Lord Pickles
Main Page: Lord Pickles (Conservative - Life peer)
The Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Mr Eric Pickles)
I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
Two years ago, the coalition Government were formed to take the country from difficult times to better days. In the coalition agreement, we pledged to build a new economy from the rubble of the old, to support sustainable growth, balanced across all industries and parts of the country, and to champion enterprise and aspiration. We pledged to shift power from unelected quangos to elected representatives, communities, neighbourhoods and individuals. Most urgently, we pledged to take immediate action to tackle the deficit and get the public finances back on track.
Mr Clive Betts (Sheffield South East) (Lab)
Will the Secretary of State give way?
Mr Pickles
I will give way in a few moments.
Since those heady days of May 2010, the economy has been buffeted by the problems of the eurozone. All western economies face the ongoing consequences of the banking collapse and the last decade of boom and bust. The world has changed, however, and so must we. The west is slipping down international league tables as emerging economies push ahead with energy and drive. Countries that make it will be those that step up to long-term challenges to get the economy growing, build more homes for a growing population, and provide factories, offices and infrastructure for the 21st century.
Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North) (Lab)
The Secretary of State talks about building more homes. Tens of thousands of homes could be built on land banks, but builders are holding back until the economy recovers and house prices increase, so that they make more profit.
Mr Pickles
I am sure the hon. Gentleman was delighted to see the latest figures that show a net increase of 11% in the number of homes—the biggest increase since 2007. I hope that he will work hard to persuade fellow Labour Members to get behind the Government’s schemes.
Simon Hughes (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (LD)
Will the Secretary of State confirm that, whatever details the Bill contains to allow greater flexibility in housing development, the Government are absolutely committed to having more affordable homes in England, and for more of those homes to have social or target rents for constituents such as mine?
Mr Pickles
My right hon. Friend can rest assured that the Government are confident of being able to deliver 170,000 homes, and of ensuring affordable homes for those who need housing. That is considerably better than in any of the past 10 years when the Labour party was in power.
Mr Pickles
I will, of course, give way to the Chair of the Communities and Local Government Committee.
Mr Pickles
No, it is accountable to Ministers and directly to this House, which I think restores the political balance.
The coalition has taken a number of measures to ensure that Britain can compete in a global world. The Local Government Finance Act 2012, which received Royal Assent last week, provides new incentives for councils to support enterprise and local firms, through the local retention of business rates. Local enterprise partnerships are ensuring that local councils work hard with local businesses to bring about growth. We are also looking in detail at Lord Heseltine’s practical recommendations on how we can further devolve power and funding. Through the wide-ranging Localism Act 2011, we are abolishing unelected quangos such as the Infrastructure Planning Commission and regional assemblies, replacing them with democratic accountability at national, local and neighbourhood levels. We are also scything through the reams of planning red tape imposed by Labour’s Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004, Planning Act 2008 and Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Act 2009.
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
Will the Secretary of State reassure my constituents, many of whom have fought hard for traditional community and village greens? He will know that some of the developers are absolutely ruthless. In Huddersfield, a company called Padico has bought up bankrupt stock and then spent enormous amounts of money trying to reverse a High Court decision about a village green. He knows how ruthless some of the developers are, so will he say whether our traditional village greens will be more vulnerable as a result of this Bill?
Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)
Is the Secretary of State aware of how much work his Minister of State is doing to unfreeze the blockages that some projects face because of red tape? Only recently our hon. Friend visited Wellingborough to cut through the red tape facing the Wellingborough East development and help with the Skew Bridge retail development, which is opposed by Labour in Corby.
Mr Pickles
I am delighted to hear about the magnificent work done by my hon. Friend the Minister of State. I have to say though, it comes as no surprise to me that he is working very hard indeed.
Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con)
Will my right hon. Friend confirm that, despite what is being said in the media, the planning guidance hands back local power to local people, in particular through the neighbourhood plans?
Mr Pickles
Of course it does, and it is pleasing that so many local authorities now publish a plan much more quickly and in a much better way than under the old system.
