Neighbourhood Planning Bill

Lord Porter of Spalding Excerpts

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

[Lord Porter of Spalding (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interests, particularly that I am chairman of the Local Government Association and leader of South Holland District Council; I do some small-scale private development; and, as I am going to talk about pubs, I use those as well at some point in the evenings, so I have a personal prejudicial interest there.

I largely welcome the Bill for two reasons: first, there are some good parts in it—compulsory purchase needs to be speeded up and neighbourhood planning needs to be strengthened—although there are issues around the inspectorate, which I will get around to later; and, secondly, it is not as dangerous as it could have been. It has been suitably amended before it got to us so that it is in much better condition than it was, and I hope that by the time it leaves us it will be in even better condition.

However, Members of this House ought to be under no illusion that we will speed up development with this Bill. It will not add to the totality of the numbers of properties built, nor will it speed up the total numbers of properties built. If we as a country really are serious about tackling the housing crisis—it has been 40 years in the making so all the main political parties have their fingerprints on it and no particular Government can take responsibility for it—it needs to be a Treasury Bill that fixes it, because most of the roots of all evil in planning stem from the Treasury’s policies. We need to free up local councils to be able to deliver the units that we need. Post-war, we have exceeded the 300,000-plus numbers only twice, and that was done only by the state getting involved. I am not suggesting that we go back to building big monolithic council estates, because we have seen the problems that that creates in terms of social cohesion, but there needs to be a greater role for councils and RSLs to free up the money that we already have. It would not involve the Treasury dipping its hands into anyone’s pocket; it would merely allow us to borrow against the asset that we already have. There are over 3 million social units being run by councils or RSLs that are not sweated up to their full value. Any business model would sweat those up to their full value, so if we are serious about building more homes then we need to let local government get into the space where it should be.

There are issues around planning fees, which noble Lords have already mentioned. At the moment the taxpayer is subsidising the planning system to the tune of about £150 million a year. We need to get councils to be able to increase the staff that they have by fully recovering the costs of planning permissions. At the moment that is not done. That is a relatively simple thing for the Treasury to enable us to do and, again, it would not cost us any money, or at least would not cost the taxpayer money.

On permitted development rights, yes, fine, okay, they speed up some planning permissions, but in some areas they have gone too far. There needs to be a clause somewhere in the Bill that allows us to revisit those areas that have lost the most office space through permitted development rights to see if the balance has gone too far.

While I will probably not actually go through the Division Lobby with noble Lords on the Benches opposite to support the need to make pubs more sustainable in terms of where they sit in their local communities, we need to find a way of protecting those pubs that are most valued when they are not necessarily as financially sustainable for the breweries as they could be if they were turned into residential units. There needs to be a way to resist that in the case of the larger breweries. I am not suggesting that an individual owner of a pub that has no customers should be compelled to keep it as a pub; clearly, if it was that useful to the community, people would have gone in it. There needs to be some sort of recognition of the scale of the owner of the pub if you are going to restrict the ability of the owners to do what they want.

As I say, I think the Bill is going to be really good because it will be less bad than it would have been, but it does not and will not address the needs that we have. There are 477,000 extant planning permissions in this country, and 277,000 were permitted last year. I am more generous than the Opposition and give the Government credit for 190,000 completions in the last year, but that is still nowhere near the total that is needed to be built. If we are really serious, this should be fed into the White Paper that is due soon—are we at “imminently” now? That is where we will have the biggest chance to have input into that. I am pleased that on this occasion the Government have done it as a White Paper so that there will be a chance for everyone to feed into it and perhaps move this political football beyond party politics. We can all have a strong input into the paper to make it the vehicle to fix the problem, but we should not be under any illusion that this Bill is the vehicle to do so.