National Planning Policy Framework

Joan Walley Excerpts

Thursday 26th April 2012 Commons Chamber

[Joan Walley (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Lab)]

Insufficient time is available to us to debate this subject. The Government business managers have failed to provide enough time to discuss the NPPF. I regret that our deliberations on the detailed work that has been done in at least two Select Committees is being so rushed, and that raises further issues about how today’s statement will be followed up.

On sustainable development, the Environmental Audit Committee looked into the question of what will be the parliamentary process in following up on the new revised 50-page draft of the NPPF. Will the Minister tell us what sort of scrutiny he envisages? I, for one, was very disappointed that we did not receive early warning of what was in the statement when it first came before the House. It would be very helpful if the Government would say how future proposals will be scrutinised by Members in both the Chamber and Select Committees.

One of the key problems in the NPPF is that the Chancellor talks about sustainable economic development, but that is different from sustainable development in terms of planning. The view tends to be that if there is a business or future investment in three or four years, then that is sustainable development. However, we are looking at how we can embed environmental issues and issues of social justice into the future of the entire green economy. That is an important point in respect of the NPPF.

It is equally important that the Government should, in their cross-cutting agenda at Cabinet level, look not only at what the Treasury is doing, but at how the Green Book initiative is influencing national infrastructure investment and how that then relates to planning at the local level. Such matters have not been properly addressed.

I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts) for giving the Environmental Audit Committee the opportunity to look at these issues in detail. We were restricting ourselves to looking at the sustainable aspects of this topic. Our report—published in October 2011, and included in the Communities and Local Government Committee report—looked at what we mean by sustainable development and how that definition could be tightened in the NPPF. We felt that if we could do that, it would help to address all the other concerns from around the country—from the Campaign to Protect Rural England, the National Trust and other organisations—about how we link things to sustainable development.

We made various recommendations, which the Government have taken on board to some extent, although the proof of that will be in whether they really have done that and how that pans out in planning decisions around the country. One issue we are concerned about is resources. We asked the Government to set out what resources they felt local planning authorities needed if they were to be truly able to come up with a local plan that got people collaborating, across business, civil society, local councils and everything else, to look at the long-term future of what was needed. However, I do not have the time now to talk in detail about all the issues that were raised.