Neighbourhood Planning Bill

Lord Lansley Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 17th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to the debate. As the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, said, it seems like we were discussing the Housing and Planning Act only a minute ago. I hope that during the consideration of the Bill we will see the housing White Paper. That probably presages more legislation in the course of this Parliament—it normally does—and we should not be too surprised by that. However, what is more important is that we can set it in the strategic context; that is one of the reasons why I hope that we will see the housing White Paper, preferably during the early stages of consideration. That is what it is all about. We need not always think that we cannot have more legislation—we often find reasons why it is necessary to legislate. But the point is to give the system the stability that comes from knowing that, even if new legislation comes forward, it is intended to strengthen the strategy rather than to change it. That is something that we should certainly be looking for in the rest of this Parliament. If we are to achieve what I think is the shared objective of building more of the houses that we need, then not only planning authorities but, even more so, those responsible for development will need that stability over the next few years. In that context, I should declare an interest as chair of the Cambridgeshire Development Forum.

Sometimes the contributions to this debate have seemed to suggest that development involves a constant adversarial relationship. I could take your Lordships out at night up on to Castle Mound in the middle of Cambridge and they would see nothing but cranes. They would see industrial and residential building all round Addenbrooke’s Hospital—the Trumpington development, the Clay Farm development, the southern fringe and the north-west Cambridge development. Frankly, I do not go along with the idea that developers do not get on with development where they have the opportunity to do so. Cambridge, where admittedly the land values are high and the property prices equally so, is a place where they have an incentive to build and they are building. That does not mean that they do not have problems. As somebody who, on an unremunerated basis, chairs the local development forum, I know that we approach it from the standpoint of promoting delivery not through an adversarial relationship but through a collaborative relationship with local authorities. Indeed, that is precisely what we have fostered and are seeing. However, we need a system to develop and to enable that to happen.

The noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, talked about land banking. The principal site in Cambridge where outline planning approval was given a very long time ago but no development took place was Northstowe. It was even meant to be the first garden village. The first house has just been built but, according to the original outline planning application, 6,000 homes should have been built by this stage. That is down not to developers but to the Homes and Communities Agency. We have to acknowledge that sometimes, as in October 2008 and at other points, it is extremely difficult to assess and deliver viable sites. I emphasise that, particularly when looking at things such as pre-commencement planning conditions.

From the development point of view, assessing viability and delivering certainty in relation to a site are becoming increasingly difficult, and, frankly, we added to the difficulty with the Housing and Planning Act. The demands in relation to affordable housing and starter homes have made it more complicated to carry out viability assessments. Now, we need to make sure that, perhaps by returning to a standard list of conditions but certainly by endorsing what this Bill does and making it clear that pre-commencement planning conditions must be agreed between the local planning authority and developers, we enable them to be clear about the viability of their sites at the point at which they go into a planning committee.

I do not think we should take it for granted that by legislating in this way we solve the problem. Delays in the system are, in my experience, often likely to emerge through the inability of local authorities—due to the lack of resources, the lack of will or certainly the lack of incentive—to discharge planning conditions. There might have been agreement at the point at which the application was approved, but that does not mean that they get on with the process of discharging the planning conditions. Delays can make the whole process very difficult.

That is why I hope that the housing White Paper will, among other things, as I think has been mentioned, address resourcing for planning authorities. I hope that it will do so with a mechanism that gears additional resources to planning performance agreements so that the resources for planning authorities are geared directly to delivery—perhaps through a process akin to the BID process for business rates. I know that planners and developers are willing to subscribe to additional resources for planning departments if they feel that, as a consequence, they are able to get better certainty about the planning timetable and the delivery of housing. That is what we need to look at in the context of the pre-commencement planning conditions that are coming forward.

I want to mention two other things. First, recalling last year’s Housing and Planning Act, I hope that when we look at pre-commencement planning conditions we look very carefully at how they interact with the permission-in-principle route to approval. If they are not incorporated effectively into the permission in principle, we increase the risk that the pre-commencement planning conditions will all be incorporated into the so-called technical application. However, they will not be technical at all; they will be instrumental to the question of whether planning approval is granted. As has rightly been said, if promoters are not able to agree to a condition, the local authority will be entirely justified in not granting approval. However, if that arises regularly and frequently at the point of the technical application, the whole permission-in-principle approach will be frustrated and undermined.

The other thing that I want to mention is neighbourhood plans—the parish plans that I experienced in my former constituency. There is serious concern about the extent to which parish plans, made in good faith with a considerable investment of time, energy and often money on the part of parishes and their residents, are undermined by the simple fact that the local plan is not adopted sufficiently quickly, which makes it out of date. Therefore, what was said in a ministerial Statement just before the recess was extremely welcome. It gives a degree of protection to parishes—at the moment for the next two years—in the face of the risk that their allocation of sites for housing in relation to a local plan is undermined by the local plan not giving a five-year supply or, as the noble Lord said, not meeting the strategic housing market assessment.

In the context of the South Cambridgeshire and Cambridge City councils, it was argued in the strategic housing market assessment that the local authority was 10,000 houses adrift from the necessary five-year supply—that is, that 43,000 rather than 33,000 homes were required. We currently have a lot of appeals going through and being granted on the basis of a lack of a five-year supply. This is immensely frustrating to local people. I was the Member of Parliament and I remember the South Cambridgeshire local plan being submitted to the Secretary of State on 28 March 2014. We are now in 2017 and the inspectorate is still issuing further dates for hearings through to April. The dates will go beyond that—beyond even three years after the local plan was submitted. We are already starting to find that some of the assumptions that underlay the original public consultation that led to the local plan are being overtaken by events and certainly being overtaken in time.

It should not be like that. If we are about delivery and minimising delays, the Government must look at the beam in their own eye as well as the beam in the eye of others. Looking at the delays in approving local plans is an instrumental part of the examination of where delays can be minimised. The system is designed around the integrity, speed and authority given under local plans and, by extension—I hope increasingly in future—neighbourhood planning. If we do not deliver that, I am afraid that the system will be seriously undermined.