Lord Davies of Stamford
Main Page: Lord Davies of Stamford (Labour - Life peer)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Communities and Local Government (Baroness Hanham)
My Lords, most decisions on planning are taken at a local level against a defined plan and in consultation with local people. Planning helps to protect the environment and ensure appropriate development, and helps with growth in the economy through business expansion. I wish to concentrate today on measures that the Government are taking to reform and speed up the planning system. We are undertaking these reforms because the planning system that we inherited as a Government was deficient in two key areas.
First, many local people did not feel involved with or sympathetic to the decisions that were being made. Policies such as imposed regional housing targets created antagonism. Local people saw only the disbenefits of growth, not the improvements it could bring. In the end, the real costs were borne by local communities, with fewer jobs, and fewer homes—an unsustainable future. Secondly, the system could be slow in reaching decisions. Not only did this create uncertainty, it did nothing to encourage the growth and housing provision that this country needs. Some change was required.
We took as our starting point Open Source Planning, a policy document that proposed a new approach to planning. This was adopted in the coalition agreement, with a promise to radically reform the planning system. We have already achieved much of this aim.
Last November’s Localism Act has reshaped the way in which planning is carried out. That was a major milestone towards achieving the commitment at the very heart of the coalition agreement. Its measures put power in the hands of local people and groups to engage in and shape their communities. Particularly in this respect, it introduced neighbourhood planning, which, backed by incentives such as a meaningful proportion of receipts from the community infrastructure levy being passed to neighbourhoods, will give local communities both the opportunity and the encouragement to think positively about future development.
We are keen for local people to take the opportunities to influence their local plan, as well as bringing forward a neighbourhood plan for their immediate area. It may be of interest to noble Lords that over 200 funded neighbourhood planning front-runners are now under way, and more than 100 non-front-runner neighbourhoods have begun the process. By mid-October, 52 neighbourhood planning areas had reached the first stage in the process of formally designating their neighbourhood planning areas, and another 100 had submitted applications for designation. We expect that up to three of these could reach independent examination stage this year. Thirty-five areas are aiming to go to referendum by 2013, and we expect around 80 to have plans in place by the end of next year.
Through a £3.1 million programme, four support organisations are providing advice and support to communities on neighbourhood planning. We are providing a £50 million programme to support local authorities in making neighbourhood planning a success, including funding new local authority burdens.
A further requirement will be for major developers in particular to undertake pre-application consultation with local residents and members of the neighbourhood forum. The new duty to co-operate ensures that councils have to collaborate when producing their local plans, so that issues such as the needs of strategic housing market areas that straddle local authority boundaries are addressed.
In March this year the National Planning Policy Framework streamlined over 1,000 pages of policy down to 50, reducing duplication, making it easier for ordinary people to understand the system and setting the strategic context to guide neighbourhood planning. The framework includes the presumption in favour of sustainable development, reinforces the role of local plans in meeting the needs of each area and ensures a positive approach to applications where up-to-date plans are not in place. The new, simplified framework was published in March and is already helping to deliver the homes and jobs that the country needs and an enhanced built, natural and historic environment. The emphasis on local plans in the framework, and the new incentive provided by the presumption to have an up-to-date plan in place, have resulted in intensified plan-making activity.
By May 2010, six years after Labour’s 2004 Planning Act, only 57 core strategies had been adopted out of 335 local planning authorities. By contrast, 65% of all local planning authorities now have at least a published plan, and 44% of all authorities have completed all the statutory stages and have agreed plans in place following community consultation. The framework also underlines the importance of town centres, while recognising that business in rural communities should be free to expand. However, it also guarantees robust protections for our natural and historic environment and protects the green belt. It also ultimately achieved the accolade of being praised by organisations across the planning spectrum, from the Campaign to Protect Rural England through to the CBI; and from the National Trust through to the British Property Federation. I readily acknowledge that many changes were made to it after close co-operation and consultation with those and other organisations.
In July we announced a package of measures to speed up and simplify the planning application process, many of which take forward the commitments in last year’s Plan for Growth. An effective planning system is a key part of the Government’s growth strategy. All too often we heard that the planning system is a brake rather than a motor for growth, but it should not be. Planning can help create the conditions for economic growth but only if it works in a cohesive way, recognising that opportunities in each area are different and that proposals are for local decision.
We are proud of the achievements to reform planning since 2010, but it was felt that more was needed to help trigger the provision of new housing and business development, to ensure that opportunities could be seized to encourage investment for the future. Therefore on 6 September we announced a major package on housing and growth. This included measures such as the Planning Inspectorate being given power to decide applications where local authorities consistently perform badly; the increased use of planning performance agreements for large schemes; planning inspectors being able to award costs at appeal—for example, where councils have refused schemes with little justification—the Planning Inspectorate prioritising those appeals that will help deliver growth; continuing the policy that enables planning authorities to allow unimplemented permissions to be extended easily; enabling developers with sites with unviable numbers of affordable homes the right to appeal against these obligations; a consultation on allowing developers to renegotiate non-viable Section 106 agreements; a review to rationalise local and national building standards; considering the use of call-in for major new settlements with larger than local impacts; encouraging councils to use flexibilities in the NPPF to tailor the extent of green-belt land to local circumstances, while continuing to preserve its protection; introducing permitted development rights to enable a change of use from commercial to residential; and consulting on a significant relaxation of planning controls over residential and commercial extensions, but for a limited period. Some, including this letter, will need consultations, and where that is the case we will be undertaking them shortly.
