Neighbourhood Planning Bill

Baroness Maddock Excerpts

Report: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 28th February 2017 Lords Chamber

I hope that the Minister will look at planning enforcement in the way he looked at planning fees to strengthen that area of local government planning departments and see whether planning enforcement could be reinforced. Every time an individual takes a punt against planning legislation and going through the proper routes and gets away with it, it undermines everything that we have discussed in this and the previous planning Bill. Most people do the right thing; those who do not and get away with it seriously undermine that level of community responsibility that enables us to have planning policies and rules that help everybody. That is my plea, and I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Gardner of Parkes, for raising this issue.

[Baroness Maddock (LD)]

My Lords, having listened to the debate, I will intervene briefly because this issue goes back a long way. I declare my interest as a vice-president of the LGA and many years ago I was a councillor.

One thing that happens is that, if people get away with this once, they go on doing it again and again. I was once successful in persuading the planning committee to say to this man, “You must change what you have done”, to stop him in his tracks. However, there is a bit of a nasty turn to this, because I was standing at the bus stop in front of the building where he had to change the windows at the top and I heard this lady say, “Oh dear, it is a terrible waste of money doing that, isn’t it?”. That may have been the case, but this is important. I did not realise that nothing had been done in the time since I dealt with this issue years ago. The real problem is that, if nothing is done, people who do it once go on doing it again. We need to take that into account when listening to this argument.

[Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab)]

My Lords, it is 43 years since I was on a planning committee and I am sure that the law has changed a lot. However, when I was an MP, I became involved in a case in the Lake District in which someone built a building without planning permission, and there was subsequently a row. The conclusion I drew was: “Knock it down”. The law allows too much flexibility. The noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, mentioned risk. People are prepared to take a risk, and the only way in which we can make this law work well is if we are far more vigorous in its application.