Mayfields New Town

Lord Herbert of South Downs Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd December 2013 Westminster Hall

[Nick Herbert (Arundel and South Downs) (Con)]

It is a pleasure, Mr Hood, to join the debate secured by my right hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex (Nicholas Soames). As he explained, we have a mutual interest in the proposed new town, which crosses our two constituencies. I endorse every word that he said and share his deep concern about the proposal. I shall amplify a number of the points that he made.

First, there is considerable local concern about the proposal. I have attended packed meetings in village halls in my constituency. People have been unable to get into meetings, because there is so much concern about the proposed new town. I have never known anything like it. That concern is having a practical effect on people’s economic well-being, because a planning blight is already being cast over the local area. Numerous constituents have written to me to express their concern about, for instance, their ability to sell their houses at the normal market rate due to the belief that a new town is threatened.

Secondly, I underline what my right hon. Friend said about the importance of sustainability, which is, after all, written into the Government’s new planning policy. The principle was sustainable development, not development at any price. The new planning policy framework clearly set out three dimensions to that sustainability: environmental, social and economic.

It is therefore highly significant that a report commissioned earlier by Horsham, Crawley and Mid Sussex councils, as my right hon. Friend said, ruled out a new town in the area precisely on the grounds that it would not be sustainable, for all the reasons set out. It seems to me that the report is significant for an additional reason: it shows that the local authorities considered a development in the area. They are not ruling out the notion of new housing out of hand, but they consider that it is not appropriate or sustainable. Whose view will carry the day when we promise localism in such matters? I will return to that issue.

The third issue is the behaviour of the developer in promoting the scheme. Mayfield Market Towns has not just set out a proposal for a new town; it has gone much further. For instance, it has distributed 8,000 leaflets in the constituency of my right hon. Friend the Member for Horsham (Mr Maude), north of Horsham, telling people that they need not have development in that area because they can have a new town outside their area instead. The developers are setting out to undermine the normal local planning process and interfere with the sensitive consultations that local authorities are holding with our electorate. That is entirely reprehensible behaviour; it is deeply unhelpful to the development of new plans; and it should be roundly condemned.

My hon. Friend the Minister knows that my right hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex and I expressed concern previously, in a letter to the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government on 24 June, about the position of one of the directors of Mayfield Market Towns, Lord Taylor of Goss Moor. Lord Taylor—though I emphasise that he has properly declared the interest—is one of the Government’s advisers on planning and has been drawing up the very guidance on the national policy planning framework on which local authorities are being asked to rely, as they consider their local plans. How can one of the directors of a developer that is actively seeking to subvert localism and produce a new town in a local area also advise the Government on how localism will work? That is clearly a conflict of interest. It is deeply resented by local people, and it is damaging to the perception of the Government’s independence in such matters. We do not believe that it can stand.

Fourthly, I turn to the core principle of localism that underlies the Government’s planning reforms and on the basis of which many of us supported those reforms. It is interesting to note, for instance, that in the Telegraph, which today reported the prize that Lord Wolfson is offering for the most interesting idea for new towns, his new adviser recently confirmed that Lord Wolfson

“is committed to the idea that if the locals don’t want it, it should not happen. So it is not top down.”

As my right hon. Friend said, that is the Government’s stated position through the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, who has made it clear that proposals for new towns must have local consent. Mayfields does not have local consent either from the community or from the district councils concerned, which have explicitly ruled it out.

The Prime Minister said last January:

“I care deeply about our countryside and environment. Our vision is one where we give communities much more say, much more control. The fear people have in villages is the great big housing estate being plonked down from above. Our reforms will make it easier for communities to say, ‘We are not going to have a big plonking housing estate landing next to the village, but we would like 10, 20, 30 extra houses and we would like them built in this way, to be built for local people’.”

I strongly support what the Prime Minister said more than a year ago about how local people feel when a plonking development, to use his words, is proposed in their area, and I supported the promise that they should not have to have it and would be given greater control. The local communities in both my constituency and that of my right hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex are planning responsibly for new housing at both the district and the neighbourhood level, but the new town and the way that localism is being subverted are undermining their responsible plans, causing people to lose faith in the very localism that we promised.

I remind the Minister that the 2010 Conservative manifesto said:

“We will put neighbourhoods in charge of planning the way their communities develop… To give communities greater control over planning, we will abolish the power of planning inspectors to rewrite local plans”.

Yesterday, the planning inspector delayed Mid Sussex council’s plan—that will damage the local environment and delay much-needed new housing in the area under the plan—because the council apparently failed in its duty to co-operate, according to an over-elaborate interpretation of that duty not stated in the original national policy planning framework. That will only hinder the process of localism that we promised.

I reinforce the words of my right hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex. This is not just a question of two local Members of Parliament being concerned about a proposed development; we have been at pains to point out that we support local plans that envisage a great deal of additional housing. This is much more. For us, it is a test of faith in the Government’s flagship policy of localism, which we loyally supported. The Minister knows that Conservative Members feel increasing concern about how the policy is being interpreted, whether through the behaviour of the Planning Inspectorate and the instructions that it appears to have been given or through the drive to raise housing numbers against the spirit of the local control that we promised.

This developer cannot be allowed to abuse the reforms of localism that were passed by the House and promised in our manifesto and the coalition agreement and in which local people put their trust when we made those pledges. We cannot stand before them and defend a policy unless that policy is true to what we said: that local people will have control, that responsible local authorities should be free to take their own decisions and that we would not allow a top-down planning process that has done so much damage to support for development in the past.