Neighbourhood Planning Bill (Third sitting)

Oliver Colvile Excerpts

Committee Debate: 3rd sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 20th October 2016 Public Bill Committees

[Dr Blackman-Woods]

I am sure my hon. Friend will be delighted to note that an amendment has been tabled for a later discussion in the Committee on how we ensure that disadvantaged communities are not discriminated against.

[Oliver Colvile (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Con)]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Dr Blackman-Woods]

I will give way to the hon. Gentleman in just a moment, after I have dealt with the intervention by my hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw.

We should not abandon the idea of a threshold just because it might be more difficult for some people to attend a polling station or another building to register a vote. We all want to ensure that as many people as possible are engaged in the neighbourhood planning process and, indeed, in voting more generally—but I will stick to neighbourhood plans, to avoid getting a direction from the Chair. Polling over a given period of time, and good use of postal votes or electronic voting are among the many different mechanisms that could be applied locally to ensure that the threshold is reached, and that people really are engaged in the neighbourhood planning process.

[Dr Blackman-Woods]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point, and one that I was going to come to: a minimum threshold could ensure that additional work had to be put in to get a wider, more representative group coming forward and voting for a plan. I was going to draw the Minister’s attention to the activities of Planning Aid England, which works a great deal with disadvantaged communities, trying to get them engaged in the planning process. If the Minister was keen to put a minimum threshold in place, he might want to think about how Planning Aid could be supported, in particular to work with disadvantaged communities to ensure not only that people turn up to vote for the neighbourhood plan, but that they are fully engaged in the plan-making process itself.

When we discuss the later amendment, we will see that analysis of the plans so far indicates that—this is the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw was making earlier—they have a bias towards more middle-class communities.

[Oliver Colvile]

Thank you, Mr McCabe, for allowing me to serve under your chairmanship. The point that I would make is that if we are going to be doing public consultation—which is incredibly important, and I have made that quite clear—we need to use Planning for Real weekends, so that members of the local community may have the opportunity to come in, physically, and say what they are expecting from the whole thing, although postal and proxy votes can be used, too, and a lot of people do so.

[Dr Blackman-Woods]

The hon. Gentleman makes an excellent point. As well as Planning Aid, I should have mentioned Planning for Real, which also does amazing work in communities getting people to engage with the neighbourhood planning process. Such work could be continued to encourage people to turn up and vote in the decision whether to adopt the neighbourhood plan.

As I said at the outset of our debate on this group of amendments, they are probing ones, intended to get greater clarity from the Minister about the whole range of issues that we have raised. I look forward to hearing what he has to say.