Planning Reform

Neil Carmichael Excerpts

Wednesday 8th January 2014 Westminster Hall

[Neil Carmichael (Stroud) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gray. I give my hearty congratulations to our hon. Friend the Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr Heath) on securing a worthwhile opportunity to set out our thoughts on planning.

The essence of the debate is that increasingly relying on an inspection regime to sort out problems is not localism, but quite the reverse. That is the cornerstone of most Members’ contributions today. Stroud district council is busily preparing its local plan, but it is of course a Labour-led administration, which is bound to hamper progress, and it has a committee system, which is not ideal.

Delays have left many communities spinning in the wind, as gusts of developers come along and make proposals here, there and everywhere. I have been the recipient of many messages from communities saying, “What are you going to do to protect the integrity of our area while we don’t have a local plan?” I reiterate the point made by my hon. Friend and others: while emerging local plans are still being formulated, we must give them more prominence in inspection considerations. That matters because if we are talking about localism and giving local people a voice, we must be bold enough to do it. We must give emerging local plans some consideration.

The same logic, incidentally, applies to neighbourhood planning. When we go around our patches, as I do, encouraging neighbourhood plans, the response heard is, “Well, that won’t be sufficient to stop what’s being proposed.” That is absolutely true unless or until such plans are given recognition in the planning process, too. If a community is concerned about what will happen to it, a neighbourhood plan is a good way to do something, but we must give that plan some traction. We should not only think about the local plan as a whole, but consider emerging neighbourhood plans. They are a clear illustration of what communities are thinking, if they are bold enough and sensible enough to have one.

Many hon. Members have talked about housing numbers. It is important to bring together two issues. The first is co-operation among councils. They must talk to each other and understand the scope and content of their plans and their relationship to each other’s plans. That is essential. Secondly, this is not just about housing numbers, but about the economic conditions that prevail in an area. We need planning authorities to take much more account of the economic factors, which should have a bearing on housing numbers. The Minister needs to express that clearly, so that councils have to consider the economic issues, as well as the obvious question of housing numbers.

Time is obviously short, so I shall finish by saying that we want to see local communities planning and we want to see more houses. We need to understand the value that more houses can bring to local communities which need to feel involved and have ownership of the developments. That is another essential point that needs to be transmitted to local authorities. In short, we do not want an inspection-led regime, because that is not localism; it is effectively the nationalisation of planning. We want the reverse, and we want to be able to say to local authorities, “Those of you that are doing something, do it well and be respected.”