Neighbourhood Planning Bill

Helen Hayes Excerpts

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

[Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)]

I am pleased to have the opportunity to contribute to this debate on the Neighbourhood Planning Bill, and it is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Chipping Barnet (Mrs Villiers).

I am a supporter of neighbourhood planning. Before entering this place, I spent my working life as a town planner seeking to involve and engage communities in planning policymaking. I know the benefits that come from giving communities the ability to shape planning policy and from giving that policy formal weight in the planning process. I therefore welcome the measures in this Bill, which will strengthen neighbourhood plans and neighbourhood planning. I also have concerns about several aspects of this Bill, which reflect my wider concerns about the Government’s approach to planning.

We have in the UK a strong plan-led system, which allows democratically elected local authorities to lay out the basis on which applications for new development will be considered. There is no excuse for not having a plan in place or for poor performance. Last year, the Government made that system less coherent with the introduction of permission in principle, which introduces a blunt form of zoning into our finely balanced plan-led system that is capable of balancing so many different interests and concerns to get to a good decision.

I am concerned that this Bill does nothing to address the serious under-resourcing of planning departments while also giving local authorities new responsibilities to resource neighbourhood planning. Resources for local planning departments have been cut by 46% in the past five years, and the British Property Federation—not councils themselves but the private sector—identifies that this under-resource is the primary cause of problems in the planning system. During debates on the Housing and Planning Bill, I argued that councils should be able to recover the full cost of development management services through fees. I was very disappointed that the Government rejected that proposal at the time, and I hope that the new Minister will reconsider it. It is a common-sense proposal that will make a huge difference to efficient planning decision making.

Councils must also be properly resourced to support neighbourhood planning, Involving and engaging communities is resource intensive, particularly in areas where there are high levels of deprivation, but unless it is done properly we will not have neighbourhood plans that fully represent the views of the local community. Sadly, it remains the case that those in our communities who often stand to gain the most from the things that planning can deliver—for example those in housing need—are often those whose voices are not heard in debates about planning policy, and that must change.

I am concerned that this Bill proposes to water down pre-commencement conditions. Planning conditions are one of the significant levers that local planning authorities have to secure the best possible outcomes for communities. Very often, the things that form the basis for conditions are make or break issues for communities—anything from providing additional sewer capacity to the choice of bricks. Conditions should not be unreasonable, but it should remain the prerogative of the local authority to decide what conditions best protect the interests of local residents. The idea that conditions can be imposed only following the written agreement of the developer greatly underestimates the role that conditions play in ensuring good outcomes. This proposal also sets up an unnecessarily adversarial relationship between applicant and local authority where, in reality, it is best practice for the parties to come together to discuss and agree conditions through the pre-application process. I hope that the Government will reconsider this proposal.

I am concerned that the measures in this Bill relating to permitted development rights do not even begin to address the problems that are being caused by the extension of those rights to allow the conversion of offices to residential without planning consent. In London, the policy is having a detrimental effect on the supply of business space in some areas. We are also seeing new homes being delivered without regard for the physical infrastructure or public services to support an increasing population because they are not subject to section 106 agreements. We are seeing new homes being delivered without regard to minimum space standards or the types of homes that are most needed. Most importantly, we are seeing new homes being delivered with no affordable housing being provided in areas where it is desperately needed.

Instead of tinkering with the policy around permitted development rights, the Government should be radically rethinking it so that all new homes are subject to the full requirements of the planning process and developers are not able to profit from new homes without contributing to the green space, play space, school places and medical facilities that their residents will need in the future.

Fundamentally, this is a tinkering piece of legislation when we need major reform. It is polishing the bannister when the staircase is falling down. The housing crisis is one of the most significant issues facing our country. The planning system is critical to delivering both the new homes that we need and the successful communities that we want to see. This is no less than a debate about the future of our communities for our children and our grandchildren, the kind of places that we want them to be able to live in and the quality of life that we want them to have. Properly resourced planning is a tool for delivery not a barrier—a tool for ensuring fair outcomes and high quality. Instead of this paltry Bill, the Government should be setting out a vision for planning and for involving communities in planning; bringing forward a national infrastructure commission on a statutory footing, because infrastructure is critical to the delivery of new homes; building up our plan-led system as the basis for certainty in decision making; establishing a basis in legislation for new towns and garden cities; setting a context for communities and councils to come together to plan for the future; and resourcing councils to build the genuinely affordable council homes that we so desperately need. As this Bill passes through Parliament, I hope that the Government will take the opportunity to reconsider it and to make it fit for the challenges that we face.

[Mr Richard Bacon (South Norfolk) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes). I agreed with some of the things that she said, and certainly with the emphasis that she placed on infrastructure and the need to get it right. We have a strange system in which we bring forward development as if it is a bad thing, and put in facilities—she mentioned green spaces, but there are many other things that communities want, such as health facilities and primary schools—afterwards to mitigate the “bad effects” of development. However, recognising that the words “cities” and “civic” are cognate with “civilisation”, we should be bringing forward holistic schemes that create good places in the first instance.

I disagreed with the hon. Lady, though, when she nearly made it sound as though the planning system would be almost as perfect a work of art as any rendered by Leonardo da Vinci were it not for one thing—the way that not enough taxpayers’ money was being hosed over the planning departments of this country. The hon. Member for Erith and Thamesmead (Teresa Pearce) said something similar. It seems to me that the problems are rather more fundamental.

I welcome the Bill, mainly because it gives people a local voice. I agree with all the views expressed by my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin); he is no longer here, so I shall not dwell on this, but I welcome the fact that the hon. Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann) is in his place. He is a great tribune of his constituents and is also the vice-chairman of the all-party group on self-build, custom and community house building and place-making, which has a longer name than any other all-party group as it is a better and more important all-party group than any other, with the possible exception of the all-party beer group. It recognises, as does the hon. Gentleman, that the really important thing about getting the voice right is that it should be the voice of the people who are going to live in the dwellings.

The hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood said that the local planning system should embrace every single house, and talked about the colour of bricks as if it were a good thing that local councillors were deciding the colour of bricks. I had a conversation recently with a local house builder who had a plan for a very modern house. Naturally, he wanted a render that was appropriate for that. It was bright white. He had a conversation with his local planning officer—I am not making this up—who said, “No, no. It’s too white. It’s too stark. You shouldn’t do that,” so he asked the planning officer to look at the relevant page on the website and choose the colour. She was a little nonplussed by this, but the house builder said, “You don’t want the one that I want, so why don’t you choose one and save a lot of time?” Eventually she chose a colour, which he said he would change in due course if he did not like it. It ought not to be necessary to have such a conversation. I have met house builders who have had seven or eight choices of gutter colour refused.

[Helen Hayes]

In each of our constituencies, we can think of examples of developments that, because of poor finishing and poor-quality choices of building materials, blight their communities for decades. It is not a trivial point that I am making. Once something is built, it affects that community for many, many years to come. These things are important.

[Mr Bacon]

I agree that they are important. The best people to choose the quality of the materials, and to make sure that they are of the highest possible standard, are the people who will live in those dwellings, not somebody else working to a profit margin, which is why more self-build and custom house building will result in higher quality.

I said earlier that I agreed with the hon. Lady on the subject of the local voice. I support the Bill because we need more local voice. The fundamental problem we face is that when people oppose development, they do so not because they want to see their family in trouble or not having somewhere to live. I have yet to meet the woman who wants her daughter or granddaughter to live in a ditch, and I do not think I am going to meet that person. They oppose development because they feel that local people have no say—no voice—in what gets built, where it is built, what it looks like or who has the first chance to live there. If we change that, we change the conversation completely.

Another reason why self-build and custom house building driven by customers is so important is that instead of opposition, it is met with local acceptance. I know that the chairs of many parish councils want to see dwellings in their local areas designed by local people for local people, to help local people. Of course, that also has the benefit of helping local house builders—local small and medium-sized enterprises, rather than large combines such as Persimmon, which are interested only in the bonus pool, which will result in 150 top managers getting a £600 million bonus pot, if they do reasonably well; it will be larger than that if they do very well. That business, like the banks, has been propped up by huge amounts—many billions of pounds—of taxpayers’ money through Help to Buy and various other schemes. I would rather see that money going into higher-quality materials, better thermal performance and bigger spaces.

The fundamental question, which we have not been very good at answering so far, is why we have a shortage. People give different answers. We have heard about the lack of planning resource, although we have thousands of unbuilt extant planning permissions, so the reason can hardly be planning by itself. We often hear that there is a lack of land. Only 1.2% of the land area of this country is taken up with houses. The Ministry of Defence alone has 2% of the land area of the UK. There are more golf courses in Surrey than there are houses. The problem is not planning per se; it is a lack of accessible land, a lack of financeable propositions, rather than a lack of finance, and a planning model that is broken.

