Neighbourhood Planning Bill (Third sitting)

Jim McMahon Excerpts

Committee Debate: 3rd sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 20th October 2016 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

We now begin line-by-line consideration of the Bill.

The selection list for today’s sittings is available in the room. It shows how the selected amendments have been grouped together for debate. Amendments grouped together are generally on the same or a similar issue. The Member who has put his or her name to the leading amendment in a group is called to speak first; other Members are then free to catch my eye to speak on all or any of the amendments in that group. A Member may speak more than once in a single debate.

I will work on the assumption that the Minister wishes the Committee to reach a decision on all Government amendments. Please note that decisions on amendments do not take place in the order in which they are debated, but in the order in which they appear on the amendment paper. In other words, debate occurs according to the selection of groupings list, but decisions are taken when we come to the clause that the amendment affects. I hope that is helpful.

I will use my discretion to decide whether to allow a separate stand part debate on individual clauses and schedules following the debates on the relevant amendments.

[Jim McMahon (Oldham West and Royton) (Lab)]

On a point of order, Mr McCabe. I hope you will bear with me when I ask some beginner’s questions, but this is the first Committee in which I have been on the Front Bench. The technical consultation on the Bill finished yesterday, but the public consultation does not finish until 2 November. We are having our debates on the Bill in the absence of that feedback from the public, or from the professionals who took part in the technical consultation. Is that usual? If so, how do we ensure that the comments in the consultation are fed back into the process?

[The Chair]

The Minister will have easily heard your comments. It is normal for the usual channels to have agreed the scheduling of the Committee, but we note the point that has been made, and the Minister has heard it and will do what he can to assist.

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The issue could swing either way. There could be too many expectations on the local community because the examiner has not experienced the difference between the local plan examination process and that of the neighbourhood plan; or there could be too few because they could say, “This is only a local plan and in the overall planning system it is not the most critical element.” They could have fairly low expectations.

[Jim McMahon]

This is a very important point because the provision must not be seen as a way of paying lip service to local opinion. People spend a lot of time trying to work up neighbourhood plans, which go through a massive amount of consultation, and they go round the area with clipboards, but when it comes down to it they are not treated with seriousness in the process. Having this quality assurance would help that.

[Dr Blackman-Woods]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. Public confidence in the system is important.

Just to show that I looked, we found that national planning policy guidance includes guidance on the independent examiner’s role, how a neighbourhood plan or order is examined, how the public can make their views known to the independent examiner, who can speak if a public hearing is held and whether the examiner considers the referendum area to be part of their report. However, there is nothing at all—not in that section anyway—about who the independent examiner should be or what qualifications they might be expected to have.

The reason the amendment specifies the RTPI is that it has a mark of quality attached to it, and has been clear about the principles to which examiners should work. There are five core principles. I think this might be helpful, and if the Minister does not want to include it on the face of the Bill, it might be put into regulations.

It is hard to disagree with any of the five core principles, or to suggest a reason why they should not apply to examiners. Those subject to them must act with competence, honesty and integrity; and they must use independent professional judgement. That is particularly important, because we want the examination to be seen as professional. After all, the plans are very important. They should probably have more importance in the planning system. We want to make sure that they will be professionally examined. Examiners must apply due care and diligence; they must act within principles of equality and respect; and obviously, they must exhibit professional behaviour at all times.

That set of core principles seems to me to be very helpful. The RTPI deals with professional planners all the time, and it has provided more detail about what the principles mean with respect to the role of an inspector. I shall not go through them all, because there are too many, but I thought it might be worth looking at a few that seem particularly important.

“Members must take all reasonable steps to maintain their professional competence”.

That seems fairly obvious; we want people who are to examine neighbourhood plans to deal with the planning system as it currently is—not as it was when they trained, which could have been some time ago.

They must also

“take all reasonable steps to ensure that their private, personal, political and financial interests do not conflict with their professional duties.”

Again, that is important. I wonder whether the current system pays attention to any financial, personal, political or other conflict of interest, particularly in relation to examiners. It may, and I hope that the Minister can reassure us on that point, but I think my constituents would want to know that people with a conflict of interest were screened out before the point at which they would get to examine a neighbourhood plan. It is not clear to me at what stage in the current process that happens, or what questions are asked during the appointment process, to ascertain whether there is a conflict of interest.

