Neighbourhood Planning Bill (Second sitting)

Debate between Helen Hayes and Lord Mann

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

[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.