Neighbourhood Planning Bill (First sitting)

Debate between Helen Hayes and Oliver Colvile

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.

--- 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.”