Neighbourhood Planning Bill

Lord Tope Excerpts

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 2nd February 2017 Grand Committee

[Baroness Cumberlege (Con)]

My Lords, I also declare an interest. I have interests listed in the register and I have a pending legal case concerning a planning application. I have taken advice from the Clerk of the Parliaments and have been told that the sub judice rule does not apply here. I support Amendment 14 and I have been asked by the noble Lord, Lord Porter, to introduce his Amendment 44.

On Amendment 14, I am not opposed to imaginative reuse of buildings: it is sometimes a very good way of preserving or conserving them. In my area a huge mental asylum has been turned into housing. It is of modest architectural merit but it provides homes for people, and those people, fortunately, do not know its distressing and disturbing past.

I can also think of redundant churches, some of real architectural distinction, that have been preserved by being transformed into homes. I am sure noble Lords know lots of other examples. However, I share the caution of the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, and other noble Lords, that changes of use should not be given without careful consideration of the consequences. There should be a requirement for a community impact assessment.

There are many short-term financial gains to be made by turning employment sites into housing, especially if it is, as the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, has said, large-scale development. That can, however, have a detrimental effect on a whole area, and very long-term implications. I think back to the multi-storey office blocks, built for another purpose: it is appropriate for them to be occupied by staff during the day, but they may not be suitable places in which to live.

We have learned from the mistakes of the past, such as the badly designed tower blocks with broken lifts—places of misery and centres of crime. Now they are loudly cheered as they are demolished and come tumbling down. They were recognised as unsuitable places to live in and proved not to be socially beneficial. New tower blocks, however, appear almost daily, crowding the skyline. Presumably, considering the stringency of building regulations, they are good places to live in.

I wonder, however, whether converting office tower blocks of concrete and glass is an appropriate thing to do. We are in the middle of a housing boom right now. Booms do not last for ever, which is why the rush for numbers may be expedient now but not necessarily a solution for future housing needs. We have to be very careful, therefore, to get the balance right between homes that are desperately needed now and the long-standing impact on a local area. I think of my own business. I certainly could not run it on the hoof: my staff and I need a base. We are technologically pretty able but we still need a base. So we must look at the employment opportunities in an area before giving them up.

I move on to Amendment 44. The noble Lord, Lord Porter, has asked me to speak to this amendment on his behalf because unfortunately he cannot be here today; he is speaking at the District Councils’ Network conference in Warwick. The noble Lord, Lord Porter, would have told the Committee that permitted development can be a useful way of speeding up building the homes, infrastructure and communities that are needed. Councils should, however, have powers to consider the impact that new developments are having across an area. Many areas, particularly in London and the south-east, are concerned about the rate at which office space is being converted to residential sites. This could have a very negative impact on local employment and economic growth. The British Council for Offices has estimated that between 3 million and 9 million square feet of office space were converted in England in one year. From April 2014 to September 2016, there were nearly 9,000 applications for prior approvals for office-to-residential permitted development; nearly 3,000 of those did not require prior approval and an additional 4,000 were granted.

The Local Government Association and local councils have expressed their concerns about this issue, so in an attempt to address the problem a number of councils have introduced Article 4 directions to remove the permitted development rights for office-to-residential conversions. However, there have been limitations to the scope of the Article 4 directions in places and they will in many cases be restricted to certain areas within the local authority boundary. There are 17 local authorities that have individual buildings, roads or zones within their local area that are exempt from the rights until May 2019, including the City of London and Manchester city centre.

I share the concern of my noble friend Lord Porter and the noble Lords, Lord Kennedy and Lord Tope, that local planning authorities and their communities should have a greater say on the cumulative impact of new development falling within existing permitted development rights that affects their local area. I am saying this rather than my noble friend Lord Porter, but local authorities should have the right to ask: “Is this desirable housing or are we providing the slums of the future, with all the social problems and attendant costs that poor-quality housing brings?”.

