Neighbourhood Planning Bill (Fifth sitting)

Chris Philp Excerpts

Committee Debate: 5th sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 25th October 2016 Public Bill Committees

[Dr Blackman-Woods]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point that is pertinent to our discussion.

[Chris Philp (Croydon South) (Con)]

The hon. Lady is very kind to give way, and it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bone. In response to the suggestion made by the hon. Member for Oldham West and Royton, if one requires developers to do all the surveys before the application, and the application is then declined by the local authority, the developer will incur significant costs to no purpose. That may prove prohibitive, particularly for smaller developers. What is her view on that?

[Dr Blackman-Woods]

I am sure the hon. Gentleman knows that local authorities approve nine out of 10 planning applications. It would be a rare event for such a detailed plan to come forward to a local authority without the developer knowing that it was breaching local planning policy. That is what must be happening if the application is rejected. That is not a very usual occurrence these days.

If the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton and the Minister are serious about speeding up development, they might want to look at the outcome of the FMB’s house builders survey 2016. One would assume, from reading the Bill, that the major problem in bringing forward development was pre-commencement planning conditions. However, when the small house builders were asked what was the biggest problem, they said it was the lack of available and viable land. That was the most commonly cited barrier to increasing output. We have to look right at the back of the survey, to a few specific questions on planning, to find any mention of planning conditions, and even then they were not the biggest problem; the biggest problem was the inadequate resourcing of planning departments. I hate to say that again and reinforce the message, but we are not the ones saying it; it is the small house builders.

Land is the biggest problem by far, and pre-commencement conditions do not come anywhere near that. Within planning itself, the biggest problem is the resourcing of planning departments—and that comment came only after prompting. They do not mention the setting of planning conditions at all; what they mention is sign-off of planning conditions. That seems to be a very different issue that they are raising. They are not raising an issue about the nature of pre-commencement planning conditions, or whether those conditions are appropriate. What they say in the text is that they could be signed off more quickly and that might help. Why are they not signed off more quickly? It is because of a lack of resourcing for local authority planning departments.

That was the only survey brought to our attention. I searched and found no other evidence, apart from the opinions of some of the larger volume builders. Giving such additional powers to the Secretary of State with no solid evidence base does not seem a very sensible way forward.

Some clauses in the Bill do not have the worrying aspects attached to them that this one does. If the effect of clause 7 is to restrict conditions that are set on developers, that could have a real impact on the community—not only on those who will ultimately occupy that development but on the neighbourhood. That is why we are so concerned about clause 7. We do not think it is necessary; we have not seen the evidence base. If the Bill is to contain such drastic measures, which could have real impacts on the areas that we all serve and represent, we need to hear something from the Minister.

Amendment 18 seeks to amend clause 7 so that if a condition cannot be enforced by the Secretary of State to make the development acceptable in planning terms, it makes the development unacceptable in other ways. Proposed section 100ZA(2) states:

“Regulations under subsection (1) may make provision only if (and in so far as) the Secretary of State is satisfied that the provision is appropriate for the purposes of ensuring that any condition imposed on a grant of planning permission for the development of land in England is...necessary to make the development acceptable in planning terms”.

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[Helen Hayes]

I am arguing, first, that the scale of the problem is not nearly as great as the Government say, and secondly, that where there is a problem it is a symptom of the lack of resourcing in planning departments—the primary cause of that problem—not a problem in its own right. Therefore, the Government should be directing their energy towards the resourcing of local planning departments. I have argued many times that local authorities should be able to recover the full cost of resourcing and development management services through the fees they charge for those services. That proposal has broad support from the development industry, local planning departments and the organisations that represent local government in London and across the country. It would be a far better place to start the debate than clause 7.

As we have heard from many witnesses, there are circumstances where pre-commencement conditions are welcomed by developers, and where there is flexibility to agree some details when finance has been secured on the basis of a planning application, or when more is known about the site due to site investigations that take place in the earlier stages of a scheme. Last week, I sat down with several representatives of the local community and a developer who is bringing forward a very sensitive scheme in my constituency. The planning permission for the site in question was a detailed consent secured by a previous landowner who used that consent to sell the site on; that was a controversial issue in its own right.

Last week we met the developer, which did not take part in the planning application process for the site that it has now inherited. In that case, there are pre-commencement conditions on materials and archaeology. It is entirely right and proper that the developer has the opportunity to consider those conditions and make proposals to the local authority for those conditions to be discharged before development commences.

