Clive Betts
Main Page: Clive Betts (Labour - Sheffield South East)
The Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Mr Eric Pickles)
I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
Two years ago, the coalition Government were formed to take the country from difficult times to better days. In the coalition agreement, we pledged to build a new economy from the rubble of the old, to support sustainable growth, balanced across all industries and parts of the country, and to champion enterprise and aspiration. We pledged to shift power from unelected quangos to elected representatives, communities, neighbourhoods and individuals. Most urgently, we pledged to take immediate action to tackle the deficit and get the public finances back on track.
Mr Pickles
I will give way in a few moments.
Since those heady days of May 2010, the economy has been buffeted by the problems of the eurozone. All western economies face the ongoing consequences of the banking collapse and the last decade of boom and bust. The world has changed, however, and so must we. The west is slipping down international league tables as emerging economies push ahead with energy and drive. Countries that make it will be those that step up to long-term challenges to get the economy growing, build more homes for a growing population, and provide factories, offices and infrastructure for the 21st century.
Mr Pickles
My right hon. Friend can rest assured that the Government are confident of being able to deliver 170,000 homes, and of ensuring affordable homes for those who need housing. That is considerably better than in any of the past 10 years when the Labour party was in power.
Mr Pickles
I will, of course, give way to the Chair of the Communities and Local Government Committee.
Mr Pickles
No, it is accountable to Ministers and directly to this House, which I think restores the political balance.
The coalition has taken a number of measures to ensure that Britain can compete in a global world. The Local Government Finance Act 2012, which received Royal Assent last week, provides new incentives for councils to support enterprise and local firms, through the local retention of business rates. Local enterprise partnerships are ensuring that local councils work hard with local businesses to bring about growth. We are also looking in detail at Lord Heseltine’s practical recommendations on how we can further devolve power and funding. Through the wide-ranging Localism Act 2011, we are abolishing unelected quangos such as the Infrastructure Planning Commission and regional assemblies, replacing them with democratic accountability at national, local and neighbourhood levels. We are also scything through the reams of planning red tape imposed by Labour’s Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004, Planning Act 2008 and Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Act 2009.
Hilary Benn
I accept the hon. Gentleman’s argument. The regional spatial strategies meant that local authorities had a responsibility to build houses. He has to acknowledge, however, that the regime before us, which I recognise he played an important part in setting up, will produce exactly the same numbers. That is because the same number of people will need to be housed and there will be the same increase in population. They are two different ways of doing it. However, it is the Secretary of State who has made great play of localism but who is now turning it on its head.
If the Secretary of State is thinking of using as his proxy the speed and percentage of planning applications overturned, people should, as I have indicated, go away very quickly and see where their local authorities are in the league table. To add insult to injury, however—this is pretty bad—he is taking the power to require local authorities to do all the work in connection with applications, even though they will not be taking the decisions and even though the Planning Inspectorate will be paid the fees. That is what he is doing in the Bill.
These are the same planning officers in whom the Secretary of State, in effect, had no confidence to start with—that is why he chose to designate authorities. It is therefore crystal clear what the clause is about: it is about his saying, in respect of councils whose decisions he does not like or which he thinks are being too tardy, that it is the elected council members whom he does not trust. That makes the purpose of the clause plain. He is saying, “I want this power because I think I’m in a better place to take decisions than the local communities themselves.” That is why the clause is so objectionable.
Mr Betts
My right hon. Friend makes a good case against the Secretary of State taking from local authorities the power to determine planning applications. He has also pointed out that the applicant will lose the right to appeal. When this matter came before the Select Committee, the Minister with responsibility for planning accepted in effect that the consultation arrangements for local communities would not have to be the same as if the local authority was taking the decisions, but that the statutorily required level of consultation would apply, which could be somewhat less. Local communities could suffer in that way as well.
Hilary Benn
My hon. Friend, who chairs the Select Committee so ably, is absolutely right. That is another example of how local communities will lose out as a result of this change.
I am genuinely surprised that the Secretary of State has turned out like this, especially given what he said in his speech to the Conservative party conference last month. He explained, in a purple passage, why, alongside the bust of Disraeli and the poster of Winston Churchill, he had a photograph on his wall of Che Guevara smoking a large Havana cigar. He told the delegates:
“It is there to remind me that without constant vigilance, the cigar-chomping Commies will take over. Well, that isn’t going to happen on my watch.”
