Chris Philp
Main Page: Chris Philp (Conservative - Croydon South)Neighbourhood Planning Bill (First sitting)
Chris Philp ExcerptsTuesday 18th October 2016
(7 years, 6 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Neighbourhood Planning Act 2017 View all Neighbourhood Planning Act 2017 Debates Read Hansard Text Amendment Paper: Public Bill Committee Amendments as at 18 October 2016 - (18 Oct 2016)
Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)
I should mention that I employ a local authority council member in my parliamentary team.
Chris Philp (Croydon South) (Con)
I should draw colleagues’ attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I am a shareholder in a business that provides finance for construction projects.
Helen Hayes
Q I am a member of the Select Committee on Communities and Local Government, and yesterday we heard evidence from a range of witnesses within the sector, including from the Federation of Master Builders and the Home Builders Federation, about the lack of resource and capacity in local authority planning departments. It was suggested in that evidence session that the reported overuse of pre-commencement planning conditions is a symptom of a lack of resource in planning departments, rather than a wilful misuse of pre-commencement conditions on the part of local authorities. Will you comment on your experience of the resourcing issues in local authority planning departments?
Andrew Dixon: We would certainly agree that under-resourcing is one of the major drivers behind the high level of use of planning conditions. The strong perception among our members is that planning conditions are often being used to limit the necessity of engaging in detail with a full application. Among the things that often arise from that are planning conditions that have actually been covered in the full application. An example of that would be landscaping. I have heard a number of our members say that detailed landscaping plans were included in their full application but that there did not seem to be any engagement with it, there then being a condition to bring forward those details. Under-resourcing is a major issue that causes numerous hold-ups within the system, and we think it is one of the drivers behind the excessive use of conditions.
Ross Murray: This is very profound in rural planning authorities, which are significantly under-resourced in planning. Our members around the country see that all the time. The Committee must also have a mind to the resource of the applicant and the risks within the process. We should do anything that we can to provide certainty of process after the application has been determined, and when an applicant finds that the pre-commencement conditions just do not work for him. In a rural context, these are often low-return projects, and the planning process is the highest risk point at the start of the process.
Andrew Whitaker: It is very much a chicken-and-egg situation. If local authorities do not put enough resources into determining a planning application, the temptation is—rather lazily, in my opinion—to deal with everything via condition, rather than as part of the primary application. If authorities focused their resources on what needed to be done as part of the application, they would need to condition less. That would relieve them of having to discharge conditions, which can take just as many resources as the primary application. Therefore, we think that local authorities should reassess their systems and processes to focus their limited resources into the right parts of the process.
Chris Philp
Q I would like to continue the line of questioning on resourcing and planning departments that Helen Hayes started. Mr Dixon, you said earlier that the lack of resourcing in planning departments was the No. 1 impediment to getting more applications. Will you confirm that that was the case?
Andrew Dixon: That was the case.
Chris Philp
Q Mr Murray said that certainty of process was the most important thing. Would your members or the development community be willing to pay for further resources in local authority planning departments by way of higher planning fees if, in exchange, they had guaranteed service levels—that is, the extra planning fee would be refundable if the service level was not met? Are you willing to pay to remedy the problem you are highlighting?
Andrew Dixon: The overwhelming feeling of our members is that they are quite happy to pay a higher application fee as long as those resources are ring-fenced and go into a demonstrably improved service. There would be very little resistance to that.
Chris Philp
Q It is relatively rare to find people volunteering to pay more money.
Andrew Dixon: It is fairly standard in any walk of life that people are prepared to pay more for a better service. Our members are no different in that sense.
Ross Murray: From my perspective, I would agree. Delay is risk; risk is money.
Roy Pinnock: The BPF’s position is absolutely in agreement with that. It has set that out in its response to technical consultations. There are issues of how the application is structured, indexation, inflation, and the linking of that fee not just for authorities that are performing well, but for those that are under real pressure for other reasons. There is a general consensus, particularly among commercial development investors, that you get what you pay for. There is a completely profound lack of resource in authorities to deal with the situation in which we find ourselves. It is the single biggest brake on development, in terms of applications and starts on site, in my experience as a practitioner.
