Localism Bill

Lord Marlesford Excerpts

Tuesday 7th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Marlesford]

My Lords, I congratulate the Government on bringing in a Bill to spread localism and must say how charmed we all were by the way in which the Minister introduced the Bill.

I, too, want to focus on the planning sections of the Bill. In 1928, a remarkable book was published called England and the Octopus. It was written by Clough Williams-Ellis, the outstanding architect who, among other things, gave us Portmeirion, and who, along with Professor Patrick Abercrombie, was one of the earliest campaigners to prevent the urban sprawl and squalor and the ribbon development that threatened to extinguish forever the rural beauty of Britain. The book was republished in 1996 with a foreword by Jonathan Dimbleby, who at that time was the president of the CPRE. I at the time was the chairman. I recommend noble Lords who are interested in this subject to have a look at it.

I should at this point declare my own interests: as a Suffolk farmer with a number of let houses in Marlesford, some of which could be described as social housing, as president of the Suffolk Preservation Society and as chairman of the Marlesford parish council. In view of what the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Norwich said, I should also say that I am a member of the Marlesford parochial church council,

Having served for 12 years as a countryside commissioner and eight years as a rural development commissioner, I am hugely aware of the dangers that there could still be to our countryside. It was 20 years after England and the Octopus that the Labour Government of Mr Attlee produced the 1948 planning Acts, together with the creation of national parks. The planning Acts, together with the National Health Service, were some of Labour's greatest legacies to this country—and they came just in time.

This is a very important Bill because it could have an impact on what England looks like, not just during our lives but right through the lives of our grandchildren, too. So we have to get it right, however much time it may take. Mistakes on paper can be corrected; mistakes on the ground seldom can be. The breadth and diversity of experience assembled for this debate to offer support and guidance to the House of Commons and the Government are perhaps an example of the value and function of the House of Lords as it is.

I suppose that the most dramatic example of what is at stake is illustrated by the National Trust which, through the spectacular success of Project Neptune, saved a huge part of our most beautiful coastline. If it had been lost, it would have gone for ever, and I do not believe that the planning system on its own could have saved it; nor, certainly, could ownership by local authorities, which have sometimes been among the great desecrators of our landscape. The Government are right to abolish the unelected Infrastructure Planning Commission and to sweep away the discredited regional strategies. Our counties are quite large enough to interact directly with Whitehall where national or regional policies are required.

The ownership of land, the stewardship of land and the use of land, whether for farming, recreation or development, are what the planning system is there to influence. Planning policy has been nourished by decades of casework and experience. It is neither possible nor desirable to seek to oversimplify the planning system. The core of the system has been the evolution of the series of policy planning guidance notes—PPGs, as they were known. Most of them have now been redrafted as planning policy statements. The PPG and PPS system is excellent and full of experience and expertise. I have the gravest doubts about the wisdom of replacing it with an overarching new planning policy framework that could, in its attempt at simplification, send a whole generation of babies down the plughole.

However, parliamentary scrutiny depends on having full details of the draft regulations that will implement the Bill. To move power downwards is always attractive, and certainly parish councils are the grassroots of our democracy, but there must be a balance between different local levels. Planning officers can, of course, be insensitive and bureaucratic, but they are needed to overrule arrogant or selfish developers who are not really interested in anything except the quick buck. Planning inspectors can get it wrong, although in my view they have been a most effective defence against unreasonable planning refusals and populist politicians who seek to impose inappropriately national policies at a local level.

Like my noble friend Lady Parminter, I am worried that the Bill as drafted will give fresh opportunities to big companies to get their way when they should not by using planning gain to bribe local communities. I recognise the difficulty of introducing a right of appeal against planning consents. None the less, I think that communities should have the right to challenge decisions that go against locally agreed plans or where local authorities have a conflict of interest. I fought a long battle using Parliamentary Questions and the media, eventually successfully, to stop Braintree District Council repeatedly giving itself planning consent, totally contrary to public policy, to erect advertising hoardings, from which it got some £30,000 a year, along the A12 trunk road. I think also that the proposals for a right to buy or right to bid for community assets said to be of community value could be fraught with dangers. This part of the Bill will need the most careful scrutiny and, I suspect, considerable clarification, if not amendment.

I would say that by any standards this Bill is much too long. I hope that if in Committee we find that some parts of it have not been properly thought through, the Government will be prepared if necessary to remove them for a future occasion. Finally I very much share the concerns already expressed over the European dimension. It is now 19 years since the introduction of subsidiarity under the Maastricht treaty as a guard against an overreaching Brussels, and it has had only limited success. May I suggest that localism could become the new shield against EU involvement?