Neighbourhood Plans

James Gray Excerpts

Tuesday 7th June 2022 Westminster Hall

[Dr Luke Evans (Bosworth) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the role of neighbourhood plans in national planning policy.

It is a pleasure to serve under your leadership today, Ms Ghani. I thank the staff in Westminster Hall and colleagues who have come to speak in this important debate.

The public often do not think about planning as imperative to their lives, but it is something that happens to them all the time, whether they are conscious of it or not. People are usually only conscious of planning when it is pressed on top of them, and that is an important principle for us to think about. At the heart of this 90-minute debate is neighbourhood plans, which give local people the chance to take control of how they see development in their area. I think it would be useful to set out where neighbourhood plans came from, the problems with them and, most importantly, their future.

If we look at the history of neighbourhood plans, we see that the Localism Act 2011 allowed them to be brought forward. That Act allowed parishes and neighbourhood forums to develop neighbourhood development plans and neighbourhood orders. Neighbourhood plans were about the use and development of land, and they would contain a vision, aims, planning policies and proposals to improve the area, provide new facilities or allocate key sites for specific development, with a possible focus on social, economic and environmental issues. Neighbourhood development orders were for parish or town councils, or neighbourhood forums, to grant planning permission for certain kinds of development within a specific area. This was all held together with the legal framework— section 116 of the 2011 Act—that brought into effect schedule 9 to that Act and inserted into the Town and County Planning Act 1990 schedules 10 and 11.

The main object of neighbourhood plans was to guide and shape development in a particular area around national policies, while conforming to local strategic policies. Changes in the Housing and Planning Act 2016 and in the Neighbourhood Planning Act 2017 sought to simplify and speed up neighbourhood planning processes, and allowed for greater intervention by the Secretary of State in the process of making neighbourhood plans. Further still, in the Housing and Planning Act 2016, local planning authorities were required to make both neighbourhood development plans and neighbourhood development orders

“as soon as reasonably practicable after the referendum is held”.

There was a further update in the Neighbourhood Planning Act 2017, allowing neighbourhood plans to be modified and dealt with in situations where a plan is needed but covering slightly different geographical areas from the previous one. Finally, changes to the national planning policy framework in 2018 mean that neighbourhood plan policies for the supply of housing should not be considered out of date if the plan is less than two years old.

That is a little bit of background about neighbourhood plans and where they are at, but it is worth giving an overview of the process of getting a neighbourhood plan up to date. Draft plans and orders must pass an independent check and then be put to a local referendum. If there is a majority vote in favour, the local planning authority must adapt that plan, subject to legal compatibility.

The LPA has a statutory role to support neighbourhood planning, such as by undertaking independent examination of the neighbourhood plan, and it runs neighbourhood planning referendums. The Government state that neighbourhood planning should not be a way to block necessary developments. Neighbourhood plans should support the strategic needs set out in the local plan, and they cannot promote less development than is set out in said local plan.

Neighbourhood plans can allocate sites additional to those set out in the local plan and propose sites different from those in the local plan, in discussion with the LPA. The plan can identify areas for protection, such as open spaces valued by the community or green spaces that meet local green space criteria.

That is where we have come from and, broadly speaking, it is a great approach to take forward. I think most in the House would agree that the principles enshrined in this legislation are moving in the right direction, but what is the reality we are living with at the moment? It is fair to say that neighbourhood plans are not for everyone, nor should they be. Communities should want to come forward to design and shape the planning of their community —in essence, the shape and feel of what they have.

In my area of Bosworth, many groups have come forward by choice to make a difference and take responsibility for their local planning area. A second reason for doing so is necessity, because the system is failing. There are no protections, because we do not have an up-to-date local plan. Let me explain what we are living with at the moment. I have two tiers of council: a county council and a borough council. The borough council is responsible for the local plan, but the county council intersects with the infrastructure and the signing off of that plan, and this is all done through the framework of national planning.

