Lord Barwell
Main Page: Lord Barwell (Conservative - Life peer)Neighbourhood Planning Bill (First sitting)
Lord Barwell ExcerptsTuesday 18th October 2016
(7 years, 6 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Neighbourhood Planning Act 2017 View all Neighbourhood Planning Act 2017 Debates Read Hansard Text Amendment Paper: Public Bill Committee Amendments as at 18 October 2016 - (18 Oct 2016)
Kit Malthouse (North West Hampshire) (Con)
I draw the Committee’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I am the majority shareholder of a company that provides finance for construction equipment.
The Minister for Housing and Planning (Gavin Barwell)
I employ two local authority members in my parliamentary and constituency office. For the record, I should probably also say that one of the witnesses is the leader of the council in my local area.
Examination of Witnesses
Andrew Whitaker, Roy Pinnock, Andrew Dixon and Ross Murray gave evidence.
Gavin Barwell
Q Thank you, Mr Bone.
There are just three brief points I want to make, picking up on what a number of you have said. The first is a request of Mr Dixon. You referred to the survey you had done of your members. First, can you tell us how many members you had surveyed? Committee members might find it helpful to see a copy of the results of that survey.
Andrew Dixon: We are very happy to submit that information to the Committee. I understand that 108 SME housebuilders took part in that survey, so a not insignificant number.
Gavin Barwell
Q With all due respect to the HBF, I suspect there is a very strong consensus across the House that one of the things we want to do is to encourage more SME builders. If this is particularly a concern to that sector, it is highly relevant.
Mr Murray, if I understood you correctly, I think you were saying that you were not sure that these changes regarding pre-commencement conditions would achieve anything, because dialogue between applicants and planning committees was needed. I put it to you that surely that is what this change will require. Because it is going to stop local authorities imposing pre-commencement conditions without an applicant’s agreement, it will surely create the kind of dialogue you want to see.
Ross Murray: The proof will be in the pudding going forward. My principal concern about clause 7 is the process of appeal afterwards, if those conditions are not acceptable and not viable. Regarding the point we have just discussed, an appeal that focuses purely on the offending commencement condition would be beneficial to everybody, if the dialogue has not resolved it beforehand.
Gavin Barwell
Q Yes. I think we will go on to discuss this when we get to line-by-line consideration, but the difficulty is that when an inspector looks at a condition, it is difficult to judge it in the absence of the overall application, because the council would say that the condition is necessary to make the overall application acceptable. It is difficult to just look at one condition in the absence of the overall package.
My last question is for Mr Pinnock. I understand the point you are making that there will still be an issue if this Bill goes through as it stands. I want to challenge you on what you said, that people would be in no better a position at all. At the moment, as an applicant, if you do not like the conditions attached to your application, you can appeal. I would argue that there is a beneficial step here in that, now, authorities will not be able to attach conditions that you do not agree to. The authority would have to feel so strongly about one of these pre-commencement conditions as to turn down permission for the whole application. Do you not think that it is at least going to reduce the number of cases where there is a problem, even if it will not eliminate the problem altogether?
Roy Pinnock: It may do, but it is an uncertain position. The issue for investors and also for communities is about how we create a more certain pathway to the number of homes that need to be delivered, and the amount of supported development and infrastructure. It will stop local authorities granting planning permission. That is what clause 7 does at the moment, and the BPF is wary of any measure that arguably stops authorities granting consent. There is a real risk that it is in the “too difficult” box already, and in terms of that dialogue and that negotiation, the authority will just sit back and say, “We’ve got a load of other applications that have come in, and we’ve got to meet our deadlines on that. This one’s just gone straight into the ‘we’re under a statutory restriction to grant consent’ box, so come back to us in a few months’ time when you want to agree our pre-commencement condition,” which, probably, is what would happen. We would still have the delays of discharging the pre-commencement conditions.
A targeted, fair system that allows authorities to stand by their concerns and have those adjudicated by the planning inspector on the same basis as the section 73 consideration that is undertaken at the moment, which has opened out where a condition goes to other points of the application. Quite fairly, it is broadened out. If the majority could be dealt with by written representations, that would provide a real release valve.
Also, as I say, the key thing about any legal change is that it drives a cultural shift, rather than necessarily being something people rely on. The BPF’s view is that this must have teeth and must be speedy and deliver the ultimate objective of certainty for everyone, in order to be a meaningful provision.
Jim McMahon
Q This follows on from the Minister’s point about how you compile an application with conditions to make it acceptable to the local community and the design elements within that locality. We have heard a lot about bats and newts, and a bit about hedgehogs too. There have probably been more discussions on those than on people and community. I want to explore a bit more the points you were making about the type of conditions being put forward and how reasonable or unreasonable they were perceived to be. Let us use the example of landscaping, which has been used to say, “This is how ridiculous the system is.” Following on from the Minister’s point, the idea that landscaping—planting a few plants here and there—will somehow delay an important development could be the difference between whether an application is acceptable to the local community or not. If a development is alongside your house, the screening and treatment of that could be critical to whether you support it.
Equally, the idea of phasing elements, whereby some conditions could be delayed or brought further into the application—drainage was mentioned—was predicated on the view that costing delays mount up, and that it is better to crack on, get the site done and resolve those issues later. The counter-challenge is that if you are applying for plant equipment or site security, but you cannot get an agreement on drainage, surely there is an inherent cost with that proposal. I want to challenge that to try to get some balance. We are in danger of going from one extreme to the other, and the truth is always somewhere in the middle.