[Chris Philp]

In the hon. Lady’s example, did not the new owner have ample opportunity to consider those pre-commencement conditions before the purchase of the site? If they did not like the conditions, they could simply have not purchased the site.

[Helen Hayes]

That is a rather blunt and not nuanced enough understanding of how such things work in practice. Last week, the developer met with the community —a vociferous community who feel very strongly about the site. That conversation will enable the developer to inform the discussions and plans for some important detailed aspects of the scheme. That is entirely the right order of things. It would not have been appropriate for the developer to speak to the community ahead of securing the purchase of the site; the developer would not have had a relationship with the community that allowed such a conversation. The way that things are progressing is entirely right and timely; it is not leading to any delay in bringing forward the site in question.

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[Chris Philp]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Gavin Barwell]

I will give way once more; then I want to look at the specific example of flooding, talk about the consultation document and discuss the amendments.

[Chris Philp]

I have a genuine question on which I should be grateful for the Minister’s thoughts. If we proceed as per the clause as drafted, and the applicant has to agree in writing to the pre-commencement conditions, what if the applicant—the developer—unreasonably refuses to agree to any of the pre-commencement conditions, in order to frustrate them? What would happen in that circumstance?

[Gavin Barwell]

I am sure that my hon. Friend never asks anything but genuine questions. The answer is very clear. In those circumstances, the local authority would be able to refuse permission for the development. If the pre-commencement condition that the applicant sought to resist was an entirely legitimate one of the kind we have already discussed, and if the applicant appealed, the Planning Inspectorate would turn down their appeal.

[Chris Philp]

Just to be clear, any condition that a local authority feels strongly about has to be imposed as part of the main planning condition. It has to accept that anything that it does not put into the main planning condition, it cannot subsequently impose.

[Gavin Barwell]

Pre-commencement conditions must be agreed with the applicant. If the applicant is not willing to agree to a legitimate condition, without which the authority does not feel the application would be acceptable, the application should be refused. The authority absolutely has the right to refuse such an application. I put it on record that I expect the Planning Inspectorate to back up the decisions of local councils when it judges that such a condition is perfectly reasonable to make a development acceptable. I hope that any developer silly enough to play those games will quickly learn that lesson through the appeals process.

What we want is good practice; my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton made that point powerfully. We want applicants and councils to sit down together and work out what legitimate pre-commencement issues are. We have no problem at all with such issues being used for pre-commencement conditions, but we want to stop them being abused.

The hon. Member for City of Durham used the instructive example of flooding. The test seems to me to be one of reasonableness. She used the phrase “There may not be evidence”. Local authorities are in difficult circumstances if there is no evidence to back up what they seek to do. However, if there is evidence of genuine concerns, that is clearly a legitimate and material planning consideration.

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[Dr Blackman-Woods]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point about the various surveys that the Minister mentioned, which I was about to come to.

[Chris Philp]

I was about to draw the hon. Lady’s attention to the extensive list of submissions that the Minister read out in his speech a few minutes ago. Perhaps I might add my own experience. As I mentioned in my declaration of interests, prior to being elected I ran a business that provided finance for construction projects. The whole array of pre-commencement conditions are often very detailed. For example, they frequently stipulate precisely what kind of brick must be used and it often takes a very long time to get discharged. The pre-commencement conditions are often more detailed than one would reasonably expect.

With respect to the shadow Minister, I do think there is an issue here and that the Minister is trying to address it in a balanced and reasonable way.

[Dr Blackman-Woods]

In which case, what I would say is that we need the evidence in front of us. What examples are there? In how many sets of circumstances? How and why are the conditions inappropriate? In a conservation area, for example, the type of brick would be an important pre-commencement condition.

The evidence from Knight Frank was an assertion that there was a problem because we had no details and no number of applications—nothing. The Crest Nicholson example was a problem with signing off pre-commencement conditions and we on the Labour Benches have already said we recognise that is a problem. The signing off of pre-commencement conditions is a very different issue from the setting of conditions, and the clause is about the setting of planning conditions.

In the NHBC survey, the primary problem identified was again the time taken to discharge the conditions, not the conditions themselves. That was also the primary concern in the District Councils Network survey. We are not saying there is no evidence out there of problems signing off pre-commencement conditions—