Draft National Planning Policy Framework

Lord Reay Excerpts

Thursday 27th October 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Reay]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a landowner. We are lucky—perhaps the Minister is not so lucky—to be having this second bite of the cherry following our planning debate on 13 October. I am relieved, myself, to be losing the PPSs and the PPGs and starting again with 50 or 60 pages, although I imagine that amendments in one form or another to the NPPF will follow in subsequent years. Meanwhile, I hope that the NPPF will be revised to reflect the concerns that we have all expressed and that the Government will not simply in the end insist that we have misunderstood what the document means.

On the question of the transition, local authorities surely need to be given reasonable time to complete up-to-date local plans, particularly as they dare not leave out anything, since silence will confer consent. We have heard that just under one-half of local authorities have completed their now to be renamed plans, but will these not automatically be all out of date once the NPPF has been adopted? I should be grateful if the Minister could answer that question. And who decides whether they are out of date? Is it a planning inspector? And at what point?

Government Ministers, as we have heard today, have recently been deploying all sorts of arguments to explain why there is no mention of brownfield sites as such in the NPPF: that some are of high environmental quality and that they want to protect gardens et cetera. However, in the impact assessment, the talk is largely about the remediation costs of brownfield sites—the impression is given that the Government are concerned about the additional costs for the developer.

This is an enormously important issue as in recent years—as the Minister explained—the proportion of houses built on brownfield or previously developed land has been astonishingly high, frequently well in excess of the target, which is also to be jettisoned. As the noble Lord, Lord Rogers of Riverside, pointed out in a notable speech in our last debate, there are towns, including seaside towns, that are crying out for regeneration. As the well known columnist Alice Thomson wrote in an article in the Times on 28 September:

“Young people, desperate to start on the property ladder, prefer buzzy town centres to suburbs”.

The Government should say in the NPPF that, other things being equal, brownfield site development should have priority. They should use the word brownfield even if qualified; otherwise the abiding perception will be that this priority is no longer intended to apply.

I regret the inevitable introduction of the word “sustainable”, which risks leading to all sorts of trouble. In the document’s 52 pages I counted 78 uses of the words “sustainable” or “sustainability”. It is applied so frequently and loosely as to virtually lose meaning. The Government do not always help when they set out to define it. I suggest a definition of “sustainable development” is needed that distinguishes that phrase from development without any qualification. That should be stated to mean after a balance has been struck between the need for development, on the one hand, and, on the other, after environmental and social factors—such as are mentioned elsewhere in the document—are taken into account.

My chief concern is regarding the countryside. I do not think that the document gives nearly enough weight to its protection. In contrast to the green belt, which receives extended treatment over three and a half pages, the national parks and AONBs receive only one sub-paragraph far down in a late chapter on the natural environment. This issue should be given far greater priority. No one could fail to note its demotion in this document. The policy should also be strengthened. The paragraph includes a sentence starting:

“Planning permission should be refused for major developments in designated areas”,

but then qualifies that by stating,

“except in exceptional circumstances where it can be demonstrated they are in the public interest”.

It then lists some factors to be taken into account when considering granting permission for a major development in a designated area, including its effect on the local economy. That is far too permissive. It also goes so far as to state at paragraph 75,

“applications for alternative uses of designated land or buildings should be treated on their merits having regard to market signals”.

That could be read as an open invitation to develop designated areas. Instead, there should be an unqualified presumption of no development in national parks and AONBs and their settings and an explicit statement that wind turbines should be permitted in those designated areas and their settings only in exceptional circumstances, and then limited to a single small turbine.

In a previous debate, I described how developers have been testing whether they could break through the protection given to AONBs with wind farm applications. That struggle will be vigorously resumed unless it is perceived that the NPPF forcefully reasserts the priority of protecting designated areas from disfiguring development. The countryside outside designated areas also requires protection. The failure of the Government to recognise that has been one of the principal complaints of the National Trust and CPRE. Two-thirds of the countryside in England lies outside national parks or AONBs, but it contributes much to the country's reputation and its attraction to visitors.

The NPPF makes no obvious reference to the wider countryside at all. It states that valued landscapes should be protected without making it plain whether that refers exclusively to designated landscapes. Also, countryside is not the same as landscape, which includes urban areas. The NPPF should state explicitly, as PPS4 does today, that the countryside should be protected for the sake of its “intrinsic character and beauty” and that its protection, where relevant, should be taken account of in all development decisions.

Ministers keep telling us, here and elsewhere, that they want fewer planning applications decided on appeal. Let me tell the Government where they should start. The percentage of planning applications that go to appeal is not very high. According to the impact assessment, in 2009-10, it amounted to about 3 per cent of all applications received. That is very different for wind farm applications. According to a Written Answer I was given in August, in England, approximately one-half of wind farm applications are rejected by local authorities in the first place. The point was made in the Telegraph today that the percentage of those permitted has now fallen to its lowest point to date, at 42 per cent. Of those that are rejected, the proportion taken to appeal varies from one-half to three-quarters, so at least one-quarter of all wind farm planning applications are decided on appeal. Only a minority of applications which are rejected by local authorities do not go to appeal. That is despite the enormous expense for local opposition groups and small local authorities in contesting appeals.

Of course, the reason for that is that wind farms are hugely unpopular virtually wherever they are proposed as more and more people have become aware that they are a complete waste of time, despite the bluster of the Secretary of State; that they probably do not save any carbon emissions; and that they ruin the countryside, as well as the lives of those who are made to live close to them. Having read the recent House Magazine diary, I think that I will have the support of my noble friend Lord Cormack in saying that.

It is only possible for the Government to carry out their renewable energy policy, at least on land, by getting it forced through by the planning inspectorate at enormous cost—so much for localism. The NPPF should also state that local authorities may specify minimum separation distances between wind turbines and residences. I declare an interest as having a Private Member’s Bill that seeks statutory authority for such obligations. Compliance with planning conditions and obligations can also be an issue. The NPPF could emphasise that local authorities have a duty to ensure compliance with any conditions attached to permissions, whether made by themselves or on appeal.

Finally, paragraphs 148 to 154 are highly objectionable and seek to apply pressure on local authorities to carry out the Government's extremely damaging and ultimately unsustainable renewable energy policy. One day, but not yet, I am quite sure this passage will become redundant and that we will start, if we have not done so before then, on a new series of PPGs and PPSs. However, that moment awaits a wiser, or financially more desperate, Government. In the meanwhile, subject to those limitations, I hope that the Government will display sense and sensibility and give us an NPPF that we can live with.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Hanham]

My Lords, that is not in my hands but in the hands of the business managers, but I hear what my noble friends have said.

[Lord Reay]

I do not think my noble friend has answered the question that I put to her. What is the status of the local plans that have been adopted by local authorities? Some of them will have been adopted quite a long time ago. Will they automatically become out of date when the NPPF is adopted? Will they therefore need to be revised or not? Who will decide whether that is the case?

[Baroness Hanham]

My Lords, the local plans will remain part and parcel of the requirements that people have to pay attention to. Those that have already been developed can and should be updated. That is going to be done on a fast-track basis. I said earlier that discussions were going on with the inspectorate. Those policies that have relied on the regional spatial strategies will maintain until and unless they are changed, and with the adoption of the National Planning Policy Framework. Where they are completed, they are the supporting documents; where they are not completed, they will have to be completed as quickly as possible. In between that, account will have to be taken of the national planning policy framework in any decisions being made.