Growth and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Beecham Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, this is the first day of Committee and a new stage; according to the rules, I therefore need to repeat the declarations of interests that I made at Second Reading. I remind the House of my membership of a local planning authority and of two development management committees. I am also a vice-president of the LGA.

I have tabled Amendment 32, to which my noble friend Lord Tope was good enough to put his name, whereby if the Government wish to designate an authority they should set out a notice of intention to do so. There is agreement across the amendments in the group that this is a good idea. I have tried to flesh out the broad principle set out in the lead amendment and some others. My amendment states:

“Before designating an authority under this section, the Secretary of State must serve a notice of intention to designate … The notice must … specify the reasons for serving the notice, all of which must have regard to the criteria that the Secretary of State has published”.

It should,

“specify those actions by the authority which the Secretary of State believes are necessary to satisfy the reasons for serving the notice; and … give the authority a period of twelve months in which to take the specified actions”.

Whether the period should be 12 months is debatable but I took the view that the Government would not want it to be too long. The amendment continues:

“At the end of the twelve month period, the Secretary of State must publish a report which sets out the extent to which the reasons for serving the notice still apply or no longer apply”.

At that stage, the Secretary of State may confirm the designation and take over relevant planning applications or withdraw the designation because, in his opinion, the authority has pulled its socks up, or he may give the authority another six months in which to do so.

It seems to me that this whole process, for the first time, takes away planning powers from local planning authorities and vests them in the person of the Secretary of State on the basis of alleged or perceived poor performance by a local planning authority. This is quite new and the process needs to be absolutely transparent. People need to understand why the decision is being made and how the situation can be remedied.

Like other noble Lords, I would much prefer this provision to be taken out of the Bill. However, if it is going to be there, there needs to be a clear choice between a degree of perhaps heavy-handed, detailed intervention in the running of an authority to sort out the problem and the draconian and complex process of an almost immediate central takeover of some of the development management functions of that authority. Surely the first of those must be the way forward. However few of these authorities there may be, the Government are proposing to nationalise some of their planning functions. It is interesting that a Government with a majority of Conservatives are sometimes so interested in nationalising things which up until now have taken place at a local level.

The amendment puts forward a gentle nutcracker, not a sledgehammer, if there is a nut to be cracked, and I hope that something along these lines will find favour with the Government. In particular, even if they do not want to put something on the face of the Bill, I hope that they will give very clear commitments along the lines of the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie of Luton, so as at least to give authorities the right to defend themselves and to explain what they can do, and also to give them a period of time in which to improve their performance so that we do not have to go through this rather draconian and undesirable rigmarole of the Planning Inspectorate—bless them—taking over detailed local planning functions.

[Lord Beecham]

My Lords, I also declare interests as an honorary vice-president of the Local Government Association and a member of Newcastle City Council. During my service on that local authority, I was leader of the council for some 17 years and was heavily involved in major development decisions. Subsequently, I was chair of the development committee and, after that, I served as a member of the development control sub-committee. Therefore, I have some working knowledge of the role of the local authority in planning.

I join my noble friend Lord McKenzie in broadly supporting this group of amendments as a way of ameliorating what seems to me a very badly drafted Bill. It would be preferable if the Government would abandon this whole proposal. I say that because there are many questions around the reasoning behind the Bill.

In the impact assessment there is reference to the financing costs to the development industry of the present planning system, which one Professor Ball estimates at £1 billion a year in respect of delays in planning permission and another £1 billion for, as he puts it, holding assets for which at the moment development does not seem to be possible. That seems to ignore completely the outstanding permissions—as I recall, some 400,000—which have not been activated by that industry. Therefore, it seems that the professor has a somewhat skewed view. Even if he were right, would the Minister be able to indicate what the impact of these proposals would be on the figures that the professor has produced, on which the Government seek to rely in the impact assessment? What would be the reduction from the £1 billion figure, or indeed the £2 billion figure, if one takes into account land which developers do not seem able to bring forward?

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Tope]

My Lords, Amendment 6 stands in my name and has been suggested by both the Local Government Association and the Campaign to Protect Rural England. It would of course mean that only local authorities which do not already have a local plan in place could be designated as poorly performing. In other words, it would immediately remove from the possibility of designation all those authorities that have a local plan in place. As we all know, the preparation and adoption of a local plan is a lengthy process. It is sometimes too lengthy a process but it is fully democratic and shows that the planning authority concerned is performing to proper democratic accords. On that basis, it is believed that they should be excluded from this threat.

Good, sensible local plans are forward-looking. They are intended and designed to encourage and stimulate growth. It is felt that they are in themselves probably a better measure of how well an authority is performing than individual planning applications—I think that this point has been made in earlier debates today—however major the project for which they are submitted. As I said, the intention of this amendment is to exclude those authorities that have adopted a local plan over the previous 20 years, as it suggests.

[Lord Beecham]

My Lords, is 20 years a reasonable period? The point has already been made in debate that there is an issue with the effectiveness of local plans. If we are going back as long as that, it could be argued that that is not really a sufficient incentive to authorities to bring their plans up to date. They cannot be done annually but two decades is an extremely long time.

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, I apologise that I missed the speech by the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie. He was moving an amendment that is very similar to my Amendments 7 and 26, which are in this group. I am sure that I agree with everything that he said about Amendment 3, since in effect it says almost the same thing as my Amendment 7, so I will say no more about that.

I want to say something briefly about national parks. There are two issues here. One concerns planning applications that may not become relevant applications and are therefore referred to the Secretary of State, as in the noble Lord’s amendment and my Amendment 7. My Amendment 26 says that authorities that may not be designated should include,

“a national park authority or the Broads Authority”.

The helpful information that we got about the number of major applications in the past year shows clearly that there are not very many in national parks. I think that the Minister referred to this; in some cases, the figure is as low as two. The statistics there could very easily be distorted.

However, there is more than that. National parks are very special places that have been designated for very special reasons. The national park planning authorities are already different from ordinary local planning authorities. They are not the ordinary district councils; they are the national park authority, which is a planning authority in its own right. A substantial proportion of the members of national park authorities are already nominated and appointed by the Secretary of State; I think it is the Defra Secretary of State, but is definitely a Secretary of State.

To take functions such as major planning applications away from the national park authority, in these very special places with their very special landscapes, and put them in the hands of a different Secretary of State —the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government—with a quite different agenda risks the balance of decision-making on these applications in national parks, shifting away from the importance of nature and landscape and towards development. Clearly, there always has to be a balance in every sort of area and national parks have to have development, but the criteria on which planning applications in national parks are assessed and decided are materially different from the criteria in much of the rest of the country. That is why they have been designated as national parks. The national park authorities have the responsibility for looking after those parks and for ensuring that those criteria are applied, in the interests not just of the landscape but of the people who live there. To take that away from them on technical operational grounds, based on the proportion of planning applications that were dealt with and determined within a two-year period or on other similar criteria, would be quite wrong.

This proposal is causing great alarm among the people who care for and about national parks, and I hope that the Minister will make it clear that they are not to be designated under any circumstances—and, preferably, will do so in the Bill.