Some will require primary legislation, and these are included in the Growth and Infrastructure Bill that is receiving its Second Reading in another place today and will come to this House thereafter. However, I assure noble Lords that the measures in that Bill do not mean that we are throwing the planning system up in the air again and starting afresh; it is not a change of direction. These measures build on our existing reforms.
We have given councils and communities more power to plan and to identify, after widespread consultation and taking of views, what development their areas need and where it should go. With power, though, comes responsibility—the responsibility to get on and plan, to focus on the key decisions that affect the future of their areas and to deal in a positive and efficient way with individual planning proposals.
This is a long list of reforms but there is still more that we will do. Having streamlined the policy documents, we are doing the same with the 6,000 pages of guidance that has built up over the years. We have recently launched the review and my noble friend Lord Taylor of Goss Moor is leading a group of practitioners in identifying what can make this less complex.
It is not just a case of changing the rules, however; there needs to be good or better co-operation. We want developers to invest time in helping local authorities and planners understand the economic benefits of their proposed development and, most especially, to give local communities the opportunities to discuss and shape those plans in advance of the plans going forward. We are making clear to elected members and council officers the circumstances in which they can speak to developers without raising propriety issues. In turn we want the developers to seize every opportunity to make it easier for councils and local communities to understand their aspirations and be positive about economic development.
By developers and business working together with local authorities and local communities we firmly believe that we can deliver the sustainable development the country needs without treading on the toes of local communities and their absolute need to protect their environment into the future. Everyone involved in planning—whether a homeowner with a small-scale addition, a developer of small or larger projects or the planning authority itself—has to remember that the decisions that they make today will still be there scores of years later.
Lord Davies of Stamford
The noble Baroness did not mention at all by name the affordable housing obligation, and she only referred to it very obliquely, as if it did not really exist at all or had no significance. Is the report in the current issue of Private Eye—that the Prime Minister’s office in 10 Downing Street put out a statement that the affordable housing obligation could be abolished without the loss of any affordable houses, even though there is a ministerial Statement which states that the result of that abolition would be loss of 10,000 affordable homes a year—correct?
Baroness Hanham
My Lords, I did not know whether the noble Lord was going to intervene in the gap; this is a debate, not Question Time. However, I am not aware of the Private Eye article. I have not seen it, nor have I been advised about it. I usually take Private Eye with a fair degree of scepticism. I beg to move.
Lord Beecham
Briefly but, I am sure, stunningly successfully. Of course, the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, served on a local authority as well, so there are many of us with some local authority experience. I was, for a couple of years after I was leader, chairman of the development committee. I declare an interest as a current member of Newcastle City Council and, once again, as a vice-president of the Local Government Association.
Despite the moderate tones in which the Minister opened the debate, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Government are really viscerally opposed to planning. They are essentially an anti-planning Government in many ways, and that shows through their policies—not just strictly in the planning field. They have adopted wholesale the Treasury fantasy that the planning system is somehow responsible for low growth in our economy and for the lack of new housing. This is not an evidence-based approach; it is one that they partially successfully sold to the previous Government as well as the present one. However, the fact is—it is well known, although whether it has appeared in Private Eye I am not sure—that 400,000 outstanding planning permissions are available for residential housing to be built. Moreover, 87% of planning applications were approved in 2011; that is a significant statistic.
There is not, in general, a huge backlog in terms of the way in which planning applications are dealt with. The bigger problems actually come with the bigger schemes. We have now an almost interminable debate about a huge infrastructure project, on if and where to have additional airport facilities. This is taking years. It was to try to deal with these major problems that the previous Government introduced the Infrastructure Planning Commission which, of course, the present Government have abolished. However, if there were to be delays in the planning system it would partly be a function of the staffing which is having to be curtailed. Of course, the Government abolished the planning development grant, which encouraged and facilitated the adequate staffing of appropriate people in local authority planning departments.
Local government has a good record of promoting economic and housing development: witness the enormous regeneration of many of our provincial cities over the past couple of decades under, it must be said, Governments of both political colours. I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, who certainly was instrumental in moving on this agenda during his time in office. It is interesting that the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, is not in his place tonight—indeed, one hesitates to say it, but he is rarely in his place, which is unfortunate because he has much to say and contribute, and was an outstandingly successful Secretary of State for the Environment in many respects. He does not cite the planning system as a major obstacle to growth in the interesting and idiosyncratic document which he has published with recommendations for a new approach to growth in the economy. He makes some recommendations about planning, but they are pretty modest in relation to the general thrust of his report.
