Neighbourhood Planning Bill

Baroness Finn Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 17th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Finn (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome the Neighbourhood Planning Bill as an important next step in tackling the problem of housing shortages. I am not sure that it is a huge exaggeration to claim that a failure to tackle this problem may lead to a social explosion further down the line. Home ownership is simply moving beyond the reach of millions of families, and that risks undermining one of the key foundations of a stable society.

I will not go into the 2016 figures, but in 2015 just 142,890 new houses were built in England. Home ownership rates have fallen back to 1980s levels. Millions of young people are still living with their parents while saving for a deposit to buy a home of their own. The only ways to resolve the issue are to ensure that the current rules are reformed, to allocate more land to housing and to double homebuilding as soon as possible.

The Bill is important because it allows local communities to embrace new developments, rather than having them imposed and being forced to live with them. The measures to strengthen neighbourhood plans introduced in the Bill will ensure that more tiers of government come together and that more plans are put in place. These plans will reduce uncertainty for communities, which are often left with no idea of what will be built where, and the subsequent resentment when developments are imposed.

In decades to come, neighbourhood planning will go down as one of the most radical and successful reforms of the coalition Government. Previously, people had always believed that if you gave residents in communities facing development pressure greater power over planning, they would use it to refuse all proposals and stop anyone building anything anywhere. But the former Prime Minister David Cameron, Eric Pickles, Greg Clark and Nick Boles all disagreed. They believed that if you trusted concerned residents with the power to shape the way in which their community discharged its responsibility to build more houses and cater for investment and economic activity, they would rise to the occasion and take the responsibility seriously. This is exactly what has happened.

An impressive 280 communities have held local referendums on neighbourhood plans since 2012 and, on average, and even more astonishing 89% of eligible voters have supported the proposed plans. This is one of the greatest experiments in direct democracy that this country has ever seen.

The Bill’s proposals to build on the reforms of the Housing and Planning Act to strengthen neighbourhood planning ensure that communities will continue to have a stronger say in the planning of their area. They will further entrench the legal weight given to neighbourhood plans in planning decisions and encourage even more communities to develop a plan of their own. The Bill will also establish a clear and straightforward process for updating neighbourhood plans without having to go back to square one.

On compulsory purchase, I welcome the measures to streamline compulsory purchase orders. I would also urge the Minister to consider an important point not covered in the Bill. It relates to vacant public sector land. The right honourable Member for Chipping Barnet, Theresa Villiers, raised this issue during the Bill’s Second Reading in the other place. She highlighted a derelict site owned by the NHS that had not been used for many years. During my years in the Cabinet Office, we ensured that government departments and agencies collocated and used office property much more intensively. This enabled us to release surplus property to the private sector.

It became increasingly clear that the public sector was hoarding vast acreages of surplus property and that many departments, due to an appalling lack of management information, were not even aware of the land that they actually owned. I would suggest that there could be rich pickings if we applied some rigour to putting records straight and then requiring public sector entities to disgorge property to meet the ever-growing housing need. We always assume that compulsory purchase is for the state to use to purchase property from recalcitrant private sector entities. I suggest that the Government should consider taking powers for central government to compulsorily purchase property from other public sector entities with a view to releasing it to the private sector.

I also commend the measures to address pre-commencement planning conditions. Pre-commencement conditions imposed by local authorities are unnecessarily restrictive and a major cause of delay, so I am delighted that Clause 12 introduces robust regulations to deal with these problems.

As many noble Lords have said, the Bill on its own is not a solution to building all the homes this country desperately needs. In particular, we must get a much better linkage between the provision of infrastructure in return for more housing. The Government must ensure that new homes are built in sustainable communities where the roads do not become hopelessly congested, where existing residents are not met with increased waiting lists to see their GP, and where there are no battles for limited school places.

However, there is simply not enough housing in this country. There needs to be more housing and more infrastructure. We have not built, and are not currently building, enough homes, and we eagerly await the White Paper due later this month. However, this Bill marks an important step in building a housing market that works for the country, and for that reason I fully commend the measures to the House.