Planning Guidance

Nick Boles Excerpts

Friday 18th January 2013 Commons Chamber

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

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Sir Tony Baldry) on securing this debate, on a subject that I know is of close concern to you, Mr Deputy Speaker, as well as to my hon. Friend.

I want to start by addressing my hon. Friend’s proposals for a new garden city extension to the town of Bicester in his constituency, before moving on to the main point in his speech. I am very pleased to say that the Deputy Prime Minister has very much welcomed my hon. Friend’s invitation to work with him and local partners in Cherwell district council to explore the various factors necessary for Bicester to become a garden city for the 21st century. On a personal note, I entirely share my hon. Friend’s enthusiasms for garden city principles. I have visited Letchworth Garden City twice in the short time that I have been planning Minister, and I am inspired by the way in which Letchworth has combined a huge amount of green space, a huge amount of trees and parks and gardens and broad verges, with a great deal of housing that, when it was built, was very much affordable housing. It was not housing just for the well-heeled. If we can find a way to do that again, nobody will be more pleased than I.

What is important—this is why it is so good that my hon. Friend made the speech that he did about Bicester’s future as a garden city—is that the proposals are locally determined, and that these communities spring up in response to local suggestion. I encourage more communities around the country to come forward with such proposals, and the Government will be thinking more about how we can encourage that. My hon. Friend mentioned Graven Hill, and there is another site in north-west Bicester. They have different needs and we are determined to work across Government and with local partners to ensure these are addressed.

In addition to the ongoing discussions on each of these sites, officials from my Department have been in contact with Cherwell district council with a view to starting discussions on how all the development in and around Bicester can be brought together under the garden city banner. The Deputy Prime Minister announced a special fund of £225 million to support large locally determined developments of this kind and to help unblock any obstacles, infrastructural or otherwise, to such welcome developments.

I congratulate my hon. Friend’s district council, Cherwell district council, on publishing its local plan in August 2012, and on producing a plan which, from everything that he has told us and all the evidence we have, does what the Government and the country would like to see, by embracing growth and the need for more housing development. That is vital, as my hon. Friend said. One of the greatest crises of social justice facing our country is that young people increasingly have no prospect of getting a home of their own until they are well into their 30s, and that there are many young families with both partners working who nevertheless have to bring up small children in a pokey flat with no green space.

That is an affront to all of us and the Government are determined to tackle it. The important question is how. We tackle it by persuading local communities and local authorities that it is in their interest too to meet that need locally. The way to do that is to follow the policies set out in the national planning policy framework and draw up a local plan, as Cherwell district council has done.

Let me reassure my hon. Friend that the Planning Inspectorate will proceed promptly and expeditiously with the public examination of that local plan, once it has been submitted. Although my hon. Friend referred to the new duties that the Planning Inspectorate will take on if the Growth and Infrastructure Bill achieves Royal Assent, I can reassure him that those duties are relatively limited and not as expansive as some have feared or suggested, and that there is no reason why the Planning Inspectorate will not be able to examine Cherwell district council’s plans and all the other plans coming forward for examination promptly and expeditiously, as I said.

Let me also reassure my hon. Friend that the draft plan that Cherwell district council has produced emphatically does have some weight in decisions. Of course the weight that attaches to it is not as great as it will be once the plan has passed examination, and of course not as much as it will have once it has been fully and finally adopted. It was produced on the basis of extensive consultation locally, so it is not the case that developers can propose sites for development and that the plan will be entirely ignored by the decision makers in their decisions about such applications.

Let me turn to the issue that my hon. Friend raised about sites that have received planning permission, but on which building work has not commenced. He was right to point out how that works in the national planning policy framework. I am grateful to him for quoting my predecessor, my right hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark), now the Financial Secretary to the Treasury. The framework is very clear that sites with planning permission should be considered deliverable until that planning permission expires unless they have become clearly and demonstrably unviable. I am sure that my hon. Friend would agree that if, for instance, a scheme were proposed, perhaps in the heady years of the boom, that was even then a marginal scheme the economics of which did not seem to stack up, it would not be sensible for it to be considered a deliverable part of the five-year plan that the council is now adopting given that it was clear that houses would never be built on the site.

That is a pretty tough test for any site with planning permission to pass, and it cannot be passed merely on the claim of the developer that was associated with the original application. There needs to be clear evidence, which will be considered by the inspector in their examination, and all that evidence needs to be available to the public so that they can see and test why the inspector has come to such conclusions. This is not an easy hurdle to surmount. It presumes that sites with planning permission will be considered deliverable unless that hurdle is surmounted and it is demonstrated that a particular site is unviable.

I hope that I have reassured my hon. Friend and his constituents that even though a number of applications are coming to the local authority from developers for building in areas that are not contained within the local plan, and even though some of those applications might have been appealed to the Planning Inspectorate, the Planning Inspectorate will be following the policy that he voted for and thought he understood. That policy does indeed say what he thinks it says, which is that only in exceptional cases will sites be removed from the plan because they are clearly unviable.

I conclude by returning to the example that Cherwell district council offers to the whole country, particularly to other parts of England with areas of great housing need and housing demand. The authority embraces its responsibilities. It is imaginative and creative, and, with my hon. Friend’s support and leadership, it is coming forward with exactly the kind of proposals that this Government want to see. I would love it if more authorities wanted to act in this way. I hope that they will be inspired by the work of Cherwell district council, its councillors, and my hon. Friend.

Question put and agreed to.