Housing and Planning Bill
Debate between Lord Kennedy of Southwark and Earl of Listowel
The Earl of Listowel
My Lords, I had not planned to comment on these issues, because my experience is limited. I remind noble Lords of my registered interests as a landowner. I recall speaking some years ago with a young project manager on a development about extensive work she had done in consulting local people in taking forward this development. It seemed to her that she had done everything that the local planners had asked of her but she found that her work was not acceptable. She said that this was often her experience—one jumps through all the hoops and suddenly one finds that the hoops have changed. This is only one person that I remember speaking to about this issue, but it certainly left me concerned that there is not enough certainty in the system and that developers can put a lot of work into a project and find that suddenly the hoops have changed and different requirements are being asked of them. I just wanted to put that into this debate.
Lord Kennedy of Southwark
My Lords, Amendment 107ZZB in this group, in my name and that of my noble friend Lady Andrews, would delete Clause 136 from the Bill. The clause is concerned with permission in principle and was debated at some length in Committee in your Lordships’ House. Permission in principle is a major change in how we approve developments. It has, of course, been suggested that the supply of new homes is being held back due to the planning process and the failure to get planning applications approved. That is complete nonsense which has been cited by one or two noble Lords in debate on this issue in recent times.
I tabled a Question to the Government on this issue and received a reply from the noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Trafford, on 4 April. In her reply the noble Baroness confirmed that there were planning permissions for 658,000 homes in England where work was either not started or not completed. That is a large number of approvals. As a local councillor I have approved some of those applications over the last two years. In the area where I live I regularly note sites for which I have been party to approving an application for housing but nothing has happened. All that has happened on one site is that, a few days after the committee gave permission for housing, a “for sale” board went up saying, “for sale with full permission for housing and two shops”. That is all that has happened since we gave permission well over a year ago.
That is not the local planning authority dragging its feet or attempting to stifle development; no, there are other factors at play here which this clause does nothing about. It is about the value of land and the price it is rising at. It can also be about the ability to raise finance to undertake a development. It is not about a planning authority dragging its feet. We very much support building new homes, although we may seek to do it in a different way. We want to see brownfield sites brought back into use for housing and other ancillary and alternatives uses, but we have concerns about what will be built, in terms of design, space, energy efficiency and affordability. We want to see a range of tenures and the building of viable, long-term communities.
Government Amendment 106A confers additional powers on the Secretary of State. I draw the attention of the House to the 28th report of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee—in particular, the section concerning Amendment 106A which starts at the bottom of page 1 and carries on to page 2. The report concludes:
“Inadequate and incomplete provisions of proposed primary legislation cannot be excused on the basis that consultation has not taken place or that the Government wish to retain ‘flexibility to set out differing timeframes as they apply in different contexts’. The policy should have been finalised following appropriate consultation before, not after, the Bill was introduced.
We therefore consider that the delegation of power in the proposed new Section 59A(8) inserted by amendment 106A is inappropriate, and that the duration of permission in principle should instead be specified on the face of the Bill. An alternative approach, although we think that this is a less satisfactory option, would be to specify the maximum duration on the face of the Bill, coupled with an affirmative procedure power to provide for a shorter period”.
That is damning criticism by the committee and the Government should take heed of it.
To help matters along, I make the following offer to the Government. If the noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Trafford, will withdraw the amendment today with a view to reflecting on the concerns raised by the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee and bringing an amendment back at Third Reading that takes those concerns on board, then in the same spirit we will not test the opinion of the House on our Amendment 107 in the next group, in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Beecham. Instead, we will wait to see whether we can get an amendment that addresses the concerns raised in the report. It is for the Minister to decide what to do and I hope the noble Baroness will take up this offer made in the spirit of wanting to get this right.