Baroness Young of Old Scone
Main Page: Baroness Young of Old Scone (Labour - Life peer)Growth and Infrastructure Bill
Baroness Young of Old Scone Excerpts
Lord Cameron of Dillington
My Lords, I am totally supportive of this clause, but I am vague about how it will work as it is without any form of back-up information. It may be my ignorance of the planning system because I come to it from, as it were, the other side of the desk as an applicant rather than a local authority or planning officer. I am particularly concerned about small developments in rural areas, and here I ought to declare an interest for the purposes of this Committee as a farmer and landowner.
In many rural areas, which are of course underfunded as the result of an unfair and imbalanced central government funding system, planning departments have inadequate resources, staff and expertise. I believe that some local planning authorities are reluctant to engage in pre-application advice; indeed, they cannot afford to do so. I am concerned about the first encounter with the local planning authority for small applicants when they submit an application. It is likely that they will find themselves having to pay, say, 30% to 50% of the costs of a project—we must bear it in mind that these are small projects worth £50,000 or even less—in order to conform with the demands made by the local planning authority in terms of reports and consents. The project, of course, is also greatly delayed because they have to get all the answers needed to complete these reports. It seems to me that the belt-and-braces, tick-box approach applied by local planning authorities is not necessarily in order to cover themselves in case of a comeback on the result of an application, but all too often because they lack the expertise within the department to know what is relevant. That is why they take a belt-and-braces approach. The fact that, due to the costs, a small project is killed before it even gets off the ground is often the cause of a secret sigh of relief in an overworked and underfunded local planning authority. In these circumstances, you have to ask yourself where our much-needed development will come from.
In my experience when talking to councillors—I have never actually been a councillor—I have found that few of the reports that are asked for are read by the members of the planning committee. One might say that that is fair because they are reported by the planning officers who know all about them, but even that is not necessarily always strictly accurate. I have known reports to be asked for by planning officers which are already in the file; in other words, the officers have not read the file. I have some questions. How is an underfunded rural local planning authority without knowledge and expertise to apply this clause? How will an overworked planning officer apply it to the multitude of different sorts of application that he has to deal with in a rural area? Is this clause all there is? Should there not be more guidance, which is what I would really like to see?
As I say, it may be perfectly clear to those who have worked for a local planning authority and are used to being on the other side of the desk, but it seems that we need a bit more detailed guidance. However, I repeat that I am totally supportive of this clause.
Baroness Young of Old Scone
My Lords, perhaps I can help the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington. Lots of guidance on this issue is already available. I believe that Clause 5 is unnecessary in what, if I may say so, is a pretty unnecessary Bill, so I support the amendments, particularly Amendment 55 and, indeed, the proposal that the clause should not stand part of the Bill.
As I say, quite a lot of guidance is already provided in the NPPF to local authorities on information requirements, and we need to allow some time for that to bed in before taking any unnecessary legislative steps to control local authorities in the information that they may seek. As the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, said, it is possible to see what the evidence is that local authorities are being overly prescriptive and requiring information that is otiose, irrelevant or unreasonable. I have had experience across the planning system, mostly from the point of view of organisations requiring information from applicants through local authorities, and I would say that it is the lack of information, or delayed or poor quality information, which creates uncertainty and causes delays that result in poor quality decisions and make it virtually impossible for other interested parties to have a full and fair view of the impact of an application. That is particularly true for some of the environmental requirements that local authorities seek from planning applications.
With regard to “reasonableness”, I am sure the Minister will say that reasonableness is reasonable, but that the wording removes from the local authority the ability to be the final arbiter, to be in the driving seat and to be able to reduce the level of uncertainty that can cause these adverse consequences for decision making. It would be much wiser to allow the guidance that has been issued so recently time to work through in order to see whether local planning authorities are making overly onerous information requirements. If they are, the guidance should be tightened because this issue is much more appropriate for guidance than for primary legislation.