If we want to correct that, we need to put customers at the heart of that model—people who will live in those dwellings. The way to do that is to separate the business of placemaking—all the things that I am sure the hon. Lady would agree with: creating places that are well served, well designed, well run, well governed and well connected—from the business of building houses on infrastructure that is already in place, with well serviced plots that have all the things that we would expect, including fibre to the premises, water, gas and so on, provided by one of the many hundreds of suppliers. There is a growing market of people out there who are willing to supply the house that people want, rather than what a very small number of large companies are telling people that they want. We need to put the customer at the centre, as in all other successful markets. That is the way that we will solve the housing crisis.

Neighbourhood Planning Bill (First sitting)

Helen Hayes Excerpts

Committee Debate: 1st sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 18th October 2016 Public Bill Committees

[Oliver Colvile (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Con)]

I think I probably need to do so, because I still have shares in a company called Polity Communications, which gives advice to developers on how to get planning permission. I have in the past done work on opposing things with community groups as well.

[Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)]

I should mention that I employ a local authority council member in my parliamentary team.

[Chris Philp (Croydon South) (Con)]

I should draw colleagues’ attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I am a shareholder in a business that provides finance for construction projects.

--- Later in debate ---

[Oliver Colvile]

Q Thank you very much, gentlemen, for giving up your time to come and have a chat with us. Before I was elected to this place, I did a lot of work in the development industry, giving advice to developers on how to manage community consultations and stuff like that. A number of my clients would have said that every time the Government get involved in producing another piece of planning law, frankly, that delays everything. I would be interested in your comments.

Turning to preconditions, I am very keen to make sure that local communities are absolutely and utterly involved in the whole decision-making process and feel that they should have their say. How do you think we can ensure that the preconditions are also considered by local communities in the process?

Andrew Whitaker: I do not think there is any doubt that local communities are involved in the planning process and in the planning application process. Therefore, the discussion over the determination of the planning application should involve whether things about the planning application need to be sorted out at a later date, and therefore communities should be expressing those concerns in their representations as part of the planning process. They are represented by elected members at a local level, so I have no worries that local communities are not involved in the determination of a planning application as it proceeds through all the legal procedures. Whether to place a condition on that planning permission is part of the determination process, so whether or not as a community you agree that condition or that the condition should be pre-commencement, it is possible to raise that through the normal procedure, rather than as a discussion on the particular schedule of those conditions. That is a technical process as to whether you need the condition in the first place.

Andrew Dixon: We would very much agree with that. We do not see this as in any way reducing the extent to which local communities and local residents can be involved in the process or can have their say on particular applications. Broadly speaking, the Federation of Master Builders is positive about the provisions on conditions in the Bill because we think that they would institute an earlier conversation about which conditions are necessary, which need to be pre-commencement conditions and which do not, and which can perhaps be pre-occupation conditions, but none of that precludes those conditions being in place or those issues being tackled in some other way. It should serve to institute an earlier conversation about how best to deal with those issues.

[Helen Hayes]

Q Mr Whitaker, you mentioned a couple of times that it is best practice for conditions to be agreed in discussion between the local authority and the applicant, and I agree with you. The Bill proposes a much more formal process than that through an exchange of letters between an applicant and the local authority to agree the conditions. The mechanisms in the Bill for resolving a dispute, when that process can be resolved through an exchange of letters, are pretty blunt: the rejection of the application wholesale, and the developer is then left in the position of going to appeal. Notwithstanding what you said about the system not working so well at the moment, can you comment on whether this will help to further encourage best practice, or whether formalising the process in the way proposed in the Bill might have unintended consequences?

Andrew Whitaker: Formalising the discussion in writing—of course, that does not mean by post these days—is reasonable. It makes it very clear what people have and have not agreed to, and one can go back and check that that is the case. We would agree with the BPF’s proposal that a fast-track appeal mechanism when disagreement continues would be a good idea, because that would sort out some of the potential further delay that this provision would introduce.

In terms of whether this is a blunt sword—a blunt instrument—the whole point is that one is not supposed to hold the other party to ransom. The applicant is not going to say, “I am not going to accept any pre-commencement conditions on my planning decision at all,” because then it might be perfectly right for the local planning authority to say, “In which case we will refuse your application, on the basis that you haven’t sorted out a particular detail that you could do via condition, so long as you do it prior to commencement of your application.” Or they have to think to themselves, “Would we be happy defending that at an appeal when the only thing we are concerned about is not whether this particular issue can be dealt with via condition but whether it needs to be worded as a pre-commencement condition, rather than as a condition that can be discharged at a different stage in the development process?”

There are lots of trigger points in a development, the most obvious of which is prior to the occupation of a dwelling. You are allowed to do all the groundwork—to slab level, as we call it—so you can word conditions like that. You do not need to agree everything prior to commencement, and we believe that that discussion will be able to focus minds and, ultimately, will lead to the best practice that we all seek.

Roy Pinnock: I have just two points on that in relation to the discussion and dialogue, and the role of the planning onion—we just add another layer to it and make things more complex, rather than less complex. I think that is in part your point: do we add to the systemic complexity that we already have in this regime, which is already a series of layers? As I have already said, the BPF’s position is that there is an opportunity here to do something that is quick, clear and effective, which is where a measure that has real teeth tends to drive cultural changes.

I go back to the question on whether more legislation can really achieve anything in the planning world. Section 96A is a really good example of that. It is a very small amendment to the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 that has had a great impact on the day-to-day lives of practitioners by making things a lot easier, and it has driven a cultural change without people having to rely too heavily on legalistic points.

The second point is in relation to how we actually speed up the dialogue and use this as a tool. In part, the solution may be to have greater use of model conditions, which the Planning Inspectorate used to promote. We feel there is an opportunity for the Government to be much clearer about what their model conditions are, using working groups from industry and the government sector to say, “This should be the starting point. This should be when these kinds of conditions are imposed. We shouldn’t be asking for details of windows when you are decontaminating a site or knocking buildings down. This is the form of the conditions imposed.” By doing that we would drain away a lot of the administrative tasks that planning officers, of whom there are too few, are being required to do. They can rely on those model conditions and say, “We have done our job and have justified departures from them because we think it’s important to local people on this particular issue. We are prepared”—as Mr Whitaker said—“to justify that in front of an inspector, and we think they will reach the same decision.”

[Helen Hayes]

Q I am a member of the Select Committee on Communities and Local Government, and yesterday we heard evidence from a range of witnesses within the sector, including from the Federation of Master Builders and the Home Builders Federation, about the lack of resource and capacity in local authority planning departments. It was suggested in that evidence session that the reported overuse of pre-commencement planning conditions is a symptom of a lack of resource in planning departments, rather than a wilful misuse of pre-commencement conditions on the part of local authorities. Will you comment on your experience of the resourcing issues in local authority planning departments?

Andrew Dixon: We would certainly agree that under-resourcing is one of the major drivers behind the high level of use of planning conditions. The strong perception among our members is that planning conditions are often being used to limit the necessity of engaging in detail with a full application. Among the things that often arise from that are planning conditions that have actually been covered in the full application. An example of that would be landscaping. I have heard a number of our members say that detailed landscaping plans were included in their full application but that there did not seem to be any engagement with it, there then being a condition to bring forward those details. Under-resourcing is a major issue that causes numerous hold-ups within the system, and we think it is one of the drivers behind the excessive use of conditions.

Ross Murray: This is very profound in rural planning authorities, which are significantly under-resourced in planning. Our members around the country see that all the time. The Committee must also have a mind to the resource of the applicant and the risks within the process. We should do anything that we can to provide certainty of process after the application has been determined, and when an applicant finds that the pre-commencement conditions just do not work for him. In a rural context, these are often low-return projects, and the planning process is the highest risk point at the start of the process.

Andrew Whitaker: It is very much a chicken-and-egg situation. If local authorities do not put enough resources into determining a planning application, the temptation is—rather lazily, in my opinion—to deal with everything via condition, rather than as part of the primary application. If authorities focused their resources on what needed to be done as part of the application, they would need to condition less. That would relieve them of having to discharge conditions, which can take just as many resources as the primary application. Therefore, we think that local authorities should reassess their systems and processes to focus their limited resources into the right parts of the process.

[Chris Philp]

Q I would like to continue the line of questioning on resourcing and planning departments that Helen Hayes started. Mr Dixon, you said earlier that the lack of resourcing in planning departments was the No. 1 impediment to getting more applications. Will you confirm that that was the case?

Andrew Dixon: That was the case.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Philp]

Q Of course, you would still have the statutory time targets, and if you increased total resource levels, it may most directly benefit those paying more, but it might have wider benefits as well, even to applicants who were not paying the extra fees.