To return to the national planning policy framework, we have streamlined 1,000 pages of planning guidance down to a mere 50 pages and opened up the planning system, which is no longer the preserve of lawyers, town hall officers and non-governmental organisations, but there is more to do.
Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)
Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr Pickles
I think it would be reasonable to make a little progress now.
Now some reforms can be delivered by circular and some by order, while others rightly require primary legislation in Parliament. The Bill we are introducing today has three key themes: boosting Britain’s infrastructure, cutting excessive red tape and helping local firms to grow. Let me deal with each in turn.
Mr John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)
I welcome the wish to get on with sensible infrastructure development, and I see that there are provisions to speed up planning permissions for power stations. As EU carbon dioxide regulations will entail the closure of a lot of necessary power stations quite soon, how much quicker will things be under the new procedures? We need to get on with it.
Mr Pickles
The new procedures remove a lot of the old regulations, which have been superseded by time, and make it much easier for those providing power to adapt to modern conditions. Technologies have improved, and the new procedures will enable us to adapt to them.
Mr Jim Cunningham
Is the Secretary of State aware that in Coventry there is a considerable need for social housing in particular? Does he have any incentives on offer to unlock more housing and make a bit of progress?
Mr Pickles
I am sure the hon. Gentleman will be pleased that Coventry has made enormous strides in recent months to ensure that planning applications—particularly for large sites—have improved considerably, so that they are now pretty close to meeting all the necessary requirements. I am sure that he will be delighted with the additional effort the Government have made on social housing and that, as someone who cares about it deeply, he will have felt highly embarrassed by the failures of his Government.
Mr Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)
May I thank my right hon. Friend and his colleagues for the assurances that they have given so publicly about the green belt? I represent a constituency that is wholly within the metropolitan green belt, where the green belt is at its narrowest around London, and he will understand the anxiety of my constituents over this matter. What concerns does he have about threat to the green belt posed by the regional spatial strategies that were introduced by Labour?
Mr Pickles
The regional spatial strategies represent the single greatest threat to the green belt. In them, the Labour Government imposed housing targets on local areas that would effectively have ripped up vast sections of the green belt. We are consulting on the strategies, and I assure the House that I have a completely open mind on that consultation. Once it is over, we will come to a decision on their future.
Kick-starting infrastructure will not only promote construction jobs but ensure long-term, natural expansion. The Bill will unlock billions of new investment in energy projects through repealing outdated energy laws. Thankfully, the Energy Act 1976, which sought to restrict gas use because of the energy shortages at the time, is now redundant. We no longer have to legislate in that way to keep the country’s lights on. This Bill will allow companies to vary consents to incorporate the latest technology and to make their plants more energy efficient.
The Bill will remove the excessive red tape that hinders superfast broadband from being rolled out to local homes and businesses. It will especially help those parts of rural Britain facing a digital divide. As hon. Members will recall, it was telecommunications deregulation in the 1980s that created the modern communications industry that we enjoy today. Measures such as abolishing the special TV licences for satellite dishes and introducing permitted development rights for those dishes are the reason that we have television channels such as Sky News and our own beloved BBC Parliament channel. Satellite dishes can be put up without planning permission. Why should not we be able to do the same with 21st-century broadband technology?
Dr Sarah Wollaston (Totnes) (Con)
My constituency covers part of the Dartmoor national park, where there is real concern about a proliferation of radio masts. Does the Secretary of State accept that there is good evidence that national parks around the country already work sensitively to promote rural broadband?
Mr Pickles
And I am sure that they will under this Bill. These regulations are not a free-for-all. All that they will do is apply the prior approval regime. Local planning authorities will be able to object to inappropriately placed posts and wires. For the sake of clarity, given the appalling scaremongering by the shadow spokesman in the Labour party on these issues, I should like to point out that these measures do not relate to 4G. We are a long way from considering 4G improvements; these measures relate exclusively to broadband, and to ensuring that my hon. Friend’s constituency has an equal chance with those of constituencies in other parts of the country that have broadband.
Guy Opperman (Hexham) (Con)
I represent the constituency that contains the Northumberland national park. Kielder forest has more than 200,000 trees but no mobile phone or broadband coverage whatever. The Forestry Commission says that it is the only place in the country where it cannot contact its representatives at all. We welcome these provisions.
