Neighbourhood Planning Bill

Chris Green Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons & Money resolution: House of Commons
Monday 10th October 2016 Commons Chamber

[Chris Green (Bolton West) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Rugby (Mark Pawsey). Since becoming a Member of Parliament, I have found that, rather like the Secretary of State, concerns about planning are by far the most common issue that constituents raise with me, whether it is increasing pressure on local services and transport infrastructure or frustrations with the local council for failing to listen to and act on their concerns. A recent email I received perfectly captured local feelings in just four words: “Enough housing, infrastructure required”.

Planning failures—everything from the daily commute, to people’s children having access to a good local school, to the place where they live having a sense of community— have the greatest impact on peoples’ lives. When building new houses, the focus has too often been on providing new dwellings for newcomers, with an apparent disregard for existing residents. Road networks designed for a village have to cope with the traffic of a town, plus the additional out-of-town traffic thundering through narrow streets. As the demand for housing increases, we must recognise and respond to the challenges that additional housing brings for existing residents, rather than focusing all our attention on creating new residents.

A glaring example of the failure of planning is the A5225 in my constituency, which ought to be serving the local population. Wigan Borough Council has built most of the route that goes through its borough, but Bolton Council has not followed suit. In fact, in Atherton there is a roundabout junction with massive concrete blocks showing where the A5225 should have been continued, and daily we see the problems that its absence creates. There is now a proposal for 1,700 houses to be built over the proposed route of the A5225, thus preventing its completion. That is a double failure that guarantees that road upgrades will be impossible while delivering massive and unsustainable housing development.

Hundreds of constituents replied to my online survey about congestion in Bolton West, and the vast majority of people from Westhoughton thought that a revived plan for the A5225 would be the right solution to our congestion problems. I am currently running a petition, to be presented to Bolton Council, against the proposed 1,700 houses at the Chequerbent roundabout, and it has been signed by over 1,000 local people. This development, and those proposed for Hulton and south of Atherton, will add many thousands of people and cars to the local area. Local opinion is that the council, rather than seeking to fulfil a house building quota, should be playing catch-up for the decades of missing infrastructure.

My constituency is now part of the commuter belt for Manchester, a work destination for other commuters and a place where people further out in Lancashire use the local railway stations for park and ride. That all adds pressures on the local road and rail network that do not seem to have been addressed when each individual housing project is designed and built. The pace of development for transport is lacking considerably in Bolton West. For example, I receive many complaints about the rail service and how capacity can be increased on the line, which takes people from Blackrod, Horwich and Lostock en route to Bolton and Manchester. Although I welcome the electrification that will add 281 new carriages to the local route, with an increased service of 12% by 2019, in the longer term that will not reduce the pressure on services due to an increased population resulting from the additional housing.

I would be grateful if the Minister informed the House what discussions his Department has had with the Department for Transport on what type of housing developments are best for encouraging the use of public transport, and what conclusions have been drawn from this. The right hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb), who is not in his place at the moment, highlighted carbon neutrality as an important part of any new development. A great problem with suburban developments and rolling suburbia is that it is very difficult to have local transport infrastructure—whether buses or railways—that works. We perhaps need to be more mindful of the need to build up and not necessarily always out.

I am pleased that the Bill includes measures to further strengthen neighbourhood planning and to give even more power to local people, but I hope that, by setting ambitious targets to build 1 million homes by 2020, the Government are not creating an environment in which councils—perhaps under pressure from developers—will disregard infrastructure requirements or the opinions of local residents. After all, the original title of the Bill, as introduced in the Queen’s Speech, was the Neighbourhood Planning and Infrastructure Bill, and we should not make a decision on one without being mindful of the other.

Communities need as much certainty as possible about where and when development will take place. I am encouraged that the Bill seeks to increase transparency on the part of the local council, requiring local planning authorities to publish their policies for giving advice and assistance to people preparing or updating neighbourhood plans. At present people have little faith that their council has the bigger picture in mind when several smaller developments are approved without thought to local amenities, while a development that is as large as the sum of those smaller developments would require accompanying infrastructure support. There is much more to be done to give communities—not councils—more rights in the planning process.