Lord Beecham
Main Page: Lord Beecham (Labour - Life peer)Growth and Infrastructure Bill
Lord Beecham Excerpts
Lord Beecham
My Lords, the Minister has taken the opportunity to mention in your Lordships’ House a decision recently announced by the Secretary of State. The latest ukase from the tsar of Eland House goes even further in eroding the position of local authorities. The proposal that he has just announced would allow the Secretary of State to grant permitted development status—as I understand it, for a year—during which a planning application would be processed. That seems to be an extraordinary pre-emptive procedure. I cannot think of a precedent for something of that kind. It would be bad enough if it were a final decision. It is ludicrous to pretend that it is a temporary decision because it is almost inconceivable that the Secretary of State, having granted that permitted development, would not end up approving an application even if it had been turned down by the local authority and the matter went to appeal.
It is another example of the Government interfering and intervening in local decision-making, and in this case in a quite unprecedented way. I invite the Minister to indicate the basis on which this change is happening. I know in my own city a sort of school has been established in what are effectively domestic premises. I do not know how big the school is intended to be, but it is certainly not complying with a number of regulations, including of course the planning regulations. While I would not expect there to be many examples of wholly unsatisfactory buildings being used in this way, there clearly is a risk that schools will be encouraged by the order from the Secretary of State to proceed willy-nilly with their proposals, potentially excluding the local authority entirely. If that is what is envisaged in this context, in how many other areas will the Government seek to assume these powers, and with what effect on the local planning system?
Lord Greaves
My Lords, I saw this only a few minutes ago when I was alerted to it by an e-mail from the Bill team. I congratulate them on doing that, since, along with the Minister’s comments, it gives us the opportunity to debate this under a rather different and less dramatic amendment from that of the noble Lord on the Labour Front Bench.
Having now read the Statement while the discussion was taking place, the proposal that is being put forward seems quite extraordinary. Anything that is announced as a new state-funded school and has the support of the Secretary of State for Education goes ahead outside the normal planning system. That is, I understand, exactly what is being proposed at least for the first year. Presumably it will apply to all of them and not just to those which are said to have had problems opening on time because of delays in the planning system. Once again, we find that if there is a problem with planning—which is presumably caused by something real and is not invented by the planning authority—it is the planning system that is to blame. As the Prime Minister said quite recently, the planners should be removed from the scene. Those were not his exact words, but he said that they should be swept away—that they should get out of the way and let growth commence.
If that is what parts of the Government want, they should be fairly clear and overt about it and we can have debates about it. However, what is happening is that bits are being chipped away here and there. The noble Lord, Lord Beecham, said that it is eroding the power of local authorities. I would say it severely undermines the whole reason for and purpose of the planning system. If it is to be undermined for somebody who wants to run a small business that does not really affect anybody else, and that person wishes to run that business in very unsatisfactory circumstances—in a condition of squalor—I suppose that is their business. However, we are talking here about schools, children in schools and the people who live in the neighbourhood around schools. Even if it is a small free school, it will inevitably have some impact on the people who live around it.
I read that these changes will be subject to a prior approval process to mitigate any adverse transport and noise impacts. I am not quite sure how that will work. Presumably, if there are adverse noise impacts, they will come under environmental health legislation anyway, but I am not sure how the prior approval process will mitigate any adverse transport impacts and what that means. Perhaps the Minister can explain exactly how that will work.
For everything else that might result from a change of use to a school, not necessarily with changes of any sort to the building, presumably you just close down whatever it was previously and move in. It could have been offices, hotels, residential institutions, secure residential institutions—perhaps they are appropriate for some schools, but I will not comment further on that—or used for assembly and leisure. These uses can be converted overnight to a school without so much as a by-your-leave other than prior approval to mitigate any transport and noise impacts. Surely this is fundamentally wrong. It is stated that in a small number of cases free schools have had to delay their opening because there were planning problems; that may be the case. If there were problems, whatever they were, that suggests that that opening should have been delayed and those problems should have been sorted out, just as with any other change of use that would take place.
The Minister’s Statement, headed “Planning and Schools”, says that the Government believe,
“that the creation and development of state-funded schools is strongly in the national interest”—
—we all agree with that; it is a question of how you create and develop them—
“and that planning decision makers can and should support that objective, in a manner consistent with their statutory obligations”.
I think that is referring to the planning decision-makers, but this proposal would abolish their statutory obligations, at least for 12 months. As the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, said, a free school supported by the Secretary of State for Education which opens without planning permission in the first year has to spend that year getting planning permission. If that planning permission is turned down because the premises are obviously unsuitable to be turned into a school, for whatever reasons, the idea that that will go to appeal and the inspectorate will uphold the decision of the local planning authority is not likely. The inspectorate will get its firm instructions. It is quite clear that the Secretary of State for Education and the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government are in cahoots over this. The planning system is being pushed to one side.
Yet the Statement goes on to say:
“Experience to date has demonstrated that with the assistance of the Education Funding Agency new state-funded schools, and free schools in particular, have been successful in identifying sites that have gone on to secure planning permission”.—[Official Report, Commons, 25/1/13; col. 25WS.]