Bill Esterson
When the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, the hon. Member for Grantham and Stamford (Nick Boles) gave evidence to the Select Committee a few weeks ago, he was asked repeatedly about how the issue of the correct size of extensions in back gardens would be dealt with. He made it very clear that planning departments would rely on people to dob their neighbours in if they had exceeded the permitted size. Does the Secretary of State think that this will lead to the snoopers’ charter that his colleague suggested when he gave that evidence?
Mr Pickles
That question might have sounded like a good idea earlier this morning, but this is the wrong Bill, the wrong matter and the wrong debate in which to raise it. If the hon. Gentleman writes to me, no doubt we will do our best to help.
In an internet age, Britain must be able to compete virtually; otherwise, businesses will literally select another country at the click of a mouse. We live in a connected age, but technologies also make our society interdependent. Everyday families take for granted the “just-in-time” technologies that stock our supermarkets and drop off internet deliveries to our doors. To make them work, however, we need to build and provide the storage depots, warehouses and rail exchanges, and the supporting energy infrastructure to keep the economy moving.
The number of large-scale business and commercial applications taking over a year to determine is rising, so this Bill will allow an alternative process to decide nationally significant business and commercial projects within 12 months of the start of examination. Existing requirements to consult local communities will be retained, as will democratic checks and balances.
Mr Pickles
Of course I will give way to the very distinguished gentleman. [Interruption.] Or were there two distinguished Members standing together?
Mr Speaker
On this occasion, I believe the Secretary of State is referring to a former Minister of State—with no disrespect to the hon. Member for Northampton South (Mr Binley), whose distinction is universally known.
Mr Raynsford
I am grateful to the Secretary of State for giving way, and hope this will not cause him any difficulty with his colleague. How will “nationally significant developments” be defined? What definitions will be used to decide whether developments are nationally significant and thus fall within the remit?
Mr Pickles
First, there are national policy statements, in addition to which we are going to consult. Let me be absolutely clear that it is our ambition to ensure that, providing local authorities put together a planning performance agreement with these large developments, this measure will not be necessary; it is there to help. I give way now to my distinguished hon. Friend.
Mr Binley
I am grateful and I understand why my right hon. Friend gave way to a much more distinguished Member than me.
Let me refer to the issue of infrastructure—not only of utilities, but housing. I know that my right hon. Friend is very aware of the need to build on brownfield sites first, so can he tell me what work his Department is doing to ensure that, when planning permission is given, proper surveys of brownfield sites in a given area are undertaken before greenfield sites are built on?
Mr Pickles
That is a reasonable point. My hon. Friend will know—I know he is an assiduous reader of these things—that the national planning policy framework indeed lays out a test to look at brownfield sites. In a few moments, I shall come on to a few additional measures that will make my hon. Friend even happier than he is currently.
John Healey (Wentworth and Dearne) (Lab)
May I press the Secretary of State on the point raised by my right hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Mr Raynsford)? The Bill extends to commercial and business developments the system for nationally significant infrastructure projects. The Secretary of State has just said that there will be national policy statements for reference, so is he saying that national policy statements will be prepared for commercial and business developments? Otherwise, I think he might have mis-spoken; perhaps he could make himself clear.
Mr Pickles
There are obviously national policy statements—full stop. In addition, we are consulting on where these should bite in. We will be looking most carefully at those authorities that have not been able to meet these targets, but there is a big distinction—[Interruption.] We are not including housing or eco-towns. We are not suddenly going to impose big developments without local people having a say. That is the difference between Government and Opposition Members.
Cutting excessive red tape is the Bill’s second theme. The Bill will enable us to implement the reforms recommended by the Government’s Penfold review, which examined the multiple, overlapping development consents that were needed for many projects on top of planning permission. While much of the review is being implemented via secondary legislation, other parts require primary legislation. The Bill removes or streamlines duplicate regimes for highways, rights of way, and town and village green registration.