Planning is a very difficult issue for an MP. The most common issue in my inbox is inappropriate development in my area. At the same time, people ask me to step in and make changes to individual planning applications. We all know that an MP cannot do that. Without an up-to-date local plan, it is open season in my area. It is a desirable place to live, set perfectly in the heart of the UK. Quite literally, we have the middle of England in my constituency. We have beautiful rural countryside and we are close to the city of Leicester, so the area has a lot to offer. The problem is that with a piecemeal approach to planning, we have huge problems to solve with infrastructure and providing the amenities and services we need.

Across the House, we all agree that nationally we need more houses, but that message seems to have been lost locally, with the Liberal Democrats saying that the issue is the Government’s agenda of putting in 300,000 houses. However, in the “Access to Affordable Housing” section of their 2019 manifesto, the Liberal Democrats state that they will:

“Build at least 100,000 homes for social rent each year and ensure that total housebuilding increases to 300,000 each year.”

[James Gray (North Wiltshire) (Con)]

My hon. Friend makes an important point about the Liberal Democrats and the fuss they make about all this. Is it not disappointing that no Liberal Democrat Member has chosen to come to this extremely important debate on the subject?

--- Later in debate ---

[James Gray (North Wiltshire) (Con)]

I am most grateful to you for your chairmanship, Ms Ghani, and for promoting me. I am, in fact, just Mr James Gray at this stage, though you never know; it might be in the post. It is most kind of you, none the less.

[Ms Nusrat Ghani (in the Chair)]

I withdraw my Sir from the record.

[James Gray]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. My congratulations to my hon. Friend the Member for Bosworth (Dr Evans) on securing the debate, and on explaining what is often an abstruse, complicated and difficult area, in the clearest and most sensible terms. The way he framed his speech was extremely useful, and it will be well read up and down the country by local authorities and others who are considering neighbourhood planning.

I agree with my hon. Friend that planning should be about how many houses and where. I would add “and when”, because the timing of development is extremely important. I am a strong supporter of neighbourhood planning, and I had the great luck to be here in 2011 when the Localism Act was one of the first to be passed by the coalition Government.

We brought in neighbourhood planning, because we felt that decisions about planning should be given to the lowest possible level. We thought that local people should be allowed to decide what houses they want, where and when, as well as what the rest of the neighbourhood should look like. I am glad that Malmesbury in my constituency was one of the first places to spend an enormous amount of time and effort on bringing forward a neighbourhood plan. It is a very good document that works extremely well, and many other places around the country have based their neighbourhood plans on the Malmesbury example.

Neighbourhood planning is a great idea that I strongly favour, but I have three little reservations, which the Minister might be able to answer in his wind-up. Alternatively, he might be able to include some of these notions in the amendments that are no doubt coming forward to the Levelling up and Regeneration Bill, which, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bosworth said, starts its progress through Parliament tomorrow.

My first reservation is that in neighbourhood planning, there is a presumption in favour of expansion. It is not possible for any neighbourhood to say, “We like it precisely as it is today. We want no more houses. We do not want any change. We would like it to stay as it is.” No matter how beautiful, how perfect or how remote the neighbourhood may be, the neighbourhood plan, by definition, presumes that there will be growth.

The neighbourhood plan people go around and have the following conversation with people in their houses. “How many children have you got? Would you like them to remain in the village?” “Oh, yes, I would.” “Are there any houses?” “No, there are not, because in this village every house costs £1 million, and there are no houses for them at all.” “Oh, jolly good. Three children; that’s three more houses for this village.” The neighbourhood plan writes into itself a presumption in favour of growth. In some places, that makes sense. If there is a way to bring in low-cost housing for local people, that is much to be desired.

