Neighbourhood Planning Bill

Lord Shipley Excerpts

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

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I hope that all noble Lords, as I have done, have found this Second Reading debate extremely helpful. A number of issues have come to the fore in the course of our debate which I think that we will need to examine more closely in Committee. Before I go any further, I should add my name to the list of vice-presidents of the Local Government Association.

This Bill is part of a package of measures that includes financial support to boost housebuilding and the forthcoming housing White Paper. The Bill aims in particular to simplify and speed up the neighbourhood planning process and, in principle, that is a welcome intention. However, as the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege, and my noble friend Lord Greaves reminded us, neighbourhood planning is about a great deal more than building homes. It is about building communities. We will need to explore that in greater detail in Committee. Can the Minister confirm that there is nothing in the White Paper, which is due when Committee has been completed in your Lordships’ House, which will impact on the Bill that we do not already know about? It would be helpful to know when it will be published—and I suppose that I seek the Minister’s assurance that it will be published in very good time for consideration of the Bill at Report.

When we debated the Localism Bill in 2011, I and other colleagues were strongly supportive of the proposals to introduce neighbourhood planning. Since then, I have been very impressed, like so many in your Lordships’ House, by the commitment of so many communities to get involved in the process. The evidence of its success is there, in that 10% more houses are being built because neighbourhood plans exist. As my noble friend Lord Stunell reminded us, neighbourhood planning is seven years on, and this still has the potential to be a centralising Bill rather than a decentralising Bill. I hope that we will take steps in Committee to examine that in some detail.

More recently than the Localism Act 2011, during the passage of the Housing and Planning Bill, we argued that that Bill did not go far enough in ensuring a fuller role for neighbourhood planning bodies in planning matters that might impact on their area. We also argued that we needed greater promotion of neighbourhood plans in urban areas, which are mostly unparished and have many fewer neighbourhood plans than parished areas. My noble friends Lady Pinnock and Lord Greaves spoke in some detail about that. This matters. If neighbourhood planning is to be the future—and we want to see it expand—there need to be structures in unparished areas that are stronger than the structures that we currently have. I hope that we will explore how we might encourage neighbourhood planning to be strengthened in those urban areas.

My noble friend Lord Taylor of Goss Moor reminded us that professional help matters and that the process is a long one. He said that he was sceptical that all stages were necessary. Again, I wonder whether we might look further at that issue in Committee.

The reputation of neighbourhood planning has been damaged a little—and in some places more than a little—by the requirement for a local planning authority to have a five-year land supply even when a neighbourhood plan has been adopted in the absence of an adopted local plan. In other words, if the local planning authority has failed to produce a local plan with a five-year supply, the neighbourhood plan can be deemed out of date even if it is only recently adopted. The noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege, reminded us of this but there are other examples, right across the country, where neighbourhood plans adopted in good faith and after a referendum suddenly find they have problems because the five-year land supply has not been produced by the local planning authority. I hope we will look at this issue further in Committee. However, it might help if the Minister, in replying, explained the impact in practice of the Statement made by the Minister for Housing and Planning on 12 December, which suggested that only a three-year supply was needed in some cases. What exactly will the practical outcome of that Statement be?

We welcome the fact that the Bill gives greater weight to neighbourhood plans earlier in the planning process and it is good that principal planning authorities are required to provide stronger professional support for neighbourhood planning. The Bill makes it easier to modify existing and future neighbourhood plans and, in the main, these are helpful and seem to command broad support. However, the Bill could be strengthened through amendments giving neighbourhood plans even greater weight in the planning system than is currently proposed, through the right to be heard. We were reminded of that by my noble friend Lady Parminter, and we can come back to it in Committee too.

I have a number of concerns about the Bill. It has been said—and it could be true—that it may not build enough homes. My noble friends Lady Maddock and Lord Greaves talked of direct commissioning and how this might help build yet more new homes towards the target which the Government have set but which is unlikely to be delivered. I am concerned about numbers but I am also concerned that there are no measures in the Bill to ensure that new homes are sustainable, low-carbon and protected from flooding risks through sustainable drainage in all cases. My noble friend Lady Parminter reminded us that we need to investigate those issues further in Committee. We shall look at the protection of ancient woodland. I hope an amendment will be forthcoming on this and that it will command all-party support. If it does, the Government might want to look more closely at the value of such protection.

Clause 7 gives the Secretary of State powers of direction over local plans. I hope we might explore this issue further to understand the intention better. At this stage, we need to reserve judgment on it, and the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege, gave us good reason to do so. A new clause, Clause 8, has emerged concerning county council default powers. I have not fully understood why this clause is deemed necessary. County councils do not have the local planning expertise required to discharge the function. To get it, they would have to employ consultants or staff or, maybe, district council staff. If a district council is deemed to be failing in its duty and the Secretary of State decides the county council should take over, it is not clear who would be legally responsible in the event of a challenge to an adopted local plan if it is approved through that route. The Minister may be interested in receiving amendments in Committee which might point a way through that problem and we will, I hope, come forward with some suggestions.

