Food Prices (Planning Policy)

Debate between Nick Boles and Mark Spencer

Wednesday 17th October 2012 Westminster Hall

[Nick Boles]

The hon. Lady is quite wrong; I never praised the previous Government for what they did to protect the green belt. They only ended up doing so by completely failing to build any houses and failing to meet the nation’s housing need, thus landing the Government with the difficult task of maintaining protections for the green belt and precious open land, while also increasing the rate of house building. As in so many other areas, we are trying to clear up the mess that Labour created.

[Mr Spencer]

I share the Minister’s experience, certainly with regards to Nottinghamshire. The regional spatial strategy, which was the flagship for development under the previous Government, put enormous pressure on the Nottinghamshire green belt. All the heartache I am experiencing now is caused by some of the sites that were brought forward under that strategy. Only the localism agenda and freeing up the planning process have given us a chink of light to defend some of those green-belt areas and to try to force local authorities to develop brownfield sites first.

[Nick Boles]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend’s description of the effect of the previous Government’s policies on the green belt and elsewhere.

To return to the difficult planning balance to be struck on renewable energy, I hope that hon. Members and others are encouraged by the call for evidence from the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change. When I visit the Planning Inspectorate for the first time next week, I will be happy to ensure that it is aware of the call for evidence, and that the result of that call is taken into account in the inspectorate’s judgments on how the impacts on communities are being managed, and whether those impacts have been managed satisfactorily before granting planning permission.

On the other hand, I do not want to be disingenuous. I do not believe that the Government can move to a position where wind farms are built with no objections from people who live nearby. I have a lot of sympathy for the attempts by Lincolnshire and others to define acceptable boundaries. It is right that things are dealt with case by case, because sometimes the distance can be more disturbing in a flat area of the country, as Lincolnshire largely is, than it would be in a hilly area. Although the wind farm might be close, there might well be a hill in between. It is not right for the Government to have blanket policies on such subjects, but the impacts should be properly assessed and accounted for in the decision making of planning authorities and the Planning Inspectorate.

I move on to the contribution made by the hon. Member for City of Durham. Mr Streeter, you may have heard, as I did, the Prime Minister’s excellent speech to the Conservative party conference, in which he talked of the “party of one notion”—that is, the hon. Lady’s party—and that notion was of course, borrowing. The Prime Minister is right to say that borrowing is the ready stand-by of the Labour party in response to any issue.

In planning, borrowing has a slightly smaller role to play, but a couple of other notions are the ready stand-bys of a Labour Government and Labour Ministers when confronted with any planning question. The hon. Lady is no exception; she calls for more guidance, more targets, and more direction of local communities, so that they know what is good for them. Well, I am delighted to say that Lord Taylor, the Member of the House of Lords whom the hon. Member for Ogmore (Huw Irranca-Davies) congratulated on work for the previous Government, is conducting a review of planning guidance. The aim is to reduce the guidance for local authorities from 6,000 pages, which the hon. Lady clearly feels is insufficient, to something more manageable. I look forward to receiving the results of that work.

In conclusion, my hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood spoke of the importance of diversification in the agricultural sector, and of farmers being left to make their own decisions, while not being skewed excessively by the interventions and subsidies provided by Government and other branches. He left us with a particularly appealing image of natural, green cemeteries where people can be buried and which support a flock of sheep. As a son of a sheep farmer, I cannot think of any better way of ending my physical existence than as nutrition for high-quality grazing for sheep.