“Members must not offer or accept inducements, financial or otherwise, to influence a decision or professional point of view”.

That is an issue that councillors are used to having to deal with; but again, it has not been made clear. I do not suggest for a minute that any examiner would have been subject to the taking of financial inducements, or anything of the kind. I just do not know, at this stage, what process there is in place to ensure that that does not happen, or what oversight there is of the examination process. Also, examiners should not disclose to employers or clients what is happening in the neighbourhood plan where it would be to their advantage.

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[Dr Blackman-Woods]

I am not trying to suggest there has been a problem in the past, but we have neighbourhood planning provisions before us in a Bill that seeks to strengthen and streamline the process of neighbourhood planning. It is the Opposition’s job to seek ways of improving the Bill and one way might be to give greater clarity and confidence to the public and all our constituents that neighbourhood plans are being effectively and efficiently examined. That provides more confidence in the process, which we are incredibly supportive of.

[Jim McMahon]

I actually think—I am sure my hon. Friend will agree—this is a gift for the Minister. Imagine a situation in which there is no quality assurance in place and no mechanism built into the membership organisation to deal with complaints. Where else would the complaints come but across our desks?

[Dr Blackman-Woods]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. It drives home the point we are making. We have tried to be incredibly helpful in tabling the amendment. The point has not been raised only by Opposition Members. As I pointed out earlier, it was raised by people who gave evidence to the Committee. It is important as a matter of public record that we are clear about how the plans will be examined and about the qualifications of the examiners. As my hon. Friend said, the RTPI has given a gift to the Minister by saying there is already a code of conduct and already professional guidance in place, so why does not the Minister simply adopt it and then we will all have better reassurances about the qualifications—[Interruption.] I am sure the hon. Member for North West Hampshire can intervene on me if he wishes to do so, and I will seek to answer his question.

If I may, I will move on to new clause 1. Although we have tabled it as a new clause, it is really just a further probing amendment to find out whether the Minister thinks there should be a threshold for the number of electors who will turn up to vote for a neighbourhood plan. Again, I am not trying to make the process of having a neighbourhood plan more difficult, because we are terribly supportive of neighbourhood plans and want as many of them in place as possible.

In fact, because the Minister is extremely good at reading the Lyons report, he will know that we had a whole section in that report about local plan-making and how we might marry up neighbourhood plans with the local plan-making system. That was not to take powers away from local neighbourhoods, but to have these as an initial building block for local plans so that local plans are not something that is seen to be imposed on a local community, but are something that develops organically from looking at a whole range of neighbourhood plans. He knows that the Lyons report also talked about how we could fund that, because if we are going to adopt a system where neighbourhood plans are the building blocks of local plans, resource will clearly need to be put into neighbourhood plans.

If I may again use the example of my constituency, we are now back at the beginning, more or less, of our local plan-making process. I think I am right in saying that process started in 2007; if I was being really generous to the local authority I might say 2008, but really we had preliminary discussions in 2007. Here we are in 2016, I think 11 rounds of consultation later, and we still have no local plan in place. In fact, we would be lucky to get a local plan in place in the next couple of years.

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[Dr Blackman-Woods]

I will give way to the hon. Gentleman in just a moment, after I have dealt with the intervention by my hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw.

We should not abandon the idea of a threshold just because it might be more difficult for some people to attend a polling station or another building to register a vote. We all want to ensure that as many people as possible are engaged in the neighbourhood planning process and, indeed, in voting more generally—but I will stick to neighbourhood plans, to avoid getting a direction from the Chair. Polling over a given period of time, and good use of postal votes or electronic voting are among the many different mechanisms that could be applied locally to ensure that the threshold is reached, and that people really are engaged in the neighbourhood planning process.

[Jim McMahon]

That is the crux of the issue. The gift of a neighbourhood plan is that it binds a local community together to agree collectively what is best for that community. The benefit of a threshold is that a bar is put in place to say, “You have to be able to demonstrate that the plan has the community support in place.” If one of the arguments is that disadvantaged communities are disfranchised from such processes in a way that middle-class communities are not, a threshold would place a greater onus on ensuring that people are included in the process and in more active ways.

