Housing: Planning Laws

Lord Shipley Excerpts

Wednesday 25th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham]

I welcome what the noble Lord has said about the Prime Minister’s announcement on lifting the local housing allowance cap on supported housing. That is welcome. We now need to move on to an agreed model for supported housing. On planning consents, the planning system granted consent for 304,000 new homes in the year up to March this year, which is up 15%. However, the noble Lord’s point is a good one. A third of new homes granted permission between 2010-11 and 2015-16 have yet to be built. That is where we need to focus. In the Autumn Statement last year, the Chancellor announced £2.3 billion of funding for housing infrastructure. That is to be focused on those sites where we have planning consent but, for infrastructure reasons, development is not taking place. We hope that will unlock sites for 100,000 homes in areas of greatest need. On raising the cap on local authority borrowing, he will see from Hansard, in my reply to last week’s debate, that there are circumstances in which we would consider lifting the local authority borrowing restrictions.

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I remind the House of my interests in the register. I do not think this should be about liberalising the planning system, but rather about making the current system work better. Is the Minister aware of the very recent study by the Royal Town Planning Institute, which shows that we need more, not less, planning for getting large sites right without the delays and compromises we see so often? Does the Minister agree with that statement because, if so, there is an issue about the resourcing of planners from planning fees?

[Lord Young of Cookham]

There is indeed an issue, which is why we have decided that local authorities should be allowed to raise their planning fees by 20%, as long as the proceeds are then ring-fenced and ploughed back into the planning system. We are also looking at the so-called viability assessments, which sometimes hold up the planning process. The noble Lord will know that Ministers have powers to intervene where, for whatever reason, local authorities are dilatory in coming forward with local development plans.