Andrew Whitaker: I do not think we are. We are obviously talking about something different. We appreciate that some conditions on a planning permission will have to be pre-commencement. They are right at the heart of the application, and all types of different conditions may well be at the heart of a particular application. We are not suggesting that all landscape conditions cannot be pre-commencement.
You are absolutely right that in some cases—few, I would suggest—the landscaping proposals might well be the fundamental determining issue of that application. In others, it will be other things. The whole point of this proposal is to have that dialogue so that applicants to local planning authorities can say, “Is this really fundamental to you granting me a planning consent, given what I have already put into my planning application proposal?”
To use your example, if I have already screened the neighbour using whatever it was we agreed at the pre-application discussion, it is there as part of the plans of my planning application, and all you need to do is grant me consent in accordance with the plans that I have already submitted to you. You do not need an unnecessary condition requiring further landscaping details to be submitted.
If we have that discussion, I can point out to you that I have already submitted what I believe to be an adequate landscaping scheme. You, as the local planning authority, must then tell me why that is not adequate, whether I could address it through amended plans and all sorts of things, rather than just using the potato stamp—I think we heard that term earlier—of saying, “There is a pre-commencement landscape condition. Let’s sort this out later.” That leads to the delay, but we could have had a discussion about it as part of the planning application or as part of the determination process.
Andrew Dixon: I mentioned landscaping, so I am keen to clarify that point. I was not for a second suggesting that landscaping is not a proper consideration within a planning application. Above all, I stress that we do not see the provisions as a means to exclude certain considerations from the planning process. This should be about rationalising when certain information is needed and the optimum point in the process for it to be submitted, so that the development can come forward as speedily and efficiently as possible. If we get that right, the gains are huge.
Roy Pinnock: I have one point to add. I have sympathy for authorities, in that they will raise the issue of monitoring. They can generally see, when site operations start, that they will receive pre-commencement discharges anyway. Sorry to hit on this point again, but it goes back to resourcing. They will say, “It is just too difficult for us to monitor, after commencement, what is going on at the site, so we need it to be pre-commencement to create certainty.” We always have to be sympathetic to real life, boots-on-the-ground planning where we understand what is happening with these sites.
Some thought needs to take place between the Government, the sector and the commercial sector as to how we can assist the process and set the right stage. There is a preoccupation with many things. There will be a genuine concern that that trigger is missed, that you then cannot evict people and that it is a weak trigger. Therefore, getting it right, and having examples, guidance and model conditions from the Government is important.
Rebecca Pow
Q But where would you put it? In the pre-commencements?
Hugh Ellis: You would need to think about it right from the top. The content of the NPPF on design is actually quite good, but I do not see it being enforced, particularly, through plan-making.
Gavin Barwell
Q I have two quick questions for Councillor Newman. You felt that the planning conditions measures were a sledgehammer to crack a nut. I want to get a sense of the size of the nut. Among the previous witnesses, there was a consensus that the use of pre-commencement conditions has been growing over time. Does the LGA share that view?
Councillor Newman: As I said at the start, I think there is sometimes a perception in Government that planning is the problem. Maybe we are not even looking to crack a nut. To repeat what I said at the start, we risk setting up a far more confrontational process at the start. Conversations around design, sustainability and so on get lost, because people have to take a fixed position very early on in the process. Look, it is not perfect—there will always be examples that people can give of where it has ended up in confrontation—but the evidence seems to suggest that the nut is not particularly large.
Gavin Barwell
Q In its submission to us, the District Councils Network acknowledged that the discharge of planning conditions can be a factor in slow decision making and supported the Government in seeking to address conditions. Why did district councils take a different view on this from the LGA as a whole?
Councillor Newman: I have not had district councils coming to me, knowing that I was coming here, but if that is the position of their network, we will include it in our evidence.
Gavin Barwell
Q You made a very good point that in the year to 30 June, this country granted a record number of planning applications for housing, but that there is a gap between the planning permissions we are granting and homes being built out. If you do not think planning conditions are part of the problem—I would certainly say they are not the sole problem—what do the panel think are the reasons for that gap?
Hugh Ellis: The core reason is that we have restricted our delivery of housing to a single development model. You have signalled, Minister, that you are interested in exploring how we can find new ways to challenge that. The critical issue is that from 2019-20 onwards, the private sector will probably go on building 150,000 homes a year, almost forever. The critical elements missing from our debate—I know your mind is open to this issue—are how we deal with scale strategic development, how we join up infrastructure with housing development and, crucially, how we deliver a new generation of new settlements.
I am very conscious of Macmillan’s achievement in delivering 350,000 homes in the mid-1950s, but he did have a programme that was 32 new towns strong at that point. They are a fantastic way of delivery. They overcome the issue of delivering numbers. Milton Keynes is delivering almost 4,000 homes a year. I believe that there is an exciting opportunity for us to take that up again, but it seems to me above all that in our collective debate about housing delivery in this nation, we need to address our attention to that strategic scale.
Councillor Newman: I will finish with an example from Croydon. If a planning permission has not been taken up within three years, perhaps a council building company like Brick by Brick should be invited to step in and start building the homes that somebody promised they would build but did not.
The Chair
I am afraid that time has beaten us, although we could have gone on much longer. Thank you, witnesses. That ends this morning’s evidence session.