[Dr Blackman-Woods]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point, and one that I was going to come to: a minimum threshold could ensure that additional work had to be put in to get a wider, more representative group coming forward and voting for a plan. I was going to draw the Minister’s attention to the activities of Planning Aid England, which works a great deal with disadvantaged communities, trying to get them engaged in the planning process. If the Minister was keen to put a minimum threshold in place, he might want to think about how Planning Aid could be supported, in particular to work with disadvantaged communities to ensure not only that people turn up to vote for the neighbourhood plan, but that they are fully engaged in the plan-making process itself.

When we discuss the later amendment, we will see that analysis of the plans so far indicates that—this is the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw was making earlier—they have a bias towards more middle-class communities.

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[Kit Malthouse]

No, I accept what the hon. Lady says and I apologise. She said these are probing amendments and I was being slightly flippant, but I doubt very much whether a member of the RTPI would do the examination free. The point is that if you restrict it to just them, I imagine the fees might rise slightly. Basic economics is that the smaller the pool of people, the more fees will rise.

I acknowledged that the amendments were probing, but I am not sure what problem the hon. Lady is trying to solve. Thousands of neighbourhood plans have come forward and there are two major issues, which the Bill solves. The first is more assistance from local authorities, because obviously the plans have to conform with the local plan and they are often developed in parallel. Certainly mine were developed in parallel with the local plan. There is quite a lot of iterative process between the two and the Bill allows that. Secondly, if they are going to do this work, there should be protection in the planning system, which is also in the Bill.

Beyond that, I fear the hon. Lady is trying to create with the amendments—I accept they are probing—a sort of recreation of the whole planning system on a local scale, instead of realising that the process is organic and should be exactly that without as much restriction as the formal planning and plan development process has, notwithstanding the fact that there will be supervision by the local council.

[Jim McMahon]

I cannot understand why the hon. Gentleman would want to water down the integrity of this process. If it is to have any credibility in the system, it must be tested in the system. We do not want a neighbourhood plan that does not stand that test and is treated in a second-rate way.

I also cannot understand the point about levying a fee. People do not generally work for free in their profession. Someone will want to be paid as part of that process. All that my hon. Friend the Member for City of Durham is trying to do in the amendment, which is open to debate, is to make sure that a standard is applied and it provides that standard. If this is not accepted, what is the alternative to provide that surety?

[Kit Malthouse]

This may be a philosophical difference between us. I am naturally inclined to deregulation, whereas this is obviously an attempt to impose regulation on the neighbourhood planning process. In my experience, regulation generally gets in the way of speed and efficiency, and frankly of people even bothering to get involved.

In my neighbourhood there has been huge enthusiasm, wide acceptance and a recognition that there are two issues—first, more assistance from the local authority and secondly, more regard from the planning system as it is. It would be a mistake for us to try in the Bill to reproduce the same level of planning regulation that exists at local authority level for what is, frankly, often a group of volunteers who are trying to put together an imaginative plan for their neighbourhood. They should be left with as little restriction as possible to do that as far as they can, and when they realise their plan needs to be in conformity with the local plan and it has to go to democratic approval, to modify it accordingly. If we are to have acceptance, we must do it that way. Once we start putting rules and regulations and hurdles in their way, I am afraid the enthusiasm will drop away.

I would not support a 40% threshold. As the hon. Member for Bassetlaw said, there lots of reasons why not, but we do not apply that for any other election in this country, including referendums and elections for police and crime commissioners. There is no other election or exercise of the democratic process in this country where we do that and I do not think we should start now.

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[John Mann]

It is absolutely a building block. We will come at a later stage to how we deal with less affluent communities, which is important, but when it comes to all neighbourhood plans, there is a great opportunity here for the Minister. He will need to come back with a bit more, otherwise the certainty is not there. One likes certainty in life. We know where we stand with a local plan. We would know where we stand with a neighbourhood plan. So a neighbourhood plan voted through where there is house building built in ought to be the certainty for the foreseeable future, which, in planning terms, seems to be 15 years. Such certainty seems reasonable enough to me. If the Minister could deliver on that, when I go back to my local communities he will find that there is even more enthusiasm. I will be able to get the urban communities saying, “This is a great idea, and by the way we will have more housing. We will change this and we will change that. We will create more open spaces. We will want space for our community facilities.”

Large numbers will participate in the planning debate and decision making, given the chance. The Minister has the proof already. Let us unleash more of this local empowerment. He will then be a very popular Minister.

