Growth and Infrastructure Bill

Baroness Young of Old Scone Excerpts

Tuesday 8th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Young of Old Scone]

My Lords, I declare an interest as president or vice-president of a number of conservation and environment NGOs. I ask the Minister’s forgiveness because I am mystified by the Bill. As many noble Lords have said, it seems to be at odds with a whole range of commitments that I thought the coalition much cherished, particularly localism. It also seems to be a bit of a knee-jerk Bill. It was not included in the Queen’s Speech. It has been cobbled together with indecent haste and little consultation. As many noble Lords have said, it does little to promote growth but puts at risk the protection of our environment. It is also a bit of a windmill-tilting Bill, because it perpetuates the myth that planning is responsible for holding back growth, rather than focusing on the significant issue of the lack of finance for investment and the difficulty that people have in borrowing.

The noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, pointed out that planning is not the real barrier to growth and that a considerable number of building schemes with planning applications already approved are not being built at the moment as a result of constraints other than the planning system. Indeed, the hit rate of planning applications being approved by local government is commendably high. What we are seeing in this Bill is a set of proposals that do not do the business in terms of growth but put at risk that important natural capital that we have and undermine future prosperity.

Unlike the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, I am a great fan of the planning system. It is one of the jewels in the crown of democracy in this country. It allows informed decisions to be made between competing interests on a local basis in the interests of the public. Anything that knocks that is to be resisted. It is not as if the Government have not already made some pretty clear statements recently about their position on the planning system. For example, the planning system was recognised in the Government’s natural environment White Paper, which was published only in June 2011, as being a vital underpinning of the protection and restoration of a healthy functioning natural environment. That in itself was recognised as being the underpinning of a prosperous and sustainable economy.

I am mystified that the Bill follows so soon after the planning reforms introduced by the Localism Act and the National Planning Policy Framework in 2012. The National Planning Policy Framework negotiation was accompanied by much sweat and tears. It seems a shame that we are not allowing it a bit of time to prove its worth.

Why was planning law not got right then, when all these statements of government policy and legislation were going through the full panoply of consultation and in-depth parliamentary scrutiny? Why is the coalition coming back for another go, which is so sadly at odds with its recently promoted policies? During the coalition mid-term review yesterday I was waiting for an admission that something was wrong in the planning system. There was a lot about what has been got right, but the mid-term review did not say yesterday, “By the way, we screwed up the planning system changes and now we need to sort them out”.

What are the changes proposed in the Bill that are out of tune with recently approved legislation or policy? Noble Lords have spoken at length about Clause 1 and the designation of poorly performing planning authorities. That is a retrograde step. It centralises power in the hands of the Secretary of State. It breaks trust with local communities and runs the risk of important decisions being made out of the local strategic setting and without access to local information. The criteria for designation seem to say “Never mind the quality, feel the speed” and could put pressure on local authorities to make swift and potentially poor decisions to avoid losing their planning powers.

The provision in Clause 5 to limit the power to require information for planning applications seems unnecessary. Local authorities need the right information to make an informed decision and the noble Baroness, Lady Valentine, was clear about the need for expertise and clarity at a local level if good planning decisions are going to result. A limitation on the power to require information could result in delays if information is not available or in challenges to information requests, which again could prolong negotiations. The National Planning Policy Framework has only recently established a clear policy on information requirements and, as I said before, should be given a chance to prove its worth.

In Clause 8 the electronic communications code issue underlines the importance of improving broadband in rural areas. I live in a village where it is possible to stream the BBC iPlayer only after midnight because of competition for band-width. It is only recently that paragraph 115 of the National Planning Policy Framework stressed the responsibility of planning authorities to give greater weight to conserving landscape and scenic beauty in national parks, the Broads and areas of outstanding national beauty. The Bill’s provisions appear to go against that recently settled paragraph.

I worry that this could be a precedent for removing the greater weight duty in other ways and for opening up an avenue for removing other protections in the future. The reality of knee-jerk legislation is that the knee can jerk in some other random direction in the future. Apart from that this is a pretty evidence-free zone. There is no evidence that the additional protection afforded to designated landscapes has acted as a barrier to rural growth or has delayed broadband rollout. The noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, rightly pointed out that the national park authorities have been pretty proactive in minimising visual impact over the past five years in broadband applications.

The registration of town or village greens provision in Clauses 13 and 14 seems to be another “tilting at windmills” element of the Bill. It appears to have been introduced to prevent the registration of a town or village green as a ploy for stopping development. There are fewer than 200 applications each year to register a green. In 2010 there were only 134. A tiny proportion of those could be regarded as vexatious. Potentially we are having a massive piece of legislation to prevent a small number of vexatious applications. It does not seem to be proportionate.

In Clause 24, the inclusion of major business or commercial projects in the major infrastructure planning regime is another erosion of the principle of localism and could risk that decisions are taken centrally out of the local context, uninformed by local expertise and knowledge, and certainly not as part of a local process informed by local democracy. The local strategic approach, which stresses the value of landscape-level land use decisions, was emphasised in the Government’s natural environment White Paper as fundamental. This would offend that principle.

The types of development expected to fall within the procedure have recently been set out in the government consultation. As other noble Lords have pointed out, these include minerals and gas-extraction projects. It is not clear how fast-tracking onshore gas and oil extraction could be decided validly in the absence of national planning policy on this issue. This must raise major questions about the Government’s real commitment to climate change policy.

I shall say nothing on Clause 27 about creating a new employee shareholder employment status other than that I agree with every single syllable that the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, said on that.

We have a Bill that was introduced at speed, without consultation and with very brief opportunities for engagement. I hesitate to characterise the Secretary of State as Don Quixote, but you could say that this is a Bill that tilts at windmills that do not exist, given that there is little or no evidence that these planning issues are the true obstacles to growth and infrastructure. It is a Bill that flies in the face of policies and legislation that are barely dried ink on the paper. The combination of these features makes this bad legislation. I hope that the Minister, for whom I have huge respect, having worked with her in Kensington and Chelsea, will use the passage of the Bill to tell us in the House what the real evidence is for these measures. If she is unable to give us real evidence, I hope that she will drop or amend these proposals.