Planning and Housing Supply

David Rutley Excerpts

Thursday 24th October 2013 Westminster Hall

[David Rutley (Macclesfield) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Brady. I am grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for securing the debate, and I congratulate my hon. Friends the Members for Tewkesbury (Mr Robertson) and for St Albans (Mrs Main) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) on making sure that we have a debate on such an important subject. The fact that there are so many of us here shows that there is a need for a debate, and I am sure that the Minister is taking copious notes.

As others have said, the debate is a critical one. It is about balance: getting the housing supply right—we have a growing population, so that is an important priority—and protecting the countryside at the same time. We need to provide more houses, but also to protect our natural assets—and they are assets. Our countryside helps to define our communities, making them distinctive. It provides agricultural land and draws in visitors, which boosts tourism in towns and villages. Those things are valuable assets and need to be protected. It is important to underline the point that the debate is not about quaint rural traditions threatening to block housing development; it is about economic effects on the macro-economy and on communities, businesses and residents. That is why it is important to make the right decisions.

In east Cheshire we understand that it is a critical matter to get the local plan in place. The move to become a unitary authority, and the time taken to integrate services previously provided by other local authorities, initially slowed progress, but we got back on track quickly and a huge amount of work has now been done to shape the plan. Successive rounds of public consultation have been undertaken, at pace. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) and the Under-Secretary of State for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mr Timpson), I have attended many public meetings and met many community groups, so that I could understand their concerns better and help to shape and refine the plan.

I am pleased to say that the residents of Macclesfield are not shy about coming forward with their concerns. That is a good thing, and means that there has been rigorous and challenging debate. I commend those who have taken part in campaigns about south-west Macclesfield, Fence Avenue and Lark Hall, to name a few, for the way in which they engaged elected representatives and clearly expressed their views. I know that the final local plan will be much better for that. We recognise in Cheshire East, and in Macclesfield in particular, that the local plan urgently needs to be signed off to stop unwanted speculative housing developments, as my neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton, so clearly articulated. At the moment they are a particular challenge in the south of the borough. In Congleton and Crewe work is going on tirelessly with Cheshire East council and residents to stop them, and I fully support that work.

We need to get the local plan set up, and are working hard, but we need the Minister’s support and advice to get the right plan signed off. I am, like other hon. Members, grateful for the Minister’s efforts to understand the issues on the ground better. I am pleased that he recently went to Cheshire to speak to residents. I am also pleased and grateful for his meetings with me and colleagues to hear about our concerns and challenges. As he knows, one key issue is defining what housing is required in our five-year housing supply. At the moment that is holding us back. As my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton pointed out, sites have been identified in our draft plan that can be developed. There is a difference of opinion between the councils and the inspector as to what the figure should be; that is what needs to be unblocked so we can move forward. I urge the Minister to use his good offices to help resolve the situation and clarify what the target should be, so that the plan can be concluded and unwanted, speculative house building can be stopped in the borough. That is a vital priority, as I think the Minister knows.

For all the hard work that has been done to shape the plan, there are other questions that urgently need an answer. Like many Macclesfield residents I understood that we were close to finalising the plan and that its focus was on housing developments to 2030. I think that the Minister may be a little surprised to know that I found out a few months ago that Cheshire East council officers were now under the impression that they had to work towards a planning horizon not of 2030—which by most people’s standards is, I think, quite a long time horizon—but 2050. That has completely slowed down the process. How can we have a view and a sense of purpose in relation to a time horizon of not 17 but 37 years?

The new requirements have major implications, particularly for the northern part of the borough. In communities such as Macclesfield and Poynton, which I am proud to represent, the news led the council to highlight green-belt land as supposedly “safeguarded for development”—not to be confused with safeguarding it from development, which is very different. The designation could be applied to large areas such as south-west Macclesfield, where up to 3,000 houses could be developed.

We have all worked hard to ensure that the green belt around Macclesfield and nearby communities is protected in the 2030 local plan. The green belt exists to protect the communities from urban sprawl from Manchester, and it is important for it to be kept that way. The Minister will understand the strong local concern—including mine—at the proposal to safeguard green belt “for development” to achieve housing targets for not 2030 but 2050. That situation is made even worse by the fact that there are no exceptional or compelling circumstances, which are a clear requirement in the national planning policy framework.

