Neighbourhood Planning Bill

Richard Bacon Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons & Money resolution: House of Commons
Monday 10th October 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Richard Bacon (South Norfolk) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes). I agreed with some of the things that she said, and certainly with the emphasis that she placed on infrastructure and the need to get it right. We have a strange system in which we bring forward development as if it is a bad thing, and put in facilities—she mentioned green spaces, but there are many other things that communities want, such as health facilities and primary schools—afterwards to mitigate the “bad effects” of development. However, recognising that the words “cities” and “civic” are cognate with “civilisation”, we should be bringing forward holistic schemes that create good places in the first instance.

I disagreed with the hon. Lady, though, when she nearly made it sound as though the planning system would be almost as perfect a work of art as any rendered by Leonardo da Vinci were it not for one thing—the way that not enough taxpayers’ money was being hosed over the planning departments of this country. The hon. Member for Erith and Thamesmead (Teresa Pearce) said something similar. It seems to me that the problems are rather more fundamental.

I welcome the Bill, mainly because it gives people a local voice. I agree with all the views expressed by my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin); he is no longer here, so I shall not dwell on this, but I welcome the fact that the hon. Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann) is in his place. He is a great tribune of his constituents and is also the vice-chairman of the all-party group on self-build, custom and community house building and place-making, which has a longer name than any other all-party group as it is a better and more important all-party group than any other, with the possible exception of the all-party beer group. It recognises, as does the hon. Gentleman, that the really important thing about getting the voice right is that it should be the voice of the people who are going to live in the dwellings.

The hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood said that the local planning system should embrace every single house, and talked about the colour of bricks as if it were a good thing that local councillors were deciding the colour of bricks. I had a conversation recently with a local house builder who had a plan for a very modern house. Naturally, he wanted a render that was appropriate for that. It was bright white. He had a conversation with his local planning officer—I am not making this up—who said, “No, no. It’s too white. It’s too stark. You shouldn’t do that,” so he asked the planning officer to look at the relevant page on the website and choose the colour. She was a little nonplussed by this, but the house builder said, “You don’t want the one that I want, so why don’t you choose one and save a lot of time?” Eventually she chose a colour, which he said he would change in due course if he did not like it. It ought not to be necessary to have such a conversation. I have met house builders who have had seven or eight choices of gutter colour refused.

[Helen Hayes]

In each of our constituencies, we can think of examples of developments that, because of poor finishing and poor-quality choices of building materials, blight their communities for decades. It is not a trivial point that I am making. Once something is built, it affects that community for many, many years to come. These things are important.

[Mr Bacon]

I agree that they are important. The best people to choose the quality of the materials, and to make sure that they are of the highest possible standard, are the people who will live in those dwellings, not somebody else working to a profit margin, which is why more self-build and custom house building will result in higher quality.

I said earlier that I agreed with the hon. Lady on the subject of the local voice. I support the Bill because we need more local voice. The fundamental problem we face is that when people oppose development, they do so not because they want to see their family in trouble or not having somewhere to live. I have yet to meet the woman who wants her daughter or granddaughter to live in a ditch, and I do not think I am going to meet that person. They oppose development because they feel that local people have no say—no voice—in what gets built, where it is built, what it looks like or who has the first chance to live there. If we change that, we change the conversation completely.

Another reason why self-build and custom house building driven by customers is so important is that instead of opposition, it is met with local acceptance. I know that the chairs of many parish councils want to see dwellings in their local areas designed by local people for local people, to help local people. Of course, that also has the benefit of helping local house builders—local small and medium-sized enterprises, rather than large combines such as Persimmon, which are interested only in the bonus pool, which will result in 150 top managers getting a £600 million bonus pot, if they do reasonably well; it will be larger than that if they do very well. That business, like the banks, has been propped up by huge amounts—many billions of pounds—of taxpayers’ money through Help to Buy and various other schemes. I would rather see that money going into higher-quality materials, better thermal performance and bigger spaces.

The fundamental question, which we have not been very good at answering so far, is why we have a shortage. People give different answers. We have heard about the lack of planning resource, although we have thousands of unbuilt extant planning permissions, so the reason can hardly be planning by itself. We often hear that there is a lack of land. Only 1.2% of the land area of this country is taken up with houses. The Ministry of Defence alone has 2% of the land area of the UK. There are more golf courses in Surrey than there are houses. The problem is not planning per se; it is a lack of accessible land, a lack of financeable propositions, rather than a lack of finance, and a planning model that is broken.

