Localism Bill

Debate between Earl of Lytton and Lord Lucas

Monday 17th October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, in former times it was the custom of some generals after a victory to allow a limited period for rape and pillage before good order was restored. The thought has been raised in this House and outside that this is what the Government intend with this Bill. Along with my noble friend Lord Cormack, I find myself worried. I do not understand how this transition is to be managed: how we are to get from a position where there are not valid local plans in a large number of local authorities to the position where there are, without there being a succession of undesirable planning permissions given. The core of this Bill is to allow localities to determine what happens in their areas. It would be most unfortunate if we had a period where an awful lot of bad will was created by the exact opposite happening, just because some superior authority had failed to get the ducks in a row.

[The Earl of Lytton]

My Lords, I rise briefly first to declare an interest as a practising chartered surveyor and as someone who is involved with planning, although I am not a chartered town planner.

There seems to me to be three particular issues here. One of them, as has already been touched on by the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, is the corpus of knowledge that is currently involved in the planning system. If we uproot that, we will cause delay, doubt, risk and uncertainty. There are economic implications, so we must try to avoid that. We have seen some of the public pronouncements that are based on questions of doubt about what is intended here. A great deal of clarification is needed.

Secondly, the noble Lord, Lord Howarth of Newport, referred to the effect on economic growth. Yes, planning is a huge driver of economic growth in so many ways. While I would not wish to suggest that it is the be-all and end-all of economic growth, it is clearly something that is tangible that the general public can relate to. We must not lose sight of the fact that it is going to be one of the significant factors, if for instance what we are told about the lack of completions on housing is true.

My last point is to do with neighbourhood plans. I must declare another interest here as the president of the National Association of Local Councils, whose member parish and town councils may be those very bodies that are having to draw up a neighbourhood plan. A neighbourhood plan has to be in conformity with the principal authority’s local plan, and if the principal authority’s local plan is not in place, or is in disarray or is out of date, then we have a problem. This has a knock-on effect. I ask the Minister to give the House some reassurance that there is going to be some sort of seamless transition that will take place. I do not wish to add to what has already been said about the timescale over which that is to be done; and there may be different timescales for different bits for all I know, but the transition does have to be, to some degree, seamless. With regard to my first point about the economics of doubt, it is very important that we get this right.

Localism Bill

Debate between Earl of Lytton and Lord Lucas

Thursday 14th July 2011 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Lytton]

I support the noble Baroness, Lady Byford. I, too, am a member of the Country Landowners’ Association and a landowner. Briefly, we need to ensure that there is an authentic local view at work here. We need a reasonable level of general support to be established and demonstrated, and we need a coherent and reasoned justification for things to be included as “commons”. We do not need national agendas, narrow sectoral bases of arguments, frivolous or vexatious grounds, or to give succour to a no-development ethos. As the noble Baroness rightly pointed out, this is currently capable of being a free bet. That cannot be allowed to continue. There are clearly well-documented instances of abuse of process and therefore I support her in the amendment.

[Lord Lucas]

My amendment seeks to remedy this difficulty by allowing neighbourhood plans to rule out the creation of village greens that the neighbourhood plan does not recognise.

Localism Bill

Debate between Earl of Lytton and Lord Lucas

Thursday 30th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, the Minister has got ahead of us on this with Amendment 128E being debated rather earlier today, but I do not see that Amendment 128E covers the cases that interest me. Perhaps, if I am wrong about that, my noble friend can explain. I am principally interested in the way in which allowing planning matters in under a referendum would make a mess of the provisions for neighbourhood planning. We have extensive provision there for referenda and there should not be a cross-cutting system which allows that process, which is difficult and expensive enough to organise anyway, to be upset by people running competing referendums, or in other ways trying to upset the decision once it has been made.

My noble friend’s amendment looks at the granting of planning permission. I am much more interested in the creation of a neighbourhood plan. Subsection (4)(b) of the government amendment refers to,

“a statutory right of appeal in respect of the substance of the matter or decision”,

on the part of persons adversely affected. In other words, it is saying that this provision does not apply if there is no third-party right of appeal, which I think there is not in a lot of planning permissions. I view the scope of subsection (4) of Amendment 128E as being very limited compared with the sort of exclusions that I would like to see. As all planning is dealt with very satisfactorily in the neighbourhood planning section, it should not be allowed in the local referendum section in any form. I beg to move.

[The Earl of Lytton]

My Lords, as I explained to the Minister earlier today, I think that Amendment 128E has largely covered my amendment. However, like all amendments, there was a supplementary purpose lurking behind it, which was to try to probe the wider interaction between the facility of referendums generally, especially in their cumulative effect—the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, who is not in his place at the moment, touched on that a few minutes ago—and the wider family of the statutory functions of local authorities. It is instructive to note Amendment 128C relating to transport.

I have lost count of the number of times that the burdens on local authorities on the one hand and the need to get at the authentic voice of people on the other have been referred to in this part of the Bill. We are considering the effects for a democratically elected representative body whose functions might not work terribly well, or be effectively discharged, if a referendum is imposed. The Bill cannot be all things to all men. We have to have a balance between vox populi on the one hand and the effective administration of local government on the other. That balance needs to be explained.

I hope that the Minister will be able to elaborate on some of these points, but I certainly think that there is an issue here, which was touched on in earlier debates in Committee. We need to be clear to what extent people within a community should engage with the representative and democratic processes of those who are set up to represent those community interests as opposed to reaching for some bypassing measure in the form of a referendum.