Lord Rooker
Main Page: Lord Rooker (Labour - Life peer)Growth and Infrastructure Bill
Lord Rooker Excerpts
Lord Rooker
My Lords, I have nothing to declare other than a spell as a planning Minister and the fact that I was never a local authority councillor. I think the Bill is very depressing. It is a bit like the situation over the past decade, when we have had an annual immigration Bill from the Home Office. “Immigration still rising? Get another Bill. It carries on rising? Get another Bill”. We are on the verge now of almost an annual planning Bill. “Less building and infrastructure? Get another planning Bill”. That seems to be the treadmill. This is probably the third planning Bill since I relinquished the responsibilities that I held briefly at one time. From that point of view, I am very depressed about it.
I do not think that any planning Bill in the past two decades advanced the cause of sustainable development or growth. That is my broad-brush answer. Have all the planning Bills had good intentions to modernise the system? You are too right that they have: every single one of them had that intention. Have the attempts to use the planning system for social engineering to create genuine mixed communities really worked? I have to say, honestly and in a broad-brush answer: no. Have all Ministers had good intentions to foster good design, respect local communities and work in partnership with local government? The answer is yes, all Ministers have been in that position. Did we obtain the Docklands development in London—with the tens of thousands of jobs that have been created in the past 30 years there—and create Brindleyplace slap bang in the middle of Birmingham, with the thousands of jobs there, or the new towns, by the aforementioned approach? No, we did not. The system did not work and failed the country. Will this Bill deliver these objectives? I do not think that it stands a chance.
I watched the Planning Minister the other night on “Newsnight”. I was reminded of one of my own speeches in this House as a Minister as he recited just how little of the land of England is developed. It is some 11% or 12% maximum. He used the same facts I did, probably briefed by the same officials as briefed me. It is a disgrace that, as far as I can see, he has not had support from senior government colleagues in his bald approach to putting the case for growth and extra building in a way that identifies the fact that we are not concreting over the countryside.
By the way, I do not equate this Bill with the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine. I might have made a mistake about this but I did not see the connection between the two. The noble Lord rightly asserts that local—or, more accurately, city—regions ought to be the bedrock. He does not talk about local authorities in that sense but about the city regions. The boundaries there are impossible to make out. If you look from above, from a helicopter, you do not see the boundary. That is his approach. This Bill does not deliver his approach. I do not think that it purports to.
I do not think you can allow the decisions to be made locally, with communities operating as super-parish councils. That is the reality. We are in a serious mess both on housing and infrastructure in this country. We have it locked in. I am not saying that there is nothing happening but we are getting less and less, and no one can see a way out of that. I do not think the status quo will work, but if we leave it to the present system the status quo will win every time. We will get less growth and will come back with another planning Bill. If there is to be progress, decisions have to be made for the greater good of society and not of particular local communities. I do not wish to fall out with the LGA but its briefing talks about democratically accountable, locally elected councillors. First, those councillors follow the Whip and, secondly, the ward councillors cannot vote on the issues relating to their wards anyway.
Lord Rooker
It also said that communities are likely to be increasingly reluctant to accept new developments in their areas. So what? If it is for the greater good of society, why should a local community resident already there have the final say? I cannot accept that people own their local community in that sense. I remember many years ago there was a major park area in my big, urban constituency—a constituency of only 16 square miles but with a population of 100,000. The world famous Birchfield Harriers had to have a new stadium. They were in a terrible location with the way the roads were joined. It was suggested that the ideal place was in the park because we could also go for the Commonwealth Games. On the other hand, people who lived round the park said, “This is our back garden: you cannot build on that”. If it had been left at that level, the stadium that brought massive benefits to the city of Birmingham and UK athletics would never have been built. You have to look and elevate consideration above the level of localism. It caused me great pain at the time to get those representations from constituents.
I think the Minister said in the “Newsnight” interview that if we have only about 12% built on, an extra 2% to 3% of the land of England would solve our problems. Of course, the press can take that up and say that it would be like a city the size of A, B or C, and that can be made to frighten people. But that is a tiny percentage of the land-mass of England.
The one area where we have to be really radical is on brownfield sites. We debated the guidelines in this House some time ago—I think it was in October 2011. I raised then that there was a major problem about the lack of serious attention paid to brownfield. More radical measures are called for rather than the tinkering in this Bill. I do not wish to nitpick through particular clauses of the Bill. It wants something radical: a line from the Severn to the Wash, and north of that for five years brownfield sites need no planning permission or obligations—nothing. Let the developers go. All the facts quoted are correct about planning authorities doing this, that and the other. The thing that is missing is confidence. You will not fix that by nitpicking around the changes in the Bill. That is my view.
There has to be development in the south-east, so south of that line, with brownfield sites of less than five hectares, again, there should be no need for planning permission. Sites of more than five hectares probably need it. New towns, Docklands and Brindleyplace were built without planning permission, but we have building regulation controls and all those things that have to take place. That is fine. I would not object to a density directive but the barriers have to come off for a decent specified period—as I said, for about five years.
At all costs, we have to protect the national parks. I declare an interest; for 25 years I have had a timeshare home in one of the national parks. That does not mean that there cannot be new jobs installed there, or that we cannot reuse former agricultural buildings and existing properties. There are barriers to that now, where planners think they can decide whether someone doing some work in the countryside—perhaps they have diversified—should have a pitched or sloping roof. It is preposterous that a planning official should make decisions like that about someone wanting to make a modest investment for some work they are doing, maybe to encourage diversification. But that actually happens.
To a lesser extent, we have to protect the areas of outstanding natural beauty. They cover a large part of the country, but not that much. The green belt is a collar around the urban areas. A lot of it is rubbish land, but it is there as a collar to stop the urban sprawl. The previous Labour Government left more green belt than they inherited, but we allowed incursions into the green belt because we could replace it with thousands of hectares elsewhere. You can do that. There does not seem to be a plan in the department. The approach is laissez-faire; “We’re in charge” and “Leave it all to local government”. But it does not have the wherewithal to do it in my view. That is not the level at which decisions should be taken.
There are brownfield sites in existence today where the Chancellor or somebody should do a masterstroke. If the developers cannot conclude development in the next couple of years on a brownfeld site where planning permission is granted, lift the obligations now. That would generate confidence. More brownfield sites are being created. I do not accept the argument that we are running out of it. There are thousands of hectares. If we concentrate on that we will protect cities and the green belt. I was very proud—and so was my noble friend Lord Prescott—to operate the policy we inherited from the noble Lord, Lord Deben. I saw examples of it the other day in the middle of Cambridge. I remembered a particular development at the site that crossed our desks at the time. It regenerated the centre of the city. It protected building on green fields. Builders love green fields—no doubt about it. They love flat green fields. In fact, most of those are called flood plains. They should be required to carry the insurance of such developments. This would even up the cost of the remediation of brownfield sites. It has been made too easy for them to get away with it.
I do not propose to cover other points. I just want to make the point that the Bill is not radical enough and will not work. In two years’ time we will be back again, wondering why we have not generated growth both for housing and for infrastructure.