If we want to correct that, we need to put customers at the heart of that model—people who will live in those dwellings. The way to do that is to separate the business of placemaking—all the things that I am sure the hon. Lady would agree with: creating places that are well served, well designed, well run, well governed and well connected—from the business of building houses on infrastructure that is already in place, with well serviced plots that have all the things that we would expect, including fibre to the premises, water, gas and so on, provided by one of the many hundreds of suppliers. There is a growing market of people out there who are willing to supply the house that people want, rather than what a very small number of large companies are telling people that they want. We need to put the customer at the centre, as in all other successful markets. That is the way that we will solve the housing crisis.

--- Later in debate ---

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)]

I am grateful to catch your eye, Madam Deputy Speaker, and to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes South (Iain Stewart). I will be brief, as the hour is late. I have one or two things, as a chartered surveyor and declaring my Member’s interests as a landowner, that I would like to say about the Bill, which I warmly welcome.

Neighbourhood planning is very important. The problem is that, in my constituency, it is not working. It is not working because I represent two local authorities, one of which has a local plan and the other of which—Cotswold—does not have a local plan, for reasons best known to itself. The result, I say to my hon. Friend the Minister, is that, in The Cotswolds, which is 80% in the area of natural beauty, we have one of the most complicated planning systems anywhere in the country. I represent over 100 towns and villages, and we do not have a single neighbourhood plan adopted, because we do not have a local plan in place. That cannot be acceptable, and I warmly welcome the Secretary of State’s statement today that he will take powers in the Bill to force local authorities, that have been laggards, like mine, to get a local plan in place.

[Mr Bacon]

Does my hon. Friend agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin), who said that it would be a good idea, where the planning authority does not have a local plan, for the neighbourhood plan to become, sui generis, the local plan for that parish?

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

My hon. Friend has taken the words out of my mouth—I would do exactly that. We need to simplify neighbourhood plans, as we have done in this Bill. We need to give them greater weight, as we have done in the Bill.

However, there are problems even where there is a local plan in place. Stroud District Council has a local plan in place. I have a village in the very south of my constituency, which is huge—65 miles long—that has an advanced-stage, very professional neighbourhood plan, and there is also a local plan in place. However, a developer took the district council to appeal over an area right next to the cricket pitch and the village hall. The village was desperate not to develop it, but the decision was overturned on appeal. I would just say to my hon. Friend the Minister that, where there is a local plan and a neighbourhood plan in place, it should be de rigueur that the Planning Inspectorate does not overturn those plans on appeal, except in wholly exceptional circumstances.

I warmly welcome the powers to look at pre-commencement orders. As a chartered surveyor, I have advised, on an unpaid basis, on a very big development in East Anglia. Although it was designated in the local plan from the beginning, the process took five years because of the over-zealousness of the local authority. Think of all the houses that could have been built by now if the over-zealous pre-commencement conditions were not in place.

Finally, I want quickly to move on to compulsory purchase because nobody has said much about that in this debate. I spent many months sitting on the High Speed Rail (London - West Midlands) Bill Select Committee, and I have seen how HS2, as a major public acquiring authority, works. Some of the compulsory acquisitions, of which there were a very large number, were in my view over-zealous. We need to be careful about large acquiring authorities being over-zealous.

I am grateful for the provisions in the Bill on temporary acquisitions, but, equally, the requirement for such acquisitions should be tempered by what the acquiring authority needs to do on them. If it needs to demolish somebody’s house, proper compensation should be paid.

I am concerned about the provision to do away with the 10-year disturbance payment. Where there is an uplift in the value of the land, even subsequently, the person whose land has been acquired gets some benefit from that uplift. I heard what my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State said about the no scheme world. In theory, that is an ideal way of valuing a property—as a chartered surveyor, I know about these things—because it ignores the uplift, or indeed the fall, caused by the scheme itself. The danger is that the acquiring authority will acquire properties too cheaply, because there will be no allowance for any hope value for potential planning permission. Given that a lot of the big schemes are near centres of population, where the land will—if not immediately, at least in due course a few years down the line—get planning permission, it seems to me that the acquiring authority is getting an unnecessary advantage.

However, I warmly welcome the provisions for compulsory purchase whereby interest can be paid and payments in advance can be made. As we saw on the HS2 Bill, all these things are desperately necessary. With those few words, I warmly welcome this Bill.