Chris Philp
Q What level of fee uplift, compared to today’s levels, would your members or the development community be willing to pay if a guaranteed service level—an application determined within x period—was associated with that fee uplift? Give us a feel for the quantum.
Roy Pinnock: I might just duck that question, like any true lawyer. The critical point is that we are very used to planning performance agreements, and to guaranteed service levels being offered and assumed, and then not being delivered. There is sympathy for the reasons for that, not least because applications are complex. Local people’s relationship with planning is complex, and quite rightly so, as we are making difficult decisions. Probably the worst thing, from an applicant’s point of view, is that a guaranteed committee date is set and you do not get that committee. You then go into the long grass, and that is used to ransom the applicant. Concessions are made throughout the application process to get to that committee.
Chris Philp
Q So if the fee uplift was refundable if the date got missed, would that give comfort?
Roy Pinnock: It would and the planning guarantee should achieve that currently. The BPF would support that planning guarantee being amended, which would require the application regulations to be changed. The original idea of the planning guarantee was that you should determine either way—refuse if it is a rubbish scheme or approve if it is a great scheme. Within 25 weeks there should be certainty. That certainty is crucial to everyone.
How the planning guarantee works at the moment is that where there is an agreed extension of time, it drops away entirely. It is not the case that if you agree to extend the time to enable a sensible dialogue about the detail of planning application matters, and then that extension fails to deliver a result, you go back to the position of being able to claw back the application fee. What happens, for no good reason, is that it kills off altogether the ability to rely on the planning guarantee. That is completely wrong and undermines the whole purpose and intended effect of the guarantee. In our view, that should be amended so that the system has real teeth.
Chris Philp
Q Am I right in thinking that the current planning agreements apply only to large applications? The planning agreements that can already be entered into do not currently help small applications, so one could also introduce that.
Roy Pinnock: Yes, although there is another resourcing issue around entering into and administering planning performance agreements. There is a cultural shift that needs to go on around how applications are project- managed. That is true of the commercial sector, in terms of how it approaches negotiating section 106 agreements, when it looks at conditions in the application process and how much it is prepared to take things on at the earliest stage.
There is also an issue around how to programme-manage people’s diaries. Within an authority, you need sign-off from transport, the education aspect of the authority and housing officers. At the moment, you cannot get a meeting. I have waited three months for an authority to sit down. We said, “Look, there’s no point us sending ping-pong emails on this agreement because you keep telling us everything is not agreed. We just want to sit around the table with everyone and understand your views.” That is impossible, and it is partly due to the chaos, unfortunately, that is going on because of the multiple restructurings and the lack of resource.
Chris Philp
Q Are you satisfied that section 106 agreements, which are currently entered into after planning permission is granted, are adequate? It can take a long time to agree them. Are you satisfied that they are adequately addressed by the Bill or not? Do you think that they can still be a source of delay?
Roy Pinnock: They can be a source of delay, but equally, they are highly sophisticated tools for development. I will give you one example: the North Greenwich peninsula. There are 15,000 new homes approved on public land, despite the number of parties involved: the Greater London Authority, the developer and the Royal Borough of Greenwich. That took place within three months of the planning board.
There are other examples. I have just done two schemes further south and west in the country, and it has taken more than a year to get from committee resolution to approval to planning consent. It depends very much how that is approached, but fundamentally, far too much is in section 106 agreements. Much more should be in planning conditions. The Housing and Planning Act 2016 provides a mechanism for a dispute resolution service. We think that should be used in the same way as the appeal that we have spoken about in relation to section 100ZA to provide recourse where planning obligations are used unnecessarily.
Chris Philp
Q Should we make section 106 part of the main planning application so that the whole thing gets dealt with in an expeditious fashion in one go?
Roy Pinnock: The difficulty with that, from a practical point of view, is that there should be dialogue about what needs to go into that agreement. It is fine to do a first draft, but there is a dialogue in planning applications. Other witnesses will have a contribution on this as well.
Chris Philp
Q Yes, but dialogue can happen in pre-app.