Let me stress, for the avoidance of doubt, that we are maintaining the strongest protection for England’s village greens. Indeed, the national planning policy framework has created a new planning protection for valuable green open spaces. However, we will need to prevent the registration system from being misused to hinder and slow legitimate, planned development. A review conducted by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in 2009 slammed
“the existence of two parallel systems”
—village greens and planning—
“between which there is minimal communication”.
It added that, in the view of the Government of the day,
“this seems to be problematic”.
The problem lay with the last Government’s Commons Act 2006. Labour DEFRA Ministers told Parliament in 2009 that there would be a consultation to streamline the confusing regime and that the results would be published in 2010, but nothing happened. I wonder why. Perhaps the former Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn), will take the opportunity this afternoon to apologise to the House for his tardiness.
We are also reforming special parliamentary procedure to remove a duplicate consent regime, introduced as a result of the poor drafting of the Bill that became the Planning Act 2008. As the Ways and Means Committee in this House and the Chairman of Committees in the other place have stated,
“since the 2008 Act did not amend the 1945 Act, we now have a statutory framework which is internally contradictory.”
The Bill removes that overlap, while retaining parliamentary safeguards for land with genuinely “special” historic and parliamentary protection, such as National Trust and common land.
The Bill also cuts red tape by allowing the renegotiation of economically unrealistic section 106 agreements. These measures go hand in hand with changes to secondary legislation on which we have consulted. In our sights particularly are affordable housing requirements that were negotiated at the height of Labour’s unsustainable housing boom. Now that the Brown bubble has burst, bringing us back to reality with a bump, we recognise that 75,000 homes, with planning permission, are lying unbuilt.
Mr Pickles
Not for a while.
Unviable section 106 agreements have led to no development, no negotiation, and no community benefits.
Mr Pickles
I will give way in a moment. I ask the hon. Gentleman to be patient, and allow me to develop my point.
More affordable housing will be delivered by the unlocking of those stalled sites than would be delivered without our reforms. The new powers will be used when negotiation is not already under way, and, as the House knows, it has the opportunity to send a clear message to all parties to get round the table and start negotiating now. We can all have pie-in-the-sky targets, but the hard truth is that the houses will not be built unless the sums add up. The reforms will complement our affordable housing programme, which will lever in £20 billion of housing investment over the spending review period.
I will now give way to the hon. Member for Easington (Grahame M. Morris).
Grahame M. Morris
I am grateful to the Secretary of State. He is very kind. Does he accept the view of David Orr, the chief executive of the National Housing Federation, who says that the abolition of the section 106 agreements is likely to cost us 35,000 affordable houses each and every year?
Mr Pickles
Only in the fantasy housing figures. The truth is that 41% of local authorities have already started these negotiations. That is one of the reasons why we have seen the number of houses start to increase. Eighty per cent. of authorities are willing to negotiate. Some lack the skills and experience to do so. We are willing to help there, but the truth is that, if we have a 50% target and nothing is built, 50% of nothing is nothing. The idea is to move things on. We have found in the negotiations that, rather than have a 30% target, many authorities have dropped to 26%. Many have managed a little higher than that, but they have shown flexibility to get the whole process moving.
Simon Hughes
Of course none of us wants stalled sites and there are many of them, but will the Secretary of State be helpful, as his Ministers have indicated, and ensure that we have a much more transparent check on what developers say is economically viable? Our experience on the south bank is that they say certain things are not economically viable. They then build the housing and flog it off at higher prices that were not revealed at the beginning.
Mr Pickles
Of course this is not going to be done on the basis of a developer’s word—developers will have to demonstrate clearly to an inspector that the current targets are uneconomic. I believe that we will get more social houses built because of this measure and I believe that we will have more affordable houses. We have put additional sums in, as my right hon. Friend will recall, and fairly soon the schemes will be going out to tender.
Mr John Redwood
I think that this is the best bit in the Bill. It is so obvious that we have to allow the developers and the council to decide what is affordable and realistic. It may be that in some cases all we can get built is houses for sale. What is wrong with that?
Mr Pickles
There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, but I am afraid that a strange municipal machismo has grown up—if one authority managed 40%, another would say, “Well we managed to negotiate 50%.” It is wholly unrealistic.