Well, it has happened—with this Bill. There are a couple of words for what he is doing. It is a concept much loved by communist parties the world over. It is called democratic centralism—telling other people what to think and do. The powers he is asking the House to give him in clause 1 are, frankly, enough to make any self-respecting democratic centralist slap him on the back in gratitude and give him a cigar to chomp on. In no time at all, he has gone from claiming to be the friend of localism to taking a hammer and sickle to local democratic decision making. He fools nobody by trying to describe it as muscular localism. The really puzzling question is whether this is a genuine conversion. The House must ask itself whether the Secretary of State decided of his own volition to dump everything that he previously believed in. I doubt it; I suspect that the truth is rather different.
I think the truth is that the Secretary of State lost control of planning policy during the summer. He told us just a few months ago, “Here’s my shiny new national planning policy framework. It’s fit for a new century”, and he must have been bewildered to read those unattributed briefings suddenly appearing in the newspapers—the criticisms of his shiny new planning system from the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and I bet he was particularly irritated by the summonses to attend urgent meetings at 10 Downing street. Whoever was in charge of planning policy over the summer, I do not think it was the Secretary of State.
Annette Brooke
I would like to proceed.
Enforced renegotiation means that benefits from 106 agreements may be lost for ever, regardless of the needs and views of the local community. If renegotiation outcomes were in line with local planning policies, I cannot see why a local council would not renegotiate on a voluntary basis. Developers’ profits will rise, but how transparent and independent will the appraisals be of the viability of a development with and without the section 106 obligations? It is important to have mixed communities of housing. One of my favourite places that I visit is a large housing estate. As I knock on the doors, I do not know which house was built originally as social housing and which was built originally as private housing—that is what we must aspire to. My problem is that even if the developer finds that a development is not economically viable and we all agree with that in a transparent way, we would lose that social housing. Could the £300 million not be targeted to make sure that the local planning authority keeps the housing it needs?
Mr Clive Betts (Sheffield South East) (Lab)
It is no surprise that we are talking today in this Chamber about growth, or rather the lack of growth, given the parlous state of the economy. Only today the Construction Products Association revealed that in the third quarter of this year, whatever slight improvement there might have been in the rest of the economy, construction activity declined again, in both the public and private sectors, and there is no expectation of any growth in the sector until 2014, despite all the Government initiatives and those that are proposed.
What is more surprising, however, is that we are talking once again about planning. It is only a matter of weeks since we were here discussing the revised version of the national planning policy framework, which had been subject to months of consultation. To be fair to the Government, they had listened. The Communities and Local Government Committee produced a report, which was agreed unanimously by its members, and the Government accepted nearly all its recommendations. There was a general welcome for the statement, both across the Chamber and by most outside organisations. Only a few weeks after that general agreement on the way forward for planning, we are talking about measures that were not even part of the consultation that took place over many months last year and the early part of this year. It seems that we are back to the old situation: when in doubt, blame the planners.
It was interesting to listen to the right hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert). I think that he is right: there is simply no evidence for the claim that the planning system in this country is an obstacle to growth. When the Select Committee took evidence about the national planning policy framework, we could find no such evidence, and Ministers never brought forward any. If there is any, will someone please stand up and say so? We really need to put that argument to bed once and for all. We have heard that 87% of applications last year were approved and we know that 400,000 homes could be built on sites that already have planning permission. Those are the figures and that is the current situation.
When Governments start to change, or even suggest changing, the planning system, there is always a danger that that in itself will create uncertainty, both for councils and for potential applicants, and that that uncertainty will create delay and have the opposite effect of the Government’s initial intention.
What is the situation and why are we here today? My right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) got it right. Over the summer, we could almost see the wringing of hands at No. 10 and No. 11 because the economy would not move. They were worried about why there was no growth, not sure what to do about it and looking for others to blame. We could almost hear the call to the Secretary of State: “Find me some initiatives. Anything will do, so long as we look as though we’re doing something.” They came up with what can best be described as a rag-bag of measures which have not been thought through. Ministers at the Department were then given the job this afternoon of trying to justify the measures with some sort of coherence, and to work out how to implement them.
In his first appearance before the Communities and Local Government Committee, the planning Minister had a difficult job explaining why there were no criteria to justify so many of the measures and why there were still going to be consultations. I thank him for replying to us, as we requested, with the list of consultations on secondary legislation that the Government intend to undertake—there are rather a lot of them—in order to implement the measures that they think will stimulate growth in this country.