Angus Walker: It is possible, but in my field, it is not financial deadlines—we have time deadlines in some areas, and not in others. The ones that have a decision required, statutorily, in a certain length of time get their decisions within that time; the others probably take longer than they otherwise would have done, because more of the resources are devoted to making those decisions on time.

[Helen Hayes]

Q I have a question for Councillor Newman, and perhaps Hugh Ellis as well. Have either of you undertaken any assessment of the likely additional burden to local planning authorities from the new proposed process in the Bill? Supplementary to that, and following the discussion that was just had about the possibility of applicants paying for an enhanced level of service, might a better system be for local authorities to be able, on a transparent and consultative basis, to charge the full cost of their development management service through fees? One concern I have about the proposal that developers be able to buy in an enhanced level of service is that it is potentially quite difficult for local authorities to manage fluctuating demand, in relation to individual applications. Surely what we actually want is for local authorities to be properly resourced to do the job well for everybody, irrespective of who the applicant is.

Councillor Newman: We do want to be properly resourced anyway, as a starting point. There is a £150 million tax subsidy going in; that would absolutely be the starting point for me, but I still think that this is worth exploring, in terms of the particular recruitment issues we have, because there will never be agreement on what “properly resourced” would be. That is why I would not rule out looking at—I do not like the word “enhanced”. There is something around fast-track and something around some major developments perhaps requiring more resource than other developments, but there is a discussion to be had. One way or another, we have to get more resource into a system that is under-resourced financially, and where in many areas, as we have heard, there are pressures regarding recruitment and staff coming forward.

On the other question you asked, I know the LGA is submitting written evidence later in the week. I have not got figures in front of me to evidence the extra burden, but I think the extra work this would potentially bring round is significant. As colleagues here have said, you could see more refusals, and the whole thing could become mired in a more confrontational process that, by definition, will set planning applications back, rather than them being, where possible, resolved, sometimes in a mature manner.

Hugh Ellis: Just to reiterate, planning is a key service with vital outputs for communities; in that sense, it needs to be resourced properly, and certainly at a minimum level. It also worries me that a lot of this resource in fees would go into development management, leaving open the question of how you fund the rest of the planning service, which is, in some senses, the most important part for us—the development plan, neighbourhood planning and master planning process, and getting it right up front.

On the idea that applicants would pay a fee base for a particular service, and that that would somehow sustain the planning service, there are some real questions to answer. It could be part of the answer—that is absolutely true—but I return to the point, on section 106 and the community infrastructure levy, that there is already, in pure taxation terms, a slightly regressive element to planning: you get most in high-demand areas. If this was another measure that led to that, it would be challenging, partly because the planning system has to deal with all sorts of varied issues. The examples coming in from Cumbria really reinforce that. They need very powerful local plans; how are they to pay for them if the predominant form of income generation is fees from applications that they do not get?

[Helen Hayes]

Q I have a further question for Duncan Wilson. You mentioned concerns about archaeology. It seems there have been indications from the Government that some assurance might be provided around the question of archaeology, and we will wait to see what comes forward in that regard. Are there other areas of heritage about which you have potential concerns relating to pre-commencement planning conditions?

Duncan Wilson: Less severe ones. A number of concerns were raised in the context of the Housing and Planning Act that were perhaps more significant than in relation to this particular clause, other than for archaeology. Our concerns on brownfield land, design, massing and density are not really centre stage, as I understand, with pre-commencement conditions here.

[Kit Malthouse]

Q Obviously, the Government are trying to strengthen neighbourhood plans in the Bill. Do you think the provisions they have in there at the moment are likely to eliminate the erratic decision making from the Planning Inspectorate that we have seen with regard to neighbourhood plans?

Hugh Ellis: They go some way. The relationship between neighbourhood plans and local plans in law is still really quite problematic. There is a direction of travel question about whether or not we end up with a full coverage of neighbourhood plans and in some sense an idea that they might replace local plans. That is talked about but it is important to get that right.

There are a range of challenges. For example, the neighbourhood planning process is producing neighbourhood plans of variable coverage, predominantly in areas with the social and economic capital to prepare them. In law, neighbourhood plans escape a number of the placemaking duties that the wider planning system has applied; those on good design, for example, in law, do not apply to neighbourhood planning but do apply to local plans. I think these measures try, do they not, to fill some of those loopholes in relation to the status of an unadopted neighbourhood plan as it comes through the process, which might help solve part of that appeal process.

For us there is still a wider issue about how the system will work as a whole and the friction that is inevitably produced by neighbourhood plans coming forward in advance of a local plan; the different legal status between the two plans; and ultimately the adoption of a neighbourhood plan as part of the development plan. Part of this debate could very usefully settle what the vision is for neighbourhood planning. Is the idea that the neighbourhood plan ultimately becomes the key lodestone of the English planning process with local plans doing something else, or are local plans going to remain intact? That is a very important question going forward, because many neighbourhood plans are not dealing with the full range of placemaking issues that we need to resolve. That is perfectly fine because communities have a measure of choice about what they do with them, but in relation to good design, flood risk and climate change, for example, those issues are not well represented in the content of neighbourhood plans. So, this is a step; I am not sure it resolves the full range of legal issues that we are confronted with between neighbourhood and local plan status.

Neighbourhood Planning Bill (Second sitting)

Helen Hayes Excerpts

Committee Debate: 2nd sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 18th October 2016 Public Bill Committees

[Kit Malthouse]

Q Okay. My final question is on neighbourhood plans and the areas, to which you alluded earlier. Do you think that neighbourhood plans could be put in place by self-defined areas?

Ruth Reed: My understanding was that you could put forward an area and have it accepted. That is, to a degree, self-defining.

[Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)]

Q May I have your views on the availability and level of resources to support communities that want to undertake neighbourhood planning? What more could be done to enable and encourage neighbourhood planning in more deprived communities and in areas of high housing need, for example, where there are voices that might not be heard in the planning process, but that might stand to benefit from the neighbourhood planning process?

Ruth Reed: I personally believe that there should be a proactive role for local authorities to instigate and identify neighbourhoods, and put in train a process. There should also be an opportunity to financially enable not only the technical aspects of planning, but—on behalf of the Royal Institute of British Architects—to provide design capacity to enable them to input well-worded design policies, and even design codes so that individual neighbourhoods can give expression to the kind of development that they would like to see, and to make it real to them. We believe that there may now be financial provision for this. One of the problems in planning is that it is a paper, two-dimensional base exercise. Sometimes you need people like architects to make it real and three-dimensional and to be able to explain what it would look like, using models or digital models.

Jonathan Owen: The pump-priming funding provided by the Government to support neighbourhood plan development has been an element that has encouraged parish councils to get involved, and it has driven neighbourhood planning of the 2,000 plans that have been produced. Parishes have led 90% of them, so they are embracing that opportunity, and I would like that to continue. The element in the Bill requiring planning authorities to identify the kind of advice that they would provide to groups and draw up neighbourhood plans is helpful. Where it falls a bit short is where it does not set out what is required or expected by the local planning authority.

We would like to see something more formal by way of either a statutory memorandum of understanding or a code of practice relating to what might be expected of the local planning authority in terms of helping with community involvement, helping them to access the principal authority website to do consultation work on it and that kind of thing, rather than just a basic entitlement. So it would be a mix of hard cash and softer things that could be provided by the planning authority. I know that would cost them money, and there was a good debate this morning about planning authority resources.

[John Mann (Bassetlaw) (Lab)]

Q Prince Charles’s Foundation for Building Community did the groundwork in my area to self-define an urban area around a historic church as a community. It is a coherent community, and it is a community that has not been defined as such for 300 to 400 years. In your position, would you say that there was far more scope for this? Imagine if it had been done for the St Paul’s neighbourhood plan 40 years ago. Things might be rather different. Do you see great scope in this, and do you see scope for your organisation in prompting this kind of thinking?

Ruth Reed: I think we have locally active members who have been engaged in the first phase of neighbourhood plans. It is not core to architects to bring forward planning initiatives. There is no reason why certain individuals should not get involved, but it is not something that the RIBA would do, since the RIBA exists to promote architecture rather than enable communities to deliver local plans. There are groups aligned to the RIBA, including the Design Council, the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment and the Architecture Centre Network to put design capacity into local authorities. The RIBA would be involved in initiatives in this kind of area to provide resources to local groups.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Philp]

I am not sure that any public body has ever been financially liable for changing planning permissions.

[Helen Hayes]

Q May I ask Carole Reilly how many neighbourhood plans Locality has supported to date?

Carole Reilly: To date? Under the current programme, we have supported 1,300 neighbourhood plans with grants for technical support. In outline, there are two ways in which you can get support. You can get cash—£9,000 for straightforward plans and, for those that are more complex, the grant can go up to £15,000—and, alongside that, we offer a number of technical support packages. Under the current programme, which we have been running since the beginning of 2015, we have worked with 1,200 or 1,300 groups.