Roy Pinnock: Yes. No plan survives contact with reality. There is always dialogue. There should be dialogue in planning; it is fundamental. I think BPF members value pre-application discussions but recognise that once you are in the mix, having submitted the application, the most important thing is how you project and programme-manage those discussions so that you know when local authority resources are available. The crucial thing is that we preserve the ability to have a sensible dialogue about quality, but drain off some of the issues involving technical things, which can be addressed by model planning obligations and model conditions.
Andrew Dixon: Just to pick up on a couple of points, you asked about the use of PPAs on small sites. They are not normally used on small sites—they are probably too clunky and an inappropriate tool for small sites—but we think there would be value in a standard, very basic, perhaps one-page agreement for covering small sites that would perform the role of some kind of service level agreement against which the applicant can hold the planning authority.
Chris Philp
Q So if I pay a higher fee, then this is a service I get in return?
Andrew Dixon: You could have that range or, whatever fee you pay, you could have an agreed service level that the planning authority has to meet—
Chris Philp
Q Without extra resources, there will not be any extra service, and extra resources mean more money.
Andrew Dixon: No, and in response to your other question, I cannot put a figure on how much more our members would be prepared to pay, but the planning application fee is a fairly small proportion of the total cost of moving forward a planning application. For an improved service, they would be prepared to pay more.
Chris Philp
Excellent.
Ross Murray: Can I take the Committee on a journey from the Greenwich peninsula, with applications for 15,000 homes, to the barn conversion, which is my members’ domain? The concept that someone would instruct lawyers, pay for the authority’s legal department and negotiate a section 106 agreement for a very small, low-value application beforehand is just not practical. There is not time and it will load risk and cost on to the applicant, so I think there are probably circumstances when the section 106 agreement will follow after the determination of the resolution to grant.
Chris Philp
Q Finally, on the question of pre-commencements, are there any particular conditions or parts of the planning process that you think are particularly onerous or absurd and would like to draw the Committee’s attention to? It might be anything to do with great crested newts, for example, without wishing to lead the witnesses.
Andrew Whitaker: No. It is possible to discuss everything. It is right that we have conditions that control various things that are not controlled in the planning application, but as I said before, people should be focusing on what is in the application and what the applicant is going to do to mitigate all the concerns on any subject. We frequently find that the mitigation that is proposed in the planning application itself is ignored. A planning condition is placed on the decision notice and the applicant then resubmits the self-same evidence that they submitted as part of the planning application and it is approved under discharge of planning conditions. That is a total nonsense. It is absolutely right that we take a lot of things into account. A lot of people are engaged in the planning application process.
I am interested in the evidence from your questioning of the other witnesses in respect of whether people pay for a better service and whether they get one. Small applications already have a PPA. Those are statutory timetables within which local authorities need to determine a planning application, and they get a fee for that.
Chris Philp
Q If the LPA breaks that, no consequence flows from it, other than a bad statistic in its report.
Andrew Whitaker: Absolutely, and we have suggested in various documents that a staged payment process of all the planning application fees would be better, because the other thing that your questions draw attention to is that there are lots of stages of a development, and not just the tiny part that is the planning application and/or the conditioning of that planning decision. We are also talking about allocations of site in local plans and in neighbourhood plans—the other part of the Bill—and then pre-application discussions, the application discharge conditions and section 106 agreements. All those things need to be looked at in the round, rather than merely focusing on a tiny little part and asking, “Would you pay more for a planning application fee?”. It is a very simple approach but it does not have a very simple answer.
Roy Pinnock: Just to round that off, where those additional fees are ring-fenced for the planning service—either where they are going into a smaller application so that an officer who might be a specialist in the 15,000-unit scheme, but who is dealing with smaller but no less valuable schemes, is freed up, or where they are funding on a locum basis, or however we need to deal with this problem—we should use that fee. We should ring-fence it and use it to allocate resource. I think the industry would probably support that. You get what you pay for, in that sense, and I think that is more important than the idea that we have a specific set of milestones, which may well be missed, just because that’s life.
