Neighbourhood Planning Bill

Debate between Lord True and Lord Shipley

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

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, I first declare an interest as leader of a local authority—a London borough council. I must apologise to my noble friend the Minister and to other Members of the Committee. I was unable to take part in Second Reading because we had a full council meeting that day and I could not stay until the end of proceedings. I am also afraid that when the Bill was in Committee last week, I was abroad on an unbreakable work engagement and so was unable to take part in the first two days. However, I have read the debate carefully and rise to speak with due humility. Having read the proceedings, I hope my noble friend Lady Cumberlege will not be disinclined to intervene—I enjoyed reading a large number of her interventions.

I say to the Committee how grateful I am to my noble friend the Minister for his openness and, through him, the willingness of his officials to discuss difficult issues. That needs to be put on record immediately. As my noble friend knows, I am a little concerned about where these proposals are intended to go—we could be bringing out a Dreadnought to deal with problems on the local public pond which, frankly, could be sorted out. I am grateful for the elucidation that my noble friend set out, but we need to understand a good bit more about how these regulations might work. For example, there is a requirement that the applicant must give written consent agreement. How many pages of regulations will there be to say in what terms that will be? Will it have to be legally sanctioned? When will it have to be delivered, et cetera? It says also that the Secretary of State must carry out a public consultation before an order is made. How long will that take? With whom will it be? Will it be in an individual area or across the nation?

We all want to get development going more quickly. But my concern is that, in some circumstances—perhaps the noble Baroness opposite pointed to one when she talked about fear of flooding—pre-commencement conditions actually enable development to happen more quickly and with more consent, rather than, as is assumed, every council necessarily trying all the time to deter. I want to look very carefully at the detail of these proposals.

I am puzzled by the statement in subsection (2)(a) of the new section, to which the noble Lord opposite has referred, that the condition must be,

“necessary to make the development acceptable in planning terms”.

Make it acceptable to whom—to the local community, to the neighbourhood, to the people who will be affected or to the planning inspectorate in Bristol?

On the other hand, I cannot follow the noble Lord opposite—even though I understand where he is coming from—in proposing in his Amendment 37 setting up a mediation process. I spoke about this on the previous planning legislation we had before us, in which the Government set up a sort of national arbitration service concept. If one does not define this very closely, there is a risk that everything would automatically go to some sort of statutory arbitrator. That in itself could also clog up the system. With all the good will in the world, it may be that the amendment in the name of the noble Lord opposite is as guilty of causing potential obstacles as overregulation would.

I am not going to support any proposal that this provision be struck out—I see there is an amendment to that effect. I understand the Government’s concern to get development but we have not seen enough evidence. Between now and Report, and perhaps when my noble friend replies, we might get to understand a little better where and when the steel of a Dreadnought will be seen emerging from the department. I am a passionate localist: so much in recent planning legislation is about centralism and making things harder in the guise of getting development. I do not accept the view that local authorities are always against development. I look forward to hearing more from my noble friend, today and between now and Report, on the justification for these proposals.

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I have serious concerns about Clause 12, particularly about subsections (2), (5) and (6) in new Section 100ZA on pages 10 and 11. The Government are going to have to rethink this very carefully because, as it stands, Clause 12 will cause more problems than it solves. We have heard many reasons for this, but I will go further. What discussions have been held with the Royal Town Planning Institute? I ask the Minister that because it has sent a briefing on the Bill which states, broadly speaking, that there are advantages to pre-commencement planning conditions:

“These have certain advantages to applicants who may not be in a position to finalise details of a scheme but wish to secure a planning permission as soon as possible. They have advantages to local authorities because councils may have in practice limited legal ability to enforce conditions once a scheme is underway. Conditions are useful to the development industry in general because they enable schemes to be permitted which otherwise might have to be refused”.


If they were refused it would take longer and, as the noble Lord, Lord True, said, you may get faster and better planning decisions as a consequence of having pre-commencement conditions. Refusal of planning permission should, in general, be avoided because of all the complexities which are then introduced.

In telling the Committee what discussions the Government have had with the Royal Town Planning Institute, will the Minister explain what consideration they have given to the 15th report of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, which was written substantially on the subject of Clause 12? It points out that,

“the national policy framework confirms that planning conditions should only be imposed where they meet six tests. They must be: necessary; relevant to planning; relevant to the development to be permitted; enforceable; precise and reasonable in all other respects”.

So that already exists within the National Planning Policy Framework.

Paragraph 12 of the DPRRC report states that,

“the Government want to take this power because ‘there is evidence that some local planning authorities are imposing unnecessary and inappropriate planning conditions which do not meet the tests in national policy, resulting in delays to the delivery of new development’”.