None the less, the principle of looking simply at the number of children under 10 in the village and working out from that how many houses will be needed in 20 years’ time is totally flawed. Like it or not, our children tend to go off to the nearest big town or city and will not remain in a remote little rural village. The houses built on that presumption tend to be three, four or five-bedroom houses for executives who come in from elsewhere. It is no longer about low-cost housing for local people. It becomes an unreasonable development of that area. That is my first reservation: neighbourhood planning presumes growth in the number of houses, and I think that is wrong.

My second reservation is perhaps easier to deal with, and my hon. Friend the Member for Bosworth touched on it briefly. Under revisions that were made to legislation in 2018 or 2019, the Government brought in the stipulation that the neighbourhood plan is valid for only two years. That might have seemed a good idea at the time, but it takes about two years to develop a neighbourhood plan. By the time it comes to the consideration of a big planning application of the kind that we see across Wiltshire at the moment, the neighbourhood plan is out of date. There is no point in having it if two years later we say, “It is no longer an important document.” All of the thousands of person hours put into creating a neighbourhood plan in the first place are, by that means, wasted. We should look again at the stipulation of a two-year limit on the validity of a neighbourhood plan. We could perhaps reverse it and say that the neighbourhood plan will be valid unless local people ask for it to be changed, and that it remains valid not for all time but perhaps with a 20 or 30-year limit, so that by and large the neighbourhood plan becomes the rule.

My third reservation about neighbourhood planning is slightly more complicated, but I will take the example of my hon. Friend the Member for Bosworth and try to make this as straightforward as I possibly can. It is a consistent problem in Wiltshire. The five-year housing land supply figures that are used in considering whether an application should be allowed are based on the completion of estates in the area. In other words, if the planning inspector is worried about it and Wiltshire Council is correctly concerned so it turns down an application for a big development, the inspector will then look at the five-year housing land supply figure, which I will come back to in a second, and almost inevitably find in favour of the developer. There is a big presumption in favour of the developer under those conditions. That of course means that Wiltshire Council lands up paying the barristers’ fees, which can often be substantial.

Unsurprisingly, officers have been correctly saying, “We must be very careful as councillors. We must not allow you to turn something down if we believe you will then lose at appeal.” That is where, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bosworth says, the local and the national intertwine in the person of the planning inspector, who considers the rules under the national planning policy framework, and by and large they tend to favour the developer.

I mentioned in passing the notion of the five-year housing land supply figure. This is a complex area of the law, but the law states that the local authority is required under the local plan to make available enough housing land that is readily developable for five years. If that figure is based, as I understand it is, on completions—estates that are completed—we are by definition writing into the law a presumption that the developer will not complete it. We see that all the time in Wiltshire. Developers go out of their way not to complete the development, not to provide the primary school that was part of the section 106 agreement, and not to complete the number of houses. By that means they can say that the development has got 500 houses, that it is not complete, and therefore it does not form part of the five-year housing land supply. That means Wiltshire Council has consistently got 4.6 years and 4.8 years rather than five years, and that means the inspector will then always say, “The developer has it. The developer will get it because Wiltshire has not completed the five-year housing land supply figure.”

The situation is unfair because we have written into the system a presumption in favour of developers not doing what they ought to be doing and completing the estate. A simple change would correct that: instead of the figure being based on completions in an area, it could be based on planning permission granted on land. If every time a developer who had a completable application granted said, “I am going to build 500 houses on that piece of land there and I can demonstrate it can be done”, that should count against the five-year housing land supply, which would then mean that Wiltshire, for example, would have something like a six-year housing land supply and therefore local people could decide where and when they wanted the housing.

At the moment, the neighbourhood plan is a worthless piece of paper. All that happens is that local people say, “We want housing there and there”, but an inspector says, “I am very sorry. With the five-year housing land supply, your neighbourhood plan is a waste of time. It is a worthless piece of paper and I am going to overrule you. And not only that; I am going to give you £100,000-worth of barristers’ fees against the council tax payer”, and of course the council does not want to do that.