We need to know that we have someone dealing with the application, that they have read all the papers and are not going to get switched over, that they understand the ecological mitigation because they have read, unfortunately, the three habitat surveys that have been done, and that they can have that conviction, because it comes from a deep knowledge of these complex schemes. At the moment, we have a real crisis in dealing with these applications, because we do not have the deep knowledge available. Unfortunately, with the best will in the world, this is a resource issue.
Ross Murray: May I come back to your point about newts, Chair? Newts and bats are totemic in rural England and Wales in the planning process. I offer you a personal story about an application for a barn conversion. Thieves came and stole the slate roof. There was no roof and, therefore, there were no bats. The planning authority insisted on the bat survey—and there we were, £1,000 later.
Mrs Theresa Villiers (Chipping Barnet) (Con)
Q I possibly take a slightly different view from my colleague of newts and bats. There is some anxiety about the Bill, probably based on a misunderstanding of what the changes on pre-commencement conditions actually involve, so this discussion is very helpful from that point of view. I have constituents who are keen to see local authorities retain the power to ensure that proper surveys are done in relation to wildlife and archaeological heritage. From what I understand from the debate on Second Reading and from what you have said today, the planning authorities will retain the power to impose conditions of that kind; there will just be a change in how that is done to ensure that it involves the developer at an earlier stage and does not necessarily have to happen right at the start, before the whole process has begun.
Mr Whitaker, can you explain, in simple terms, at what stage of the process surveys of that kind can be required? I can then reassure my constituents that the Bill will not prevent an archaeological survey if it is necessary, and that the aim is to ensure that it happens in a way that causes less delay and cost to developments. It is obviously important to ensure that such work is done before a final decision is made on a planning application.
Andrew Whitaker: You are absolutely right and we agree with you. There are many stages in the planning process at which a local planning authority can reflect the community, in many instances, by asking what are the important things that need to be considered as part of the development of a site. They can do that when they allocate the site in a local plan—they can set out various matters that will need to be addressed as part of the development. That can be done by the community themselves at a neighbourhood plan level; it can be done as part of the pre-application and consultation discussion, with the potential applicant, of the issues that the local authority will want to be addressed via the planning application process; and it can then be discussed as part of the planning application process itself, prior to a decision being made. It can also be addressed as part of a planning condition attached to the planning permission.
At all those stages, one can quite legitimately raise any issue that one sees as being key to the planning decision, whether that is archaeology, bats and newts, or any other issue—for example, drainage is often seen as causing delay. Some of those issues will be so critical to whether the development is allowed to go ahead that they should, of course, be addressed very early on in the planning process.
If my local plan allocated a site but said, “This is a difficult site to drain. We will want to see all drainage details sorted out as part of the planning application. We are not going to leave this to a planning condition because it is fundamental to how much development you are allowed to put on the site, depending on your drainage scheme”, the developer would accept that as a constraint and would submit a detailed drainage scheme with their planning application. It is up to the local planning authority to then say, “Okay, this is an important issue for this site. Is the proposed drainage system capable of mitigating the drainage issues and should we approve the planning application on the basis of the scheme submitted with it?” The problem we see is that a lot of local authorities say, “We haven’t got time to do that now. We will make a planning condition that says that, prior to the commencement of the development, we want to agree a drainage system for the site.”
As I have previously explained, frequently, all that happens is that you submit exactly the same drainage system as was submitted with the planning application, or the same mitigation for wildlife, or the same detail that you knew was critical to the determination of your planning application later down the line as a pre-commencement planning condition, rather than it being sorted out as part of the original planning application. We think there are lots and lots of points along the planning journey at which the things that are key to the development of sites can be sorted out. The Bill does not change that at all.
Dr Blackman-Woods
Q Do you think that the measures in the Bill change the balance of power more towards the developer, and what are the risks with that? We have not yet talked this morning of the risks, particularly in clause 7.
Hugh Ellis: Pursuing that point, it is an issue about whether you end up with a planning system whose primary purpose is the efficient allocation of units or a wider endeavour around place-making and inclusion. Although it seems like a good idea because it is difficult to defend inefficiency or apparent inefficiency when it is thrown up, really good place-making requires good dialogue with developers, but also strong control from local government and an empowered local government to ensure that community visions are truly delivered.