[Helen Hayes]

Q Of those, how many neighbourhood plans have been in urban areas and/or in areas of significant deprivation?

Carole Reilly: It is pretty similar to the national figure, so we are talking about 10% deprivation, but on the programme about 15% of groups coming from non-parish areas, which is slightly more—it stands to reason that those people would come in for higher levels of support.

[Helen Hayes]

Q Have you done any work to understand good practice or the resources necessary to engage effectively communities that might not naturally have the capacity or inclination to engage in strategic planning?

Carole Reilly: We have. We undertook an internal review early days, thinking, “Why is this going on?” because we always seemed to be speaking mainly to the parish council. I have to say that that is one of the elements of the Bill that I feel most disappointed with—it does not go far enough. There was a manifesto commitment to encourage neighbourhood planning across the country, but I think we could be sitting in this room in 10 years’ time and, if we have not done something very significant around urban and deprived areas, we will still be having 10% to 15% of forums doing neighbourhood plans.

Some of the issues are very straightforward. Parish and town councils have a place, a building, a phone, a clerk and an address where people know to go, so they are easy to do. When we did all the asset transfer work at Locality, people understood district councils better than counties. People understood where to go. Those councils also have a big infrastructure, like a number of other bodies, to inform them, “This is an opportunity, take it!” and they have a bank account that they can get going straightaway.

In urban areas, who is your neighbourhood? Is someone on the next street your neighbourhood? Where is the boundary? Is it coterminous with another one you know, such as your political or health boundary? What is it? That is really difficult. Who are the leaders on that? I think it is a major problem that neighbourhood forums have a five-year lifespan. From the start, that does not build in long-term thinking.

There is a problem about funding for implementation for forums, so while my first reaction would be to say that CIL is an issue, it and the new homes bonus scheme only channel funding to areas where there is growth already. If we look at those forums in deprived, urban areas, where CIL is set but set at nought, 0% of nought is still nought, so it makes no difference. These issues could be helped in terms of big-picture stuff. A national policy that tried to balance regeneration and planning would be really helpful so that people can understand what a neighbourhood plan can do for an area where there is actually not a lot of housing demand—there is not a problem because there is not a shortage—but where there is a shortage of employment. Using your neighbourhood plan to understand employment space and encourage and generate that would be great.

The reason why it does not happen in urban areas is that there is not already a thing or a vehicle to do it. In poorer areas, there is an issue about personal investment. If you do not own your own home—if you live in private rented accommodation—you have no investment there, and there is nothing to lose. If you are time-poor, you are not going to get involved. There are also things about skills, transient communities and a general point about focus.

I think a huge amount of work can be done. There have been promotional campaigns on neighbourhood planning, but I think we need something much more targeted and focused, something that works with the people that we know on the ground—the local planning authority—and supports them. We also need to fund it, so it is about a very proactive, promotional mobilisation campaign that targets specific groups to take it forward, otherwise we will be still be at the same picture.

[Mrs Villiers]

Q I would very much like to ask Matt Thomson about one of the points made in your recent report, “Safe Under Us?” about housing development on the green belt. Obviously our planning rules say that such development should be made only in very exceptional cases, but I am alarmed by the research that CPRE and the London Green Belt Council have done, which seems to suggest that inspectors are now deeming general housing pressure and housing need to be sufficiently exceptional to justify green belt development. Could you expand on that?

Matt Thomson: Well, you have put the case that I think CPRE would make very eloquently. Despite the fact that Ministers have said on several occasions that housing demand on its own is not sufficient justification to grant planning permission on green-belt land, it is of concern to us that neither local authorities nor the Planning Inspectorate have necessarily enforced that in all cases, and certainly not in a number of cases that are of concern to CPRE.

Secondly, under the same principle, it is very clear, in our view, in paragraph 14 of the NPPF that, while local authorities should plan to meet their objectively assessed need in full, the requirement does not apply in green belt areas and other areas listed in footnote 9. However, councils are planning for growth—despite being restricted by green belt—and releasing land from the green belt to meet that growth need at an increasing and higher rate than regional plans were doing before they were abolished, largely for the reason that they were proposing development in the green belt. Yes, that is a great concern to us. Housing need obviously needs to be met somewhere and there is still some way to go in order to overcome the problem of how housing need should be met while protecting the green belt and other areas of landscape importance and so on that we would expect to be protected.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kit Malthouse]

That is encouraging. It is certainly the case that it is possible to make more money holding land and trading it than it is developing it. The other area to look at, I suggest, is developer finance, because none of them have got any balance sheets that they can use to expand their operations beyond where they are. I am grateful for the answers, Minister.

[Helen Hayes]

Q I have two quick questions. Can you address the concerns that Carole Reilly raised about neighbourhood forums and their lack of accountability, lack of infrastructure and resources and lack of clear identifiability to local communities? There were also issues raised—I have raised them on a number of occasions—about the intensity of resource you need genuinely to engage a diverse community in a deprived area.

Gavin Barwell: This is a real challenge and I am very open to talk to the hon. Lady, to the hon. Member for Oldham West and Royton, and to others who have an interest in this matter about how we go about doing things. As I said, there is extra funding in deprived areas that a rural parish would not get. There are also people who have expertise in this area and who can engage with groups.

There is a democratic issue; I do not think we can get around that. Clearly, if someone is in a part of the country where there are parish councils, there is an automatic accountability and legitimacy that comes from that. Although we can now have parish councils in Greater London, I think there is only one in the whole of Greater London; we do not tend to have that kind of infrastructure. So there is a challenge in making sure that the plans that come forward have that legitimacy and are genuinely owned by the whole of the community, and not by a particular group of people who have a certain interest.

If we look at the average turnout in referendums on neighbourhood plans, it is running at about a third, which is actually not that different from the kind of turnout that we would see generally in local elections. That is quite an encouraging average figure in terms of trying to ensure that there is some legitimacy—I think the hon. Lady would regard her local council as legitimate on that kind of turnout—but there is certainly more that we can look to do and I am very happy to have a dialogue with her about that.

[Helen Hayes]

Q Thank you. I have a second question. The issue of permitted development rights continues to be a cause of concern. I appreciate that it is not within the scope of the Bill, but it has a direct bearing on neighbourhood planning, so it is essentially a way in which development can take place that is not allowed for in a local plan and that has not been discussed by the local community, who have not been consulted about it. It is under the radar, without anybody having any say about it at all. I wonder whether the Minister has any plans at all to address the concerns that have been raised about permitted development rights.

Gavin Barwell: I would say two things there. There is some limited scope for local say. The main one that the hon. Lady is probably talking about is the office to “ressy”, or residential, permitted development. There you do have to give a prior approval application to the council. The council can only look at certain limited things such as flooding; there is a list of four or five things that can be looked at. It is not a full planning application, but there is at least a little bit there.

I tried to touch on this in my response to the Second Reading debate, so I understand some of the concerns that people have. You do not get the affordable housing contribution, for example, that you would get if there was a full planning application. However, I think it is demonstrably the case that permitted development has delivered additional homes that we desperately need.

I went on Friday night to see one in central Croydon. It is a building called Green Dragon House that was essentially an old office building with very low levels of occupancy and it has been converted into 119 homes. In my community, those homes are desperately needed and I am not sure—in fact, I am pretty confident that if we had left things as they were, many of the buildings that have been converted would not have come forward. Now, they are not all as good quality as Green Dragon House, so I am perfectly prepared to accept that there are challenges here.

I suppose the point I tried to make in response to Opposition Members on Second Reading is that if you genuinely believe that there is a really urgent need to get us building more housing, you have to look at some measures that you would not take if you did not feel that urgency was there. That is the argument about PD. However, the one thing that this Bill does on it is uncontroversial, I would have thought, which is to say, “Let’s make sure we get good data.” At the moment, all we know is the number of applications that have gone in, but not how many homes they are delivering. So, the one measure in this Bill on this issue is trying to ensure that we collect data on how many units the policy is delivering and then, as we debate our different opinions on this policy, we can at least be informed by what the output is.

[Helen Hayes]

Q So you do not have any further plans at the moment, either by way of additions or amendments to this Bill, or within the White Paper—?

Gavin Barwell: No. There is an issue that I think we have consulted on, which is around the office to “ressy” thing and whether you should be able to do it potentially through demolition rather than just refurb, but there are no plans to amend this Bill further to change the PD rules.

[Jim McMahon]

Q During your introduction, you said that part of the reason why the amendments were so late in coming was actually change of positions and looking at the Bill with a fresh pair of eyes, and that was the result. Given the tone of the contribution, I take that at face value, and I appreciate the comments that you have made.

