Planning for the Future

Lee Rowley Excerpts

Tuesday 15th December 2020 Westminster Hall

[Lee Rowley (North East Derbyshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Charles. I also congratulate the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Sarah Olney) on securing this important and timely debate, as well as my colleagues from the south-west who have spoken. It has been a bit of a south-west fest so far and I feel like I need to pull the centre of gravity back and further north towards the north midlands, because, sadly, we have similar challenges to those of many of my colleagues who have already spoken.

I represent a constituency bedevilled for more than a decade by planning issues caused by the failure to put a local plan in place in a timely and effective manner, as is so often the case. That means a cascade of unwanted and unnecessary development, followed by a local plan that does not necessarily work for the local community in its first iteration and initial drafts. We are in the middle of trying to resolve that knotty conundrum after so many years of it failing to be resolved.

As a concept, I welcome many of the things that the Government are trying to do. There is no denying that the planning system, as it stands, is sub-optimal. It is broken, in places, and does not work either for those seeking to get on the housing ladder to be housed in the first place or for those interacting more closely with it, be they developers, planners or applicants. I accept that there is a fundamental problem with planning that needs to be resolved. The evidence bases that have to be put together by local councils are too detailed and take too long. The overall process is laborious, and the plans produced often bear—at best—a relationship to problems that existed five years ago rather than current problems.

We need to reinvent community engagement. I welcome the Government putting all those ideas on the table in principle but, as with everything in planning, the devil is in the detail. The Government have brought forward a set of consultations that are deliberately high-level and that deliberately encourage this kind of debate. I welcome their commitment to that, but the challenge is the detail and the devil within it. I can see that zoning could be welcome for my constituency in principle, or it could be significantly deleterious to my constituency if it was not not implemented in the right way. I can see that the streamlining of the planning processes should be welcomed because it gives an effective outcome to everybody involved more quickly, and I should be able to welcome that in principle, but the issue is the devil underneath that streamlining. I can see the replacement of soundness as positive in principle, as long as the actual reality on the ground enables us as communities to make better decisions.

The same goes for better engagement and planning, fast-track for beauty, and section 106 replacements: they could all be good in principle but we need that detail. We need it in the next stages of the consultation before we can have the comfort that our communities demand. That is particularly the case for those communities who have had historical challenges with planning to ensure they have confidence that the White Paper will try to resolve some of those challenges.

The questions that remain for communities such as mine are about how, for example, we reconcile the building of more houses, which is necessary in many parts of the country, with the desire to protect, which is apparently underneath the principle of zoning. There is a tension between those two principles and at the end of that process, one will have to take priority over the other. It is that decision that is the most important for my community.

How do you speed up the creation of a local plan process—a great idea in principle—while ensuring that a greater decision-making process is embedded at the start of that process and that people have the right level of oversight and ability to influence it? How will you reduce an evidence base—again, a great idea in principle—in a system that is so formal and specific to individual areas, and at times so litigious, which is the whole point of why the evidence base is often created and takes so long?

How will localism be maintained with such an increase in standardisation? How will we ensure that the neighbourhood plans that my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Anthony Mangnall) highlighted will have a continued central place within this system? How fundamentally will the very good ideas and principles within “Planning for the Future” interact with the housing methodology? In that regard, I also have concerns about the overall implementation and impact on areas such as mine.

In principle, there are some good ideas and opportunities to make a system that has not worked for many decades better. However, it is the detail that we need and that our communities require to be comfortable with these ideas.