The system has been weakened—permitted development is one example of that—and the Bill needs to strike the right balance. I suppose that if it went forward, the safeguard would be, and would need to be in the wider system, the place-making objective, otherwise we would find a series of outcomes that potentially have very long-term and serious impacts on everything from public health to wider economic efficiency.
Councillor Newman: I agree with that. As I said earlier, the Bill would potentially build in a more confrontational approach, and we would lose that ability to have a place-making and sustainability overview of a development, along with the benefits and perhaps future development to come.
Somebody mentioned permitted development. We have certainly seen the flip-side of that. Where permitted development has sometimes let rip, we have seen poor-quality provision of homes—perhaps people do not have any choice in a market such as London. Permitted development has proved not to be the answer. At one point, I think, half the permitted development in London was happening in Croydon. We got an article 4 direction for Croydon town centre, and we were able to protect what is now thriving business use and office space, so permitted development was not only delivering poor-quality planning outcomes but threating our local economy by damaging a space that is now at a premium for investment in jobs.
All that would reinforce my view that you need a holistic approach where possible. That is not to be naïve—there will always be confrontation in the system, but to build it in at the start seems to me to be the wrong approach, and in the LGA’s view it is an unnecessary further layer of legislation or red tape in the process.
Duncan Wilson: It seems to me that there are two issues. One is the imposition of unnecessary conditions and the other is the time taken to discharge conditions. I have been on the other side of the table too as, in effect, the developer of a number of major heritage schemes in London, and inasmuch as we had any trouble, it was to do with the time taken to discharge conditions, which was largely related to the people and resource within the local authority—it is simply a matter of getting people up to the place to tick the box and see that we had done what was required of us. The same applies to a whole load of other things such as building regulations.
On the imposition of unnecessary conditions, the local authority has to be reasonable already—if it is felt that unnecessary conditions are being imposed, it is challengeable. I worry that the proposed new system will lead the local authority to have to make a choice early on as to whether it wants to impose a condition that would be challenged—the application could be turned down and the condition challenged again. That whole system would surely take longer than arguing about the condition and determining whether to impose it at the beginning.
Angus Walker: In line with the other speakers, I think that the planning system is a balance. Although economic growth is important and development contributes to that, it still has to be in the right context and have regard to social and environmental factors.
I can see that, if an applicant and a local planning authority cannot agree on a condition, in some cases the planning authority will refuse permission, which may be appealed and then allowed. In others, the authority will agree the application without the condition in it, even though it might have been one that ought to have been imposed. In answer to your question, it seems to me that there is a slight increase in the balance being weighed towards applicants by the measure.
Chris Philp
Q Good morning. One of the speakers briefly touched on this. What is the panellists’ opinion about whether planning departments in local authorities are adequately resourced to deal with the kind of issues we are discussing—pre-commencement conditions and the determination of applications?
Councillor Newman: Local government has taken more than its fair share of efficiency savings in the past few years and has faced serious cuts. Planning has to be properly resourced: the LGA would put forward the figure of £150 million a year for the planning department, which is effectively subsidised by the council tax payer. The British Property Federation—two thirds of it anyway—supports the view that they would rather see a contribution that meant it was properly resourced and not subsidised by the taxpayer, and there are always issues around recruitment. Many planning departments work well but are stretched to the limit. There are extra pressures and other challenges in growth areas. I do not just want to sit here and say that more resources are needed, but local government is operating on tight budgets after year-on-year decreases in our budgets.
Chris Philp
Q Will other members of the panel comment on the resourcing question: do you think local authority planning departments are adequately resourced bearing in mind the demands being placed on them?
Duncan Wilson: In relation to archaeology, it very much depends on the archaeological advice rather than the planning department. Some local authorities have that advice, but in the past few years there has been a reduction of around 30% in the volume of archaeological advice directly available to local authorities. There is no straight-line relationship between the quality of the advice, its timeliness and the number of hours that the local authority has, but obviously there is a relationship. There is also the question of conservation offices, which is another specialist area where there has been a significant decline in local authority resources. It would be counterintuitive to suggest that there is no relationship between the volume of resources available to the local authority in terms of its planning department and conservation and archaeological advice, and the timeliness of turning casework around, but it is not quite as simple as that.