Mr Pickles
That is absolutely right. That goes to the heart of what we are doing. We are pleased to be introducing healthy competition.
Sir Paul Beresford (Mole Valley) (Con)
Does my right hon. Friend accept, from his experience of local government, my experience and that of the Minister, that one of the concerns many of us may have is that for a planning authority and a planning committee to understand what is economically viable will be difficult? There may be a slight flaw and a problem there.
Mr Pickles
I think that is precisely how we got into this problem. That is why we are looking to developers and local authorities to work together in open negotiation and, to use the words of the hon. Member for Warrington North (Helen Jones), to be much more competition and market-oriented. We want to get a degree of realism into the process.
Bob Blackman
Does my right hon. Friend agree that it is not just the targets on the percentage of affordable housing and the mix of dwellings, including flats, that are important? The targets on design, density and everything else that goes with it are crippling the market right now. Those decisions were taken years ago, when the housing boom was at its height.
Mr Pickles
My hon. Friend makes a reasonable point. I want to make it clear that we do not want to go back to the bad old days when we were doing swaps. I think we should be building real communities, which means that there should be a mixture of market houses and social houses. That is the way real communities live together. To get that mix right and to get social housing moving, we need, again in the words of the hon. Member for Warrington North, greater competition and a much more market-oriented approach.
Our approach is working. Official figures show that more affordable housing is being provided under the coalition Government than under Labour. On average, a third more affordable housing has been built every year than during Labour's last decade.
Local authorities have an important role in promoting development and shaping where it should go.
Mr Pickles
I say I will give way for the final time more often than Frank Sinatra said he would be performing for the last time. Therefore, I want to make it clear that, until I have moved off the planning stuff, I will not take any more interventions.
The Bill will make it easier for councils to choose, if they wish, to dispose of surplus land held for planning purposes, thus helping get more brownfield land back into productive use. Councils will also be given more local discretion over when they review the planning conditions for mineral sites, rather than following rigid, centrally-set targets.
The Localism Act 2011 has also given councils more control over local plans to determine where development does, and does not, take place. Some 65% of planning authorities have now published an up-to-date local plan. That is great progress, but the planning system needs to be fair and responsive to applicants and local residents. Alongside tackling the small number of councils whose performance on planning is exceptionally poor, we want to deal with those councils that insist on demanding large amounts of unnecessary paperwork to support planning applications. The Bill will therefore ensure that information requests from councils are genuinely related to planning and proportionate to the scale and nature of the development proposed. The reams of documents demanded have now got out of control. They do not make the planning system more accessible; they achieve quite the reverse. So this practical reform will save everyone time and money.
Planning includes a quasi-judicial process which, of course, puts fairness at its very centre, yet in some cases it is taking far too long for that process to be concluded. Justice delayed is justice denied. Unreasonable delays are unfair to both applicants and local residents because of the uncertainty delays create. The Bill will therefore help speed up planning decisions where councils have a poor record in deciding applications. This will be a help to localised planning, as it will make the worst councils up their game.
The planning system is at times Kafkaesque, with applicants having to wait months, sometimes years, for different pieces of consent from different people. Our proposed change squares with localism. In a quasi-judicial system, there should be minimum standards of due process. That principle is no different from that for the intervention powers that address rare cases of public service failure such as on best value, care homes or education. In the longer term, however, our goal is that no council should find itself in a position where these powers need to be used.
The Bill also contains a series of measures to help local companies grow. We want to help companies introduce a new employment status that gives employees a stake in the company. Employee-owners will benefit from shares in the company worth between £2,000 and £50,000, as well as a different set of UK employment rights than for normal employees. This is particularly aimed at fast-growing small companies and enterprises that will benefit from a flexible work force. We are currently consulting to ensure that appropriate safeguards are in place so people fully understand the consequences of this new type of contract. Only the enemies of aspiration would oppose this modern embrace of co-operative values.
The Bill also provides for tax stability in the business rates system. Business rates are the third biggest outgoing for local firms after rent and staff, but an unpredictable business rate revaluation would be costly to British firms, so this Bill reschedules revaluation to 2017. This will give businesses five years of tax stability and certainty, leaving companies looking to grow and improve the economy free to concentrate on delivering growth. This revaluation comes off the back of Labour’s unsustainable property boom. Rents have been falling, but at any revaluation that would be offset by a soaring multiplier.
