Planning (North East Lincolnshire)

Nick Boles Excerpts

Tuesday 29th April 2014 Westminster Hall

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

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone, and it is a particular pleasure to take part in a debate among Lincolnshire MPs about the examples of good and poor local government in our wonderful county.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers) on securing the debate. I know that the issue is of great importance to him and his constituents, because this is by no means the first time that he has talked to me about this subject—his concerns about the lack of a local plan in North East Lincolnshire and the effect that that is having on decision making about particular applications in his constituency. Because he has such a sophisticated understanding of the planning system, he will understand that I cannot refer to any decision that has been made or any application that may be under way, but I can talk to his point about the local plan and to the effects on decision making of not having an up-to-date local plan.

My hon. Friend is absolutely right that local plans are absolutely at the heart of the planning system in a way that they were not when we came into government in 2010. The previous Government’s approach was that local areas were told what they had to do and where they had to do it, and they were denied both the responsibility and power to make decisions about providing for their needs. That happened through regional strategies, and he referred to the fact that his authority lies at the edge of two such regions.

On coming into government, we strongly felt that it was important not only that local areas were given the power to make decisions about development, but that that power could be transferred to them only if they had taken responsibility for showing how they would meet their housing needs by identifying, through a local plan, a sufficient supply of sites to meet those needs so we could all be reassured that enough houses and other facilities would be developed over the coming years to meet the area’s needs—hence the importance of local plans.

I am glad to say that, nationally, local authorities have been making very rapid progress in plan making. When we came into office, less than a third of local authorities had a draft published plan and only 17% of authorities had an adopted plan. The latest figures, in 2014, are that 76% of all authorities have a draft published plan and more than 54% of authorities have an adopted plan. There are lots of local councils whose plans are in examination or about to be submitted for examination by inspectors, so I am hopeful that those figures will continue to rise steadily over the next few months and years.

What those figures highlight, I am afraid, is the failure of some authorities, including North East Lincolnshire, to do what many other authorities have managed to do. I am not suggesting for a moment that putting together a local plan is easy or straightforward, or that it is uncontentious. It is not easy, straightforward or uncontentious in any part of the country, but 76% of local authorities have managed to produce a draft plan and 54% have managed to have it passed through examination and be formally adopted, so there simply is no excuse for his local authority not having managed to make more progress. My hon. Friend the Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy) draws a contrast with the other authority in the neighbourhood, North Lincolnshire council, which is Conservative controlled. That contrast is instructive because the North Lincolnshire local plan was adopted in June 2011 and sets out a five-year land supply, which means that North Lincolnshire council’s development decisions are respected. As I often put it, North Lincolnshire council is in the driving seat on local development decisions.

If North Lincolnshire council could adopt a plan in time—and no doubt it had to go through difficult moments and have difficult conversations with local communities—and ultimately do what we elect local authorities to do, which is to take responsibility for local decisions, there is simply no reason why a neighbouring authority should not have been able to do the same. I have to confess that I can see absolutely no reason or excuse for the suggestion that North East Lincolnshire council will not be able to put a plan in place until November 2017. World wars have been fought and won in the same amount of time. It is extraordinary that an authority will spin its wheels for so long.

My hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes is entirely right about the effect on decision making. In his textbook exposition of the planning system, he made only one very small error when he said that, in cases where there is no five-year land supply, there is a presumption in favour of development. The presumption is actually in favour of sustainable development, which means that policies on environmental protection, respecting the need for adequate transport infrastructure and recognising floodplains, and so on, have to be seriously taken into account. The presumption will apply only if a proposed development can be demonstrated to be sustainable.

Nevertheless, my hon. Friend is right that, in the absence of a local plan and a five-year land supply, the presumption in favour of sustainable development will be what determines whether a development should go ahead. The preferences of local people and local communities as to where development should happen will unfortunately not carry the weight that they would have carried if the local authority had a five-year land supply and a local plan. Indeed, that is what has happened in some of the decisions to which he referred, and it is happening in other areas of the country, too. I completely understand local people’s frustration and dismay that their opinions are effectively being overridden by such decisions, but we have to return to the fundamental point that we can transfer the power to say yes or no to development proposals only if local councils have taken responsibility for identifying how they will meet those needs. It is only when that responsibility has been demonstrated through a five-year land supply that that power can be transferred to local councils in a relatively unfettered way.

I know that my hon. Friends the Members for Cleethorpes and for Brigg and Goole, and indeed all hon. Members, including yourself, Mr Hollobone—nobody is more involved at both local level and parliamentary level in representing people than you are—want our authorities to be in a position to make decisions on behalf of local people that local people have helped to shape and form. That is what we all long to see. The good news is that most areas are arriving at that point, but I completely understand the frustration of my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes that his authority, a Labour-controlled authority, is entirely failing. I wonder whether that failure is a result of incompetence or cowardice, and I wonder whether his local authority prefers to be able to blame the Government and the Planning Inspectorate for difficult decisions, rather than taking responsibility for having conversations locally about where development should take place. I hope that the people of north-east Lincolnshire will not reward people for failing to take responsibility, for acting in a cowardly fashion and for failing to discharge their responsibilities.

We are all elected to public office to do a job on behalf of our communities. That job is not always popular, and it is certainly not always to avoid difficult decisions; the job is to work with communities to explain what is needed, to talk about the alternatives and to secure broad community support for a balanced plan for discharging our responsibilities. That is what we try to do here in Parliament, and I suspect that it is what all of us here today tried to do when we were councillors representing people on local authorities. It is what North East Lincolnshire council should be doing, and it is what North Lincolnshire council is doing.

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate, and I will be delighted to meet him to discuss further how we can help him to kick North East Lincolnshire council into swifter action on making its local plan.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (in the Chair)]

I thank all those who have taken part in this extremely important debate.