Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Bob Russell and Greg Clark

Tuesday 24th March 2015 Commons Chamber

[Greg Clark]

I am very surprised that the hon. Gentleman seems to be against the devolution that has been welcomed right across the country and that has led to the leaders of Cardiff approaching the Government to request a city deal. I will visit Cardiff later this week to begin negotiations. They will be very concerned to hear that the hon. Gentleman is against it.

[Sir Bob Russell (Colchester) (LD)]

The population of Essex is more than double that of Cornwall, and the population of the six counties of the east of England is considerably greater than that of Wales, so may we have devolution to the powerhouse of the six counties of the east of England?

[Greg Clark]

Through the Government’s programme over the past few years, we have devolved—and we will complete the devolution of—£12 billion of resources that were previously administered by Ministers and officials in Whitehall to Essex and other great counties. That is work in progress, but I agree with my hon. Friend that we can and should go further.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Bob Russell and Greg Clark

Thursday 11th September 2014 Commons Chamber

[Greg Clark]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving me the chance to point out that those fears have been completely unjustified. Since 2010, there has been a 17% increase in students from the poorest backgrounds, including an 8% increase in the past year. More students from disadvantaged backgrounds are going to university than ever before, and the gap between the richest and the poorest has never been smaller.

[Sir Bob Russell (Colchester) (LD)]

On a point of order, Mr Speaker.

Cyprus

Debate between Bob Russell and Greg Clark

Monday 18th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Greg Clark]

The arrangements for advice on implementation of the commitment to compensate members of the armed forces cannot proceed until the Cypriots have decided on the final arrangements, which will be in the next few days. Having made the commitment to ensure that pensions are not paid into bank accounts to which access might be questionable, I will discuss the hon. Gentleman’s point with my right hon. and hon. Friends to ensure that similar arrangements are considered for the MOD.

[Sir Bob Russell (Colchester) (LD)]

The Minister is presumably unable to say how many of the 3,000 members of the armed forces serving in Cyprus will be affected, but does he agree that serving military personnel who have Cypriot bank accounts, even if they are not in Cyprus, should also be included in the scheme? Also, why will the Government be compensating only for “reasonable” losses and not full losses?

[Greg Clark]

I know that many of my hon. Friend’s constituents will be in that situation and will have bank accounts in Cyprus. We have made a commitment, but these are very early days—we learned only over the weekend that these matters are being discussed. I think it is appropriate for the Government to make an immediate commitment of reassurance to those members of the armed forces. They have no choice about being sent to Cyprus, and when they go on this country’s business it seems to me to be reasonable to make that commitment.

National Planning Policy Framework

Debate between Bob Russell and Greg Clark

Tuesday 24th April 2012 Commons Chamber

[Sir Bob Russell (Colchester) (LD)]

What importance is to be attached to the protection of the natural environment, particularly where it abuts existing urban communities, and what about the protection and the greening of the urban environment where it already exists in our towns?

[Greg Clark]

Both points are of the utmost importance and were reflected by my hon. Friend in his contribution to the consultation. I will have more to say about that as I make progress.

It was, I think, Sir Winston Churchill who said, “We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.” That might be applied to planning policy, so it is right that we have taken the approach that we did. Our reforms have three objectives—first, to transfer power to communities, to give them more power and authority in the planning system than they have been used to having for many years; secondly, to ensure that we support the building of the homes that the next generation will need and the jobs that all our constituents need now and in the future; and thirdly to ensure that the next generation inherits an environment, natural and historic, that is at least the equal of the environment that we inherited. In my view, it should be better than the environment that we inherited. I believe in progress.

National Planning Policy Framework

Debate between Bob Russell and Greg Clark

Thursday 20th October 2011 Commons Chamber

[Greg Clark]

I do apologise; the hon. Gentleman is from Sefton. I will therefore not make the point that I intended to.