There is a popular misconception that postponing the revaluation means delaying falling rate bills. That is not the case. The postponement will be revenue-neutral. It is most important to stop a game of Russian roulette with municipal finances. Initial Valuation Office Agency estimates suggest that the revaluation would see up to 800,000 firms paying more in business rates, with only 300,000 paying less. The decision will avoid local firms and local shops facing unexpected hikes in their business rate bills over the next five years. Places that would be particularly hard hit are small shops, petrol stations and public houses. We cannot know with complete certainty without spending £43 million on a revaluation, but there is a significant risk of the revaluation going very wrong and harming growth. Small and medium-sized firms will be the hardest hit if we do not take action. Without action, there will be massive volatility, which, in itself, could close down businesses and, at the very least, discourage business investment. This reform will provide certainty for business to plan and invest, supporting local economic growth. So these measures complement the local retention of business rates, go hand in hand with the Localism Act’s reforms to small business rate relief and build on the abolition of Labour’s “ports tax”, which threatened to sink Britain’s export trade because of a botched, unfair revaluation.
Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab)
I share the Secretary of State’s desire to try to use this mechanism to boost our high streets. However, I get a bit lost by his argument, because many small shops in a town centre such as Denton had their business rates set on the basis of their rents before the recession and would benefit from a revaluation on the basis of the current lower rents.
Mr Pickles
The hon. Gentleman should not be mocked for not understanding this, because the misconception is a common one. If London values went down enormously, we would have to adjust the multiplier to ensure that the same amount of money was in the system as whole. Initial estimates of the multiplier suggest that a massive increase would be required, so those very places that have seen a drop in rents—a drop in rateable values—could find themselves paying much more through this process. That is the very nature of it. He may recall that when a revaluation took place last time the values had gone up so high that there had to be a small reduction in the multiplier to compensate. Our feeling is that the multiplier would be likely to have to go up considerably, which is why we have taken the unusual decision of trying to do the revaluation against a more stable position.
Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)
None the less, businesses in my constituency have expressed dismay at this announcement. What analysis has the Secretary of State, or his Department, carried out on the geographically distributional spread of the impact of this measure?
Mr Pickles
We cannot definitively model geographical spread. All we can do is rely on our officials’ best professional judgment and initial reports—I stress that they are initial—from the Valuation Office Agency. Big changes are likely to be seen, even within an area. We can see what has happened in the City. We recognise that banks and a lot of financial institutions are likely to see a colossal drop in their rates bill, but compensating that will be enormous increases in other parts of London to pay for it. So the hon. Lady’s constituents should not feel aggrieved. They should feel that we have taken a sensible decision, and we hope that we can get broad consensus on it.
The measures I have outlined today will help Britain compete in a global world. They will support local firms, local jobs, local housing and local regeneration. They will remove the unnecessary red tape that holds our country back and they will ensure that sustainable development goes hand in hand with environmental safeguards and democratic checks and balances We are speeding up the system, cutting excessive regulation and giving employers a helping hand to compete on the global stage.
We are being true to the aspirations that brought the coalition Government together. We are taking the bold action needed to fight for Britain’s future and ensure that we succeed in a changed and uncertain world. We are promoting economic growth, rebalancing our economy, backing the industries of the future and allowing Britain to compete in a modern, 21st-century world economy. I commend the Bill to the House.
Hilary Benn
If my hon. Friend bears with me a moment, I shall come presently to precisely that point. The first question that the House must ask the Government is that if they are to propose such a fundamental change to the way in which planning decisions have been taken since 1947—that is about 60 years of local decision making—the Secretary of State must have had really strong evidence on why such a change is needed, so where is the evidence? I will make this very easy for him, and I will happily give way. Can he name one example of a so-called failing planning authority? Will he name an authority now?
