Neighbourhood Planning Bill

Lord Stunell Excerpts

Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 6th February 2017 Grand Committee

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

My Lords, I have covered only one amendment so far. I appreciate that the noble Lord is making a central point and I will seek to respond to it, and if there are other points that he wants to bring up towards the end of our consideration, I will be happy to deal with them.

On Amendment 31, I recognise that there are concerns around the impact on sustainable development, which is evidenced by the fact that this amendment was also put forward in Committee in the other place. However, I need to be explicitly clear that the clause is not aimed at conditions that are necessary to achieve sustainable development. I reassure the noble Lord that appropriate protections for important matters such as heritage, the natural environment and measures to mitigate the risk of flooding will be maintained. If the planning authority in question is unable to come to an agreement with the developer it is obviously the case, just as it is now, that planning permission will not be granted. What we are seeking to do is bear down on those conditions that we think are not appropriate and do not need protection.

It may help noble Lords if I give some background to the same issue when it was raised in Committee in the other place by Roberta Blackman-Woods MP, the honourable Member for the City of Durham, who was concerned about a situation where a condition prohibited by the Secretary of State makes the development acceptable in planning terms but makes it unacceptable in social, economic or environmental terms. The purpose of the planning system as set out in the National Planning Policy Framework is to contribute to the achievement of sustainable development. Sustainable development is recognised as being comprised of three distinct dimensions: economic, social and environmental. Each of these aspects is capable of being material in a planning decision. This amendment would remove a key element of new Section 100ZA(2) which ensures that the Secretary of State can make regulations only under subsection (1) in order to ensure that any conditions imposed are necessary to make development acceptable in planning terms. Subsection (2) is important as it constrains the power in subsection (1) so that it can be used only to ensure that any conditions imposed meet the well-established policy tests for conditions in the National Planning Policy Framework. To recap, paragraph 206 of the framework states:

“Planning conditions should only be imposed where they are necessary, relevant to planning and to the development to be permitted, enforceable, precise and reasonable in all other respects”.


This, as well as subsections (2)(b) to (d) are key safeguards to ensuring compliance with the policy tests, and I therefore believe that the amendment could run contrary to the noble Lord’s intention.

In addition, if by removing subsection (2)(a) noble Lords are seeking to ensure that conditions cannot be overlooked because they are unacceptable for other reasons, the existing drafting of subsection (2)(d) already adequately provides for this in its requirement for conditions to be reasonable in all other respects. Finally, as noble Lords are aware, before making regulations under subsection (1), as I have said, we are required to carry out a public consultation as set out in subsection (3). I appreciate the point made by my noble friend Lord True and others that perhaps it would be of assistance if I set out in a letter following today’s Committee session exactly how we expect the public consultation to play out, but it will give anyone with an interest an opportunity to be heard and for their views to be considered.

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

I wonder if either in that letter or perhaps in another one the Minister could set out to what extent the provisions of Clause 12 are or are not simply putting the National Planning Policy Framework on a statutory footing. Could he also set out whether to any extent it either goes beyond the framework or reduces from it?

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Stunell, for that intervention. Obviously the National Planning Policy Framework stands independently from the Bill and I do not believe that any cross-reference is made in the legislation to the framework, but of course all planning decisions have to be made in accordance with it. I will deal with the point in the letter I will send round, but I think that all of the points which have been raised are covered in the National Planning Policy Framework as far as the Government are concerned and as far as the legislation allows.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Cameron of Dillington (CB)]

My Lords, I hesitate to intervene. I am not an expert on planning and I have never served on a local planning authority, but I have been involved from the other side, the side of the applicant—not big developments but small developments in villages and so on—so I probably see this slightly differently.

I am on my feet because I cannot quite see why all the conditions and the problems that have been mentioned by noble Lords—drainage, lighting and so on—cannot be dealt with, as the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, suggested, in the pre-decision planning conditions. In other words, in the normal planning agreement, you work with the planning authority to determine under exactly what conditions the planning permission will be granted, but surely Clause 12 is not about planning conditions; it is about a situation when all the conditions have to be implemented before the building starts. That is where the delay seems to be, and the clause seems to me quite reasonable.