[Jim McMahon]

This has been a fascinating debate. We are all localists. We all come from our communities—that is why we are here in the first place—and the spirit of the Bill embraces that. We are fine-tuning the Bill to ensure it works in practice. We do not want to set people up to be disappointed. We do not want them to be given this power, to be told that after years of having things done to them they are suddenly empowered, and then to go through the process of having an application submitted only for it to be completely against what they want. That is really important. In the local context of Greater Manchester, we have got the spatial framework. Within that process there is a call for sites, so developers and landowners put sites forward as part of the mix.

A member of the public has the local plan that has been agreed, but now they also have in consultation a strategic plan with sites that have been put forward by developers and landowners, and not necessarily with the agreement of the local authority. However, that causes a lot of tension because some of the sites are controversial. Landowners do not always take into account local opinion before they submit sites to get the development value that could be achieved afterwards. In an odd way, that could be the thing that inspires the local community to come together. Instead of having something done to us, let us get together and design what we want our community to be. We could think further about design quality, open space provision and how a community works more generally.

I will certainly be a champion for this type of planning in my local community. Let us be honest: in deprived, working-class communities, people have for decades and generations been told, “This is what you are getting, whether you like it or not.” I see this legislation as a route for empowering people to have far more control over their lives and communities, so it is welcome. However, let us not lose an opportunity to make sure that this is a really decent piece of legislation and a really decent process that people can feel empowered by. When a planning application goes through the system and is tested—when it is submitted and goes for approval—it is important that it has enough weight to ensure that the professional planners, and those sitting on the planning committee if it goes for determination, treat it with the respect it deserves. That is in the spirit of today’s amendment and the amendments we will discuss at a later date.

I want to return to the point I made earlier about the consultation process. If we say that we want to put the community at the heart of the process and have a community voice to make people feel more empowered, it seems odd that the public consultation on this issue does not close until 2 November, because here we are determining the legislation that will by and large have been debated before that date. Can the Minister tell us why that has not been sequenced in the right way? How can we ensure that the responses to the consultation are fed in? If significant issues come up in that process, what mechanism does Parliament have to make sure that those are picked up at the appropriate time?

[Gavin Barwell]

It is a pleasure to serve for the first time under your chairmanship, Mr McCabe. With your permission, I will start by responding briefly to the point of order raised by the hon. Member for Oldham West and Royton so that I can provide some reassurance. I have worked very hard to try to ensure that Parliament has as much of the material relating to the Bill as possible, and as early as possible in the process. There was an earlier consultation on neighbourhood planning this year, our response to which was published at the same time as the Bill. This is a technical consultation about how we are going to implement some of these provisions.

The assurance we have given the House, and the business managers more widely, is that when the Bill gets to the Lords stages we intend to have the draft regulations or policy statements published. I agree with the hon. Member for Oldham West and Royton that in an ideal world all this would be ready when a Bill first comes to Parliament, but if we look historically we see that is the case for virtually no Bills. I am keen to learn the lessons of the Housing and Planning Act, which received Royal Assent earlier this year, and get the material out as early as possible and give people as much opportunity as possible to scrutinise the measures.

[Jim McMahon]

Just to clarify, there are two separate consultations. There is a technical consultation that closed on 19 October, and there is a wider public consultation on the pre-condition element that closes in November. I would not necessarily consider the second one to be just a technical consultation. I would not want it to be lost in the mix and not treated with importance, because residents and community organisations will respond to it expecting it to be treated appropriately.

[Gavin Barwell]

The intention behind that consultation paper was to be helpful to Parliament and wider stakeholders interested in these issues. When we announced the Bill in the Queen’s Speech and set out the broad measures that were going to be in it, there was concern about what the impact of these reforms to planning conditions might have. Our feeling was that publishing a consultation paper setting out exactly how the Secretary of State might use these powers, if the Bill receives Royal Assent, would be helpful. The intention was to try to assist.

I am grateful to all hon. Members who have contributed to the debate, which has raised important areas about neighbourhood plans, their relationship with local plans and national planning policy, the examination process and the extent of the democratic mandate they receive through a referendum. Before addressing each amendment, I would like to make a few general comments.