[Lord Tope (LD)]

My Lords, my name is to Amendment 44 and I would certainly have been happy to add it to Amendment 14 as well, which I support. I first declare my interest as yet another vice-president of the Local Government Association. An interest in many ways more relevant to this debate which I no longer have to declare is that until May 2014, I was for 40 years the local councillor for a town centre ward in a south-west London borough. We debated the effect of permitted development rights, particularly the conversion of offices to residential development, during the passage of the Housing and Planning Bill less than a year ago. In Committee and on Report, we had some spirited debates led by the even more spirited noble Lord, Lord True. I think that he was speaking more in his capacity as leader of Richmond Council, another south-west London borough. Sadly, both debates were very late at night and inevitably therefore curtailed.

I will not repeat all that I said a year ago but this issue has had, and continues to have, a devastating effect on the town centre ward that I used to represent. It has particularly affected the town centre. I cited nine months ago the figures I had had from my local authority, showing that in the 18 months between the coming into effect of the prior approval permissions and being able to obtain an Article 4 direction to cover that area, the town centre lost 28% of its office space. This was just in that 18-month period. Many people assumed that those were vacant offices but they were not. Sixty-two per cent of those offices were then currently occupied and the businesses occupying them were, politely or impolitely, asked to leave. Employment was directly lost from the town centre, with an inevitable effect on its economy—not just the work that goes on in the offices, but all the commerce that is brought by the people working in them. Some businesses were able to move elsewhere; others, sadly, have gone out of business, with a consequent loss of jobs.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Horam (Con)]

What the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, said strikes a chord with me. I always represented very urban areas in the House of Commons. I remember rather similar problems, particularly from my time as the Member for Orpington, which was in the middle of the borough of Bromley in south London, not too far from Sutton. The idea of neighbourhood planning is, frankly, a serious joke. It simply does not exist. In fact, it is worse than the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, described it. He said that there was a vacuum and that essentially only a very small number of people, largely in rural areas, had neighbourhood councils, and that is true.

Planning for a neighbourhood in an urban area such as Bromley simply does not exist. In fact, it is worse than that. Orpington was historically a district council and had all the appurtenances of a district council. Indeed, the late Lord Avebury, who was the MP for Orpington, was a district councillor when there was a district council for Orpington, and the council was used to making plans for Orpington. Under the Heath local government changes, it then became part of the London Borough of Bromley. When councillors for Orpington put forward schemes for Orpington high street or whatever for the benefit of the local residents, inevitably when they went to the planning council in Bromley they were promptly overruled by the councillors for Bickley or Chislehurst, who had no knowledge whatever of the Orpington situation. That was to the fury of people in Orpington, who thus became convinced that Bromley was fundamentally an anti-Orpington organisation, and the sooner they got rid of it the better. They went back to Kent, where they had some power as a district council, but they had no power inside the London Borough of Bromley. Their fury was evident to me on many occasions.

It will please the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, to know that when briefly it was under Liberal Democrat/Labour control during the early part of the noughties, as they are called, when the Liberal Democrats were more of a power in the land than they are today, it attempted to meet this problem by forming ward committees—putting wards together and having committees which would consider planning issues on a level more local than the council level. It was a sensible initiative. Sadly, it did not attract much support from the local population. They thought it was another piece of bureaucracy which did not work, cost money and so on. It fizzled out but it was a brave idea, which I supported at the time. It would have given large boroughs such as Bromley—the largest borough in London, with areas such as Biggin Hill on the one hand and Orpington on the other, each with distinct personalities—some kind of local say in a way which the amorphous Bromley council, as such, has difficulty in giving it.

