Planning and Localism

Nick Boles Excerpts

Wednesday 7th November 2012 Commons Chamber

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

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi) on securing the debate on a subject of such great importance to his constituents. He is not just my hon. Friend, but I hope, even after the strength of feeling that he has expressed tonight, my friend—and he is not just my friend, but one of the great talents and one of the most effective constituency representatives to be elected alongside me in 2010. Madam Deputy Speaker, I am sure you remember—I certainly do—his speech in May when he moved the Loyal Address. The whole House was moved when he talked of his family arriving in Britain with £50 in their pockets, refugees from tyranny in Iraq. He talked of his pride in representing Stratford-on-Avon, one of England’s most beautiful and historic towns. He paid tribute to another self-taught, self-made and self-created man: William Shakespeare, in my view the greatest Englishman who has ever lived.

I can understand my hon. Friend’s determination to protect Stratford-on-Avon from inappropriate development and his disappointment at this recent planning decision. I hope that he will appreciate that I cannot comment on the details of the decision, because it is still open to legal challenge by the authority or, indeed, anyone else. It would be wrong for a judge to comment on his or her court judgments, and in this capacity the Secretary of State acts in a quasi-judicial role. The reasons are set out fully in the decision letter.

I would like to reassure my hon. Friend about the Government’s commitment to localism in planning, while also illuminating the responsibilities, as well as the powers, that localism entails. The last Government believed that they could solve Britain’s long-standing and severe housing crisis through regional spatial strategies and centrally imposed housing targets. Whatever the merits of the original concept, the facts are clear: they failed miserably. They infuriated local communities, such as Stratford-on-Avon and many others, and infuriated and undermined the councils that represented them. Those councils, quite understandably, responded by dragging their feet in making plans and doing their best to challenge and evade those regional housing targets.

What was the result for house building? It stalled during an economic boom, so when this Government came into office, we embarked on a different approach. We decided to give local authorities, representing local communities, the power to plan and the responsibility to provide housing to meet housing need in their areas. We encouraged them to adopt local plans, and communities —those that wanted to—to adopt neighbourhood plans to reflect local views about how their places should develop. We also decided that regional strategies would go.

We are trying to make as much progress as we can, within the law, to get rid of those regional strategies, but thanks to our old friend, the EU directive, this has taken longer and been more painful than we had hoped. But we are making good progress. Today we published the consultation on the strategic environmental assessment of the north-east plan, which means that we have now published consultation papers on five of the outstanding plans, and we hope to be able to respond to the consultation and all the comments it attracts shortly—and by that I mean months not years. We are making progress and there is light at the end of the tunnel, although we all wish that we had reached the end sooner.

I could take the easy way out and blame the Shottery decision entirely on the regional spatial strategy—that nasty hangover from a dictatorial Government—but it would not be wholly honest to do so. The regional spatial strategies came up with numbers for a region’s objectively assessed housing need. Local plans need to determine equally objectively assessed local housing need in a local authority area. I want to help local authorities, not just in Stratford-on-Avon, but elsewhere, to understand both the powers and the responsibilities enshrined in the national planning policy framework, so that they can equip themselves to prevent such decisions in future.

England has a chronic and severe housing shortage, and we will fail the next generation of hard-working people if we do not build more homes for them to raise their families in. The national planning policy framework is therefore clear that councils must estimate their housing need based on an objective assessment of all available evidence and identify five years’ supply of deliverable, developable sites.

If an authority has an up-to-date local plan, with identified sites to meet five years of objectively assessed need, it has all the powers it needs to resist speculative applications for development on sites that lie outside the local plan. Such an authority need fear nothing from the Planning Inspectorate or even clipboard jobsworths such as me. However, if an authority does not have a plan or even a draft plan that contains an objective assessment of housing need and identifies five years of developable, deliverable sites, it runs the risk of its decisions being overturned on appeal, as happened in the case of Shottery. I know that Stratford-on-Avon has been working on a draft plan and has commissioned a housing options study to inform it. I welcome that, but the regrettable truth is that rates of housing supply in the district of Stratford-on-Avon have been lower than those in Warwickshire and England as a whole. Like many authorities, therefore, Stratford-on-Avon still has much work to do.

The good news is that the Government’s approach of devolving power and responsibility to local authorities is working. Forty-eight local plans have been adopted since May 2011, and 65% of councils have published a plan for public consultation. We also have 100 neighbourhood plans up and running, and we are supporting more than 200 communities to take control of the future shape of their towns and villages. I am delighted that Stratford-on-Avon’s neighbourhood plan is making progress, and I would like to offer my hon. Friend all my support and that of my officials to help to achieve the truly local control of planning that he and his constituents seek. I know that the answer I have been able to give this evening will not satisfy him or his constituents fully, but I hope that he and they understand that this Government have put in place that power and responsibility, which will enable the people of Stratford-on-Avon to take control of their town and preserve it for many generations to come.

Question put and agreed to.