Business and Planning Bill

Baroness Randerson Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 6th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Randerson (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I understand the temptation to take a hatchet to the—sometimes annoying—bureaucracy associated with the planning system, but one man’s bureaucracy is another’s fundamental democratic right. Many noble Lords will have experience of serving as a councillor, as I have, and will know that planning applications are a sensitive issue. When you add alcohol licensing to that, you have a combustible combination. The short cuts proposed here, allowing pubs and restaurants to install pavement furniture, go beyond streamlining, but some sensible amendments could make them workable. At the moment, the provisions are self-defeating. If you give people only seven days to object, they will probably object, so give them time to talk to neighbours and find out more.

There are concerns about the shortness of consultation and the method to be used. The need only to display a notice, and no legal requirement to post the application online, is plainly ridiculous in the age of Zoom. The lamp-post notice is created on a computer, so posting it online is easy. People with sight loss cannot see lamp-post notices. As the Bill is drafted, it is discriminatory, because they are the people, together with wheelchair users, whose safety is most at risk when a café springs up on the pavement, forcing them into the road. I urge the Government to rethink the methods and timing of consultation. If the local authority does not deal with the application within 10 working days, it is automatically to be granted for a year. Why should local residents have to put up with an unsuitable use of the pavement for a whole year, simply because the council did not react fast enough? Surely three months would be long enough before it is reconsidered.

Any pavement development must leave sufficient space so that people, including wheelchair users, can pass safely. Recently, councils have been reconfiguring roads to encourage more cyclists, so they may be prepared to do that for pavement cafés too. However, some new cycle lanes have obliterated existing bus lanes, and this must be prevented. In future, we will need efficient bus services more than ever. Whether for cyclists or drinkers, any road reconfiguration needs to remember the buses.

The Bill also contains amendments to the licensing and testing of goods vehicles, and grants some temporary exemptions. It amends the requirements for medical reports for older drivers of those vehicles. These are issues of road safety, and any loosening of requirements must be looked at closely, especially in relation to buses, where passenger safety is at risk. If the Bill had come to this House in April, I would have understood. Now, we are giving the Government additional powers after the event. They have already reinstated the need for MOTs. They have never asked for powers to reduce the equally onerous requirements for those needing to renew their licences at the age of 70. Once again, the Government’s approach is to belatedly ask for a haphazard mismatch of additional powers, with no evidence of a strategic approach.