As the Committee will know, the role that communities play in planning has been revolutionised, at least in certain parts of the country, by the neighbourhood planning process. More than 200 communities have recognised the opportunity to shape the development of their area. The numbers speak for themselves. Nearly 2,000 communities have started the process, as the hon. Member for City of Durham said, in areas that cover nearly 10 million people in England, and 240 referendums have been held, all of which have been successful. The Government are hugely proud of neighbourhood planning and of the communities that have taken up the opportunities we have provided for them. We have been clear that we want an effective system that will inspire communities, as the hon. Member for Bassetlaw said, and give them confidence that their views matter, while delivering the growth and additional housing we need.

Clause 1 helps to achieve that. I accept the point made by the hon. Member for Bassetlaw that it is not a solution on its own and that more action will be needed. The White Paper will set out some accompanying policy changes that will try to address the issue. The clause inserts a new paragraph and new subsections (3B) and (3C) into section 70 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990. It will require decision makers to have regard to post-examination neighbourhood plans where the decision has been made by the local planning authority, or in certain cases the Secretary of the State, that the plan should go to a referendum. We might call that the Malthouse clause, because it originates from an issue with the neighbourhood plan in Oakley and Deane, in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire. Essentially, an appeal was granted just before the referendum was going to be held.

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[Gavin Barwell]

I am sorry; I did not make myself clear enough. Those provisions are in relation to people examining a neighbourhood plan.

The hon. Lady raised a couple of points that are worthy of clarification, including the important point on equalities, which she was quite right to mention. The public sector equality duty does not sit on the examiner. It sits on the council appointing the examiner to ensure that it is confident that it appoints someone who will fulfil that duty.

I recognise that the amendment is purely a probing one, but I want to deal with the point picked up on by my hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire about the particular group of people that the hon. Member for City of Durham suggested should do the work. The Government’s understanding is that many local planning authorities have used the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors’ neighbourhood planning independent examiner referral service to source an examiner. That seems to be standard practice. That service offers examiners that it has assessed as suitably qualified to carry out examinations. The RICS maintains that members of the panel are continually monitored to ensure that they maintain performance and standards.

Although I am a huge fan of the RTPI, the amendment is neither necessary nor sufficient. In other words, there are some experienced planners who would do a perfectly good job and are not registered with the RTPI. There might also be a newly qualified planner who is registered but may not have particular experience in neighbourhood planning and, therefore, might not be the ideal person. I completely understand the thrust of what she seeks reassurance on, and I share her view, but the relevant safeguards are in schedule 4B to the Town and Country Planning Act 1990.

To a degree, we should trust councils. They have a clear interest in ensuring that the neighbourhood plan is properly examined, because they share the hon. Lady’s concern that it should be in conformity with the strategic policies of their local plan. Therefore, I do not think that we, sitting here, need overly to pre-judge that councils are not capable of ensuring that we get the right people to do what I accept is important work.

I turn to new clause 1. As I said earlier in the week, neighbourhood planning referendums have an average turnout of 33%, which is not too dissimilar to the average turnout in local elections. At the moment, support needs to be gained purely from 50% of those who vote in the referendum. That is a fairly consistent principle that we apply across our democratic system. Although new clause 1 was tabled to probe, it may be useful for the Committee to know what its effect would be. Of the approximately 240 referendums that have taken place to date, about 170 would not have passed the test proposed by the hon. Member for City of Durham. I want to make three more quick points.

[Jim McMahon]

Will the Minister give way?

[Gavin Barwell]

I am slightly conscious of the time. It might be helpful to the Committee if we finished consideration of these amendments before 1 o’clock.

The hon. Member for Bassetlaw made an important point about the effect of a threshold on more deprived communities, where turnout tends to be lower. I think there was a consensus in the oral evidence sessions that neighbourhood planning has been too concentrated in certain parts of the country. We must be wary of that because we want to ensure that everyone is benefiting.

It is also important to note that for local plans, which arguably have a much bigger impact on communities, there is no requirement to hold a referendum. I think the people of Croydon would be delighted if they had a chance to have a referendum on the Croydon local plan. In questioning the exact wording of the new clause, the hon. Member for Bassetlaw said that we should look at having a threshold for how many people vote in favour—the proportion of the electorate that had voted yes. I am wary of that for the reasons mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire, but it might reassure the hon. Gentleman a little to hear that the average yes vote in the 240-odd referendums that have taken place so far is 89%. That shows what is happening where people are proposing referendums. Nevertheless, he is quite right to say that there could be, theoretically, a situation in which that is not the case.