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.