Neighbourhood Planning Bill

Debate between Geoffrey Clifton-Brown and Roberta Blackman-Woods

3rd reading: House of Commons & Legislative Grand Committee: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Tuesday 13th December 2016 Commons Chamber

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

New clause 3 calls for a comprehensive review of the entire compulsory purchase order process. There was clear consensus among the witnesses at the Public Bill Committee evidence sessions that the current CPO system is not fit for purpose. It is convoluted and puts people off using it, which in turn has a negative impact on the delivery of development. Colin Cottage of the Compulsory Purchase Association commented:

“The existing system is not helpful for reaching quick solutions. In fact, in many ways it encourages people to be fighting with each other from the outset.”––[Official Report, Neighbourhood Planning Public Bill Committee, 18 October 2016; c. 64, Q114.]

He said that ultimately that causes uncertainty and additional cost. Richard Asher of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors said:

“I believe, and the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors has always believed, that codification of the whole of the CPO rules, which go back to 1845 and are highly complex, would be a sensible way forward”.––[Official Report, Neighbourhood Planning Public Bill Committee, 18 October 2016; c. 64, Q113.]

He said that he wanted a review of the system as it stands. Labour strongly believes that the legislation should be updated to enable the greater use of CPOs as a tool to drive effective regeneration and development strategies and to work in partnership with developers to ensure that we get the new homes and development that we need.

More than 100 years of conflicting statute and case law makes up the current CPO legislation, so small changes will not have a significant effect. Indeed, in Committee the Minister reflected on the fact that the changes, welcome though they are, would not be a game changer. I therefore ask him why the Government continue to make small changes to the CPO system bit by bit, rather than bringing forward legislation to allow us to review it and make it fit for purpose.

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)]

I wish to speak to new clause 12 and amendments 26 and 27, which are in my name.

On new clause 12, both the Housing and Planning Act 2016 and the Bill contain welcome measures to make it clear that an acquiring authority should make payments of compensation in advance—that is the important bit—of taking possession of land. They also provide a mechanism for improving the rates of interest on late compensation payments, which is important because it will hopefully encourage acquiring authorities to pay in advance, and to pay a reasonable interest rate, rather than delaying payment.

Those measures require further regulations to bring them into force. As soon as the Bill becomes law, those regulations should be brought forward without delay to ensure that landowners and business owners benefit from the Government’s previous commitment to improve interest rates on late payments.

On amendment 26, I welcome the Bill’s provisions to allow acquiring authorities to take land on a temporary basis. That will provide much-needed flexibility within the compulsory purchase system and stop acquiring authorities having to take land on a permanent basis that is required only temporarily. However, they should not be allowed to take land on both those bases. If, having taken land on a temporary basis, an acquiring authority finds that it needs to take it on a permanent basis, that should be subject to a second notice to treat and a compulsory purchase procedure.

Finally, amendment 27 is the most important, in my view. It would remove clause 28, which repeals part 4 of the Land Compensation Act 1961. That repeal will prevent landowners who have had land compulsorily purchased for a particular purpose from seeking additional compensation should the land end up being used for a different, more lucrative development. I will briefly try to explain that to the House.

The general principle of compulsory purchase is that if someone’s land is being compulsorily acquired, they should be paid the same price as if that land were being acquired on a voluntary, willing-seller willing-buyer basis in the private commercial sector. Abolishing part 4 of the 1961 Act will mean that if the land subsequently has a different use—for example, if the planning zoning changes so that it suddenly becomes extremely valuable because it could be developed for housing or commercial purposes—the person having his land acquired will not get the benefit of that uplift. As a chartered surveyor—I declare that in my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests—if I were ever selling land that I felt was likely to have such an uplift, I would always insist on an overage clause being placed on the sale, not for 10 years but for 20 or 25 years. During that time the vendor would get 50% of the value of the uplift.

I say to my hon. Friend the Minister, loud and clear, that in clause 28 he is enabling acquiring authorities to acquire land on the cheap at the expense of private landowners, and I think that is unfair.

