Localism Bill

Lord Best Excerpts

Tuesday 19th July 2011 Lords Chamber

But there can be a hearing if the examiner considers it necessary to ensure adequate examination of the issue or for a person to have a fair chance to put a case. Many people do not have the literacy skills to be able to take part comfortably or confidently in complex written exchanges, but they are much better at putting their views across in person. The purpose of the amendment is that people should have a choice. I beg to move.

[Lord Best]

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendments 152ZA and 153ZA, which concern the design considerations in neighbourhood plans. This House contains many eminent champions of good design, including the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, and the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, who have added their names to the amendment and are in their places today. I would only say, in declaring my interest as an honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, that my experience of looking after housing projects has proved to me that poor design not only alienates and depresses those who have to suffer it but is wastefully expensive because it does not last.

Contrast the disasters of now demolished council housing from the 1960s and 1970s with the enduring popularity of the homes built many decades earlier in the garden villages of Rowntree’s New Earswick, York, and Cadbury’s Bourneville, Birmingham. Last week the president of the RIBA, Ruth Read, launched an excellent report, Good Design: it all adds up, which the relevant Minister, John Penrose, highly commended. Design matters, so it seems entirely right that neighbourhood plans should be just as mindful of the requirements of good design as the local development plans of local authorities themselves. The first of these two amendments places a responsibility on neighbourhoods when engaging in neighbourhood planning to have,

“regard to the desirability of achieving good design”.

This replicates precisely the existing obligation on local authorities which resulted from an amendment in your Lordships’ House to the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Bill in 2004.

Amendment 153ZA would mean that when neighbourhood plans are examined, as they will have to be under the Bill's provisions, the independent examiners would have special regard to the desirability of achieving good design. It may be argued that this issue can be addressed at one remove, through national or local government planning requirements. Publication of the national planning policy framework—when we finally see it—may shed light on the emphasis to be given nationally to issues of good design, and because the neighbourhood plan must be,

“in general conformity with the strategic”

priorities of the local development plan, good design could perhaps be implied through that route. However, the experts tell me that this is likely to be too weak a link.

Ministers in another place have helpfully accepted an amendment that requires the independent examiners to pay special regard to conservation areas and listed buildings. It seems equally important and worthy of an amendment to require the examiners to have special regard to design quality. I know that the decentralisation Minister, Greg Clarke, also favours good design and I hope that these amendments will appeal to the Government.

[Baroness Whitaker]

My Lords, in supporting Amendments 152ZA and 153ZA on the crucial aspect of the good design of the places that people live in, which has such wide support from professional and interest groups, I take comfort from the Minister’s undertaking in her letter to me of 20 June:

“We remain committed to promoting the highest standards of architecture and design”.

Indeed, this is what the Government did in also undertaking to honour the provisions relating to design in the previous housing and planning Acts. Those provisions, as the noble Lord, Lord Best, said, bound local authorities but not neighbourhoods because neighbourhoods did not come into being as the deciders of planning until the present Bill, so it is only consistent that the duty to have regard to good design should be extended to neighbourhoods, as Amendment 152ZA says.

Amendment 153ZA is consistent with the Government's undertaking and I need hardly repeat the evidence of the profound impact that design has on enjoyment, security, amenity, health and leisure. I am sure the Government would agree that communities should be enabled to make good design choices.