Let me continue the point about the importance of putting local people in charge. The British people are a pretty bolshie lot, and when we feel that we are being dictated to from above, the natural response is to seek to frustrate, thwart, resist and impede whatever is being imposed without enjoying the consent of the community. We know from this country and around the world that it is good practice to involve people in plan-making early and to allow them a genuine say in producing plans for their area, because then they will participate with enthusiasm. People are right to resist when bad planning is done to them, but when good planning is done with them, they will prefer to get involved and create positive places. That is why we are scrapping the regional strategies and the right of the Planning Inspectorate to rewrite local plans and why we are introducing compulsory pre-application scrutiny for major developments and neighbourhood plans to ensure a local voice.

[Bob Russell (Colchester) (LD)]

Local decisions by local councils are important, but may I draw the Minister’s attention to what has happened in my constituency within 48 hours of the consultation closing? The neighbouring local authority, Tendring, decided to allocate land for about 3,000 houses immediately adjacent to the borough boundary with Colchester, 2 miles away from the nearest community in Tendring. In other words, our neighbouring authority is putting its housing on Colchester’s doorstep. Who will make the decision there?

[Greg Clark]

My hon. Friend will understand that planning Ministers cannot comment on specific situations such as the one that he raises, for reasons that he knows. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Plymouth, Moor View (Alison Seabeck) also knows perfectly well why that is not possible. However, over the years there have been examples of precisely such situations, which is why the Localism Bill will impose a legal duty on neighbouring authorities and other public bodies to co-operate, so that both authorities take into account the consequences for the neighbouring area’s infrastructure. That is an important test in the Localism Bill—indeed, it was strengthened by consensus with the Opposition—that will provide the kind of general protections that my hon. Friend seeks.

Urban Planting

Debate between Bob Russell and Greg Clark

Tuesday 19th July 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Minister of State, Department for Communities and Local Government (Greg Clark)]

It is a delight to be able to respond to the debate initiated by my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester (Bob Russell), and I congratulate him on securing it. He spoke with the characteristic passion that he brings to this subject. I am immensely flattered that he not only reads my forewords, but brings them to the House to quote from them: if I may say so, I could not have put it better myself.

My hon. Friend will know that the issue of greening has been close to my heart for many a long year. When I was a new Back Bencher, I introduced a ten-minute rule Bill, which became a private Member’s Bill, to change the designation of back gardens as brownfield sites in order to allow local authorities to protect them. I did not want local authorities to be obliged to allow their redevelopment because they were in the same planning category as genuinely derelict industrial land, old railway sidings and gas works. That designation was having huge unintended consequences across the country—I say “unintended” but I fear that perhaps it did have a purpose in the minds of the Ministers who introduced it. Local people were certainly mystified that the environment in their local area that they cherish most, and which is greener than many other areas that enjoy green protection, was ripe for development and had no protection. One of the great pleasures for me of coming into government in the coalition Government was being able, as Minister, to change the national planning guidance to reclassify gardens in order to make it clear that they are not brownfield sites. I wanted the determination on gardens to be made by local people, through their local councillors, and I wanted gardens to be protected, if necessary.

The reasons for taking that approach were absolutely the ones that my hon. Friend set out. Green urban spaces, including private gardens, parks and places where trees and other greenery are planted in towns, make a disproportionate contribution to our ecology. The opportunity to preserve and, indeed, enhance bird life in our urban areas is advantaged by the pockets of green space that we have in what otherwise would be concrete deserts for wildlife. It is therefore especially important that we examine our urban environment and, first, stop, as we have, the depressing trend to concrete over back gardens and front gardens—we need to call a halt to that. I completely agree with him that we should seek not only to arrest the decline, but to repopulate our city centres with greenery so that they can, once again, be the areas of delight that have attracted people to live there over the years.

One of our national characteristics is that our towns and cities are greener than most of those in continental countries, which often have a much denser urban design scheme imposed. If one thinks of an English town—or, I dare say, one in any part of the United Kingdom—one thinks of greenery, especially at this time of year. I fully support the purpose of what my hon. Friend is seeking to bring to the attention of the House.

My hon. Friend is right that the planning system is integral. The purpose of planning is to help to achieve sustainable development, and he alluded to the fact that the question of sustainability obviously has not only an environmental aspect but an economic and social aspect. Our cities and towns will not only be more beautiful but are liable to be more prosperous if they are places where people can live comfortably and in which, if they work there, their health, happiness and well-being are enhanced. On the social aspects of sustainability, if people live and work in areas that are beautiful and green and in which there are places where they can take their leisure, the antisocial behaviour that is too often characterised by a hyper-urban un-green environment is less prevalent. The research to which my hon. Friend referred bears that out.

