Oral Answers to Questions

Clive Betts Excerpts

Thursday 21st October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Robert Neill]

Localising decision making and planning is central to the Government’s policy. Ministers have made it clear that they will exercise the power to call in only very sparingly where matters of significant national interest and policy are concerned.

[Mr Clive Betts (Sheffield South East) (Lab)]

Is the Minister aware that in looking at the abolition of the regional spatial strategies, the Select Committee is receiving evidence that because those strategies had an evidential base—not merely in respect of house building numbers, but in many other matters on which local development frameworks were based—many local authorities are now having to go back and redo that evidential base at a local level, causing an enormous amount of work and inconvenience to them? Did the Minister take account of those extra burdens when he decided to abolish the regional spatial strategies?

[Robert Neill]

The vast majority of local authorities I have spoken to greatly welcome the abolition of those strategies, which imposed undemocratic targets on them. There is no need to rework the evidence base—it is already there. We have given local authorities the power to revise the figures that were arbitrarily imposed on them from above.