It is interesting that the Royal Town Planning Institute is against Clause 5. Even the Law Society, while supporting Clause 5, quite rightly notes that careful guidance will be needed to avoid this provision becoming a new judicial-review weapon for third parties to stall developments. As an old hand at judicial review as a weapon to stall developments, I would not like to think that we were creating more opportunities to do that.
Lord Beecham
The noble Baroness, the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, and my noble friend Lord Hanworth have done a pretty effective demolition job on this proposal, without the benefit of planning permission.
Another issue arises from the impact assessment. That impact assessment purports to make another part of the case for the Government’s proposals, which relates to costs. On page 29 of the impact assessment, there is an analysis of the:
“Estimated savings for applicants under a central scenario assuming 10% reduction in costs”.
For the 347,800 annual applications, that comes down to something like £54.8 million, on the basis of a 10% reduction in costs. That is the net present value. The costs are £54.8 million and because of some mysterious rounding of the figures, the savings purport to come out to £6.5 million. It might be thought that that is not an inordinately vast sum of money in the scale of things, but it is perhaps worth saving if one could get it.
However, within that, it is significant that for major developments for dwellings, the annual savings would be £1.4 million, so it is hardly a material factor in holding up house building in the country. For a major development—not dwellings—the annual saving is even less, £0.9 million.
Where does the 10% figure come from? Why is 10% applied across the piece? Are the Government really suggesting that information required for a householder development, for which the savings per application are deemed to be all of £69 each, somehow will be of the same percentage order as those for a major development? That strikes me as highly unlikely. This seems to be a bogus figure plucked out of thin air to provide some sort of financial justification for this measure. In addition, the impact statement goes on to say that the Government intend:
“to introduce complementary changes to secondary legislation, which will have the effect of re-introducing a right of appeal where a council has failed to validate an application”—
presumably inter alia but not necessarily exclusively on the ground of lack of information—
“and the statutory time limits for determining a planning application has passed. This will address the impact of recent court decisions that have challenged the Planning Inspectorate’s ability to consider such appeals”.
If this is a significant issue—the Government appear to think that it is—why is there no amendment to the Bill? Why is it being done in the form of secondary legislation, which, of course, cannot be amended if it comes before your Lordships’ House? From time to time, the Government take opportunities to add things to Bills, sometimes in considerable numbers. Why is this matter not being added to this Bill but being left to secondary legislation?
Baroness Young of Old Scone
While the noble Lords opposite are rummaging under the Benches, I wonder whether the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, might like to comment on the worry of the Law Society that I raised. He seems to be weakening in his resolve about this clause being unnecessary. I would like him to ponder on the fact that the Law Society is worried a bit about it becoming new judicial review territory which, as we know, is a great source of delay in planning applications.
Lord Greaves
I do take that seriously. If I am weakening, it is as to whether this clause will have any significant effect in practice and therefore whether it is worth while making the effort to remove it. There is lots of legislation which has no real effect in practice; we just accept that it goes through, I am afraid. However, with regard to judicial review, the ordinary applicants, about whom the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, spoke, who might be having a modest expansion to their farm, business or whatever, are not going to go to judicial review. If there is a problem about too much information being required, I suspect it will concern those people. The noble Lord, Lord Cameron, is probably right that it is that sort of level of applicant. I do not think the householder applicant who wants an extension will be asked for lots of environmental information, and so on.
The big applications will have to provide the information anyway. If you are building a sizeable new housing estate, you are not going to get away without providing information on all the things that will be on the council’s list because they will include things such as drainage, the impact on the local roads and access into the site. They will want traffic counts and all the rest of it. You are not going to get away without that, whatever this legislation says. I suspect that they are providing all the information anyway and will continue to have to do so, while on the question of judicial review—for the people who would have the resources to go to judicial review—that is not going to happen in practice.
Having said that, I said at the beginning that one of my questions was whether discussing this clause at all is a waste of all our time. I suspect that it is but, nevertheless, I am grateful to everybody who has debated and to the Minister. These are important issues. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.