When you were looking at the Bill and at opportunities to enhance it further, did you consider the roles of listed buildings in that? In my constituency, we have a very old mill—apparently one of the oldest mills with a concrete floor, if anyone is interested in those kinds of things—but it is a blight on the local community. Last year, there was the death of an 18-year-old, who fell through the floors, because the mill is so unsafe. The fire service, the council and the police have all put a notice on the building, because it is absolutely liable to cause another death very soon, but its heritage value for the experts in London, who do not have to live in its shadow, maintains that it should stay there. It is scuppering development on the site—a £248 million tram system runs alongside it, with a station there ready for development. Did you consider that the process is stifling the development of what should be attractive places to live?

Gavin Barwell: The simple answer to the hon. Gentleman’s question is that that is not an issue that I have looked at in particular, but if he wants to write to me to set out his concerns, I would be very happy to take that forward. He knows his community and what the issues are, better than anyone who is adjudicating on such things from a distance. I am very happy to help him to get that issue resolved.

Neighbourhood Planning Bill (Fifth sitting)

Helen Hayes Excerpts

Committee Debate: 5th sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 25th October 2016 Public Bill Committees

[Dr Blackman-Woods]

I am happy to answer the Minister’s question, but I am trying to find out what the Minister thinks about this particular subsection. Has he thought through a set of circumstances in which adding or removing a restriction or adding or removing a condition would make something acceptable in planning terms, but might have unforeseen consequences somewhere else? I am just giving the Minister an example because there could be environmental concerns. I suppose there are a lot of examples when we think about it. The removal of trees might be allowed under this clause, because that would be acceptable in planning terms, although I am not sure why it would be acceptable. There might be ongoing environmental or even social issues arising from that.

If we come back to the traffic measures, there is the issue of the roundabout. Traffic measures could be applied to make a development acceptable, and there could be absolutely dreadful issues for the local community in terms of air quality because of the requirement to make the development acceptable in planning terms. So the amendment is very much probing like amendment 15. We are trying to find out what this is all about in actuality. How will it work in practice? What sort of conditions might be set or removed by the Secretary of State? What is the impact of the decisions made by the Secretary of State and how will proposed section 100ZA(2)(a), (b) and (c) work in practice?

I will now move on to discuss amendment 16, which is innocuous and quite helpful. It simply asks for some consultation with local authorities when regulations are being drawn up. I actually thought this might be a helpful amendment for the Minister because, as we have already explained, we clearly have some difficulty understanding and finding an evidence base to support what is in clause 7.

If these regulations are to do the job that the Government want them to do—transfer powers to the Secretary of State, so that he or she can apply conditions or take conditions away—presumably they want the regulations to work in practice. These regulations really impact on the work of local authority planning departments, and local authority planning officers will be the people to know whether this clause is going to produce anything helpful or not in practice. It seems entirely reasonable that there would be a particular role for local authorities to contribute to the drawing up of the regulations, so that they are proportionate, and that the way in which the Secretary of State can interfere should be proportionate to the problem that the Government have identified.

I say that because nobody else seems to have identified pre-commencement conditions as a problem, but clearly the Minister thinks they are and some of his colleagues seem to think they are. All that we ask is that a very sensible approach is taken to local authorities, and that rather than simply having a set of regulations imposed upon them, which may or may not work in practice, they are involved in the process. Then, hopefully, we will get something commensurate to the problem and not a whole-scale transference of powers to the Secretary of State. I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say.

[Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bone. I have listened to evidence from both the development industry and local authorities both as a member of this Committee and as a member of the Communities and Local Government Committee. Although there are some examples, which have been much quoted, of the excessive use of pre-commencement planning conditions, the evidence is really not very strong. There are many reasons why the measures proposed in clause 7 are, in fact, an attempt to treat the symptom of a problem rather than the cause of that problem itself.

When asked, and when I have questioned them, all the witnesses—pretty much without exception—who have spoken about pre-commencement planning conditions have acknowledged, and in some cases spoken extensively about, the constraints on local authority planning departments. As we know, planning is the second most cut area of local authority services since 2010. It is an area that has, for good reason, lost out in the competition for local authority resources between it and statutory services such as children and adult social services, which affect some of the most vulnerable in our communities. To my mind, that is because the funding of planning, and in particular development management, is not on an appropriate footing.

I was very disappointed and frustrated that the previous Housing and Planning Minister simply ignored this issue during the debate on the Housing and Planning Act 2016, and did not acknowledge that we needed well-functioning, properly resourced planning departments to facilitate the building of the new homes that we need. It is absolutely not right that planning should be competing with services that are needed by the most vulnerable in our communities, and therefore we need a different way of funding planning departments.

[Kevin Hollinrake]

How will extensive pre-commencement conditions that are difficult to discharge help with that process? Local authorities will choose where to resource their departments. The pre-commencement conditions simply increase the burden on planning officers.

[Helen Hayes]

If the hon. Gentleman bears with me, I will explain exactly how that part of the argument hangs together.

There is evidence that officers are currently using pre-commencement conditions because they are simply unable to resolve every aspect of the planning application before the deadline for making a decision. In some cases, they are unable to look in detail at all the documents submitted as part of a planning application. In some cases, they are unable to spend the time negotiating and discussing with the applicant the type of detail that might be necessary. There is no question but that that is clearly not acceptable practice. Some have referred to that as lazy conditioning, but I would argue that it is, in fact, more commonly a symptom of the problem of under-resourcing, rather than deliberately poor practice.

When faced with the threat of appeal on the grounds of non-determination, local authorities and individual officers will look to use conditions as a way of making a timely decision to avoid losing control of every aspect of that planning application to the Planning Inspectorate. That is an entirely rational way for authorities to behave, rather than taking the risk of losing an appeal on the grounds of non-determination.

[Gavin Barwell]

I very much welcome the hon. Lady’s speech, because she is admitting that there is a problem and that the pre-commencement conditions are being abused. She believes that the reason for that abuse is that local authorities are under-resourced. That is exactly what she just said. Would not the right solution be to stop that abuse? That will do one of two things. It will show either that it is all about resourcing—the proportion of applications approved in time will drop dramatically—or that there is a problem. Either way, it will stop the abuse and reveal the true problem.

[Helen Hayes]

I am arguing, first, that the scale of the problem is not nearly as great as the Government say, and secondly, that where there is a problem it is a symptom of the lack of resourcing in planning departments—the primary cause of that problem—not a problem in its own right. Therefore, the Government should be directing their energy towards the resourcing of local planning departments. I have argued many times that local authorities should be able to recover the full cost of resourcing and development management services through the fees they charge for those services. That proposal has broad support from the development industry, local planning departments and the organisations that represent local government in London and across the country. It would be a far better place to start the debate than clause 7.

As we have heard from many witnesses, there are circumstances where pre-commencement conditions are welcomed by developers, and where there is flexibility to agree some details when finance has been secured on the basis of a planning application, or when more is known about the site due to site investigations that take place in the earlier stages of a scheme. Last week, I sat down with several representatives of the local community and a developer who is bringing forward a very sensitive scheme in my constituency. The planning permission for the site in question was a detailed consent secured by a previous landowner who used that consent to sell the site on; that was a controversial issue in its own right.

Last week we met the developer, which did not take part in the planning application process for the site that it has now inherited. In that case, there are pre-commencement conditions on materials and archaeology. It is entirely right and proper that the developer has the opportunity to consider those conditions and make proposals to the local authority for those conditions to be discharged before development commences.

[Chris Philp]

In the hon. Lady’s example, did not the new owner have ample opportunity to consider those pre-commencement conditions before the purchase of the site? If they did not like the conditions, they could simply have not purchased the site.

[Helen Hayes]

That is a rather blunt and not nuanced enough understanding of how such things work in practice. Last week, the developer met with the community —a vociferous community who feel very strongly about the site. That conversation will enable the developer to inform the discussions and plans for some important detailed aspects of the scheme. That is entirely the right order of things. It would not have been appropriate for the developer to speak to the community ahead of securing the purchase of the site; the developer would not have had a relationship with the community that allowed such a conversation. The way that things are progressing is entirely right and timely; it is not leading to any delay in bringing forward the site in question.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Blackman-Woods]

My hon. Friend is making a series of important points, which are helping us to understand pre-commencement conditions more thoroughly. Does she agree that the provisions in the clause will in fact make communities much more anxious about possible development in their area? The local authority may set conditions that will make a particular planning application acceptable and then find some way down the line that those conditions have been removed by the Secretary of State.