There may well be such examples. If they do not meet the six tests, there is already a legal statutory requirement to demonstrate that the six tests are applied. But in paragraph 26 of the report, the DPRRC asked for,

“specific examples of pre-commencement conditions to help us understand the effect of subsection (5)”—

which my noble friend Lady Parminter talked about—because:

“None appeared to be included in the explanatory material accompanying the Bill”.


The committee had to ask the DCLG to provide a list of,

“details that developers have had to provide to local planning authorities before building works could begin”.

There are nine things on that list. With my long experience in local government, I can see a very good case for all nine of them. I will come back to this, with some practical examples of what goes wrong if you do not have pre-commencement planning conditions. But when I read that,

“installation of superfast broadband infrastructure”,

is not deemed to be required as a pre-commencement condition, I think this is wrong. We ought to have agreement on superfast broadband infrastructure, since within the next few years every part of the country is going to have it.

I will say more about this issue when we debate whether the clause should stand part of the Bill, but it seems to me that if that is the extent of the problem, the things listed are not in themselves significant problems. I am really starting to think that Clause 12 is not a good clause. We will look at this further on Report, but at present I have to say that this clause will cause more problems than it solves.

Housing and Planning Bill

Debate between Lord True and Lord Shipley

Wednesday 20th April 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord True]

My Lords, the hour is late and I should make it clear that I have never had any intention of pushing this amendment to a Division. The reason that I bring it before your Lordships is that this clause is effectively a proposal to set up a new quango. I welcomed the meeting that I had with officials earlier, and I was grateful to Ministers for facilitating it. I was told that it will probably not be formally a quango but a new, independent body to be served by people as yet unspecified. It will have a series of functions as set out in part over several pages of Schedule 13, which might have been drafted—it is a bit late, so I am perhaps a bit free with my words—as in that famous scene with Groucho Marx and the contract and “the party of the first part”. There is a whole mass of regulatory powers, with prescribed persons not defined and circumstances which the Secretary of State will determine later.

This clause was introduced to Parliament in the other place on Report, after midnight and with a 185-word introduction by the Minister. There was no debate on the subject and the technical consultation that went out really answered no questions at all. Theoretically, I believe in arbitration, but to set up a statutory process of compulsory arbitration without defining particularly what you are about is risky. I would much prefer to have seen this properly scoped and perhaps included in subsequent legislation, if there were some. What is this new body? Who will staff it? Where will it be based and what will its budget be? Quangos and their functions are never cheap.

Statutory arbitrators will be sent in at the request of unspecified third persons—in some circumstances, not even the two parties to the dispute. We do not really know who those third persons are yet, although the Government are asking who they might be. Will they be interested local people? The new body can charge fees. Well, any government body likes to charge fees and we can be sure that the fees will not be cheap—and it will probably expand.

I do not want to labour the issue but I did raise it in Committee. While I do not criticise my noble friend on the Front Bench—she has done an absolutely fantastic job on the Bill in my submission—it was in a large group so there was no real response on what it was all about. As I said, 185 words were spoken in the Commons, and there was no response.

What is the calculated impact on affordable home provision? What local knowledge will these statutory arbitrators require? What will be their qualifications? How will they relate to the existing inspectorate, which is supposed to resolve difficulties between local authorities and developers? Will their decisions be judicially reviewable? Any statutory body lets the lawyers loose.

If she can, I should like my noble friend to say at what stage those questions will be answered for Parliament, because I am concerned that, well-intentioned though this might be, we risk creating a statutory body that will run out of control, cost more and lead to more delay in the system rather than less. Will the public be able to make representations to these arbitrators? Will they meet in open session? If so, what role is there for the planning committee? Where do we go with appeal afterwards? We could have a three-stage process.

I beseech my noble friend and her colleagues to think about what this new statutory body might be. They might even know what it might be called.

[Lord Shipley]

My Lords, I speak in support of the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord True, who asked a set of important questions. I shall not repeat them, and I am pleased that a large number of Members of the House are here to hear him ask them. This is an example of the creation of a bureaucracy that may not solve a significant set of problems. In other words, because there may have been some difficulties in a limited number of cases in some places, we may set up a large bureaucratic structure to solve them.

I have read the impact assessment and the Bill very carefully, but I am still at a loss to understand what problem the Government are trying to solve. It may in some cases speed up some Section 106 negotiations but, in the main, I am not sure that it will. It may create a set of unintended consequences. When I read line 1 of the impact assessment—

“The Government wishes to provide for someone to be appointed to help resolve, within a set timescale, outstanding issues about planning obligations relating to individual planning applications”—

I immediately wonder who the “someone” will be. How will you ensure that they do not have some kind of interest? How will you know that there is a firewall between that person and their conclusions? For example, the impact assessment does not answer the question asked by the noble Lord, Lord True: what might the impact be on starter homes? That is a very important question, because the funding of starter homes comes from reductions in the amount of Section 106 money received by local authorities.