One aspect of that report, of course, is the regional imbalance which is again becoming a current topic, and which the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, certainly addresses. It is interesting that, in some respects, he seems to seek to revert to previous practice. He refers to the abolition of regional development agencies; he does not call for their reintroduction, because it is quite clear that the Government have set their face against that—unfortunately, in the view of some of us. However, he talks about having local growth teams, which arguably could be said to replace the government offices which have, alas, also been abolished and which I and others have commented on in debates in this Chamber before. He calls also for, as he puts it, Ministers to be associated with local enterprise partnerships. Some of us are somewhat sceptical about local enterprise partnerships, certainly in terms of their accountability. However, he is almost turning back to the inner city partnership days when there was a Minister—the noble Lord was one of them—who was closely associated with a particular area. I do not know quite how many Ministers would be required to cover the 38 local enterprise partnerships but, whatever the mechanism, the intention is clear that you have to see the country as a whole and not simply leave it in an unstructured way, which has led to the imbalance that we are all familiar with.
Indeed, one aspect of this matter is that there is simply no planning framework for England. I have referred before in debates in your Lordships’ House to the report of the Town and Country Planning Association some years ago, which strongly suggested that we needed a national planning framework for England so that there could be a deliberate attempt to secure balance in development. I recall that when I pressed the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, during his second term as Secretary of State for the Environment, to support a particular development in Newcastle relating to a brewery site—since demolished and subsequently redeveloped—his officials said that it was of no concern to government as to where this investment should go. There was a rival contender for this investment in the Midlands, and the department was simply not concerned about where it should go. That seems to me an abdication of responsibility indicative of the failure to have a sensible national framework for these decisions to be made.
Coming to the current proposals, my noble friend Lord Davies has referred to one aspect which is a matter of concern—but only one of a number of issues which arise in terms of the Government’s apparent dilution of the current system. Affordable homes are no longer apparently to be required. There is to be a relaxation, perhaps, of Section 106 agreements and, of course, we have the wonderfully developed thought, translating Marie Antoinette into housing planning terms, that the answer is of course to “let them build extensions”. This seems to be the answer to both the housing problem and the plight of the construction industry. I suspect that that is a recipe for considerable difficulty between neighbours and around authorities as people fall out about unsightly or large extensions which would not otherwise get planning permission. I note that apparently it has been suggested that the Secretary of State is counselling people who still find difficulties in obtaining such permissions that they might sue their local authority for damages, which strikes me as a little excessive. There is also a suggestion from Mr Nick Boles, who is now a Minister in the department, that the three-year period for this absurd policy might well become indefinite.
Other matters also concern the Local Government Association and the Campaign to Protect Rural England, including the notion that applications might be made in certain circumstances direct to the Secretary of State rather than to the council. One might think that that is not the most localist approach to planning. Another matter of concern is a limitation of the power for local authorities to require information with planning applications. How they are supposed to deal properly with planning applications on sketchy information is not at all clear. Of particular concern to the CPRE is the fact that major business or commercial projects might be regarded as nationally significant infrastructure and therefore would be taken out of the local planning regime altogether. That also poses considerable threats—one thinks of large warehousing and other developments —which could significantly damage local authority areas.
There are many questions about other aspects of policy. What sort of housing are we to have in the Government’s view? Again, this is well known and I have referred to it in previous debates. In the past couple of decades—this occurred under the previous Government as well—houses and accommodation have been built with much smaller areas and lower space standards than most of the rest of Europe. Generally speaking, we have worse design features and less concentration on environmental aspects of housing. None of that apparently attracts the Government’s attention. It is carte blanche to build what you like where you like, which is not a satisfactory way of dealing with the substantial problems of local economy, housing need or the construction industry.
Although there are certain sensible ideas in the Government’s national policy framework—I know that my noble friend will address those later—the current atmosphere is one in which the Government are clearly potentially creating a situation in which we will see unsatisfactory development. We will not see the right number of houses built or the right kind of houses built that are desperately needed. I do not see the Government’s proposals at all achieving the aims which they profess they wish to see implemented. I regret that the role of local authorities in all this is clearly very much under threat. We are capable of producing a new partnership with the private sector and others with the right kind of development in the right place at the right time, given the power to do so.
Lord Davies of Stamford
I am grateful to my noble friend for his clear and convincing analysis of the situation. Does he agree that the abolition of the affordable housing obligation will lead to windfall profits for developers who will have signed the Section 106 agreement and costed in performing their affordable housing obligation, which they now will find retrospectively they do not need to perform? They will be able to write back that provision straight to their bottom line. Does my noble friend think that the public interest should in some way be allowed to share in these windfall gains?
Lord Beecham
I would rather that the windfall gains were not made at all. My noble friend, in his ingenious intervention, makes a perfectly valid point. This is almost the most lamentable feature of the Government’s current policy and I invite them to rethink it.