[Helen Hayes]

My hon. Friend is exactly right. It is so important that the voices of local communities are heard, particularly given the volume of development that is needed to deliver the new homes that we need in this country. Conditions are one way that a local authority can broker and establish a relationship between applicant and community and the genuine and material concerns that our constituents all have about development can be taken into account and addressed. Communities will find ways for their voices to be heard. If the planning system excludes those voices and makes those negotiations much more difficult, those voices will be heard in other ways: there will be an increase in applications for judicial review of planning applications and much more in the way of petitions, protests and attempts to frustrate development. It is right that the concerns of local communities are heard and addressed through the planning system.

I further take issue with the clause and support the amendments in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for City of Durham because it simply does not reflect or encourage good practice. It is widely acknowledged—the Committee has heard evidence from experts across the sector about this—that best practice involves applicants and planning authorities, having undertaken appropriate public engagement and consultation, coming together to agree what is necessary for an application to meet policy requirements in relation to a given site.

Members on the Government side of the Committee have made the point that there is cost and risk for applicants in taking applications through the planning process. That risk is mitigated and minimised when applicants fully understand and take into account the policy context and do everything possible to ensure that their applications are policy-compliant. To suggest that local authorities are in the business of refusing planning applications on a whim in a policy vacuum misrepresents what actually happens. In the case that a local authority makes a flawed decision, it is open to the applicant to appeal, and such appeals will succeed.

[Kevin Hollinrake]

Is the hon. Lady not arguing for the clause? She talks about best practice and engaging with the applicant and the planning authority to agree the way forward rather than unilaterally sticking in some pre-commencement conditions without discussing those with the applicant. Is that not exactly what the clause will do?

[Helen Hayes]

It is my view that a clause that requires an exchange of letters and makes agreement to the principle of pre-commencement conditions the preserve of the applicant rather than the local authority does the opposite. It does not encourage best practice; it encourages a much more litigious and formalised approach to negotiation, which does not allow for genuine engagement between applicant and planning authority. It would be far better to resource planning authorities properly to undertake those detailed discussions with applicants, so that they can agree and discuss the issues that are important to local communities and ensure they are properly addressed, with as many as possible being within the planning permission itself rather than within pre-commencement conditions. However, there is a role for pre-commencement conditions and it is a very important one.

Finally, we should remind ourselves of what pre-commencement conditions seek to achieve and why they are important. Conditions cover many aspects of application, such as the choice of materials, which is sometimes belittled as a trivial matter but is in fact so important in determining the impact that a new development will have on a community in the long term. Once something is built, it is there certainly for the rest of our lifetimes and perhaps those of future generations. What a development looks like, the impact it has and how sensitively considered the materials are plays a really important role in how acceptable it is to the local community.

Conditions also cover issues such as sewerage capacity, which influences whether residents will have serious problems, sometimes in their own homes, in the long term. They are a key means by which local authorities can safeguard the interests of local communities and ensure the quality of new development. Of course, they should not be overused or misused, but where that occurs it is a symptom of the lack of resources rather than wilful misuse or poor practice.

I argue that the setting of conditions should be the preserve of democratically elected local authorities, not contingent on the agreement of the applicant. Local authorities must be properly resourced to undertake pre-planning discussions, to review properly the content of applications and to agree as much as possible within the framework of the planning permission itself, in order to minimise the use of conditions. The clause is simply misdirected. It is trying to treat the symptom of a problem, rather than the cause. I hope the Government will therefore reconsider it.

[Mrs Theresa Villiers (Chipping Barnet) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to take part in this Committee under your chairmanship, Mr Bone. I have what amounts more to an intervention than a full speech. I spoke about this clause on Second Reading and received some useful reassurance from the Minister, but now we have the more relaxed circumstances and timings of a Committee, I would like to reiterate broadly the importance that many of my constituents place on matters relating to the protection of habitats—that includes bats and newts—and landscape and flooding.

It would be helpful if the Minister expanded on his remarks on Second Reading to explain how it will still be legitimate for the planning process to consider such matters and how there will still be opportunities for local authorities to require research to be done into them, so that planning permission can be granted on the basis of full awareness of the facts. While the clause as drafted will help streamline the planning process, it must leave planning authorities with the ability not only to take matters such as habitats into account, but to require developers to provide the appropriate surveys and research. Will the Minister explain at what stage that is still open to the planning authorities? I am sure my constituents would be very grateful for that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Gavin Barwell]

If the hon. Lady allows me to expand the argument, I will be happy to allow her to intervene.

The reasons why we do not build enough homes in this country are complicated. Lots of things work, but if the answer were simple my predecessors would have solved the problem. There is no silver bullet and no one thing that will solve the problem, which instead will require a complex web of policy interventions.

[Helen Hayes]

Will the Minister give way?

[Gavin Barwell]

To say that there is a problem with local authority resourcing of planning departments, which I think everyone on the Committee has accepted, and that therefore that is the sole problem and we do not need to worry about anything else, is to miss the point completely. There are a lot of reasons why there are problems in our system. We need to take action to deal with all those things, not simply say, “This is the main problem, so we should solely deal with that and forget about the rest.” I will now happily take the interventions.

--- Later in debate ---

[Helen Hayes]

rose—

[Gavin Barwell]

If it is helpful and the interventions are on the same subject, I will take both before responding.

[Helen Hayes]

I want to make two quick points in response to the Minister’s remarks. There might be multiple causes of the issue that the clause seeks to address in relation to the use of pre-commencement planning conditions, but as my hon. Friend has argued, we do not believe there is evidence that this is a primary cause of the problem. We believe the primary cause is the under-resourcing of planning departments, and Government Members acknowledge the extent of that problem. Will the Minister explain why there is nothing in the Bill that addresses that problem?

My second point relates to the remarks made by the Minister about housing. I welcome his acknowledgment that renting and the affordability of housing are part of the problem. His predecessor took an entirely binary approach to housing: he put all of the Government’s resource into home ownership and did not recognise that nuance at all. If the Minister is thinking of changing direction, that would be welcome.

[Gavin Barwell]

On the latter point, if the hon. Lady were to look back at some of the things I have said over the period that I have been Housing Minister, she would find that those signals have been loud and clear. A White Paper is coming shortly. I do not want to add any more on that point, but on the resourcing point, other members of the Committee will say that I was pretty clear about where I stood last Thursday. On the question about why there is nothing in the Bill, some things do not need legislation to fix them. There is a White Paper coming out. I have to be careful, but the Government have consulted on the issue of whether we need to get more resourcing into local authority planning departments. The results of the consultation were clear, and the Government will reflect on them.

I was glad to hear the comments of the hon. Member for City of Durham. I will come to the evidence on this point, which is where we should concentrate our debate, but I would observe that the modern Labour party, which is a rather different creature from the one in the late 1990s when I was getting involved in politics, seems to find it easier to recognise problems when the private sector is involved and is more reluctant to recognise problems when the public sector is responsible.

Let us turn to the question of evidence. Knight Frank’s house building report 2016 refers to

“the need to address the increasingly onerous levels of pre-commencement conditions applied in some planning permissions and the length of time taken to sign them off.”

Crest Nicholson’s half-yearly report 2016 states:

“Speeding up the clearance of pre-start planning conditions and securing sufficient labour resources to deliver growth plans”

remain the two challenges to delivery.

The Persimmon annual report states:

“Whilst planning-related pre-start conditions continue to increase the time taken to bring new outlets to market, we are pleased to have...opened 60 of the 120 new outlets planned”.

I referred on Second Reading to a survey done by the National House-Building Council in 2014, which showed that a third of small and medium-sized builders identified planning conditions as the largest constraint to delivery. Specifically, the two questions were about the time taken to clear conditions and the extent of the conditions.

[Helen Hayes]

rose—

[Gavin Barwell]

The hon. Lady asked for evidence; I am giving it. The time to clear conditions was mentioned by 34% of respondents and the extent of conditions was mentioned by 29%.

The District Councils Network—local government, not developers—stated, in its submission to the Committee:

“The DCN has acknowledged that the discharge of planning conditions can be a factor in slow decision making and supports the government in seeking to address conditions.”

The hon. Member for City of Durham referred to a survey, but did not give the issue the prominence that it has in the survey. The planning system was identified as the second biggest challenge to small builders—tied with finance and behind the availability of land. The Government will be addressing all three issues. Among those commenting on planning difficulties, the signing of conditions was the second most cited challenge, behind the resourcing of planning departments, and the Government will be addressing both of those things.

The speech by the hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood was commendable. She acknowledged the abuse of pre-commencement conditions. Her explanation for it was not that local authorities were being lazy, but that there was a resourcing issue. I think the words she used were that people just did not have time to read planning applications, so they slapped pre-commencement conditions down. That clearly is not right, so the Government are absolutely justified in taking action in that area as well as looking to address the resourcing issues that she rightly identified.