On page 167, at lines 10 to 12, the Bill states:

“The local planning authority must not refuse the application on a ground that relates to the appropriateness of the terms of the section 106 instrument”.

I understand that statement in one sense, but at the heart of our debate about starter homes is the fact that Section 106 provision will be reduced to help to provide the developer subsidy for those starter homes. There are major implications in this, and I see more potential problems over Section 106 negotiations. I am not convinced that setting up the kind of bureaucratic structure that the noble Lord, Lord True, described, will actually help us to solve that problem. It will be solved if local planning authorities are properly resourced, have the proper powers and there is a proper context within which they are to work to build the homes that the country needs.

Housing and Planning Bill

Debate between Lord True and Lord Shipley

Monday 18th April 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I should repeat my declaration from last week that I am a vice-president of the Local Government Association, because this impacts directly on local government. I welcome Amendment 133B, which confirms that we will have the affirmative procedure so that we can at least talk about the proposals that the Government finally come up with.

I want to be really clear about two things. The first is that the purpose of these amendments is, ultimately, to ensure that we build more social homes for rent than we otherwise would because of the powers of housing associations, particularly in terms of borrowing. Secondly, although local authorities will not have as much control as they do now, nevertheless, there is nothing in the legislation as now proposed that will prevent officers or members of a council joining a housing association board if invited to do so directly in their own capacity. That is my understanding of what is proposed, but I am very keen that the Minister should make it absolutely clear when responding to this group of amendments.

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, I very much agree with the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Shipley. Obviously, I welcome what my noble friend said: that there will be a good amount of time given to consider this rather new proposal. I understand the rationale in terms of the audit rules. However, I would like to make three points, one of which the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, has anticipated. It surely cannot be the case that a member of a local authority should be excluded by that from using his or her experience in the service of housing interests—although, clearly, under subsection (1)(b) of the proposed new clause they would not be able to exercise any voting right. Recent legislation dashed local authority members’ hopes when they were told that they were not allowed to have pensions any more because they were not employees of local authorities. In those circumstances, clearly they are not employees of the local authority. Therefore, I do not think that that should be used to exclude them from potential membership where that is judged useful by the housing association.

My second point is on the wording, which, again, is relatively new to all of us, and therefore I have not been able to take advice from my office, which I will when I have time. Subsection (5) of the proposed new clause states that appointing, in relation to an officer,

“includes nominating or otherwise influencing the selection of the officer”.

Local authorities that are responsible for housing individuals, and even those authorities that are not directly housing authorities, have a public responsibility to house effectively. In the course of that experience they will accumulate a great deal of knowledge about the local housing market, the capacity of individuals and, in some respects, the record of individuals. That wording—

“otherwise influencing the selection of the officer”—

could exclude the capacity of the local authority to offer advice on whether a person who has been put forward is an appropriate or effective person to carry out these very important functions.

That relates to my final point: accountability. A great deal in the Bill is about putting housing associations on one pedestal and local authorities and others on another. There has to be some recognition that the housing function is an important one for which local authorities have responsibility. I do not happen to think that putting councillors on boards is necessarily the best way of doing it. Indeed, I agreed to the removal of councillors from the board of our own major housing association. However, as we tease out what these proposals mean, particularly where there is a move from the local authority sector to the housing association sector, I hope we will not lose some thought as to the way in which relationships between housing associations and local authorities are sustained, and in which there is an element of mutual accountability between the two. Clearly, if this goes through, that may not be by appointment, but there must be some consideration of that point, in my submission.

Housing and Planning Bill

Debate between Lord True and Lord Shipley

Wednesday 13th April 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shipley]

My Lords, before the Minister replies, I would like to be really clear about what is being said—in part, following what the noble Lord, Lord Porter, said a little while ago. I understand from what the Minister told us that there will be a further amendment at Third Reading on the matter of high-value homes. I would appreciate confirmation of that when she replies. Will the Government leave with local authorities enough money from the sale of higher-value homes to build replacement homes? That is what I heard the noble Lord, Lord Porter, say but that is not explicitly stated in the letter we received just before 3 o’clock this afternoon. I would just like to be really clear about that one-for-one replacement. One of our concerns in Committee was that there was to be a two-for-one replacement in London but not—in the Bill—a one-for-one replacement in the rest of England. I think the House would find it helpful to know exactly what the Government propose here.

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, I will briefly intervene as a member of the London Councils Leaders’ Committee. I will not follow my noble friend Lord Deben, who occasionally joins us for our deliberations on this Bill to launch an attack on local authorities. Perhaps he could bring a different 1990s LP next time he comes to us, as we have heard that little speech before.

