National Infrastructure Projects (Local Development)

Debate between Frank Dobson and Roberta Blackman-Woods

Thursday 12th February 2015 Westminster Hall

[Roberta Blackman-Woods (City of Durham) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship again, Mr Sheridan.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith (Mr Slaughter) on securing the debate and speaking so eloquently on behalf of his constituents. I also thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Frank Dobson) for making a really interesting and captivating case for Old Oak Common to provide the major HS2-Crossrail-tube interchange. I hope somebody somewhere who has a say over these matters was listening to the sensible case he made. I will concentrate most of my remarks on the issues raised by my hon. Friend in his excellent, forensic dissection and examination of the key issues relating to the manner in which redevelopment is being undertaken in his area. It is worth emphasising some of those points.

Clearly, my hon. Friend’s local community supports redevelopment, as indeed do he and I, but there are real concerns about the approach being taken to secure it. That includes the mayoral development corporation’s governance arrangements, the time scales adopted and the accountability, or rather the apparent lack of accountability, to local residents. They are also concerned about uneven development across the MDC area, which I suggest is not a good way of securing community confidence in a development. They also have queries about the funding of infrastructure and how and when it will be delivered. There are concerns about the balance between housing and employment land, and about whether there will be any affordable housing. That concern is shared by the London Assembly Labour group planning spokesperson, who said:

“Given the capital’s acute housing crisis, the provision of high levels of affordable housing should be at the forefront of the MDC’s aims. To achieve that goal we strongly believe the Mayor should include a requirement that 50 per cent of all new homes are affordable, with a 60:40 split between intermediate and social rents. Instead he has neglected to set any targets for affordable housing.”

Surely that is not an acceptable way to proceed.

There are further concerns about boundaries and, indeed, about why Wormwood Scrubs has been included at all. There are queries about compensation. Local knowledge seems not to have been listened to or taken on board. Residents want better use of transport and improvements to local transport, as well as access to jobs and apprenticeships. That is quite a long list of issues, and we look forward to the Minister’s comments on them.

I want to look in more detail at the mayoral development corporation model and question why it has been rolled out across London. This is the second MDC and there may be others in the offing, and I question whether it is the most appropriate model to support redevelopment. I want briefly to consider other models that might be available, and how we go about delivering national infrastructure. At the moment there is little connection between what happens in national infrastructure projects and what happens in localities. There are other models available for improving the links between the two and ensuring that local areas’ needs are reflected in national infrastructure projects, and vice versa.

One of the concerns already raised about MDCs is whether they are underpinned by sufficient democratic accountability arrangements. The Mayor has set out that the Old Oak and Park Royal MDC would have three local authority representatives on the board, and three members on the planning committee. Perhaps the Minister can explain why that is considered acceptable, especially as the powers given to MDCs under the Localism Act 2011 are extensive and include powers relating to infrastructure, regeneration, development and other land-related activities, acquisition of land by compulsory purchase, and overriding third party rights in that land, adoption of private streets, carrying on of business by the MDC and its participation in subsidiaries and other companies, and giving financial assistance.

When the MDC model was proposed in the then Localism Bill, the Government were at pains to stress that the model would be used only for the Olympic park site. In Committee on 8 March 2011 the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill), then the Under-Secretary of State responsible for planning, responded to concerns about the possibility of MDCs being rolled out in other areas:

“Regarding the background as to why the power is cast as it is, it was made clear in evidence by Sir Simon Milton, the deputy Mayor, that Mayor Johnson has no intention of going beyond the mayoral development corporation for the Olympic park.”

He said that the only reason for not putting that in the Bill was that it

“would have created all manner of technical and legal problems, which would prevent the timely setting up of a body”. ––[Official Report, Localism Public Bill Committee, 8 March 2011; c. 906.]

Yet here we are a few years later; and that model is being rolled out.

As it happens, Labour members of the Committee were not convinced by the Minister’s arguments, and my right hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Mr Raynsford) pointed out that the legislation does not limit the scope of the Mayor, in designating an MDC, to the Olympic park:

“It gives the Mayor carte blanche to come forward with proposals for an MDC in any area in London. I am not sure how compatible that is with the localist thrust of the Bill. There is not any provision for what happens if the Mayor proposes an MDC in an area where the local authority does not like the idea, and where a local neighbourhood forum has come into existence, and says, ‘We do not like the idea either.’ That is unresolved and there is no mechanism for it. That is a curious omission in a Bill that is supposed to have a well worked out theory of localism.”––[Official Report, Localism Public Bill Committee, 8 March 2011; c. 900.]

My hon. Friend the Member for Worsley and Eccles South (Barbara Keeley)pointed out that the Bill gave the Mayor new powers to designate any area of land in Greater London as a mayoral development area. She expressed worry that there would be

“nothing to stop a future Mayor from establishing a new mayoral development corporation”

anywhere, and there would not be close enough consideration of what the London boroughs might want to do in their areas when putting the MDC together or drawing up plans to support regeneration. She pointed out that the provision could override the wishes of locally elected representatives,

“which would not be within the spirit of the Bill.” ––[Official Report, Localism Public Bill Committee, 8 March 2011; c. 905.]