Neighbourhood Planning Bill

Debate between Geoffrey Clifton-Brown and Roberta Blackman-Woods

2nd reading: House of Commons & Money resolution: House of Commons
Monday 10th October 2016 Commons Chamber

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

I thank all Members—they were mostly Government Members—who have contributed to this debate. They did an excellent job speaking up for their constituencies and the various planning issues that affect them, and extolling the virtues of neighbourhood planning. My hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann) also did an excellent job in explaining how important neighbourhood planning was to his constituency and the need for local plans to refer to it. I was also grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes) who, as always, pointed out exactly what was wrong with the Bill, what needs to be improved and how we need to support planning more effectively.

I am rather surprised to be speaking again on planning legislation so soon after our proceedings on the Housing and Planning Act 2016. After all, the ink is barely dry on the paper. However, as there have been six pieces of planning legislation in the past six years, I perhaps should not be that surprised.

The Minister said that he wants to have shovels put in the ground, but I am not sure that this is the Bill to do it. Indeed, the Bill is much more interesting for what is not in it than for what is. I am not sure whether it represents—in the words of the Secretary of State earlier— “action on many fronts”. In fact, his own colleagues came up with quite a substantial list of things that should have been in this Bill. They thought that there should be something about infrastructure and how it could be funded effectively to underpin developments and something about carbon-neutral housing. They felt that local plans should have a strong relationship with neighbourhood plans, or that neighbourhood plans should trump local plans, and that there should be a green-belt review. There was some suggestion that there should be a statutory footing for local plans and deadlines for their delivery. There were other suggestions that the Bill should cover broadband in developments, the use of vacant public sector land, how to protect hedgehogs, how to pluck geese, how to repeal applications, how to use fees more effectively, land banking and permission banking, the failure to address Brexit, and a call-in procedure for neighbourhood plans. Those were just some of the issues that were raised, so there is a lot to be addressed by the new Minister, whom I welcome to his post. I look forward to working with him in Committee on improving the Bill.

We strongly welcome the measures to strengthen neighbourhood planning. We all agree that communities should be at the heart of development and that development should start with our neighbourhoods. Any measure that will strengthen neighbourhood planning should be welcomed. Too many people think that planning is done to them, and we need to return to a much happier place in which communities feel that they and their representatives have some control over planning.

There are a few issues about neighbourhood planning that I hope to address in Committee. We need to look at whether it is being properly resourced, and whether the links to local plans are strong enough. We welcome the opportunity of a planning register that will allow for better scrutiny of permitted development and, in particular, the scale of use of permitted development. The Government Front-Bench team will know that we have a long-standing objection to permitted development being used for the delivery of housing in this country. Indeed, we would not need a register if we did not use permitted development in the way that it is used, as all homes would have to go through the planning process properly, and there would be some control of the infrastructure that supports them and the quality and standards of the properties being built. However, as the Government are using permitted development, it seems sensible for a register to be in place.

One of our main bugbears with the Bill is that it does not sufficiently recognise the difficulties that local planning departments are facing as a result of the lack of resources to carry out their responsibilities. Ministers would be living in a cupboard if they did not know that right across the housing and planning sector, developers large and small, a large number of agencies and planning departments are saying that the lack of resource for planning departments is the major spanner in the works for delivery. Since 2010 spending on planning by local authorities has almost halved, from £2.2 billion in 2010 to £1.2 billion last year. The Royal Town Planning Institute, the Local Government Association, the Town and Country Planning Association and the British Property Federation have all pointed to the fact that greater expectations must mean greater support for planning, yet the opposite is happening. Planning fees are vital to plug the gap.

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

Would the hon. Lady support greater flexibility for each local authority to be able to set its own planning fees to meet its own circumstances, and possibly to allow higher fees to give accelerated results?

[Dr Blackman-Woods]

Indeed. That was one of the amendments that I tabled to the Housing and Planning Bill when it was going through the House. Alas, it was rejected by the then Housing Minister. It was interesting to hear the same point being made earlier in our discussion. I am pleased if Conservative Members are coming round to our view that planning departments should be able to set fees at full recovery level.