I am not going to say that this is the end of the planning system as we know it, but clause 1 is a fundamental attack on localism. This goes to the heart of what the Government have been talking about for a long time. First we had localism, which is about transferring power to local communities. I support that principle and some of the things that the Government have done. We then had guided localism, which is about giving powers to local communities and then telling them how to use them. For example, local authorities have the power to decide how often to empty their bins, but the Secretary of State knows best and will tell them how to do it. Now we have muscular localism, which is a wonderful phrase. The Secretary of State embodies it—it is his own and he has taken it to himself—and we are now able to see what it means. It is about giving powers to local communities, telling them how to use them and then, when they do not use them in the way in which the Secretary of State thinks they should, taking them back. For muscular localism, read centralism, with or without the cigar to which my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central alluded.
We are in a peculiar situation. The Government have said that local plans should be at the heart of the planning system, but they are now proposing that local applications made by local developers should be judged against the local plan not by the local authority, but by the centralised Planning Inspectorate. That is a complete contradiction of the Government’s policies.
We do not know how this system will operate or whether it will have any great impact. When the planning Minister gave evidence to the Committee, he said that it might only apply to a few cases for a short period. He did not anticipate many problems and thought that councils would up their game and respond, but we do not know what criteria they are supposed to be upping their game against. We have some idea about the criteria, because the Minister mentioned the speed of applications and the number of decisions that will be overturned on appeal. He then recognised, however, that there were problems with the statistics on the planning performance agreements with individual applications, because they may be skewed in such a way that the Secretary of State would have to have even more powers to decide whether authorities were falling down on their set targets. I thought that the Government were against targets and central assessments, but how can the system be run as defined by clause 1 without centralised targets and centralised assessments? Surely they are inherent in what the Government now propose.
In effect, clause 1 abolishes—this is an attack on the fundamentals of our planning system—the applicant’s right of appeal, which has always been at the heart of the planning system. Anyone who has a planning application turned down has a right of appeal to someone independent of the body that took the initial decision.
As I said when I intervened on my right hon. Friend, the Minister had to accept that consultations on planning applications with the local community will now simply be those that are statutorily required. Most planning authorities go beyond that by calling public meetings, staging local exhibitions where people can see what an application means, and sending letters to far more people than statutorily required, but the Planning Inspectorate will not be required to do any of that. Local authorities will still have some of the requirements, but no fees to pay for them. What a situation to get ourselves into!
As for the nationally significant infrastructure projects, we do not know what they will be. We know that they will involve business and commercial developments, but we do not know whether that includes retail. It would be helpful if Ministers could tell us whether retail schemes are included and whether we are going to drive a coach and horses through local shopping centres without the local community having a say in such decisions. At present, national policy statements—I congratulate the Government on ensuring that they are now approved by Parliament—represent democratic accountability for such decisions. However, Ministers now tell us—the planning Minister was clear, for example, on office development—that there will be no national policy statements. There will be no democratic say on how the schemes should be judged and no democratic involvement in the initial decision. Ministers might seek to defend that, but it is another fundamental change.
Why—the Minister could not explain this—will business and commercial developments follow the route laid down by the Planning Act 2008, but housing will be subject to increased and enhanced call-in powers by the Secretary of State? Why is housing being treated separately? If the Government are concerned about the scale of some housing projects in various council areas, why do they not beef up the duty to co-operate, which is what the Select Committee asked them to do when we addressed these issues some time ago? This is about getting agreement for big schemes across authorities, so surely the duty to co-operate is the way forward, if it means anything at all.
There is no evidence of a problem with section 106 agreements for affordable housing. The letter that the chief executive of the Homes and Communities Agency wrote to me said that it was not an issue. Where is the evidence that there is a problem? Local authorities are renegotiating the agreements where appropriate and in line with local circumstances, but why determine the viability of individual schemes in different localities on a national basis? That is simply not acceptable. The danger is that if developers think they will get a better deal by delaying and going to the Planning Inspectorate once the Bill is enacted because fewer affordable homes will be required, the result of the measure will be the opposite of that intended. Ultimately, we could end up not only reducing the number of affordable houses being built, but, as the hon. Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke) has said, reducing mixed communities, because those schemes will all end up being private and the extra £300 million to produce affordable houses will go elsewhere. That is not acceptable either. In some areas there will be no alternative sites, other than those that currently have planning permission to build affordable homes. That is the reality.
I am also concerned about the proposals to use telecommunications equipment in the national parks. Other hon. Members have already made those concerns clear and I support them.
With this Bill, the Government are turning localism on its head. It is a fundamentally centralising measure. If the Government were able to argue that, pragmatically, it was worthwhile for them to go back on their principles because it would result in stimulating growth as intended, I would be able to understand. The likelihood, however, is that they will abandon their principles without achieving any extra growth whatsoever.