Local Plans (Public Consent)

Guy Opperman Excerpts

Wednesday 9th July 2014 Westminster Hall

[Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con)]

It is a delight to see you in the Chair, Mr Betts, for a debate on a subject in which I know you have a particularly keen interest. I must say that there is no tumbleweed today; looking around me, I can see that my Conservative colleagues have a clear interest in this subject as well. I will try to give the short version of my speech. I had planned lengthy remarks, but if I was to say everything I have in mind I would consume my colleagues’ time.

I begin by outlining two key problems. First, land for development is extremely scarce in Wycombe, and there is real public anger at the prospect of building on all of High Wycombe’s reserve sites, which would further burden the inadequate infrastructure, especially our roads. Secondly, there is an obvious, acute need for more homes, especially those that people, particularly young people and families, can afford. In some cases there is a real sense of despair; I am thinking particularly of one working father I talked to with a family of four who will not only struggle to buy a home locally but might find himself facing the prospect of a Bank of England cap on the mortgage he would need.

There is a real problem of despair among those who do not own homes, and there is also a clear need for public consent. We need to find a way forward because the current approach is failing for three key reasons. First, collaborative democracy is inherently unlikely ever to meet policy makers’ aspirations. Secondly, a duty to co-operate is not the right way to co-ordinate decision making and works against localism. Thirdly, the crux of the matter is that the current system leaves individuals and families facing the imposition of costs without adequate recompense. I am going to say something about each of those points.

I rather regret that I cannot put a map in Hansard, but I will try to describe the problem in High Wycombe. It is surrounded by an area of outstanding natural beauty, apart from where the M40 emerges to the south-east, where it is green belt. That creates enormous pressure on development land—indeed, the district, which is larger than my constituency, is 71% AONB. There are four reserved sites in Wycombe: Abbey Barn north, Abbey Barn south, the Gomm valley and Terriers Farm, all of which are highly prized by local residents and would be served by roads that are already heavily used. We are short of school places and our hospital is already falling short of public expectations, having lost services; it is no surprise that the public have concerns.

Among all that, I have been very impressed by the commitment of Wycombe district councillors to represent their electorate and mine, as well as by the cool-headed professionalism of the planning officers. They are operating a system that they have been given, with all its complexities, uncertainties and, crucially, areas of discretion. They are determined to be constructive and certainly not to abdicate control to the Planning Inspectorate and developers, which is how they perceive things. They have explained clearly that, under their current proposals, most of the Gomm valley and Abbey Barn north in particular would remain undeveloped. Nevertheless, people remain concerned.

Turning to the results of a quality assurance survey about the local plan, I observe that of the 3,800 survey packs sent out, only 550 people replied. That tells me that non-participation remains a crucial problem. Nevertheless, about a third of people had seen the council’s leaflet on the local plan and read some of it, and 71% felt that new homes were needed locally. Aside from talking to local families, I have experience of talking to residents’ groups and finding out just how irate they are about the notion of their lives bearing specific costs without adequate compensation—and, it turns out, without adequate opportunity to participate.

The Government’s approach is an implementation of the collaborative approach to planning described in the Conservative party’s Green Paper, “Open Source Planning”, which was available online to download before the election—I did so and read it. Another thing I would observe about non-participation is that, given that the Green Paper very much explains what the Government have been doing, it is surprising that there has been so much controversy about the presumption of sustainable development—it was clearly articulated that a Conservative-led Government would implement that. It says something about non-participation in democracy that even the most interested campaign groups nationally appear not to have read the Green Paper.

I challenge the notion of open source consent. Without going off on too much of a tangent, as a software engineer who has participated in open source software projects, I observe that open source software is entirely voluntary—if someone does not wish to use it, they can do something else—and the incentives to participate are strong. In contrast, the land use planning system involves coercion and imposed costs, and there is no exit from it. The whole open source metaphor has been flawed.

The Green Paper said:

“Our conception of local planning is rooted in civic engagement and collaborative democracy as the means of reconciling economic development with quality of life. Planning issues drive members of the public to become engaged in local political campaigning and decision-making. Communities should be given the greatest possible opportunity to have their say and the greatest possible degree of local control. If we get this right, the planning system can play a major role in decentralising power and strengthening society—bringing communities together, as they formulate a shared vision of sustainable development. And, if we enable communities to find their own ways of overcoming the tensions between development and conservation, local people can become proponents rather than opponents of appropriate economic growth.”

We can see how that approach fed into our manifesto, the “Invitation to Join the Government of Britain”, and then into the national planning policy framework, but I want to argue that it has failed. I am very sorrowful that it has, but I would like to explain why by describing some local experience.

