set out proposals to make more efficient use of land by encouraging higher densities around commuter hubs and to encourage more starter home-led development on brownfield land. We intend to set out our response to these proposals in the imminent housing White Paper.

Our proposed changes to planning policy sit alongside other proposals to bring brownfield land back into use. The list is not exhaustive. We intend to bring regulations into force this spring requiring local planning authorities to publish and maintain brownfield registers, which was part of the Housing and Planning Act 2016. I hasten to say that I do not have personal and direct experience of the legislation, but I believe that that happened through the Act. These regulations will also enable local authorities to grant permission in principle to suitable sites on their registers. We are also committed to widening permitted development to help give new life to thousands of underused buildings, as well as accelerating the disposal of surplus public sector brownfield land for new homes.

I fully recognise that some brownfield sites have more constraints than others, and that will probably be particularly the case where land values are not so high. Greenwich had its challenges but of course the land values were greater there. Some sites may also require additional costs to bring them back into acceptable use. A number of financial measures are in place to bring such sites back into use; for example, £0.4 million has been made available to local authorities during 2016-17 to help with the costs of dealing with urgent remediation cases and, if possible, ongoing remediation projects. We have created a £3 billion home building fund to provide loans for small and medium-sized building firms, custom builders and offsite construction. Some £2 billion of that fund will be long-term funding available to developers to deliver infrastructure to support a strong future pipeline of housing supply and will help unlock between 160,000 and 200,000 homes.

We expect at least half of this £2 billion to be used to support brownfield sites, including land remediation. I am very happy if the noble Baroness wants to engage further with officials on that particular point.

Furthermore, where brownfield sites suffer from contamination, land remediation relief, offered by Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs for remediating contaminated land, provides relief from corporation tax, comprising a deduction of 100%, plus an additional generous deduction of 50%, for qualifying expenditure incurred by companies in cleaning up land acquired from a third party in a contaminated state. That is also significant. However, we must remember that not all brownfield land is suitable for housing development, and not all our housing needs will be met by building on brownfield land alone. As I have indicated, the Government have a clear plan and vision, but I am very happy to make officials available to explain the detail should noble Lords require more information.

To conclude, the Government are already taking action to support development on brownfield land. I assure the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, and other noble Lords that the Government will continue to seek prioritisation of brownfield land for development. That is central to what the Government are seeking to do in relation to housing. Without giving too much away about the housing White Paper, this aim will be reflected in that. I hope noble Lords will forgive the somewhat lengthy explanations I have given in relation to these two amendments, but they are both important. I hope that, with the assurances I have given, the noble Baroness will feel able to withdraw her amendment.

[Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville]

I thank the Minister for his very positive response to both the amendments. I am very pleased to hear that the Cabinet Office has a snappily named website where most public land can be accessed and in which most local authorities are participating. I shall go back and check that my local authority is participating. I can understand that some local authorities will perhaps be reluctant to upload exactly what their land holdings are; if I understood the Minister, that is a requirement of membership. However, I am pleased that there is some transparency around public land and that, wherever possible, it is brought into use for other purposes. I thank the Minister for the very detailed response on the issues around brownfield land. I found that very positive. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 49A withdrawn.