Hugh Ellis: I am trying to choose my words carefully based on research we have just carried out on the production of local plans. The research showed that planning teams had fallen below the critical mass capable of delivering a local plan effectively in the rural areas that we looked at that were at severe risk of flooding. In some of those authorities we visited, we found 1.2 full-time equivalent members of staff were working on a local plan process, which I found quite shocking. There is no fixed limit for how many people you need in a planning department, but minimum service levels are a critical issue, both establishing them effectively and resourcing them properly.
What struck me about your discussion with previous witnesses was that, while fees could be increased—that is an option—there are low-demand areas where not many applications are submitted. Those applications would not attract much fee income but would require significant planning services, particularly in those areas trying to deal with the aftermath of significant severe weather and flood risk. Cumbria is one of those places.
There is a crisis in the planning service—it is not everywhere because some urban areas have sustained resource—that overwhelmingly affects efficiency and the quality of neighbourhood planning service that the community receives. That is probably the single biggest thing for us as an organisation presented to us by applicants and communities about the state of the modern local planning process in England.
Angus Walker: I do not think there is any question that a large number of local authorities are not adequately resourced in their planning departments.
Chris Philp
Sorry, can you say that again?
Angus Walker: A large number of local authorities—perhaps not all—are not adequately resourced.
Chris Philp
Q The previous group of witnesses, who by and large represented the property development industry, appeared unanimously to support the idea of paying higher planning fees for some kind of guaranteed service level—for a determination within a particular time. If that target was not met, the extra planning fee might be refunded. Do panel members think that that might be one way of getting extra financial resources into local authority planning departments? If one proposed that idea, the Chancellor would probably say—I am putting words in his mouth—“The danger is that you put the extra money into the planning department, and the council reduces its subsidy, to spend it on something else, so the total amount of money stays the same; it just comes from applicants, rather than the subsidy.” If you do think extra planning fees for a guaranteed service is a good idea, how do you prevent existing resource being diverted to another part of the council’s activities? I suppose that is a question for Councillor Newman.
Councillor Newman: As you alluded to, if there was a different planning fee, there would be some relationship with, or expectation relating to, the outcome. I think what you are asking is whether it would be ring-fenced. There is a way of doing that without getting into the ring-fenced budget piece. The other position on that, the LGA would say—I welcome the question in that sense—is to have locally set planning fees. That would involve people who know an area, know what the demand is, and know what the recruitment issues are for the planning department in one area, vis-à-vis another. Then it would be for the local authority to justify both the fees it charges and the outcomes of the service it offers. Locally set planning fees and, related to them, performance indicators on how the process works—that is something that should be explored.
Chris Philp
Q Would you support the specific idea of extra planning fees conditional on service delivery?
Councillor Newman: I have to be careful what I support. I represent LGA policy here. There is a principle in the line of questioning you are asking. I think there is a way forward around locally set planning fees related to an expectation of the service one gets. That would be a step forward in terms of localism, and democratic accountability locally for the performance of the planning department.
Chris Philp
Q Do you accept that there is a danger that if you allowed local authorities to charge higher planning fees, you would at the same time have to stop them from simply diverting existing financial resources elsewhere, in order to make sure that you got an increase in total resource level in the planning department?
Councillor Newman: I do not think it would be beyond somebody to construct the model, but the key test would be the outcome—whether the planning process was working well, or was speeded up, depending on what the local challenge was.
Chris Philp
Q Can I invite other panel members to comment on that exchange?
Duncan Wilson: In the Historic England context, clearly the issue of hypothecation is really important. My colleague has said more or less what I would want to say on that. However, it is probably worth noting that Historic England has operated something called enhanced advisory services for the last year or so on more or less that basis. If it is worth your while as a developer, you can buy a tighter outcome, in terms of deadlines and delivery, and a more detailed assessment in relation to listed buildings and scheduled monuments. That has been introduced with the encouragement of the development industry, on the whole, and the British Property Federation.
Chris Philp
Q Have you found them coming forward and saying that they would like to pay these higher planning fees?