The residents of Daws Hill have strong incentives to participate in local neighbourhood planning. The Daws Hill site is bracketed by RAF Daws Hill to the east and Wycombe sports centre to the west. The sports centre is going through a major redevelopment, and more housing will be built on RAF Daws Hill because it is a brownfield site. The residents formed a neighbourhood forum and set out in good faith to participate in the system that the Government had set out. However, the council ruled that neither of the two developments of interest to residents could be considered by the neighbourhood forum. There was a judicial review and an appeal, and the council was found to have acted properly within the law.

The chairman of the neighbourhood forum said:

“Having encouraged participation in local development through the formation of a neighbourhood forum, as set out in the Localism Act, the forum now finds that the local planning authority has the discretion to restrict its area, it appears, for whatever reason it chooses.

“In our opinion, this makes a nonsense of the legislation, which is supposed to be there to encourage participation.

“It's not surprising we feel aggrieved at the outcome of the legal process. We are struggling to see any advantage in participating in local affairs.”

I am dismayed that that happened, because I stood on a platform of radical decentralisation of power, which I very much expected we would deliver. People have wasted their time, money and energy—the outcome has been everything that open source planning was not supposed to be.

Elsewhere in High Wycombe, people are not participating to any great extent. Across the district there were about 1,700 responses to the local consultation; I have about 75,000 electors. In the rather unfortunate jargon of public policy theory, people are “rationally ignorant”— it is just not worth the effort of participating in these matters because they are complex and tedious. The process of information gathering, discussion and decision often produces unacceptable results that people are forced to accept. That is the problem with public choice factors. In reality, the public either have too few incentives to get involved or have found that in practice the system excludes them from the involvement that they want: the power to avoid having costs imposed on them.

Another active local group, Penn and Tylers Green residents society, which is most concerned about the Gomm valley, provided this eviscerating judgment on the national planning policy framework:

“The NPPF seems to us to be a disingenuous mixture of high-sounding intent and contradictory assertion. It identifies planning as aiming to achieve ‘sustainable development’, a term which, because it defies succinct interpretation, has come to mean popularly, ‘the importance of building houses’.”

Notwithstanding the Government’s honourable intent, we now have council, not community, power. Land use planning remains a complex and specialist subject, so Wycombe’s local plan was produced by planning officers, not residents bravely taking control of their own lives. Planning regulations remain so complex that specialist expertise is required even to work out whether a proposal is permitted development, about which I will talk more in a few moments.

It also turns out that the process of electing councillors every four years does not persuade people to accept the costs imposed on them by the plans and decisions of officials. The process followed is certainly lawful but it cannot be said to be democratic, given that the electors do not have the opportunity to discard the plan if they do not like it. I suggest that we see, by harsh experience and by reading the Green Paper, that the NPPF and collaborative democracy in planning have turned out to be an opportunity to comply enthusiastically with the goals set by authority, which is, I am afraid, the freedom to obey.

Regarding the duty to co-operate, if collaborative planning has not worked at the local level, what of collaboration among planning authorities? Whenever decision making is decentralised, a problem of co-ordination arises. The duty to co-operate was bound to bring different plans into conflict, and such conflicts were bound to be difficult to resolve.

I understand from planning officers that the burden of co-operation is now simultaneously slowing down delivery, as authorities communicate with the constellation of organisations indicated in the NPPF, and making planning less accountable to local people. How is public consent for a local plan to be obtained when it is bound to be the product of an opaque process of collaboration between many individuals working for many official bodies?

I understand that moves are now afoot to ask local enterprise partnerships to co-ordinate local planning authorities. When the chief executive of our LEP told me that a particular problem was that there were now so many economic plans that people could not reconcile them, I asked him, light-heartedly, “Are you saying that what we need is a strongman, with the power, authority and vision to resolve the plans and impose the solution on everyone?” He said yes, but of course I was parodying Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom”; it seems that, once again, life imitates literature, if not art.

[Guy Opperman (Hexham) (Con)]

I will certainly not be quoting Hayek back to my hon. Friend. I congratulate him on securing this debate. Does he share my concern, however, that there is a lack of joined-up thinking among neighbouring councils? For example, Northumberland and Newcastle councils act differently in relation to the green belt on their border. Does he agree that that sort of problem needs the overarching view that he is so enthusiastically endorsing?

[Steve Baker]

I do. One of the problems is that the valuation of things such as the green belt is subjective—different people will have different opinions about different pieces of land. Some green belts are not especially high in quality. Around Wycombe, as I have said, most of it is AONB, but it is probably true that some of what is just green belt is not especially high in quality. Where it is poor in quality, people will value it differently. When elected representatives are involved at a local level, it is not surprising that they are unable to agree a valuation of land.