I realise that the problem is probably the financing of planning departments, which do not have the resources to deal with all the issues prior to giving or not giving planning permission. To some extent, pre-commencement conditions are added after the council has decided on an application because there may not have been the resources to deal properly with the application before that point. The local planning authority also may not have the resources to check during the building of the development that all the conditions that had originally been agreed to are being met. In other words, the only way in which this can be done simply is to do it pre-commencement, so that applicants have to apply before they can start building. It is a cheap route out of a particular problem.

I am not an expert on planning, as I said, but it seems to me that there is a difference between ordinary planning conditions and pre-commencement planning conditions. As someone who has applied, I know that sometimes pre-commencement planning conditions delay the scheme and can be, as the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, described, an ambush—suddenly new conditions are added after the planning conditions and all the terms have been agreed to. However, I am not sure why all noble Lords’ concerns are so targeted against the pre-commencement conditions.

[Lord Stunell]

My Lords, I would like Clause 12 to be taken out of the Bill. It is unsatisfactory because it is written so broadly. Under subsections (1) and (2), the Secretary of State is in a position to do practically anything as long as it is a prescribed description, but subsection (9) says that,

“‘prescribed’ means prescribed by the Secretary of State”.

So there is no limitation on the Secretary of State’s capacity to change the current planning system, not simply the pre-commencement conditions, although that has been the immediate focus of the debate.

Although the clause is widely drawn, for the Minister it clearly has a much more limited intention. I asked a question to see whether I could establish exactly what that limited intention was. On the face of it, from what the Minister has told us this afternoon, it is intended simply to ensure that the National Planning Policy Framework is the bedrock on which all planning decisions are made; in other words, to make the NPPF in effect a statutory document. If that was his intention, it could have been expressed much more clearly by a clause that would be fundamentally different from Clause 12 and be something we could debate the pros and cons of much more satisfactorily. If, on the other hand, it is intended to inhibit or prevent local authorities imposing conditions that would otherwise be in conformity with the NPPF, he needs to go to greater length to explain why the Government believe the NPPF needs to be trimmed back a bit.

I hope the Minister can see that if the NPPF is the reference, it would be useful if it was referred to in some way in the Bill, particularly in this clause. It is beginning to look as though his letter will be as long as the National Planning Policy Framework, which, incidentally, comes in at 59 pages, two of which are a list of the 44 codes of practice that it supersedes, which themselves were about 1,000 pages long. By the time we have some regulations to say exactly what we mean as a result of Clause 12, we will begin to unravel the NPPF.

There is a fundamental disconnect between what is in the Bill and what the Minister says its intention is. When I saw the Government’s amendments, I thought we were going to see something helpful, but I noticed that five of the amendments in the previous group were to insert the word “relevant” before the phrase “planning conditions”. One wonders a little whether one needed that word added. It is good that it has been, but can we just have the answer to the philosophical intent of the clause relating to planning as a whole and to pre-commencement conditions?

At Second Reading I mentioned that the National Planning Policy Framework—which is now treated as though it had originally been carved in stone at the top of Mount Sinai—had quite a troubled birth, with version one going around the Government for preapproval before it went out to consultation from the Department for Communities and Local Government, in which I was at the time a junior Minister. It came back from the Treasury with red ink all over it. It could not go out until the amendments the Treasury required had been made. Of course, there was uproar when it went public. In particular, the National Trust organised a very vigorous campaign against it. It turned out that the National Trust is the good cause of choice for a large number of Conservative Party members, who proceeded to let their Conservative Members of Parliament know about their dissatisfaction. One way or another, the consultation resulted in a completely different document coming forward, which was very similar to the document that had been drawn up and altered by the Treasury in the first place.

I rather fear that Clause 12 is another NPPF, except that we are at only the middle point, where something quite sensible has been turned into something that is not nearly so sensible and is fundamentally threatening many of the safeguards that the final version of the NPPF established so clearly, in particular the three pillars of sustainability when there is consideration of a planning application. Originally, I thought that the department had had the same experience this time that it had with the NPPF—it had gone off to the Treasury, which had put some red ink on it. But I realise that the current Secretary of State in the Department for Communities and Local Government was in fact the Financial Secretary to the Treasury at the time when the NPPF went on its rounds, so it is possible that the red ink was added at a much earlier stage.