Presumably we can discuss this further on Report, but since we are discussing it now, it seems that at the very least the Minister needs to be clear and tell us how many instances there have been, out of all the free schools which have been set up, of them having their opening delayed because of planning problems? Where is the evidence that this is happening? What is the scale of the evidence, and what were the circumstances in each of those cases? I suspect that there are not very many of them.
This is a shambles. It is a Secretary of State for Education and a Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, as I said, in cahoots, driving a coach and horses through the normal planning system. The problem is that if government policy always trumps good planning, where will it end? It will not end with free schools, it will end with anything that any Secretary of State thinks is a good idea and pushes through, regardless of the effects on the people using the premises and on the local community.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, I thought about that and then thought that the present Secretary of State will not give permission if it is a local authority school. He will say, “No, you’ve got to do it properly and get planning permission”.
I am grateful that the Minister emphasised that the period will be only one year, and I think that we understood that. However, he also said that, to the best of his knowledge, no free school has so far been refused planning permission—those were his words—and, therefore, at least half the answer to the question on how many have been delayed is “none”, at least at one end of the spectrum of being refused. It would be helpful if, when he writes, he can tell us how many free schools—and where they are—it is claimed have been delayed because of what he calls bureaucracy in the planning system. We can then look at them and make our own assessment of whether this extremely draconian measure is in any way justified.
Baroness Young of Old Scone
My Lords, perhaps I can help the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington. Lots of guidance on this issue is already available. I believe that Clause 5 is unnecessary in what, if I may say so, is a pretty unnecessary Bill, so I support the amendments, particularly Amendment 55 and, indeed, the proposal that the clause should not stand part of the Bill.
As I say, quite a lot of guidance is already provided in the NPPF to local authorities on information requirements, and we need to allow some time for that to bed in before taking any unnecessary legislative steps to control local authorities in the information that they may seek. As the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, said, it is possible to see what the evidence is that local authorities are being overly prescriptive and requiring information that is otiose, irrelevant or unreasonable. I have had experience across the planning system, mostly from the point of view of organisations requiring information from applicants through local authorities, and I would say that it is the lack of information, or delayed or poor quality information, which creates uncertainty and causes delays that result in poor quality decisions and make it virtually impossible for other interested parties to have a full and fair view of the impact of an application. That is particularly true for some of the environmental requirements that local authorities seek from planning applications.
With regard to “reasonableness”, I am sure the Minister will say that reasonableness is reasonable, but that the wording removes from the local authority the ability to be the final arbiter, to be in the driving seat and to be able to reduce the level of uncertainty that can cause these adverse consequences for decision making. It would be much wiser to allow the guidance that has been issued so recently time to work through in order to see whether local planning authorities are making overly onerous information requirements. If they are, the guidance should be tightened because this issue is much more appropriate for guidance than for primary legislation.
It is interesting that the Royal Town Planning Institute is against Clause 5. Even the Law Society, while supporting Clause 5, quite rightly notes that careful guidance will be needed to avoid this provision becoming a new judicial-review weapon for third parties to stall developments. As an old hand at judicial review as a weapon to stall developments, I would not like to think that we were creating more opportunities to do that.
Lord Beecham
The noble Baroness, the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, and my noble friend Lord Hanworth have done a pretty effective demolition job on this proposal, without the benefit of planning permission.
Another issue arises from the impact assessment. That impact assessment purports to make another part of the case for the Government’s proposals, which relates to costs. On page 29 of the impact assessment, there is an analysis of the:
“Estimated savings for applicants under a central scenario assuming 10% reduction in costs”.
For the 347,800 annual applications, that comes down to something like £54.8 million, on the basis of a 10% reduction in costs. That is the net present value. The costs are £54.8 million and because of some mysterious rounding of the figures, the savings purport to come out to £6.5 million. It might be thought that that is not an inordinately vast sum of money in the scale of things, but it is perhaps worth saving if one could get it.
However, within that, it is significant that for major developments for dwellings, the annual savings would be £1.4 million, so it is hardly a material factor in holding up house building in the country. For a major development—not dwellings—the annual saving is even less, £0.9 million.
Where does the 10% figure come from? Why is 10% applied across the piece? Are the Government really suggesting that information required for a householder development, for which the savings per application are deemed to be all of £69 each, somehow will be of the same percentage order as those for a major development? That strikes me as highly unlikely. This seems to be a bogus figure plucked out of thin air to provide some sort of financial justification for this measure. In addition, the impact statement goes on to say that the Government intend:
“to introduce complementary changes to secondary legislation, which will have the effect of re-introducing a right of appeal where a council has failed to validate an application”—
presumably inter alia but not necessarily exclusively on the ground of lack of information—
“and the statutory time limits for determining a planning application has passed. This will address the impact of recent court decisions that have challenged the Planning Inspectorate’s ability to consider such appeals”.
If this is a significant issue—the Government appear to think that it is—why is there no amendment to the Bill? Why is it being done in the form of secondary legislation, which, of course, cannot be amended if it comes before your Lordships’ House? From time to time, the Government take opportunities to add things to Bills, sometimes in considerable numbers. Why is this matter not being added to this Bill but being left to secondary legislation?