Business and Planning Bill

Lord Best Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 6th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Best (CB) [V]]

My Lords, my comments relate to planning. I declare my interests as a vice-president of the Town and Country Planning Association and of the Local Government Association. I fully support the planning elements in the Bill, which are sensible and should minimise potential delays in the planning process caused by the pandemic.

However, as the Minister mentioned, the Prime Minister has spoken of more radical changes to planning to speed up the drive to “build, build, build”. I commend the PM’s emphasis on building back better, with more beautiful, greener homes, but there has also been talk of extending the controversial permitted development rights of housebuilders and developers so that they can bypass planning requirements and, indeed, avoid providing any affordable housing in their developments.

It is true that underresourced planning departments are sometimes slow, outwitted by well-resourced developers or overwhelmed by public hostility to a development. However, the answer is not to diminish the powers of the elected local planning authorities in the hope that the developers and housebuilders who have let us down in the past will do better if left to do as they please. Effective local planning requires adequate funding, which can be properly paid for by the developers which stand to gain so much from planning decisions.

Specifically on increasing the speed of development, we fortunately have some clear insights from the review that the Government commissioned from Sir Oliver Letwin. This explains why it takes so long for developers to actually build their developments: they only build more when they have sold what they have already built. Sir Oliver spells out that if we want much faster progress on big sites, we need to organise simultaneous development of a variety of types and tenures on these sites: homes that are affordable and for market renting, homes for older people and students, as well as plots for custom building by small builders.

Sir Oliver explains that councils could achieve this by buying sites through their own development corporations, capturing uplift in land values, and parcelling out the plots within a master plan—stronger, not weaker, planning; taking back control of development from the oligopoly of the volume housebuilders. Does the Minister agree that this positive, proactive approach should represent the direction of travel for our planning system?