That is the point I want to make. When it comes to co-ordinating plans among decentralised decision makers, only the price system can promise to reconcile those differences, through voluntary and mutual adjustment. It is precisely because only the price system can co-ordinate human action that economic planning by authority always falls short of people’s ambitions for it.

I turn to what I propose the Government should do. In the short term at least, we must inevitably continue to attempt to make planning by authority in land use function without doing too much harm. I therefore ask the Government to take three short-term actions.

First, the Government should take the time to deliver a genuine simplification of the existing rules, so that complexity does not undermine public trust in the system. For example, I understand that permitted development can now be farcical in practice. I looked at the website, and to me it seems that some of it can be simple. In practice, however, people find it so difficult to decide whether something is permitted development, and are so afraid of the consequences of being fined if they get it wrong, that, in practice, they often end up applying to the planners for a certificate confirming that permission for the development is not required. That is absurd. A solution has been put to me. It essentially involves abolishing permitted development and making things simple: if there were no response within an eight-week period, the development would be allowed to go ahead.

Secondly, the Government should ensure that the duty to co-operate is not allowed to produce a creeping reinstatement of unaccountable, unelected regional government through the LEPs. I endorse everything that the Conservative party has said about regional government; I do not want to see it reinstated through LEPs.

The Government should narrow the range of bodies among whom co-operation is required and state clearly that local planning authorities must resolve differences among themselves without adjudication by authorities of broader scope—notwithstanding the wise comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Hexham (Guy Opperman). If necessary, the test on the duty to co-operate should be relaxed to avoid reinstating the failed concept of regional government.

Finally, I ask the Minister to confirm the view he set out in his letter of 3 March 2014 to Sir Michael Pitt, chief executive of the Planning Inspectorate, regarding inspectors’ reports on local plans. The Minister says, in the letter:

“The special role of Green Belt is also recognised in the framing of the presumption in favour of sustainable development, which sets out that authorities should meet objectively assessed needs unless specific policies in the Framework indicate development should be restricted. Crucially, Green Belt is identified as one such policy.”

What I understand from that is that authorities are not required to consume green-belt or other protected land to meet those objectively assessed needs. That is critical for a place such as High Wycombe; although the housing need is clear, it is also clear that the place is surrounded by AONB. I am looking for the Minister to confirm that that is his view.

I turn to reserve sites and one of the difficulties of the NPPF. The reserve sites are all in close proximity to the communities they serve, special to the adjacent communities and local in character. Under the NPPF, they could be designated as local green space and managed as for the green belt. Will the Minister confirm that that could be done, in which case local councillors and planners would have the discretion to decide whether to do so, to protect those areas? After scrutinising the documents and considering the sites, which I know well enough, I am absolutely sure that that is the case. It would mean that we have local power, at least at council level, over those sites.

In the longer term, the crux of the matter is that the development of land imposes costs on other people. The fundamental reason why local plans are failing to attract public consent is that compensation for such so-called “externalities”, as the literature puts it, is provided to councils as the embodiment of community, not to the people affected. People simply have inadequate reason to consent and every reason to object. What is necessary to achieve public consent in land use decisions is what economists call “internalising the externalities”—that is, making developers cover the costs that they impose on others when they wish to proceed.

In the long term, it cannot be right to leave young people and working families facing a housing market with too few homes whose prices are too high. It is perfectly plain that more homes must be built, and built at reasonable prices with widespread public consent. There is extensive literature on how to deliver such a system through common-law property rights and market mechanisms. For example, “Liberating the Land” by the Institute of Economic Affairs provides a good survey. Its ideas include: covenant protections and deed restrictions, combined with affordable land use tribunals; tradable development rights; strengthening the law on nuisance; and various restraints from economic forces. National protection in law could be retained for AONBs, green belts and places of historic value.

I do not doubt that such a system would have its own difficulties, but it would offer a promise of a way forward, in which people had genuine power to say no and every incentive to say yes. We must abandon command-and-control economic planning in land use, and instead find ways to meet the laudable goals of the present system in a way that is realistic about public participation, incentives and the efficiency and effectiveness of bureaucratic processes. We certainly must not continue to preach market capitalism, only to practise socialism in land use before blaming inevitable failure on the market.

There is a clear way forward. In the short term, planning inspectors should accept local plans that meet the aims of the NPPF by protecting designated land, even if that means not building the full quantities of homes identified as being objectively needed. This is necessary to establish public confidence in the democratic legitimacy of the system. In the longer term, policy should give real power to the public, which means the power to say no, combined with proper incentives to say yes, including due compensation, without the public having to acquiesce to costs imposed by other people, including the long-term costs of losing beautiful, highly valued land.

Democracy is government by consent. Only when the public do not face costs without compensation will our system of land use control meet that aspiration.