[Helen Hayes]

The example I referred to was one that we heard in evidence to the Committee. It was an example of a landscape strategy having conditions despite having been submitted with the planning application. That practice is of course completely unacceptable, but it is, along with many other things, a symptom of the lack of resourcing.

More than half of the evidence that the Minister has just provided related to concerns about the signing off and discharge of pre-commencement planning conditions, not the setting of conditions themselves. If that is, indeed, a problem, as it would seem to be from the Minister’s evidence, I ask once again why the Bill is dealing with the symptom of a problem rather than the cause. Why does it contain nothing to deal with the issue of the discharging of planning conditions, and instead deal only with the setting of pre-commencement planning conditions?

[Gavin Barwell]

I have tried to answer that question already. Some of those things do not require legislation. There are problems in our house building system that require policy changes, and others that require legislative changes. We want to pursue a range of solutions encompassing both those options.

I want to pick up on three specific examples that we were given of pre-commencement conditions, one of which may help to provide my right hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet with the reassurance she sought. I thought that the three examples delineated very well the difference between the two sides of the Committee on this issue. One example related to archaeological concerns. Clearly it is entirely appropriate to address those through a pre-commencement condition. If there are concerns that the moment someone gets on site and starts to do ground works they will destroy a key archaeological site, the issue has to be dealt with by a pre-commencement procedure.

The other examples concerned the use of materials and landscaping. I, and I am sure all members of the Committee, would accept that those issues are legitimate ones that communities would want to address through the planning process. However, I do not accept that they must be dealt with before a single thing can be done on site, as the development begins to get under way. There is no reason why they cannot be dealt with during the process.

The hon. Member for Oldham West and Royton made an interesting intervention in which he said that it is all very simple if—I will take care not to use unparliamentary language—one gets one’s ducks lined up. He said that people need to do all the work at the outset, come to the planning committee with everything sorted out, and then away they go. However, not only does that expose applicants to extra expense before they get planning permission, as my neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South, said, but it delays the process. The point that I am trying to get the hon. Member for City of Durham to accept is that, particularly with a large application, a huge amount of work must be done to get to the point where the applicant has satisfied all the legitimate concerns a community might have about it.

If, as I passionately feel, there is a desperate need to get us building more houses as quickly as possible in this country, surely anyone who has ever had any experience of managing a large project will think it is better to deal up front with the things that must be dealt with up front and then, while work is beginning on site, deal with some of the other issues that need to be dealt with. If we want housing to be built more quickly, we must allow developers to proceed in that way and not say that they must get every single thing sorted out before they can even turn up on site and begin vital work.

Neighbourhood Planning Bill (Sixth sitting)

Helen Hayes Excerpts

Committee Debate: 6th sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 25th October 2016 Public Bill Committees

[Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is setting out her case powerfully. It has been suggested that the proposal set out in clause 7 is a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Does she agree that it is a sledgehammer to crack the wrong nut, because what really needs to be addressed is the resourcing of local authority planning departments, so that they can apply the existing guidance thoroughly and rigorously, give each application the time it needs and properly negotiate with applicants to ensure that applications are policy compliant?

[Dr Blackman-Woods]

My hon. Friend, as ever, hits the nail on the head. It is the wrong target, which is exactly our point. A lot of information is available to local authorities, never mind their experience of applying conditions. The problem is not setting conditions, but the lack of resourcing for planning departments. As we rehearsed this morning, most people’s problem with pre-commencement planning conditions is not the conditions themselves but the time it takes to discharge them because of the lack of resources in planning departments. A lot of information is available to local authorities, so in general one would not expect them to set unnecessary conditions, because that would clearly be in breach of all the documents I have discussed.

I picked up, at random, a list of pre-commencement planning conditions from my constituency. The developer has just written to me about them, to ask me to ensure that the local authority discharges them, and I thought, “Here’s a helpful bit of information that has just dropped into my inbox at a very appropriate time.” To give the Committee some context, the development is taking place in a conservation area—a rather large student accommodation block—so one would expect the local authority to take some care and use some diligence over the pre-commencement planning conditions, and indeed it has. I want to go through the list—I will do so as quickly as possible—because Government Members are saying that these pre-commencement planning conditions are often unnecessary, yet when I went through the list I could not find a single one that was unnecessary. The list states:

“No development shall take place until samples of the materials to be used in the construction of the building hereby permitted have been submitted to and approved in writing by the local planning authority.”

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[Jim McMahon]

Of course, what I am talking about is the physical appearance of a shopfront, not necessarily the fact that a building was previously a shop. A building may be in use as an office but have the external appearance of a shop. It is that conversion that I am talking about. I am thinking in particular of professional services businesses that are based in accommodation with a shopfront façade but where there is office-type use behind that. That is the point that I was getting to.

Whatever our view about the finish, we need to accept that when we are talking about a policy of empowering communities and giving them a voice and a say, it is important to manage expectations to ensure that they are not let down after the fact. Permitted development flies in the face of that empowerment, because it takes power and control away from them. If nothing else, we should at least accept that permitted development rights are a significant burden for local authorities, and when we talk about capacity being an issue, we should at least ensure that local authorities are given the finances to administer that policy in the right way.

[Helen Hayes]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr McCabe. The gathering of data on homes delivered through permitted development rights is a small beneficial step. It is long overdue; it should have been introduced when permitted development rights were extended. It remains a significant problem that although the negative impacts of the extension of permitted development rights are widely reported, there are no consistent data to monitor those impacts, and we therefore cannot have the debate that we need in the House and elsewhere about this significant problem.

Concerns have been raised with me consistently, ever since the permitted development rights policy was introduced, about the size and type of new homes that are being delivered under those rights; the quality of those homes; the lack of section 106 contributions to provide properly for the physical facilities and public services that an expanding residential population needs; the lack of affordable homes; and, particularly in London, the loss of much-valued employment space for small and medium-sized businesses. We cannot quantify the scale of the problem, because the policy was flawed from the start.

Although the small measure in the clause will help with the monitoring of data, I am concerned by the fact that the Government are extending permitted development rights to include the demolition and rebuilding of office accommodation for residential purposes. That brings with it exactly the same concerns that I have about the previous extension of permitted development rights—but more than that, it will result in local authorities’ total loss of control over the quality and aesthetics of new development. As we debated earlier, those are often among the issues that matter most to local communities and make the difference between something being acceptable and not being acceptable.

The Minister argued on Second Reading that permitted development rights are helping to accelerate the delivery of new homes. The delivery of new homes at speed and at scale is of course of utmost importance, but the housing crisis is more complicated than that.

[Kevin Hollinrake]

The hon. Lady refers to the Minister’s comments about speeding up delivery. Does she accept that permitted development rights have in many cases done exactly that? She talks about the negative consequences of that policy but has not spoken about the positive consequences. Does she accept that there have been positive consequences, including the delivery of more residential units?

[Helen Hayes]

I was just about to say that in addition to the numbers, which I do not dispute are important, the size and type of homes that we are delivering matters. It matters whether we are delivering homes that families can live in and have a good quality of life in, or only homes that are too small even to fit adequate furniture into. Minimum space standards matter, and the Government have failed to address that issue. The provision of amenities matters. It matters whether there is a local park that is properly funded through the planning process. It matters whether the roads and pavements are of an appropriate standard, whether there is lighting and whether our neighbourhoods are attractive to live in. It matters whether there are places in schools and GP practices for an expanding population to access.

Above all else, affordability matters to my constituents. It is simply not fair and not appropriate that new homes are allowed to be delivered with no contribution at all to the affordable housing that we need more than any other type of housing in London. As a Member of Parliament for a London constituency, the Minister should, quite frankly, know that.

The extension of permitted development rights is a disaster for the delivery of the high-quality neighbourhoods with good facilities and services that we all want to see. We want to see the right numbers of homes being delivered, but we also want to build attractive and successful communities for the future, not tomorrow’s regeneration projects. I am deeply disappointed that, through the Bill, the Government are trying to patch up a broken policy, rather than accepting that it is not working in the way it needs to and reforming it to make it more fit for purpose, so that we can deliver not only the number, but the type and quality, of new homes needed within the successful neighbourhoods that we all want to see.

[Dr Blackman-Woods]

My hon. Friends the Members for Oldham West and Royton and for Dulwich and West Norwood have done an effective demolition job on the Government’s case for promoting permitted development. The Opposition are on record, on a number of occasions, as being totally against the relaxation of permitted development rights for all the reasons that my hon. Friends outlined, including the very poor-quality development that often ensues from developers taking a permitted development route.

It is not that we are against a change of use from offices or agricultural buildings to residential; we just think that it is critical that local people have a say on whether those changes of use take place. The process should take place through the planning system, not through permitted development. We are living with some of the huge consequences, such as poorly planned developments and neighbourhoods, emerging from too much permitted development.

