Localism in Planning

Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park Excerpts

Wednesday 17th July 2013 Westminster Hall

[Zac Goldsmith (Richmond Park) (Con)]

I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) on securing the debate. I agree with everything that he said in his excellent speech, and I want to take the opportunity to thank my hon. Friend the Minister for listening to concerns raised by many colleagues about proposals to reform the laws on permitted development. It would have been absolutely wrong for the Government to remove people’s right to object to plans that would have an impact on their homes, and I am very pleased that he managed to find an alternative that would both encourage non-contentious extensions and preserve the all-important right to object. I wanted to put that on the record.

I join the debate today because I fear that we are losing sight of the huge emphasis that many of us in Parliament placed on localism before the election. Local authorities have been stripped of authority over such a long time and to such an extent that more often than not, even on absolutely local issues, they are simply overruled by the centre. I recognise that there has been some rowing back on that since the election. As has been said, there is great potential in neighbourhood plans, for instance. However, we cannot say with any real conviction that our planning system is genuinely local, despite the noises that we all made to our constituents before the election.

I know that the Minister will make the point that there is a real and urgent need for new homes, and that is obviously right—I do not think that anyone will argue with that—but before we give up for ever our precious green spaces, I would simply encourage him to acknowledge that the reason why we are not seeing new homes is not the planning system. Vast tracts of land are available for development but lying idle. There are 250,000 plots in the south-east alone. That is in addition to 31,000 acres of brownfield land. All could be developed now. It is worth pointing out also that roughly 90% of applications are successful; they go through. The problem is not a lack of permissions. It is more likely to be, as we have heard, a lack of access to finance. Therefore, even if we were simply to rip up the planning system, we probably would not see a net increase in development. We would simply see more development in the wrong places—in the most unneighbourly places.

As a rule, it must make sense to have a strong brownfield-first approach, and that should be crystal clear in planning law. We might even want to look at the US, where there is a tax bias in favour of developing brownfield sites and against developing greenfield sites. That is the case in a country that is far less compressed than our own.

It is also worth looking at empty homes. We do not know how many empty homes there are in this country—the figures are so unreliable—but some people put the figure at about 1 million. Clearly, that is an area where we should be making more inroads.

I want to finish by commenting on the national Planning Inspectorate and echoing the words of my right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs. If I were asked to design a body with the specific goal of alienating and enraging communities, I do not think I could do better. It is a remote, virtually invisible, unelected body that simply tramples over local wishes and opinion. Even where local people are absolutely united and backed up by their councillors, they are still routinely overruled. I am about to run out of time. I will simply say that if there is to be any point at all in being a local authority councillor, we have to do away with that organisation.