Town and Country Planning (Permitted Development and Miscellaneous Amendments) (England) (Coronavirus) Regulations 2020

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Thursday 10th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I very much support the two eloquent opening speeches from my noble friend Lord German and the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox of Newport, which set out why this proposal is what, in my vernacular way, I would call silly nonsense.

First, it will not have a major impact on the number of houses built or kick-start the economy; it will simply cause a lot of difficulty and nuisance in a few places. I declare my interest as a member of Pendle Borough Council and of a planning committee. I cannot think of a single property in the whole borough of Pendle to which this would apply, so I am not talking about problems in our area.

The Government do not understand just how much pressure local authorities and planning departments are under at the moment. Covid and the cuts in local government spending have reduced many planning departments to a skeleton of what they used to be. Frankly, the new complicated proposals being introduced, such as this, will in practice not be very different from an ordinary planning application.

The Government say that this is a quick way and will be quicker, but the actual work required to deal with one of these applications will require consultation with residents and with statutory bodies—notably, in the case of districts, the highways authority, which will be the county council—and consideration of design and amenity. Highways design and amenity are just about the most important things people get worked up about when there are medium and relatively small developments of this nature being proposed. That it will somehow be much easier and simpler for planning departments is simply not the case.

The other problem is that it is yet another example of the Government micromanaging planning at a national level when planning is really about local communities and places. It is different everywhere. The idea that you can simply impose national rules like this without consideration of the importance they will have in a particular locality is quite wrong.