I suggest that the Minister has a quiet word with the Secretary of State to explain to the high proportion of Conservative activists who belong to the National Trust—because he will soon find that out again—how much regard the NPPF has now attracted on all sides as a short, intelligible and easy-to-read planning document, and consider either scrapping Clause 12 completely or introducing a provision stating that local authorities are not permitted to impose conditions which go beyond the National Planning Policy Framework. I would have thought that that would achieve the objective which I think the Minister is seeking. Finally, the Minister should also convey to the Secretary of State the fact that this is a Henry VIII clause that Charles III will be most unhappy about.

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

My Lords, I hope that that is many years from now. I thank all noble Lords who have participated in our debate on whether Clause 12 should stand part of the Bill and I welcome the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, to his place. I fully understand the circumstances that kept him away earlier. We did deal with Amendment 43A, but I will endeavour to cover a couple of points on it as we proceed.

As noble Lords will be aware, the need for new housing is paramount to deal with some of the issues we are looking at, although of course I accept that there are many other circumstances we also need to consider relating to the Bill. The Government want to ensure that, once planning permission has been granted, we can move on as quickly as possible with housebuilding. At present this does not always happen because too many planning authorities impose unnecessary pre-commencement planning conditions. I accept that they are the exception, but on occasion they require applicants to take action before any works can commence that unreasonably hold up the start of building supply. This is unacceptable to the Government when we want to address the urgent need to increase the supply of homes. I think that noble Lords realise that there is a balance to be struck and a nuance that needs to be dealt with.

I have sought to indicate that this provision does not give the Secretary of State the powers being suggested by some noble Lords. New Section 100ZA(1) set out in Clause 12(1) does give the Secretary of State the power to make regulations, but it has to be read in the light of subsection (2) which provides that:

“Regulations under subsection (1) may make provision only if (and in so far as) the Secretary of State is satisfied that the provision is appropriate for the purposes of ensuring that any condition imposed on a grant of planning permission for the development of land … is—


(a) necessary to make the development acceptable in planning terms;

(b) relevant to the development and to planning considerations generally;

(c) sufficiently precise to make it capable of being complied with and enforced, and

(d) reasonable in all other respects”.

Subsection (3) goes on to state:

“Before making regulations under subsection (1) the Secretary of State must carry out a public consultation”.


This is not the wholesale provision which some noble Lords have been suggesting would give unfettered power to the Secretary of State. However, I accept that there are material considerations in terms of reaching a balance. I thank in particular the noble Lord, Lord Stunell, who recognised that. I can confirm that, as I indicated in response to the previous group of amendments, all of the issues raised are in the National Planning Policy Framework and so would be appropriate for the agreement of conditions with the developer.

Neither the Government nor any planning authority is in a position to force people to come to an agreement. The idea that we can somehow force either the local authority, as was perhaps suggested by some noble Lords or the developer, who may walk away at the end of the day because he is not happy with what the planning authority is saying, is wrong because we cannot—the National Planning Policy Framework has to be complied with. These are matters of consent and no Government would be able to do that, short of taking wholesale powers away and rewriting the law of contract, which we are not proposing. Indeed, I do not think anyone is suggesting that we should.

I am happy to go away and consider some of the points that have been made, but I come back to the point that we have to deal with inappropriate pre-commencement conditions. That is not to say that they are inappropriate as conditions—they may be quite appropriate as conditions, and many of those cited are—but they are not appropriate as pre-commencement conditions, and that is the point I keep coming back to. This is the intention of the legislation, as demonstrated by the wording of the new section. I do not accept that it is obscure or meaningless. I accept that there are considerations here but, if I may, I refer to the Government’s response to the consultation on improving the use of planning conditions. Admittedly, views were split on this, but it is not the case that all local authorities thought that the idea is a dreadful one. The majority—a bare majority, I accept—thought it was a good idea, with 44% either in complete support or supportive of the principle with reservations about the process. That was a majority in favour of the sort of action we are looking at.