Neighbourhood Plans

Debate between Nusrat Ghani and Anthony Mangnall

Tuesday 7th June 2022 Westminster Hall

[Anthony Mangnall (Totnes) (Con)]

Thank you, Ms Ghani. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, and it is always a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon). As others have done, I start by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Bosworth (Dr Evans). He is well known in this place for being rather good at self-promotion, not least through TikTok. He has campaigned on several important issues, not least on body imagery, but he has once again brought to the forefront an important topic, which, while dry and often perceived as quite dull, he has managed to make interesting. To reference his own speech, he has given a speech at the right time, in the right place on the right topic, and I do not think that any of us will be disagreeing with the contents of his speech.

[Ms Nusrat Ghani (in the Chair)]

Order. Mr Mangnall, I believe, for the record, that the Minister will consider his portfolio to have always been interesting.

[Anthony Mangnall]

I beg your pardon, Ms Ghani. However, of course, this is a matter that we are now allowed to discuss, both today and ahead of the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill tomorrow. This is an important point, because we, as Members of Parliament, are sent to this place on the back of our constituents and we engage with them on a regular basis through our surgeries. I suspect that I speak on behalf of all Members in this room when I say that planning, neighbourhood plans and development are things that continually drop into our mailbags or inboxes. It is of the utmost importance that, while in many scenarios, we are not able to engage quite as much as we would like, we now have the perfect opportunity to give them the voice to be able to stand up for what they care about.

As has already been mentioned, the Localism Act 2011 gave communities the power—the voice—to speak up for what they want in their local area. You may call me old fashioned, Ms Ghani—or perhaps not—but I am one of those old-fashioned Members of Parliament who happens to believe that decisions are made better in local areas by empowered local communities, and in the idea that Westminster and Whitehall do not know better on the needs of my towns and villages than my parish councils, my neighbourhood plan conveners, and my local council in some instances. It is that concept that I want to speak about in this debate.

The Localism Act created the hunger, the drive and the determination for every single member of the community to be able to speak up for what they wanted in their area, to ensure that they could have the right buildings in the right places, designed in the right way, and that the infrastructure would be in place and their community needs would be met. We have that opportunity tomorrow, in the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill, I hope. I think it is worth pointing out that the Bill does enforce and enhance certain aspects of the neighbourhood plans.

I have gone through the Bill and I am looking forward to debating it with the Minister and the Secretary of State tomorrow. However, in clause 88, we have a strong opportunity to look at how we can write into law, from the Localism Act, the way in which we can strengthen those neighbourhood plans. That will allow us to allocate land for development and to detail infrastructure, affordable housing and design requirements. Those are three of the many other options that are to be included in the Bill tomorrow, and they are to be welcomed, because we need to set the standard we expect for neighbourhood plans, to make sure there is commonality but also a unique perspective from every neighbourhood plan, so that people are able to present what they want in their area.

But—there is always a “but” in these instances—the problem is that there needs to be support to help neighbourhood plans to come together and be written. All too often, a neighbourhood plan is put together and the small mistakes made by volunteers, who are working incredibly hard, are exploited by the developers—something I shall come to in a second. If there is to be support, it has to be centrally provided and not come from local authorities. We must put the responsibility on central Government to help provide that support, rather than adding to the workload of local authorities. Indeed, a perfect example of how we are encouraging and enhancing local communities’ power and the strength of their voice is through street votes. As I mentioned to the Secretary of State before the debate, it is no good having a placeholder amendment in the Bill for street votes. We need more detail to make sure that we can reassure colleagues, as well as constituents, about this matter.

The challenges are many, but I will stick to just a couple. The first is around neighbourhood plans versus the Planning Inspectorate. These plans are hard to create. We have all spent time reading neighbourhood plans, and we have all gone through them with our communities and villages. We have seen our communities hold referendums on these matters, and we know how hard they work. Recently in my constituency, Dartmouth and Strete have both had referendums, and they have produced genuinely high-quality neighbourhood plans. Volunteers worked tirelessly to produce those plans in the first instance, but it does not strike me as particularly effective to encourage people to produce neighbourhood plans if those are just thrown out after the first challenge from a developer or local authority, or if the Planning Inspectorate ignores what is in those plans.

We have to think hard about how we provide support for neighbourhood plans in the future, so that people cannot be bullied and downtrodden by developers with expensive barristers, or by planning inspectorates that end up listening to the person who is paid £500 an hour rather than the local volunteers, who are doing it out of charity for their community. I have gone in front of the Planning Inspectorate on no fewer than three occasions to try to stand up for local communities. Sadly, I am not a barrister being paid £500 an hour—[Interruption.] It could happen, I suspect. However, I did the best I could to stand up for my communities and what they wanted to see. We need to make sure that neighbourhood plans are ringfenced and secure, and that where support is necessary, we can provide legal advice against planning inspectorates in certain circumstances. It is a modern-day David and Goliath story—one that I think the Minister understands and that the Secretary of State certainly understands, and one that we can address in the Bill tomorrow.