I am very grateful to my noble friend on the Front Bench and to the Secretary of State. They have listened—I want to address this in a positive way—and are seeking to deal with a very real problem within the context of a clear manifesto commitment. In Committee, we teased out significant issues that needed to be addressed. This is manifest evidence that the Government wish to address some of those problems. The noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, put the worst construction on it and said that 51% or, in some cases, 100% of the relevant property might have to go. In all generosity, I do not think that is what my noble friend intends or is what she said. She said in her letter that she was “clear” that she wished to see,

“at least one new affordable home for each dwelling that is sold”.

I accept what she said in writing.

There will still be things that we have to consider as we go forward—for example, whether in some large boroughs the social housing in one ward could be more expensive than that in another ward not too far away, so a local element will be needed if we are to sustain mixed tenure and mixed communities, which is important. The drafting of the regulations is not a question on which to detain your Lordships today but we could look at the implications of higher value within local authority areas. However, I unequivocally welcome what my noble friend has laid before us and I know that many people in many parts of London—local authority leaders of all parties—also welcome it. I am very grateful to her.

Housing and Planning Bill

Debate between Lord True and Lord Shipley

Thursday 10th March 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, we should be grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Porter, for his contribution because he has clarified his position on the forced sale of high-value council homes, as well as for the distinction that he has drawn. It is particularly helpful and I hope the Minister will pay due attention to it.

The issue here was put very well by the noble Lord, Lord Horam. If there is a requirement on councils to sell off high-value homes, however they are defined—I hope the Minister even today might be in a position to define for us what a high-value home actually is—that should be for new social housing, not to fund the right to buy. I think I have interpreted accurately what the noble Lord said. I noted too the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Best. He said that requiring councils to sell high-value housing is a bad idea because it cannot be righted by switching the burden on to housing associations. I hope I have cited both noble Lords correctly.

The broad thrust is the same: that it is one thing to sell high-value council homes to reinvest in other council properties, but quite another to use that money to fund the right to buy housing association properties. We have hit upon one of the key problems in the debate on this group of amendments—it has taken some time, but it is right that it has because the issues have now come out. This is not about vacant homes; it is about an assumption in government that there is such a thing as surplus council homes. I am afraid that I simply do not believe there are surplus homes, yet I have heard in a number of places the word “surfeit” being used. It is not the case that there is a surfeit or a surplus of homes. It is very important that the Minister does not confuse vacant homes with surplus homes, because local authorities, which have the knowledge of their areas, know whether a vacant home can be re-let.

I will be really clear so that there is no doubt in the Minister’s mind: for these Benches, the forced sale of high-value council homes, reducing the social housing stock as a consequence, is a red-line issue if it is simply to be used to fund the right to buy housing association homes. There has to be a coherent policy that ensures there are enough social rented homes for people in this country to live in. As things stand, the Government’s policy will reduce the number of rented social homes in the places they are needed and it will make things much worse for the 1.6 million people on social housing waiting lists. As we have heard, it will jeopardise new housebuilding because it will erode councils’ ability to borrow. As the Minister has heard from me on several occasions, because larger homes tend to be high-value homes, because they have more bedrooms, their sell-off may well take priority over the sell-off of other homes, so larger families will suffer as a consequence.

I know that the Minister is aware of the research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation on council bungalow sales. It warned that although such homes are often suited to the elderly or those with special requirements, 15,300 council-owned bungalows could be sold off in England by 2021. I would be grateful if the Minister responded to that. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation is a hugely respected charity and its advice should be taken very seriously. Will the Minister tell us what the Government’s response to that research is? These things really do matter, as does raising the cap for local authorities on housing investment. Again, I do not hear Ministers talking much about this, but it has been a running proposal in your Lordships’ House for several years that that cap should be raised.

The demand is there in the social rented sector for the higher-value properties that the Government will require to be sold whether there is need for them, or whether they are actually vacant. Surely it is for local government to assess its local market needs and the need for social rented housing in its areas. Surely, its position should be protected if it knows that a vacant home is required by somebody on a housing list. Finally, what do the Government think about the overall impact on local government finances? I noted the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis of Heigham. She is absolutely correct on the capacity of local government actually to fund what some on the other side believe local government is capable of funding.

I repeat: this is, for these Benches, a red-line issue. I hope very much that the Government will think again and very quickly.

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Shipley. He knows how greatly I respect him and it was an honour to call him my noble friend for five years. But when he talks of a red line, with all the authority of a party with eight colleagues in the other place, is he telling this House that those Benches plan to deploy 100 votes here to frustrate the will of the other place? I suggest to your Lordships that that smacks rather of anti-manifesto fundamentalism.

[Lord Shipley]

I will clarify that matter. I agree entirely that it would have been much better had the Bill started in the House of Lords; then, some of these issues could perhaps have been put right before it reached the other place. That said, the Bill is here and we have a requirement to comment on it, amend it and vote on it. I have just said that our view on these Benches is that this is, for us, a red-line issue.