On a more positive note, we welcome the measures to streamline compulsory purchase orders. The new Ministers must have been studying their copy of the Lyons review. We argued strongly there that CPOs were not fit for purpose and needed to be streamlined. I am pleased to see those measures in the Bill but, again, they could be improved.

I want to spend a minute or two on pre-commencement planning conditions, which is the area of the Bill on which we will probably have most discussion in Committee. I am pleased that the right hon. Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin) is in his place. He criticised pre-commencement planning conditions at length, yet I have a list from a development taking place in my constituency and I cannot see what is wrong with any of these conditions. The developers have to provide samples of materials. The development is in a conservation area, so that is important. They have to provide full details about bats. Well, we must protect bats. There must be noise mitigation and notice of demolition.

Localism in Planning

Debate between Geoffrey Clifton-Brown and Roberta Blackman-Woods

Wednesday 17th July 2013 Westminster Hall

[Roberta Blackman-Woods]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for that intervention, because, as she will hear in a moment, the Opposition are demonstrating a strong commitment to localism, which I am sure that she would want to applaud. Popular planning policies, such as brownfield-first, have been undermined by the NPPF—a point we heard hon. Members make today. Six months on from the introduction of the NPPF, any remaining claim the Secretary of State had to being a localist Secretary of State was exposed by the Growth and Infrastructure Act 2013, in which he mentions himself no fewer than 158 times. The 2013 Act, which the Campaign to Protect Rural England states

“marks a dramatic shift away from the Government’s commitment to localism”,

includes powers that allow the Secretary of State, from October, to designate a local planning authority as failing and to strip it of its planning powers, bypassing the local community in deciding planning applications. The Conservative-led Local Government Association said that that

“represents a blow to local democracy, by taking authority away from democratically accountable and locally elected councillors and placing it instead with the Planning Inspectorate”—

a body that has been the object of ridicule for hon. Members today. The LGA goes on to say that the legislation could prove

“counterproductive in terms of stimulating growth, since the removal of local decision making risks seriously denting trust at the local level. This could mean some communities are likely to be increasingly reluctant to accept new development in their areas.”

The Planning Minister, however, was not done. In case anyone, anywhere, still thought that the Government’s localist promise held any meaning, he turned his attention to stripping local people of their right to have a say on the high streets at the heart of their communities.

The Government’s most recent move—brought in by the back door without any parliamentary debate whatsoever—temporarily allows shops to be converted into payday lenders, bookmakers or fast food shops, without any say for the local community. That is the exact opposite of what the vast majority of the public want. Polling shows that 76% of people would support the Government giving new powers to local councils to help them shape the high street in line with the wishes of the community. Can the Minister explain how his policy, which is the opposite of that, does not remove powers from local people?

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

I am interested in and intrigued by the hon. Lady’s new-found localism. When her party was in power—for 13 years—it had planning at the remotest regional level. Having found localism, if she, unfortunately, came into Government, what would her party do specifically to ensure that local authorities had greater powers than they have now?

[Roberta Blackman-Woods]

I will come on to specific things that a Labour Government would do in a moment. We are arguing very strongly that local people now have little say in what happens to their high streets. Is the Minister still arguing that local authorities should use article 4 directions to get round his new policy?

I shall now answer the question of the hon. Member for The Cotswolds (Geoffrey Clifton-Brown) about what a Labour Government would do specifically to give powers to local communities.In May this year, my right hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband) pledged that a future Labour Government would ensure that local people and councils have greater powers to stop the proliferation of certain types of unwanted shops or premises on their high streets, thereby showing that Labour is the party of true localism. That is the opposite of what we are now seeing under this Government, who are taking powers away from local communities, and the same is happening with neighbourhood planning. We want to build on neighbourhood planning, integrating it more clearly into the planning system and building on the success of places such as Thame in Oxfordshire, where 775 new homes have been planned for. We would like to see such success mirrored elsewhere. If we are to deliver the number of houses that we so desperately need, it is important that we work strongly with communities to gain their consent.

Our approach is a strongly localist one. We want to work with local communities to deliver growth and development, and the Minister could do worse than listen to his colleagues this morning.