Housing and Planning Bill

Lord Porter of Spalding Excerpts

Wednesday 20th April 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kerslake]

My Lords, I speak very briefly in support of the spirit behind the amendment and what is sought to be achieved. I will not repeat the arguments that have already been made, but I will refer to the experience I had during the London Housing Commission, where I consulted extensively with developers across every type and scale. The consistent and unanimous view of all those developers was that they were willing to pay more to get a better service.

What they described to me was a service that was truly struggling to do the job, where major and important applications were held up through the absence of good-quality staff and where they often experienced dealing with temporary staff who were learning on the job and did not have the authority to make decisions. This is, in any description you care to think of, a false economy. The improvement by way of inflation will be helpful but it does not go to the heart of the core problem, which is that, in the situation of severe funding challenges in local government, authorities are unable to resource, in the way that is required, the level of planning services that we need to deliver the increase in housing supply.

I am absolutely of the view that there should be a link to performance here, but I also believe very passionately that we should give local authorities the local initiative and flexibility to set their own fees. Over time the consequence of this will be that they will be able to plan for increased resources and, crucially, recruit new, skilled staff and rebuild a profession which, in the public sector, has been severely reduced in its capacity.

[Lord Porter of Spalding (Con)]

My Lords, strangely, I am going to speak against the amendment, because of the second part. I am not sure why this amendment is not linked to the one about the private sector being able to compete against local government to do planning. In my mind they should go together. There is no way that the private sector will pick up any planning applications if it is only allowed to charge the current fee structure that we as councils are allowed to charge. That is because in the last three years the taxpayer subsidy to planning has been £450 million. The private sector will not engage on that.

Without the second part being in there, it would allow local government to be put in the right place to prevent the private sector being able to take the work at a subsidised rate for itself. The risk seems to be that, when we get to that part of the Bill, private sector firms will be allowed to charge excessive fees and make money, safe in the knowledge that there will be an expectation that they will be more sympathetic to the applicant. I think a true level playing field would be one in which we charge full cost recovery and for those applications that are minor, where that would not be possible, there needs be a different mechanism. That is why I cannot support the amendment as written.

On the next amendment, on the retrospective planning application, again, we need some way to penalise serial offenders who wilfully abuse the planning system by not seeking planning permission in the right way when they first set out on their projects. Again, I am not sure how that should be worded in a way that will deliver it to best effect for everybody, because there will be genuine cases where some people simply were not aware that they needed to make a planning application. So any amendment must recognise that for me to be able to support it. As I have said before about any amendment that has “local government must” in it, there is no way I can support the third part of that amendment, where it says that we “must consult”. I do not think that local government ever “must” do anything. I think we should always “may” do something.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark]

My Lords, I have considerable sympathy for the amendment moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Gardner of Parkes. I regret that we were not able to get Amendment 116BA into the same group, as it covers the same issues. It makes clear that local authorities may recover their full costs in respect of the work they are doing on planning applications, which is the intention behind this amendment as well.

I think it is important that councils are able to set fees that enable them to recover their costs, or at least a larger part of their costs, in undertaking the work they need to do to ensure that applications are processed efficiently. This would, of course, mean that for larger developments developers would pay more, or more realistic costs, than someone who wants to build an extension to their home.

I agreed with the noble Lords, Lord True and Lord Porter of Spalding, when they said in Committee that it is probably going too far to allow councils to make money out of the planning application process, but it is right that they should be able to recover up to all their costs, which is the intention of my Amendment 116BA, which we will come to later. I am disposed to test the opinion of the House on that if the Minister does not make a reasonable offer in that regard before Third Reading.

The noble Baroness, Lady Gardner, made a compelling point on Amendment 116, to which the noble Lord, Lord Porter, referred. At my last planning committee meeting, I recall that a public house in Blackheath was seeking retrospective approval for the substantial changes it had made to the fabric of its building without planning permission. It obtained the approval. We made it very clear to the applicants how unhappy we were that they were there in front of us, but that was all we could do. They got their permission and paid the nominal fees. It would be good if such applicants could be made to pay a little more, given the work that we had to do.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Andrews]

My Lords, we had a very good and thorough discussion on the recovery of full-cost fees on a previous amendment. I want to draw attention to a few statistics to reinforce the case that my noble friend made and to point out that the flaw in the present system is that you cannot get speedy, authoritative and consistent decision-making at local planning level if the expert workforce is being run down and starved of resources. I have just a few statistics that pick that up.