Our ambition is the same and we share the view that our environment can be better than it is. My hon. Friend mentioned the White Paper on the natural environment that the Department produced recently, and it is a groundbreaking paper in the sense that it moves beyond taking simply a defensive view of the natural environment that states that we should try to halt its destruction. The White Paper makes it very clear that this Government’s ambition should be to enhance our environment, because, frankly, it could be better looked after than it is. Paragraph 2 states:

“The Government wants this to be the first generation to leave the natural environment of England in a better state than it inherited.”

That is a theme that should run through all Government policy and nothing would achieve that more than the points that my hon. Friend makes.

Let me say a little about what can be done to achieve such improvements. The planning system can play a very important role. My hon. Friend mentioned the fact that the planning system we have inherited has taken us away from sustainability, and we have mentioned the inclusion of gardens in the definition of brownfield sites. In general, however, the top-down approach with tightly imposed housing targets that were not set by local people who have knowledge of the local area but handed down by unelected regional bodies so that democratically elected bodies, such as district councils, had simply either to accommodate them or to have their plans rewritten by inspectors, resulted in people fearing, quite reasonably, that their local environment, which they cherished, was being changed without any involvement on their part and by people with no knowledge of it.

[Bob Russell]

The views of the people of Mile End, whose area is being ravaged by massive development, are being ignored, in effect. I was hoping that the Minister might be able to address that, because councillors across the borough have ganged up, as one could say, and put all the borough’s housing in one location, which is not fair on that community.

[Greg Clark]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that point. I was going to say that he knows that the Localism Bill, which was debated extensively in this House and is now with their lordships, makes wholesale changes to the planning system, the purpose of which is to give local neighbourhoods the right to have their say and not to be set aside. That is the heart of localism—that local people should be involved from the outset in such decisions, as is common on the continent. In my experience, the best developments and the best authorities are those that take into account the views of the local population.

However, there is a constraint. Until a new law is passed, the old law remains in effect. Tempting though it might be to rule by decree from day one of taking office, we have been advised—and on occasion the courts have required us—to complete the passage through Parliament of the Localism Bill before, for example, we can revoke finally the regional spatial strategies that are part of the problem and which contain the imposed numbers that local communities find alien to them.

We are making all haste with the Bill. As my hon. Friend knows, it was one of the earliest Bills that was introduced. It is a substantial Bill. We moved heaven and earth to make sure that it was part of the Government’s early package of legislation. It is making good progress. Its intentions have enjoyed a degree of consensus in the House. Even the official Opposition now recognise that the regional apparatus and the regional strategies are not the way forward, so there is a strong consensus in favour of a more localist approach. Unless and until the Bill is enacted, which I hope will not take too long, the frustrations that my hon. Friend describes will continue for what I hope will be just a few more months.

I hope local people are already preparing for the new world that is about to dawn. The Bill includes neighbourhood planning. On the possibility of projecting a vision for the future in their communities, the Bill gives every neighbourhood the chance to put together a local plan which for the first time will have teeth. It will become part of the development plan if a majority of the local population in that neighbourhood vote for it and it is found to be a sound and reasonable plan. The ability to adopt a neighbourhood plan will come with the Localism Bill and its commencement.

I hope communities such as the one in Mile End described by my hon. Friend are already thinking about the shape of their neighbourhood plan and beginning to do some of the research and the consultations. I am looking forward to my visit to Colchester, and after the debate I will be happy to get in touch with my hon. Friend to see whether some of the communities in his constituency might want to work with my Department and become front runners for some of the neighbourhood planning provisions so that they can have a head start and other communities around the country can learn from that. I hope they will be on the starting grid, ready to move as soon as the powers come in.

As my hon. Friend knows, there was a commitment, which was initially promoted by our hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood), to introduce a designation for valued community green space that should be available to communities to protect. There have been some problems with the village green procedures and definitions, but we have made a commitment to consult on a designation that can be part of local and neighbourhood plans, and we will be consulting on that shortly. We know that green spaces are incredibly important to local life. We are committed to protecting them, but the people who can best identify them are not Ministers or officials in central Government but the people living in those communities who know what is needed there.