Although the Mayor has a duty to consult local authorities and residents in setting up an MDC, he is under no obligation to act on their views or concerns. As we made clear in 2011, that is profoundly anti-localist.

My hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith, my right hon. Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras and I stress that we want redevelopment in many town and city areas and that we support development in London, but we must be careful about the model applied. The Minister has to explain why he is going for such a top-down model for delivering new infrastructure and housing when other, better models are available. Perhaps in 2011 such a model might have been accepted for the Olympic park, but people then were at pains to point out that it would not necessarily be suitable for other areas. Indeed, then and now they have stressed that it is better to use effective partnerships for regeneration, and that that could happen by the public and private sectors working together on infrastructure and housing delivery.

The Minister will know that Sir Michael Lyons was commissioned by Labour to examine the issues and consider models that would make it possible to deliver new housing and infrastructure, and jobs to support that. He was asked to look at a model for use in the 21st century; as we have all said, it is not acceptable to ride roughshod over the views of local people and their local representatives. Sir Michael proposed new homes corporations and garden city development corporations. He said—this is what I want to emphasise—that those delivery models should be based on an updating of the existing new towns legislation. Most serious commentators on regeneration recognise that we need a vehicle to deliver redevelopment and large-scale housing developments. Such a vehicle has to bring together a number of different organisations, agencies and partnerships and to include a mix of private and public sectors. It also has to be the right tool for the job.

That is why we need the new development corporations: to think properly about what it means to have a new generation of garden cities, urban extensions or new settlements. They should enable development based on certain key principles that already underpin the original garden cities. There should be an obligation to have meaningful community participation, not only to undertake consultation. The corporations should consider human health and well-being and look at what sustainable development really means and at how they would tackle climate change. Those would be statutory purposes, rather than policy objectives only. The Town and Country Planning Association has already issued a document to update the new towns legislation. The Government could simply have taken that off the shelf, put it through Parliament in a lot less time than the Localism Act 2011 took, and had something fit for purpose. Such vehicles should inspire community confidence in the delivery of regeneration, because if communities do not like what is happening, they are likely to object, which can slow a process down.

It is much better to get communities on board from the outset and to listen to what they have to say about how their areas should be regenerated. Communities should be involved in the drawing up of a master plan, which should be based on neighbourhood plans that they have been adequately supported to carry out in their area, so that we give communities real power over what happens in that area through the new town development corporations. Critically, we should also be supporting communities to drive forward redevelopment in their area to suit the needs of the local community and to deliver many of the different aspects and positive outcomes for local communities that we might expect from redevelopment, such as access to new jobs, better transport, better housing and more affordability in the housing stock.

[Frank Dobson]

Given the experience in my area of the privatised Royal Mail proposals for the redevelopment of its brownfield site at Mount Pleasant—the views of Islington and Camden councils and all the local people were overridden by a one-man decision by the Mayor of London—most people in my area will be dubious about any form of arrangement that does not continue to give primary powers to the locally elected representatives.

[Roberta Blackman-Woods]

My right hon. Friend makes an excellent point. I often find myself thinking about the disconnect between what the Government say about localism and powers for local people and what happens in reality, which is that local people might be consulted on plans for their areas, but are then ignored. That brings the planning system into disrepute. It is important to get back to a planning system that is visionary, but facilitates local people to develop plans in their area and helps them to think about what they want their neighbourhood and surrounding areas to look like in 25 or 30 years’ time. It is not beyond us to do that.

Additionally, on the need to update the legislation, many of the new towns did not always reflect the highest quality in design standards, so we proposed that the new homes and garden city development corporations should think properly about improving the quality of design. That, too, can often be achieved by involving local people who know what is suitable for their area and have a good understanding of the materials that should be used. That could be written into the legislation, but I cannot see any of it in the mayoral development corporations at the moment. Perhaps something like a design statement will appear in the plan, but I want to hear reassurances from the Minister about how that plan will improve the quality of housing delivered.

Finally, what can we do about national infrastructure delivery? Part of the powerful case put this afternoon is that we need a much better link between what happens at national infrastructure level and what happens locally. The Labour party, through Sir John Armitt, has come up with some really good proposals for improving national infrastructure by having it underpinned by an independent assessment of our needs, which should be carried out through a detailed assessment that looks forward over a 30-year period.

Whitehall Departments at the centre would therefore be required to set up and carry out sector infrastructure plans, which would go to Parliament for approval. Those plans would have to be all-encompassing in what they look at, including aviation, ports, transport, science, renewables, nuclear, strategic flood defences, resilient roads and rail, how we get integration, telecommunications, recycling, energy efficiency, water and waste, security of supply—I could go on, but I hope that I am making the point that we need such extensive consideration. A spatial element is also needed, and there needs to be a link with what is happening locally, in particular with local areas proposing growth plans through new homes corporations and garden city development corporations, so that the needs of the local communities speak to the national infrastructure and so that it can take on board the local plans.

We have set out a much more sensible way for the Minister and his mayoral colleague to undertake development in London. Indeed, the strategy is also a sensible one for development elsewhere in the country. I look forward to hearing from the Minister why he should not adopt it immediately.