The audit committee reported in 2014 that planning departments were taking the brunt of funding cuts—a reduction, in real terms, of 46% across the planning and development budget between 2010 and 2014. These are horrendous figures in the context of cuts of 37% in local authorities as a whole. How much deeper have these cuts been since 2014? In expert areas such as archaeology and conservation officers, there has been a drop of a third in local authority staff. In Lancashire the entire archaeological team has disappeared. How the Government expect local authorities to deliver a speedy, efficient and good planning service with this level of cuts is absolutely beyond me. Therefore, the only answer to building the capacity of local authorities to do what the Government so desperately want them to do, and to deliver a speedier, more efficient planning system, is to build the capacity of local authorities themselves, because development control is the fundamental business of planning authorities. There is an urgent need to reinvest in local authority planning services. Full-cost fee recovery can contribute to that.

I have one question for the Minister. In the previous exchange, I was not quite sure whether she believed the figure published by the Local Government Association—that there is a shortfall of £450 million to local authorities because of the difference between the cost they have to pay and the fees they receive. She talked at great length about the vitality needed to enable local authorities to do their job, but she did not address the question of the reality of what is happening on the ground. There is an absolute, logical and fair case for recovering full-cost fees, and I hope she will respond positively to it.

[Lord Porter of Spalding]

My Lords, I speak in favour of the spirit of what the amendment is trying to achieve, but against it because of the way it is worded. No one from a local government background would believe that it is right that we are unable to collect enough fees to cover the cost of the service, and it is not right that local taxpayers are subsidising the development industry to the tune of about £150 million a year—£450 million over the last three years. But the amendment as worded could have a quite negative impact on some areas. If a fully staffed planning team received only 10 planning applications in a year, the brunt of those costs would fall on those 10 applicants. That cannot be right. There needs to be a way for central government to get away from setting fees at an inflationary uplift. As welcome as that will be, it will be insufficient to get anywhere near cost recovery.

Given that the Government propose to put private sector competition into the space of a public sector monopoly, there must be a way to increase fees that works for local government, the local taxpayer and the private sector. I still do not understand why we are dealing with these amendments separately from the amendment that opens the door for the private sector to compete. At that point the Government will be sure that the fees local government charge are proportionate for the service being delivered in their area, because if local government charges too much, clearly, the private sector will take all the work. We need to find a way of getting that done but, from my end of the telescope, this amendment still does not deliver what needs to be done. I would love to able to support somebody who is clever at writing an amendment in a way that I am not.

Again, the word “must” has been used for local government. People should not put “must” in anything. Local government likes “may”, not “must”.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark]

Before the noble Lord sits down, I did put “may” in for the main part and then “must” for the consultation. I thought I was getting somewhere with the noble Lord. I think we should talk outside the Chamber—he may well be the right person to write this.

[Lord Porter of Spalding]

You should never have me write anything, because you will not be able to read it.

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I thank noble Lords for their comments and contributions. To respond to the noble Lord, I can confirm absolutely, for the avoidance of doubt, that planning authorities will not be able to charge one fee and private providers another. We do not intend to create two tiers within the planning system—it would be most undemocratic and unfair, generally.

The noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, asked about the £450 million disparity that the LGA found between costs and fees. I need to make the point that there will be differences between the efficiency and effectiveness of local authorities in delivering planning services. Some show that performance can be improved and costs reduced, and more should follow their lead. Authorities have done a phenomenal job in sharing services for many of their functions but have not moved quickly enough in doing so for planning services. I said that to the noble Baroness either earlier today or on Monday—the days have merged into one.

Amendment 116BA, as I said on a previous amendment, allows local authorities to go beyond cost recovery. We are absolutely clear that these services and other discretionary services should not exceed the cost of providing the service. I have been through the argument previously that what cost recovery means in practice, in terms of fee levels, varies from local authority to local authority. We want a highly efficient service, and there are real challenges up-front in doing this for some local authorities, but we want better-performing planning departments for better performance in terms of planning outcomes. I talked earlier about our proposals for tackling resource pressures in planning departments. I hope that noble Lords will not mind that I do not go through these again, and that with those words the noble Lord will feel able to withdraw the amendment.