How we support neighbourhood plans has to change, and my hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire said that we must find the balance and retain that important local voice. I have already cited the fact that we have had good referendums on two neighbourhood plans in my constituency, but there are two further examples, in the form of Collaton St Mary and Inglewood, where communities put together fantastic local plans. They understood what the affordable housing level would be, where the infrastructure would go and how the houses would be built—only for those plans to be completely overridden and their views ignored. Eventually it got to the Planning Inspectorate, and the decisions went against them. I hope the Minister will give me an answer, because I do not know what to say to them when they come to see me and say, “We put all this effort and hard work into a neighbourhood plan, in the expectation that we would be listened to, that this was us stamping our mark on our village and community and that we would get what we want. We are not nimbys. For that matter, we are not BANANAs”—which means build absolutely nothing anywhere near anybody—“We are people who want to build houses so that people can live in our area, work in our area and have primary residences.” They are now deeply upset and have lost faith in the system.

[Anthony Mangnall]

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention. That is exactly the point: localism is about local communities having a local voice and deciding what they want in their area. I do not think any of us in this place would disagree that we want local communities to retain that strength of voice—that strength of community—that allows them to make decisions for themselves. That is what I believe conservatism should be about, and the hon. Lady is always welcome to join the Government side of the House if she subscribes to it in such a manner. As I was saying, we have to make sure that development plans are shaped locally, and that when neighbourhood plans come into contention with developers, those plans are able to be robust and rigorous.

I will make two more quick points before I sit down. Clause 83 of the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill—I am probably making some of the arguments that I will make again tomorrow—deals with the question of development plans versus the national development plan. We are asking local communities to come up with development plans, but telling them that when they come into contention, the national development plan will override theirs.

I am deeply unhappy that the national development plan has not even been published. Tomorrow, we have the Second Reading of that important Bill—a Bill that will be watched by all our constituents—and we are faced with the fact that documentation has not been published. I have been reassured that a lot of this documentation will come forward when the Bill is in Committee, but I urge the Government to act with a little more urgency and to expedite the publication of this document, because my constituents view this as an enormous power grab. They are saying, “We will produce our local development plans, but if the Government do not like them or if a contention is raised at any point during the development of those plans, they can be overridden by a central body.” If I am wrong, the Minister will steer me in the right direction, but I ask for details on that specific point to be provided as soon as possible. The Secretary of State must not have the ability to override local plans, because that will kill people’s faith in the system. We need to have the opportunity to amend this in Committee, and not simply have a Cttee of Government-appointed members. I am happy to volunteer myself, although I am not entirely sure that the Government will be taking me up on that offer.

When introducing the planning Bill, the Secretary of State used the acronym BIDEN, meaning we would build beautifully, we would build with infrastructure in mind, we would hold developers to account, we would take the environment into account and we would have neighbourhood plans. Having travelled across my constituency, engaging with local groups, parish councils and those who have produced neighbourhood plans, I can assure Members that those people like that acronym. They want to see it written into the Bill; they want to be reassured that the Secretary of State’s words are not just words but text in the Bill that we will debate tomorrow, and that that Bill will reform a planning system that has been found wanting for the past 32 years. We have the opportunity to achieve that reform now, and the Secretary of State has the opportunity to prove that he is good not just at rhetoric, but at passing pieces of legislation.

The hon. Member for Strangford may well have misled the House in saying that his constituency is the most beautiful. I am sure we would all disagree and would make the same argument for our own constituencies.

[Ms Nusrat Ghani (in the Chair)]

Mr Mangnall, can we be careful when we suggest that colleagues may be misleading the House?

[Anthony Mangnall]

I retract that, of course. I have been to Strangford, and it is a very beautiful constituency; I am not sure it is the most beautiful, but Members would not expect me to say anything else. However, the hon. Gentleman was absolutely right that we need sensible planning.

If I may, I will conclude with a few points. First, when we debate the Bill tomorrow, we must ensure that its policy is “brownfield sites first”. There are 21,000 hectares of brownfield land across the United Kingdom, which could accommodate 1.3 million houses. Some 2,100 acres of that land are owned by publicly owned organisations, and we could accommodate 125,000 houses on it. That is perhaps something for us to think about. Secondly, we must ensure that infrastructure is there first, so that we are building with a local community—doctors, schools, roads, sewerage networks—in place before development even starts. Thirdly, developers must be held to account. Finally, and above all, we must make sure that we listen to our local communities.

[Ms Nusrat Ghani (in the Chair)]

From BIDEN, to BANANAs, to volunteering to sit on a Committee—the Minister is spoilt for choice.