On amendment 28, we are not in favour of permitted development, but if the Government are in favour of it, it makes some sense that they might actually want to know what is going on with it. To date, they are probably not that aware. The compilation of the planning register would elicit further information from local authorities about what is happening with regard to permitted development. The circumstances set out in clause 8 are too restrictive and will not capture some of the information that local authorities have told all members of the Committee is very important to them.

How many additional homes have been created through permitted development? What is the impact on any local council regeneration plans, and on the local plan? Those questions are important. Let us begin with the local plan. If a lot of windfall sites have emerged through permitted development, and a lot of homes—even of relatively poor quality—have been created that contribute towards meeting the housing need, there might be an impact on local plan provisions. The local authority might like an opportunity to tell the Minister and everyone else about the impact of permitted development on the local plan. It will also want to be able to give information not only on the type of housing delivered but on the number of homes, who they are for, whether they are affordable, their quality and a whole lot of other issues.

My most significant point about the amendment is what it would mean for regeneration, and I am really interested to hear what the Minister says about that. As my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham West and Royton touched on earlier, a number of cities and towns have areas with empty shops, pubs or offices, but they are empty for a reason: the local authority has or is developing a plan to regenerate the area. Local authorities have told us that a developer will now be able to come along, get the office block and say, “I can make a quick buck here by converting this block into housing through the prior approval route”—and bang goes the council’s ability to regenerate the whole area in line with a local plan that has emerged through the neighbourhood planning system or consultations with the community. That does not seem a very sensible way forward.

If I were the Minister, I would want to know whether a policy of mine was actually impeding local authorities from regenerating their areas because permitted development was getting in the way. I would want to do something to put that right and to help the local authority with that process. The Minister will know that the prior approval system in place for permitted development simply does not give a local authority the tools to turn down a permitted development, either for regeneration reasons or because it severely, or even mildly, affects the authority’s local plan.

Indeed, the prior approval system is very complicated. The Government make much of the fact that they have simplified the planning system; I could not help but smile when I saw the statutory instrument that they passed last year, the Town and Country Planning (General Permitted Development) (England) Order 2015, which is 162 pages long—such have been their extensions to permitted development. Each class of permitted development has different prior approval conditions, but none of them allows consideration of the issues addressed by our amendment. For instance, for a change from offices to dwelling houses, the local planning authority has to consider

“whether the prior approval of the authority will be required as to…transport and highways impacts…contamination risks…and…flooding risks”,

but it cannot take account of anything else. If the development will impede a regeneration scheme, the authority cannot even consider that. If there are huge energy conservation issues because the office block has poor energy efficiency, the authority cannot do anything about that either. If it thinks the materials are wrong, it cannot do anything about that. If it absolutely needs affordable housing in the area, it cannot do anything about that. There is really a very small list of things that it can do anything about, and that list certainly does not cover the issues in the amendment.

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[Gavin Barwell]

I would not accept that a council is a community, but I certainly accept that it comprises the elected representatives of that community and speaks with the authority of the community, if that is helpful to the hon. Gentleman.

Stepping aside from the controversial topic of office-to-residential conversion, the question that we should ask ourselves when deciding whether something should be a permitted development right or require a full planning application is whether the change being made to a property is sufficiently significant that it is likely to have implications for adjoining owners. If it does have implications, there are clearly arguments that it should go through the planning application process. I was trying to make the point that the Government did not invent permitted development—it has existed for a period of time—but have chosen to extend it to particular classes of conversion.

The hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood, who represents a constituency not too far from mine, spoke passionately, as she did on Second Reading, of her concerns about the permitted development process. It is entirely legitimate to say that, compared with the full planning application, the authority does not receive a section 106 contribution for local infrastructure or for affordable housing, and neither do the space standard rules apply. She raises legitimate concerns.

Weighed against that, we must look at the contribution of the policy to housing supply. I believe that in Croydon—my constituency neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South, also sits on this Committee—the policy has certainly brought back into use buildings that would otherwise not have come back into use. Therefore, it has contributed to supply. The debate on space standards is particularly interesting. We certainly need to ensure that at least a proportion of our housing stock is sufficiently large, providing the space to accommodate families with particular needs. There is a much more difficult balance to strike on whether we should say that all homes must meet a minimum standard, or whether we should allow flexibility. Strong arguments can be made both ways.

I visited a site just south of Nottingham at the end of last week, where I saw a good mixed tenure development with some owner-occupied housing. The housing association also provided some shared ownership properties and some affordable rent. When the Homes and Communities Agency master-planned that site before selling it on to the developer, it insisted that all the homes built on it meet the national space standard. Perhaps predictably, the developer argued to me that it would have preferred to have that requirement only for some properties, because it would have been able to build more homes, which is clearly in its commercial interests.

Interestingly, the housing association made the same argument. It needed some stock with sufficient space to accommodate families who perhaps needed a carer, or included somebody in a wheelchair. However, the association believed that housing need in the area was sufficiently acute that it would rather have had a compromise whereby some of the homes had that space standard but it could have got a larger number of homes overall out of the site. I am not expressing a view one way or the other; I am simply saying that there is a choice to be made between overall supply and space standards.

[Helen Hayes]

I simply do not accept that, in seeking to meet the need for new homes, we aspire to rabbit-hutch Britain. There are of course families who have exceptional needs for space, but every family deserves a home into which they can fit the right amount of furniture and within which their waste and recycling storage commitments can be met and there is appropriate storage for cycling equipment and all the other stuff that people accumulate in the course of family life. We should not accept that families being asked to live in homes that are too mean in space terms so they can afford an adequate and appropriate standard of life is a fair compromise anywhere in the country.

[Gavin Barwell]

The hon. Lady makes her point passionately. Let me be clear that I do not think anyone wants people to live in rabbit hutches. Her own local authority—her constituency crosses local authority boundaries, so I should be clear that I am talking about the London Borough of Lambeth—has given planning permission to a scheme in the north of the borough by Pocket Living, which I had the opportunity to visit. As part of a deal with the GLA, that developer has been given the flexibility to develop homes below the minimum space standard, and those homes have proved popular with young professional people.

A journalist gave a rather slanted representation of a presentation I gave at party conference in which I talked about housing for young people. I ran through a whole load of things that we could consider as part of that, and I referenced that Pocket Living scheme. The journalist wrote an article saying that I wanted people to live in rabbit hutches. Interestingly, that night I was speaking to students at a university and one of them had read the article in question and said, “I’d just like to say that, given the choice of being able to buy a small home of my own or there being bigger homes that I can’t afford, I’d be interested in looking at that flexibility.” Every single student in the audience agreed.

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[Helen Hayes]

To be clear, developments of the type produced by Pocket Living are a specific type of housing—they are a niche in the market. There is certainly a place for that type of accommodation in the market, and Pocket balances space standards and quality particularly well for that niche, but we are talking about the much broader issue of national space standards for all types of homes, and particularly family homes. I have too often seen examples of schemes up and down the country that are not built to the national space standard, whose quality is too mean and that do not provide the best possible basis for successful communities or places that people want to live in.

[Gavin Barwell]

Well, it may be that the hon. Lady and I are not as far apart as I thought we were, because I agree with that. People have different requirements at different ages, and it is certainly important that adequate space is provided for family housing. She may agree with the point that I am going to make. I was going to close by giving an example of a permitted development conversion that I had the opportunity to see in Croydon. She may want to go and have a look at it herself.

[Gavin Barwell]

I suppose the story I told that prompted the hon. Lady’s intervention interested me because one might to a degree expect private developers to look to maximise the units that they can build on a site and their commercial return, but what was striking about that conversation was that the chief executive of a housing association also wanted that flexibility. He saw clearly that there was a trade-off between having homes that were fully accessible and fulfilled the space standard and maximising the number of homes for vulnerable people that he could have on the site. There is a debate to be had, but I do not think that the hon. Lady and I are as far apart on this as I thought we were.

Let me give an example. There is a building in Croydon called Green Dragon House, which was a fairly old office building that was not wholly vacant but had very limited use. It has been converted into 119 homes—a mixture of one and two-bed homes. It is a little like the Pocket housing schemes. It is very high-spec—the quality of the finish is very good—but the rooms are smaller than the national space standard. Interestingly, what is not taken into account is that there is a huge amount of communal space. Virtually the whole of the first floor of the building is given over to a high-standard communal lounge, and the whole of the roof is a terrace, which is communal space for residents. In a way, it is a different vision of how people might live, and it is targeted very much at young professional people.

[Helen Hayes]

The Minister is being generous with his time. I will simply say that the scheme he describes sounds commendable. It also sounds like exactly the kind of scheme that a local authority would have given planning permission for. The point about permitted development rights is that we cannot leave to chance whether the development industry will deliver to that high standard. We have to secure that high standard through the planning system.