Will the Minister take this opportunity to set the record straight and tell the House whether showing how housing targets for 2050 will be achieved is a requirement for approval of a local plan? If it is not, will he also confirm that it will not be necessary to safeguard land for development, particularly in the green belt, beyond 2030? Macclesfield residents will be grateful for his views on those issues. They will affect green-belt areas that are vital to the fabric of the community, and will address the concerns of hundreds of residents who could become victims of a planning blight that I believe and hope is completely unnecessary.

--- Later in debate ---

[Nick Boles]

There are many questions that I have not yet answered, and there are only so many minutes left. I want to come on to the point of prematurity that some Members have raised. There is a difficult balance to be struck. One extreme would be to say that it does not matter how early stage a local plan is; as soon as an authority has started on a local plan, the draft policies, which have not yet been examined, consulted on or tested, should determine decisions. That is at one end. I understand that no one is suggesting that it should be at that extreme end. At the other end, we say that no weight should be accorded to a plan until it has absolutely finished the process.

The balance that we have put out in the draft guidance is that once a local plan has been submitted for examination—not completed or passed—it should carry significant weight if there are no substantial unresolved objections to parts of it. A neighbourhood plan has to pass a referendum, which is a big moment at which it might fail, and it starts to acquire weight when it has been presented to the local authority for what is called the local authority publicity period. I accept that both those stages are towards the end of the process. However, the difficulty if we try to move them earlier in the process is that—I promise you—developers will go to court, they will seek the judge’s interpretation and they will say, “This plan hasn’t even been consulted on. It hasn’t even been tested by examination. How can it be the basis for a decision, when in every other way this proposed development meets all of the policies in the national planning policy framework?” That is the argument that they will make, and indeed it is the argument they are making in cases right now.

Therefore, it is not simply in the gift of Ministers to move that decision point through guidance; we cannot do that. We have to put it at a point that the courts will find reasonable as an interpretation of the requirements for a plan to be sound and robust. We have set it where we have because we think that is the most reasonable position, but I am very happy to invite colleagues here in Westminster Hall today to meet my officials to discuss whether there is a way of finding another time frame that would stand up in court. However, I would simply share with them the view that the bar that would stand up in court is a very high one, and I have concluded that the position that we have outlined in the guidance is the one that will not only stand up in court but provide some protection for those plans that have reached an advanced stage of development.

[David Rutley]

Notwithstanding the point that the Minister is making, can he confirm that the planning horizon currently is to 2030 and any talk of moving to 2050 is for the birds, to use a technical term? Would he also use his good offices, given that there is good will—particularly in Cheshire East—to conclude local plans, to bring the requisite expertise to enable us to get over this hurdle as quickly as possible?

[Nick Boles]

I am very grateful to my hon. Friend for reminding me of two very important specific questions, to which it is a great pleasure—and a rare one—to be able to give an answer that I hope is satisfactory. The answer to the first question is that there is nothing in the Localism Act 2011, in the NPPF or in any aspect of Government planning policy that requires someone to plan beyond 15 years. So, anybody who is suggesting that there is any requirement to safeguard land or wrap it up in wrapping paper and ribbons for the future development between 2030 and 2050 is getting it wrong. There is no reason for it and my hon. Friend can knock that suggestion straight back to wherever it came from.

Regarding help for authorities, I will make an offer to everyone here in Westminster Hall who has an authority that is having difficulty resolving the final objections to a plan that is still in draft form. It is that I am very happy to ask officials in my Department and—perhaps even more usefully—the recently retired chief inspector and another recently retired very senior inspector to meet those authorities to help them, in a sense, to understand what are the practical things they have to do to get the plan to a point where it can pass examination.

I fully understand that there is a frustration, namely that people cannot negotiate with an inspector, because an inspector is basically like a judge; it would be like someone negotiating with a judge in court as to whether they will be found guilty or not. The inspectors cannot negotiate, but that is why we have created a resource within the Department that is able to provide that practical support, and I am very happy to offer it to Cheshire East and to other boroughs where it would be necessary.