Localism in Planning

Caroline Nokes Excerpts

Wednesday 17th July 2013 Westminster Hall

[Caroline Nokes (Romsey and Southampton North) (Con)]

I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) on a fantastic opening speech. I cannot disagree with a single word of it. I served for 12 years on Test Valley borough council and I commend anyone to serve an apprenticeship on a local planning authority, which can show how vexed the world of planning and politics can be.

I want to make some basic points as briefly as I can. The first is about a brownfield-first policy. In Romsey, we have waited since 1983 for the brewery site, the only major brownfield site in the town, to be developed. At last, there is some real progress, but it has taken 30 years. There must be a far more robust mechanism than the local authority considering compulsory purchase time and again to try to bring it forward, at which point the developer simply suggests more enthusiastically that he was going to build something. It has taken 30 years to get the site developed while greenfield sites on the edge of the town and in surrounding parts of the borough come under immense pressure.

The five-year land supply is incredibly important. In Test Valley borough, developers have competed against one another at appeal to prove that for some reason or other their site will be developable but their competitor’s site will not. At the moment, we have the spectacle of a developer competing against himself to prove that site No. 1, for which planning permission was granted on appeal, needless to say, is not developable so he is bringing forward another one. There is no guarantee that either site will be built on until prices are right and the developer believes he will maximise his profit, so there is an ever-growing land bank. My right hon. Friend may have mentioned that planning permission has been granted for 1 million houses throughout the country, but they are not being built. We must find ways to encourage developers to build on sites with existing planning permission.

The problem is not restricted to rural areas. In Bassett in Southampton, there is no town or parish council, but just a city council and residents’ associations, which work hard to introduce neighbourhood planning. My constituent, Jean Wawman, recently wrote to me saying that developers constantly have the upper hand, and that article 4 directions to control houses in multiple occupation are clunky, cumbersome, time-consuming, and prevent local people from having real control over the character of their neighbourhoods.

Finally—I have only 30 seconds—there is no green belt in Hampshire, save for a small corner in the south-west, which is preventing the spread of the Bournemouth conurbation, which is not even in the same county. In my constituency, greenfield sites without the additional protection of being green belt invariably come under pressure for development, particularly for Traveller sites. That is a huge concern in villages such as Timsbury.

I urge the Minister to think again. There is no such thing in the Test valley as ordinary countryside. It is all extraordinary and deserves protection.