National Parks (Planning Policy)

Guy Opperman Excerpts

Wednesday 11th September 2013 Westminster Hall

[Simon Hart]

My hon. Friend second-guesses one of my recommendations. Although elected councillors sit on national park planning authorities, I think members of the public feel that those authorities are still somewhat out of the reach of the normal democratic grasp. That might be an ill-founded belief, but I think that national parks are a law unto themselves and there is no way for people to penetrate the system.

[Guy Opperman (Hexham) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate. I disagree with him on one point. Northumberland national park is equally as good as, if not better than, Yellowstone or anything else the Americans have to offer, and it is consulting on the £10 million Sill project. Northumberland proposes to create the project with a number of local partners, and it is specifically considering the economic benefits, which surely makes the point that some national parks are considering the wider impact of what they are trying to do.

[Simon Hart]

I am grateful for the third intervention on this point. My hon. Friend is right, but the 1995 Act, which I will quote in a minute, prescribes in law the requirement that where there is conflict between economic and ecological factors, a national park planning authority has to give precedence to the ecological consideration. Whether Northumberland national park is keeping to the letter of the law is a matter for it, but a simple solution would be to adjust the 1995 Act.

--- Later in debate ---

[Simon Hart]

It is almost worse than that, because the arrangements favour those who can afford planning consultants and who have the patience, energy and money to unpick a system that, as we will see in a minute, seems almost to have been written by people who never learned English—not in the same place I learned it, at any rate. The planning system should be simple, not complicated or expensive, at the point of use.

There is a perception—I believe it is based on the truth—that the affordable housing subsidy, which is not unique to national parks, raises almost no money. In 12 months in my area, it raised eighty thousand quid, which is not enough to build a garage, let alone to meet an affordable housing target. The subsidy is stalling development and putting developers off undertaking valuable work, which is having an impact on jobs in the building trade in the areas affected. Worst of all, the subsidy is causing the affordable housing project to dry up, so affordable housing targets are being missed by miles in many national parks. This is one of those rare polices that fails every test it is set.

I wrote to the Minister about the affordable housing subsidy, and I hope he will forgive me for reminding him of his reply of 3 July 2013, which I shall quote for my own personal amusement:

“Where there is a disagreement about the viable level of affordable housing contributions, applicants have a right to appeal. If a section 106 agreement has not yet been signed, the applicant may appeal against non-determination of the planning application. If a section 106 agreement has been signed, applicants may apply for a review of the affordable housing element and, if necessary, appeal. This review must be on the grounds of viability only and evidence will be required to support the case.”

I hope the Minister will forgive me, but that is enough to suck the life out of almost any sane person. If that is the obstacle people are set when making a perfectly reasonable challenge to the level of affordable housing contributions, it is no wonder people lose the will to live.

[Guy Opperman]

Many of us applaud the Minister’s Herculean efforts to simplify the planning system outwith the national parks. Would it not be appropriate to call for such a simplification in this case, so that all our constituents can utilise the planning system?

[Simon Hart]

I agree with my hon. Friend. Of course, the easiest way to make a start on that is to scrap the affordable housing subsidy altogether, because it is failing to achieve anything it was originally set up to do. It has a perfectly worthy objective, but at the moment it is having the opposite effect from the one it was designed to achieve.

I want to finish on the Environment Act 1995—not, perhaps, an Act that is uppermost in all our minds, but I shall, none the less, quote from it. National parks have two designated purposes: to foster the economic and social well-being of local communities and to conserve and enhance the park’s natural beauty, wildlife and cultural heritage. So far, so good.

However, where there is a conflict—we touched on this in an earlier intervention—the Act states that greater weight should be attached to the conservation purpose:

“In exercising or performing any functions in relation to, or so as to affect, land in a National Park, any relevant authority shall have regard to the purposes specified in subsection (1) of section five of this Act and, if it appears that there is a conflict between those purposes, shall attach greater weight to the purpose of conserving and enhancing the natural beauty, wildlife and cultural heritage of the area comprised in the National Park”—

that was possibly written by the person who wrote the letter I referred to earlier. To the rest of us, those words mean that, if there is a conflict—there will, almost inevitably, with every application anybody makes, be an environmental and economic conflict—national park officers are bound by the 1995 Act to err in favour of the conservation element. Even if the conservation downside is tiny, and the economic upside is huge, officers are bound by the letter of the Act to take decisions that could, in some cases, be bad for the economic and social well-being of the communities they are there to serve, although I do not, by the way, blame officers for interpreting this part of the Act in the way they do. However, economic considerations are crucial; they are definitely crucial in my national park and, I suspect, in everybody else’s too. At the moment, however, they are not getting the proper airing they deserve.

That leaves the Minister with three solutions to chew over. First, he could scrap the affordable housing subsidy altogether—I think he will probably just let that go through to the wicketkeeper—or he could at least make a distinction between rural and urban developments. The affordable housing policy tends to favour urban developments and to put rural ones at risk, and he could explore that.

Secondly, the Minister should merge the national park and local authority planning functions, thereby saving a vast amount of public money and applying greater consistency to the planning process, which ratepayers will appreciate. If that is not possible, he should make provision for national park decisions, taken by an unelected body, to be called in and reviewed by the local authority planning body, which is, of course, democratically electable. That should be a free service. If somebody puts in an application that gets a perverse response, there should be a localised system of appeal to support the area’s ratepayers. I can see no obstacle to that suggestion.

Finally, the Minister could amend the 1995 Act to give economic and social criteria the same weight as it currently gives environmental criteria. That recommendation is simple, cheap, deliverable, practical and logical, so it will probably never happen, but, none the less, I put it to the Minister that he could consider and perhaps discuss it, although I realise he cannot make up policy in Westminster Hall.

I hope my comments have been fair to national park planning officers, who have a devil of a task in trying to satisfy their various customers. However, I also hope I have alerted the House to the fact that all is not well in the national park planning system, and there are great frustrations. People are trying to do their best as part of our economic regeneration and recovery, but, sadly, they see national parks as an obstacle to that progress, rather than an asset. I hope the Minister can give us some encouragement in that regard.