Mr Pickles
As the right hon. Gentleman knows and, more particularly, as other Opposition Members know, I have been more than helpful to those Members who have had trouble with planning authorities and I have done my best to move things along, but I am very happy to name the worst, which is Hackney.[Official Report, 6 November 2012, Vol. 552, c. 5-6MC.]
Hilary Benn
That is extremely interesting. If the Secretary of State can name what is in his view a failing planning authority, he must know the criteria for judging a failing planning authority, yet the criteria are nowhere in the Bill; he is allowed to make them up as he goes along. Officials watching this will be thinking, “Oh, my goodness, he shouldn’t have done that,” because he has just fettered his discretion and the consultation that he will probably have to undertake in deciding which are failing planning authorities.
Mr Pickles
I also made it absolutely clear that, of course, we are working with the LGA and local authorities to define this, and we are prepared to consult on it. But the right hon. Gentleman asks what the worst planning authority is, and I have named it. Whether that will be regarded as a failing authority will be a matter of consultation.
Alison Seabeck (Plymouth, Moor View) (Lab)
Will my right hon. Friend give way?
Hilary Benn
Having looked at this when I was Secretary of State, I recognise that there are some such cases, but there are also lots of others where the provision in the Commons Act 2006 is used quite properly to protect in perpetuity the public’s use of green space—village greens and so on—which they have had the right to enjoy for many years. Like lots of things, it is about getting the balance right, and this clause, as formulated, has not got it right; that is certainly the view of the Open Spaces Society.
I listened very carefully to what the Secretary of State said about delaying business rates revaluation. We all want to support measures that will help businesses at a difficult time, but we will want to scrutinise this in Committee to understand the balance of the argument. It would be extremely helpful—I put this to him in all sincerity—to see his and the Department’s assessment of who would gain and who would not, because a lot of businesses are saying that an earlier revaluation would help them. It would also be of assistance if he could set out the impact of a change on the finances of local authorities now that the Local Government Finance Act 2012 is on the statute book.
Mr Pickles
The right hon. Gentleman makes a very reasonable point. Of course we will publish an impact assessment and the calculations of the Valuation Office Agency on Report.
Hilary Benn
That is extremely helpful, and we look forward to seeing those documents.
Amid all the centralisation, there are some clauses that seem sensible and that we will support—the Secretary of State smiles—such as those on the energy industry, on removing the anomaly on disposal of land for less than best consideration, on the review of minerals permissions, and on allowing the process for stopping up or diverting highways and public paths to run alongside the planning process— which is perfectly sensible recommendation of the Penfold review. Overall, however, the bad in the Bill far outweighs the good.
That brings me to clause 23, which is an absolutely astonishing proposal. Labour Members are in favour of businesses giving shares to employees and think it a jolly good thing. We do not, however, need the Bill for that because companies are already perfectly free to give shares to their workers. The clause does something completely different, and, for the first time that I can recall, employers will be allowed to buy their way out of legislation that protects their workers. The legislation is explicit and there is a tariff—[Interruption.] I hear the cry of “voluntary”, and we shall come on to whether that is the case.
The fact is that for between £2,000 and £50,000, a company can pay to strip its workers of their rights. That is what the clause does. Never mind cash for questions; this is cash for repeal. What on earth is the connection between giving an employee shares, and taking away their fundamental rights in the workplace? Given the wording of the clause, some might say that such a change could happen only if the company and the individual agreed on it. That, however, is true only for existing employees at the time the legislation comes into force. Their choice will be quite simple: take the cash and lose the rights, or lose the cash and keep the rights. Many of them will ask, “How lucky do I feel today and when I think about the future of the company?”
The Government have made it crystal clear that in future employers will not have to get an agreement and will be able to offer only contracts involving shares. It means that the only way someone will be able to get a job with that company is if they give up their rights—[Interruption.] The Under-Secretary, the hon. Member for Grantham and Stamford, shouts from a sedentary position that it is a choice, but one feature of this Bill seems to be that those who are sponsoring it have not actually read it.
A Treasury background note published at the same time as the Bill states that
“new start-ups can choose to offer only this new type of contract for new hires.”
The English is a bit dodgy, but I think it refers to new workers whom a company is taking on—[Interruption.] The Under-Secretary says it is a choice, but—