Now is the time to change, probably under the new Bill. The Minister might like to consider very carefully this question of the five-year housing land supply, detailed as it may seem. I may be proved wrong—I am no expert in these matters—but there is a straightforward and simple way of correcting things. Instead of the five-year housing land supply being based on completions, it could be based on developable planning permissions granted.

I again congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bosworth for calling this excellent debate. It is a terribly important time. We have to supply houses for our people. The Conservative Government’s plan to provide 300,000 houses—if I remember rightly—is extremely good, and we have to find a way of doing that. We have a great problem with homelessness and the lack of housing. The question, though, is where those houses should be and when they should be built.

At the moment, the planning system does not take account of local interests and beliefs and neighbourhood planning. It takes account of nationally set targets, which tend to trump the wishes of local people. I very much hope that during the passage of the Bill, which will start tomorrow, the Government will consider some of these detailed points and change the Bill in such a way as to ensure that the interests of local people are looked after when we decide how many houses will be built and when and where.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stuart Andrew]

My hon. Friend is right. One of the big issues I have seen in my own constituency, and during my time in this role, arises when councils do not have a local plan in place—and even if they do in some instances. If they do not have the five-year land supply, there is speculative development that happens all over the place, and it pits communities against any sort of housing development. We are making it very clear in the Bill—and supporting documents will be published alongside it—that where an area has an up-to-date local plan, there is no need for it to prove that it has a five-year land supply to stop that speculative development happening.

[James Gray]

I very much welcome that stipulation in the Bill. However, will the Minister consider one of the problems that I suspect may arise, namely that if we give notice to developers that that clause is coming into effect in a year’s time, or that the local plan might well take a few more months or a year to complete, in the meantime there might be a deluge of speculative developments that we cannot stop, until such time as the law has become an Act?

[Stuart Andrew]

My hon. Friend made that point in a conversation we had the other day. It is a valid point and one that I am taking back to the Department to double-check that we have all that in place, because it is important.

I mentioned the neighbourhood plan in Dorset, but closer to home in London, in Newham, is the Greater Carpenters neighbourhood plan. That post-war estate is seeking to develop and reoccupy existing empty homes. The policy emphasises affordability, prioritising low-cost family-sized homes and homes for older and disabled people. It is a textbook example of community-backed sustainable development. We want more areas to follow that lead, so we have put in place £40 million of funding up until 2023 to ensure that residents have the tools and resources that they need to get their plans in place.

In many ways, therefore, neighbourhood planning has been a great success story, but the Government and I want to encourage more communities to become involved and have a real say in what is built locally and where. That is why the Bill that has been mentioned on many occasions today includes the important role that neighbourhood plans will continue to play in the planning system. It makes it clear that communities will be able to continue allocating sites for housing, protecting green spaces and local assets, and setting design requirements for new developments through their plans. Crucially, the Bill will strengthen the role of neighbourhood plans in decision making. Planning application decisions will only be able to depart from plans if there are strong reasons to do so.

Neighbourhood planning is widespread, but—I take the point made by the hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Matthew Pennycook)—take-up is uneven across the country. In some areas, usually in towns and cities, there is little neighbourhood planning activity. We recognise that some communities have faced challenges in getting a neighbourhood plan in place, and we want to ensure that all areas can become involved.

Through the Bill, we will introduce neighbourhood priority statements—a new additional tool to provide a simpler, faster and more accessible way for communities to participate in neighbourhood planning and to shape development in their local areas. The statements can be prepared by neighbourhood planning groups and can be used to set out the community’s priorities and preferences for their local area, on everything from the new facilities that they need to the buildings and green spaces that they want to be protected. In fact, we anticipate that in some areas the statements might also act as a springboard for preparing a full neighbourhood plan, a design code or other community initiatives outside the planning system. Councils will be required to consider statements when they prepare their own local plans, meaning that neighbourhood priorities cannot be brushed aside easily; statements have to be treated as formal input. Taken together, we are confident that the reforms will further cement—forgive the pun—the role of neighbourhood planning in the system. Perhaps more importantly, that will provide communities with more opportunity to influence development right on their doorstep.