There is a real problem here. When one thinks of neighbourhood councils, one attaches to them an almost merry England kind of picture of lovely little parishes such as Grimsargh in Lancashire. I take my title of Lord Horam, of Grimsargh, because that is where I was born. It has a beautiful set-up, with a parish council and local church, and it works wonderfully. However, such a set-up has no meaning whatever in most urban areas, and yet it is in urban areas that we need it. I now live in Fulham close to the old Imperial Gas site, an area of pollution with a great deal of bad land, gasometers, gas works and miscellaneous offices. It is now Imperial Wharf, with Berkeley-built homes sold mainly to foreigners for a lot of money. You walk down there and find that there is no one on the electoral register because they are all foreigners and that all the languages are not English. It is a great tragedy that it has happened in that way. Obviously I am pleased that it has ceased to be a polluted site and is no longer used for the supply of gas—that is delivered by other means—but the way in which it has been developed has been of no benefit to the people of London or the people of Fulham. There was a need to look at that development from the local area point of view as well that of the overall Fulham and Hammersmith Council.

There is a problem here which I do not know how to solve. It is certainly the case that neighbourhood planning is lacking in most of our major urban areas, and I do not know how to deal with that problem.

[Lord Tope]

My Lords, to follow the noble Lord, Lord Horam, I should perhaps start by reassuring him that the London Borough of Sutton is still under Liberal Democrat control after 32 years and still has six area committees—and area committees are not the same as neighbourhood forums, let alone parish councils.

[Lord Horam]

I was referring to Bromley, which has no Liberal Democrat presence at all.

[Lord Tope]

I know there is a temporary cessation, but give it another year or two.

I strongly support what my noble friends have said in proposing the amendment. However, there is a particular problem, as my noble friend Lord Greaves said, in all larger urban areas—and Greater London is the largest urban area of them all. The problem is exacerbated because until comparatively recently Greater London was not allowed by law to have any parish councils. Since that became permissible under law—I think a little less than 10 years ago; I cannot remember exactly—there has been only one parish council formed in the whole of Greater London and no others. I do not know how many neighbourhood forums there are in London, and I do not suppose the Minister has this information at his fingertips, but, if it is available, I would be interested to know how many neighbourhood plans have been formed, or are in the course of being formed, in Greater London. Perhaps that will serve to illustrate—or, praise be, to deny—the point that the noble Lord, Lord Horam, and I are making. It is a difficult problem, and while I agree with my noble friends that parishing and parish councils are particularly useful and beneficial to neighbourhood plans, if we are to wait for the whole of Greater London to be parished then neighbourhood plans will be a very long time coming. Clearly, that is not the answer. It is a problem in other places too, but particularly in London.

In London, neighbourhoods are often named after former villages. So we know what a neighbourhood is, but it is a heck of a sight more difficult to decide where the boundaries of those neighbourhoods are. They are most certainly not the ward boundaries, because the wards, particularly in London, are based on arithmetic and not on community at all. For administrative convenience, a neighbourhood forum is likely to adopt ward boundaries, at least in part, but they are not necessarily the historic neighbourhoods. That is a particular problem in London.

I have supported parishing and parish councils all my political life, but while it may be desirable, it will not happen quickly enough for the purposes that we are debating today. Therefore, I would be very interested if the Minister is able to say something about the particular issues and problems in London, to which the noble Lord, Lord Horam, and I have referred.

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I hope the Minister will understand that this is a very important issue. The reasons for that have been extremely well explained in the speeches that have been made so far. The noble Lord, Lord Horam, made an extremely helpful and important point, as did others, about the problems that exist. In a nutshell, those problems can be explained as follows. On the first day of Committee, my noble friend Lord Stunell pointed out that emerging neighbourhood plans are showing a greater appetite for more housing, precisely because they have more say in the way in which they build their community. In other words, it is in all our interests to promote neighbourhood planning. However, the second problem is that only around one fifth of the country is engaged in neighbourhood planning. As we know, in those places that do not have parish councils, it is a slower process. But as we also know, you do not have to have a parish council to undertake the neighbourhood planning process.

I hope the Minister will be willing to look at this issue between Committee and Report, because we will be coming back to this on Report. The Bill says that neighbourhood planning is important and must become more important. But as a consequence of that, local planning authorities must do more to promote neighbourhood planning. It is for them to decide whether that is through the creation of more parish councils under the review procedures that exist or through the other means that exist. This is a very important issue. It is not going to help the Bill if we simply end up with not many more people engaged with the process.