Given the importance of green spaces to the health and happiness of local communities, I hope my hon. Friend’s communities are already thinking about the green spaces that they may want to avail themselves of the opportunity to list, to give them greater confidence in the future. There are various other rights in the Localism Bill, including the right to identify land that is of community value, so that if it is ever sold and has been in community use, the community will have the chance to make a bid to take it over and keep it in community use.

My hon. Friend mentioned the big tree plant campaign, and I am glad that he personally takes part in it. As ever with these things, he has pre-empted what has become coalition policy by having his own personal commitment to it. Significant progress has been made: 100,000 trees have been planted in the first six months and we know, here in central London, how tree planting softens the urban environment.

Many steps are being taken. Planning is key, but I hope that some of the reforms I have mentioned and some of the approaches that we are taking to protect green space, to empower communities and to make better use of that green space will encourage my hon. Friend and his constituents and show that we have already made some progress. The change regarding gardens is a big step in that direction and the tree planting is another. With the enactment of the Localism Bill will come new rights that cannot be taken away from local communities.

I am very grateful to have had the opportunity to speak on a subject that I feel as passionately about as my hon. Friend, and I take this opportunity to wish you, Mr Speaker, and all Officers of the House, as well as our colleagues, a very happy and enjoyable summer break.

Question put and agreed to.

Localism Bill

Debate between Bob Russell and Greg Clark

Monday 17th January 2011 Commons Chamber

[Greg Clark]

If the hon. Gentleman is under any illusion that this is not a Bill that transfers power to people, he should talk to the coalition of voluntary and community organisations that this very day launched a campaign to ensure that the Bill is not watered down by the amendments he would suggest.

If this is the occasion when the Labour party converts to the cause of localism, it has a long way to go. The right hon. Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint) implied—breathtakingly—that when in government her party had tried to localise power. Even the Leader of the Opposition does not believe that. He said in his leadership campaign that the Labour Government looked down their nose at local government. So much for conversion! The hon. Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey) said that the Labour party downgraded the role of local government when in office. First base for the right hon. Lady is to admit that her party got it wrong in the past—I thought that was what her leader tried to do this weekend—in order then to point in the right direction.

[Bob Russell]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that passing power down from the centre includes passing powers from county halls to town halls, where we have the two levels of local government?

[Greg Clark]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The process we are engaged in gives a lot of power to local authorities, but, equally, imposes obligations on them to share their power with communities. That is the right approach.

The Opposition’s response, as expressed in the right hon. Lady’s speech, represents a split—they have not made up their minds. The right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears) said that there was a schism in the Government. Far from it! We are emphatic about the need for the Bill. However, there is a schism in the Labour party because it is advancing two arguments: that the Bill is secret centralisation and that the powers that the Secretary of State is taking represent a covert attempt to recentralise—[Interruption.] The hon. Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan) applauds. Other hon. Members, however, argued that this is a charter for dangerous nimbyism. Which is it? Is it that the Labour party does not trust local people to take decisions on their own behalf, or is it that it fears that Whitehall will lose power? It must make up its mind. Does it just fear any change, does it fear local choice, or does it fear any challenge by the powerless to the powerful?

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Bob Russell and Greg Clark

Monday 17th January 2011 Commons Chamber

[Greg Clark]

No, I do not accept that. The hon. Lady will find that we are encouraging, and indeed empowering, neighbourhoods to come together to develop a vision for their future. Funds will be provided to help them to do that.

[Bob Russell (Colchester) (LD)]

15. If he will make it his policy to introduce a third party right of appeal in the planning system.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Bob Russell and Greg Clark

Thursday 10th June 2010 Commons Chamber

[Bob Russell (Colchester) (LD)]

I welcome the answers given to questions 1 and 4 earlier. What advice and guidance will be given to local authorities, and particularly the Planning Inspectorate, when dealing with applications prior to the new legislation going through?

[Greg Clark]

My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has written to the Planning Inspectorate to inform it that the Government’s stated policy on such matters is now a material consideration when it reviews applications that have been made and gone to appeal.