Duncan Wilson: Exactly. It can be consensual, because the cost of a planning application, certainly in the sorts of services that we provide in relation to listed buildings, is a tiny percentage of a major development project.
Hugh Ellis: I would add that there are two problems here; it is partly the planning service in local authorities, but I would not want us to completely ignore the fact that there is also a crisis in the number of planners. There is direct investment in planning schools that we also need to get right. There is a major recruitment problem in local government, not just in being able to afford planners, but in finding them. We need to take a wider step back and look at how we bring planners through the process. It is also about the messages you send to young people about why planning is important and why it might be a career that they want to take up. That is important.
Chris Philp
Q One of the challenges is that local authorities lose planning experts to private practice, because private practice can afford to pay more, and because local authorities are very stretched, so it is a slightly stressful and harassed environment to work in. The resource issue might partly address the brain drain to private practice.
Angus Walker: Undoubtedly, if you pay more for dedicated resources, you will get a better service. My concern would be that those who made applications and had not paid any more would get a worse service as a consequence. Maybe the diversion of funds would be a consequence of that. It would not necessarily be more money in the system that everyone would benefit from.
Chris Philp
Q Of course, you would still have the statutory time targets, and if you increased total resource levels, it may most directly benefit those paying more, but it might have wider benefits as well, even to applicants who were not paying the extra fees.
Angus Walker: It is possible, but in my field, it is not financial deadlines—we have time deadlines in some areas, and not in others. The ones that have a decision required, statutorily, in a certain length of time get their decisions within that time; the others probably take longer than they otherwise would have done, because more of the resources are devoted to making those decisions on time.
Helen Hayes
Q I have a question for Councillor Newman, and perhaps Hugh Ellis as well. Have either of you undertaken any assessment of the likely additional burden to local planning authorities from the new proposed process in the Bill? Supplementary to that, and following the discussion that was just had about the possibility of applicants paying for an enhanced level of service, might a better system be for local authorities to be able, on a transparent and consultative basis, to charge the full cost of their development management service through fees? One concern I have about the proposal that developers be able to buy in an enhanced level of service is that it is potentially quite difficult for local authorities to manage fluctuating demand, in relation to individual applications. Surely what we actually want is for local authorities to be properly resourced to do the job well for everybody, irrespective of who the applicant is.
Councillor Newman: We do want to be properly resourced anyway, as a starting point. There is a £150 million tax subsidy going in; that would absolutely be the starting point for me, but I still think that this is worth exploring, in terms of the particular recruitment issues we have, because there will never be agreement on what “properly resourced” would be. That is why I would not rule out looking at—I do not like the word “enhanced”. There is something around fast-track and something around some major developments perhaps requiring more resource than other developments, but there is a discussion to be had. One way or another, we have to get more resource into a system that is under-resourced financially, and where in many areas, as we have heard, there are pressures regarding recruitment and staff coming forward.
On the other question you asked, I know the LGA is submitting written evidence later in the week. I have not got figures in front of me to evidence the extra burden, but I think the extra work this would potentially bring round is significant. As colleagues here have said, you could see more refusals, and the whole thing could become mired in a more confrontational process that, by definition, will set planning applications back, rather than them being, where possible, resolved, sometimes in a mature manner.
Hugh Ellis: Just to reiterate, planning is a key service with vital outputs for communities; in that sense, it needs to be resourced properly, and certainly at a minimum level. It also worries me that a lot of this resource in fees would go into development management, leaving open the question of how you fund the rest of the planning service, which is, in some senses, the most important part for us—the development plan, neighbourhood planning and master planning process, and getting it right up front.
On the idea that applicants would pay a fee base for a particular service, and that that would somehow sustain the planning service, there are some real questions to answer. It could be part of the answer—that is absolutely true—but I return to the point, on section 106 and the community infrastructure levy, that there is already, in pure taxation terms, a slightly regressive element to planning: you get most in high-demand areas. If this was another measure that led to that, it would be challenging, partly because the planning system has to deal with all sorts of varied issues. The examples coming in from Cumbria really reinforce that. They need very powerful local plans; how are they to pay for them if the predominant form of income generation is fees from applications that they do not get?