My noble friend Lady Pinnock and the noble Lord, Lord Thurlow, talked about the remediation of land, its financing and how we build more homes on more brownfield sites. The Government have made laudable attempts to do this but we need to look more closely at what financial barriers are in place as regards developers building on brownfield sites as opposed to greenfield sites.

The noble Lord, Lord Kennedy of Southwark, mentioned pubs and the amendment voted on in the other place on the need for permitted development rights to be imposed where pubs are closed and sold and then undergo a change of use without planning permission. Strong feelings were expressed in the other place on this matter, with 161 votes cast in favour of requiring a planning application to be made when it is proposed to demolish a pub or change its use. I think that is the right course and I hope that we will examine this further in Committee. Designating pubs as assets of community value is important. The last Government had a good record in that respect in creating the register of assets of community value. However, in this case we need to go a bit further.

The evidence we have heard suggests that the jury is out on pre-commencement conditions. The Minister will write to us on this matter but I hope that the Government are clear what the problem is they are trying to solve. I am willing to be convinced that there is a problem that must be solved given the way in which the relevant clause is written. As my noble friend Lady Parminter said, the difficulty with the argument put forward is that sometimes conditions can be useful because they tell you exactly what the problem is that needs to be addressed. If an applicant is not prepared to sign an agreement, you could end up with the local planning authority refusing planning permission when quite a lot of the relevant development would be very worth while. However, as my noble friend Lady Parminter pointed out, the other danger is that you could end up with poorer development. We have heard a little tonight about poor-quality development. In the rush to build and hit targets, you could well end up with poorer-quality development as a consequence of imposing a requirement to agree to pre-commencement conditions. We need to investigate that issue too. I think the Minister agrees that pre-commencement planning conditions must not be used as a way to cut corners on key matters such as protection for special environmental or heritage sites. I think that is a given. However, we need to be reassured that the means by which that will be delivered are not in danger.

I have come to the conclusion that there may need to be a thorough review of compulsory purchase powers in time. However, there is clearly much support for reforming the compulsory purchase system, and the Government are right to proceed with that now. The principle is that the public sector should be able to benefit to a greater extent from value uplift created by public projects. My noble friend Lord Taylor of Goss Moor reminded us of this in his contribution a little while ago.

Perhaps we need to clarify in Committee one or two issues concerning the detail of temporary possession as regards leasehold charges and changes to the provisions around compensation. One of the benefits of the Committee stage is that it enables us to discuss such provisions in detail.

My noble friend Lady Maddock made a very cogent contribution on resources and planning fees. In the summer of 2016, around 250,000 applications were recorded as not having been processed on time. The noble Earl, Lord Lytton, reminded us that central government can bear a responsibility for delays. It is all too easy to paint local government as the body responsible for delays, whereas there are often several reasons why they occur. That could be one, but another is the lack of resource. I am now pretty convinced by what the noble Lord, Lord Porter, told us: that councils—the Local Government Association tells us—are subsidising planning applications by £150 million a year. This is significant money. Even if that figure is only £100 million—and it could be £200 million—we need to look at how planning fees can be raised. I understand that there is a strong chance that this matter will be addressed in the housing White Paper, which is one of the reasons why the timing of the issuing of that White Paper matters. Indeed, if you read Clause 5, you see that delivering the clause requires more professional planning staff; obviously they have to be paid for, and more planners will need to be employed to enable high-quality planning to take place.

I understand from yesterday’s briefing that the Government will table amendments, which I expect will be before Committee—although the Minister also might wish to confirm that they will not come to us on Report. I understand that the Government are doing it on the primacy of neighbourhood plans, the right of parish and town councils to be consulted in drawing up local plans, and the housing needs of disabled and older people. Any further information the Minister can give us on that will be appreciated.

I draw to a close. When permitted development, which was basically seen as being about the conversion of offices to homes, was introduced, it was not anticipated that problems might be caused by the excess closure of offices—that is, places for people to work—in the interests of making a profit from the change of use from office to home. The annual register is therefore warmly welcomed, as it means that we will have some evidence of whether there is a major problem.

The Government are keen to speed up the planning process, and there is no doubt that the Bill will help to achieve that. However, I hope that the Minister will understand that there is a worry—we had it before we came to Second Reading but it has become more acute—which is whether the Bill is more of a centralising Bill of the one-size-fits-all policy-making type, as my noble friend Lord Greaves identified, or a liberating Bill that will enable neighbourhoods to take much greater control of their destiny. As I said earlier, on this matter the jury remains out.