I will turn to a couple of the points made by Members. I want to make it clear that I am a huge fan of neighbourhood planning. I am fortunate enough to have a parish council and a town council—in Rawdon and Horsforth, respectively—as well as a group of volunteers in Aireborough, developing neighbourhood planning. I have seen at first hand the enormous amount of time that they put into developing the plans.

In the first few weeks of doing this role, I was keen to do a roundtable with neighbourhood planning groups around the country. It was useful to listen to their experiences. We have taken on board a lot of what they said and we are looking at how we can make further improvements. Among a number of the points made today, however, was the argument that where such planning is locally driven, we often see more houses built. I was particularly struck by a council official, I think from Herefordshire, saying that because the council had invested in and supported neighbourhood planning, it had ended up seeing more houses built than it could possibly have achieved as a council. I would like to see that happen elsewhere.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bosworth was right when he said that too often planning is something that people feel happens to them, and we have to change that. That is why, in the Bill, we want to make local plan making easier so that more people can engage and can do so digitally and not to have go through hundreds of PDFs and complicated documents. He is right that it is about building the right houses in the right places. That will get public support for house building and stop the problems that we have seen. He is right to have mentioned the BIDEN principles, which really do stand for many of the things that we want to see, and he was completely right to raise the issue of older people’s housing too. We will soon establish a taskforce to look into that so that we provide our older generation with a choice of housing—not just one type of housing—so that we can help them downsize if they want to. They will not be forced to.

--- Later in debate ---

[James Gray]

Does the Minister agree that there is one other area that needs to be looked at, particularly in the area of older people’s housing—namely, better use of the stock that we have? There are at this moment 800,000 empty houses in the United Kingdom. We must find a way of making better use of them. Many of those empty houses are old people’s houses that they have inherited or perhaps moved out of. It seems they do not know what to do with them. Can we find a way of writing into the Bill some means by which we can make better use of the existing stock?

[Stuart Andrew]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. It is not just about building new homes, but making sure there is efficient use of the stock that we have, and there are measures in the Bill to try to encourage the use of empty homes.

The two-year validity of a plan was raised at the roundtable. Again, it is something that we are looking at. I have mentioned the issue of the five-year land supply. The issue of local housing need figures is also something that we are trying to resolve as quickly as possible.

I love the fact that the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) comes to each of these debates to give a Northern Ireland perspective, which is particularly helpful on this matter. I remember a few people scratching their heads in a debate when I was talking about HS2. I thought, “If I can’t even get it to Leeds, how are we going to get it to Northern Ireland?”, but there we go. He was right to talk about areas of outstanding natural beauty and protections for them. Neighbourhood planning could be more imaginative about the sites that could be developed. I have seen that in my own community where people are really very clever. He was also right to talk about the provision of infrastructure. That is why the “I” in BIDEN is so important. The levy that we are introducing will capture more of the land value so that there is more money for the local community.

One thing that I have certainly picked up is that we need better engagement between local planning development and the provision of health services so that they all come at the same time. People are frustrated when they see the houses and years later, if ever, the infrastructure that is needed to support them comes down the line. My hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Anthony Mangnall) was right to say that local people know best. The design standards that we are putting in the Bill will be a key feature for many local communities, and new developments will complement the local area.

On development management policy, I know that people are concerned, but it is not meant to override a local plan, which has supremacy because it is the local plan. However, there is an enormous amount of duplication in the development of local plans—for example, protections for the green belt, heritage sites and so on. Many local authorities are not confident that there is enough weight in the current system, so the policy is to try to stop that duplication and make sure we have protections in place. Again, I have listened to colleagues’ concerns and we are actively looking at many of the points that have been made.