Planning (Broughton)

Nick Boles Excerpts

Tuesday 21st May 2013 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Nick Boles)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Kettering (Mr Hollobone) on securing this debate on an important local issue. He is, as you know, Mr Weir, the living embodiment of localism, being a representative of his constituents not just in this Parliament as a Member of Parliament but as a borough councillor. I am in awe of his work ethic in taking on two such testing roles.

I strongly welcome Broughton’s interest in pursuing a neighbourhood plan. It is probably the most transformative of the Government’s planning innovations, and I am delighted that it is making particularly good progress with the first three referendums on neighbourhood plans, which were passed with overwhelming majorities. Thame in Oxfordshire secured a higher turnout than the county council elections that took place on the same day. People went to the polls to vote for the neighbourhood plan, but did not vote for a county council candidate. There is a huge amount of popular interest in neighbourhood planning, and I strongly welcome any community that wants to pursue one.

My hon. Friend will understand that I cannot discuss individual applications, past or prospective, but I hope that I can explain to him how the balance of planning policy works and offer to engage with him and Broughton’s residents in future. At the heart of the Localism Act 2011 and the national planning policy framework that it introduced is our wish to devolve to local communities responsibility for making provision for future development as well as the power to plan how those development needs should be met. It is important to understand the combination of the power and the responsibility.

This country has an intense housing need; that is true in Northamptonshire, in my county of Lincolnshire and certainly to the south of both. Every year, the country has built many fewer houses than we need just to meet the growth in our population as a result of ageing and other social changes. That is why we placed at the heart of the framework the idea that discharging responsibility to the local community involves providing sufficient sites to meet the five-year land supply need. That means having sites that are available for development now that could satisfy the area’s housing needs over the next five years. The framework then says that if a local authority does not have the five-year land supply in place, its housing policies will not be considered robust, and applications for housing developments will therefore have to be judged against the national framework policies, which cover a wide range of planning issues, and the presumption in favour of sustainable development.

To reassure my hon. Friend, it is important to understand that it is not a presumption in favour of all development—it is not a free-for-all. The presumption is in favour of sustainable development. The sustainability policies, which are clearly set out in the national planning policy framework, relate to environmental protections and to the importance of sufficient infrastructure. Sustainability captures not only environmental concerns, but economic sustainability and physical sustainability, in terms of the infrastructure supporting development. I am well aware of other decisions by inspectors. They regularly turn down proposals for development when authorities do not have a five-year land supply, because they accept that those development proposals are not sustainable and would conflict with important policies in the framework.

The presumption kicks in when there is no five-year land supply. As my hon. Friend has accepted, that is unfortunately, at the moment, the case for Kettering borough council, although he makes a good argument about why that is, in part, a result of problems with the A14 and its new junction. I would like to reassure him that, as somebody served indirectly by the A14, I am very keen for the A14 improvements to be brought forward. Just yesterday, I met the Minister in the Treasury with responsibility for infrastructure, Lord Deighton, to discuss major national infrastructure projects, and I know that improvements to the A14 are absolutely at the top of the Government’s list of priorities for such projects.

I hope that together we can work to try and accelerate those improvements and the creation of the junction, which my hon. Friend supports. I hope, however, that he also accepts that national policy must be made to apply equally everywhere. Having a policy that requires boroughs to have a five-year land supply means that his borough then needs to find alternative sites while the sites off the A14 are not available, knowing that there will continue to be development needs, and perhaps at the back end of the 15-year plan, those sites will come on stream and other sites will not need to be provided, once the A14 development is complete.

My hon. Friend quoted Councillor Jim Hakewill’s eloquent letter, which I read and replied to on the Prime Minister’s behalf, and which asked, importantly, whether it would be possible to call some kind of moratorium on development applications while neighbourhood plans are under way. That case has been made by other Members of Parliament and by a number of organisations, including the Campaign to Protect Rural England. The difficulty with that proposal is that, first—of course, Parliament could change this—there is no legal basis for introducing a moratorium on development applications while plans are under way.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly—because we can change the law any time if we are persuaded of the merits of doing so—it would, unfortunately, create a perverse incentive that I fear communities less responsible and less proactive than my hon. Friend’s would be inclined to abuse. If we said that once work had started on a neighbourhood plan, there would then be a moratorium on all development applications until the plan process was complete, every single community in the country that wanted to stop development would have a clear incentive to start a neighbourhood plan and take their own sweet time to conclude it, as they would know that they could see off any application in the meantime.

Unfortunately therefore, we need to have, embedded in the system, a dynamic incentive for communities to get a move on and put their plans in place, whether at neighbourhood or local level. The fact is that only through having a robust plan can the community make decisions about speculative applications and know that they will stick. That provides the incentive to take the difficult decisions involved in drawing up a plan, and for the borough council, of which my hon. Friend is a member, to put in place its five-year land supply. That same incentive puts a tiger in the tank of people working as volunteers in neighbourhoods to do their community plan, because they will then know that if they want to control the future development of their community, the plan is urgent, important, and worth getting on with.

In the meantime, I accept that a few applications may be made that will ultimately be accepted, either by the planning authority or by a planning inspector on appeal, that the community would rather not see happen. I completely understand that, but planning is a long game. My hon. Friend has been representing his constituents and residents for a very long time at different levels, and I hope that he will carry on doing so for an even longer time in future. Even if an application that a community does not like gets through in the next year or two, the game is over the next 10 or 20 years. If, 15 years ago, there was the possibility of having neighbourhood plans in all those communities, they would have been able to shape such developments in a way that they were never able to.

I hope that the community of Broughton, which my hon. Friend is representing so well today, will see that even if they cannot control the application that he referred to, they have the possibility, through plan making, of controlling developments for the next 15 years. That applies not only to housing developments, but to the development of community facilities, green spaces and design codes, and to lots of other issues that are vital to people growing up and living in a community.

[Mr Hollobone]

I have been listening to what the Minister is saying. He has obviously spent a lot of time on the brief and is explaining the policy clearly. On the way home to his constituency, I have a feeling that he probably comes very close to Kettering. Would he be kind enough to call in at Broughton, at a meeting that Councillor Hakewill and I would be pleased to arrange, so that he could listen to residents’ views on the issue and explain the policy?

[Nick Boles]

I would be delighted to. There is nothing I enjoy more than getting out of Westminster and talking to people. I was in Worcestershire and Shropshire last week, and next week I am in Devon and Cornwall—it is rather quicker and easier to get to Kettering and Broughton. I would be delighted to come and talk to residents, and hopefully explain to them the benefits of neighbourhood planning.

It is not that there are no frustrations—there are. It is not that there are no disappointments—there are. It is not that it is easy or quick—it is not. It is a long, painful process that requires volunteers and local councillors to undertake exhaustive efforts on behalf of the common interest, which is a thoroughly admirable thing that I applaud. However, we have a support contract in place to offer communities such as Broughton direct support. There is the possibility of securing a grant of £7,000 towards the out-of-pocket costs of organising a neighbourhood plan. I would be happy to explain that to them, and hopefully, to share the experience of other communities that have done neighbourhood plans successfully. Neighbourhood plans, such as that in Thame, have had to wrestle with substantial development. A plan has been backed that includes plans for 775 additional houses in Thame; nevertheless, it secured the support of more than 70% of the people who voted.

I believe that neighbourhood planning is the answer. I hope that the people of Broughton will not be downcast or put off this important initiative, and I would be delighted to join my hon. Friend in meeting them to discuss how we can make their neighbourhood plan come to reality.