Planning for the Future

Debate between Sarah Olney and Rupa Huq

Tuesday 15th December 2020 Westminster Hall

[Sarah Olney (Richmond Park) (LD)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the Planning for the Future White Paper.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Charles. There is a great deal to consider in the White Paper, which takes as its starting point the idea that the lack of progress in building the homes we need in this country is largely due to our system of planning controls and approval. I should declare an interest at the outset. I have been happily married to a town planner —a member of the Royal Town Planning Institute—for 18 years, which just goes to show that not all politicians are at loggerheads with town planners. I can see by the number of people who have applied to speak in the debate that the issues raised in the White Paper have generated a great deal of interest. As an MP for an urban constituency that none the less has more than half its square mileage covered by a national nature reserve I believe I have as much insight as anyone into the balances that need to be struck in our planning system between preserving our environment and building more homes.

The White Paper proposes a number of reforms to how planning permissions are granted. Among them are a proposal that development land should be divided up into different zones—growth, renewal and protected—each with different approval rules. That proposal will remove the ability of locally elected councillors to scrutinise individual applications on their merits. Engagement with local communities will instead be only in the development of the local plan. In the White Paper it is envisaged somehow that that approach will engage groups who have previously been excluded from planning decisions, although it does not give details of how that will be achieved.

There are many other contentious proposals in the White Paper and I am confident that each of the points will be fully debated during the sitting, but I want to make two specific points. The world faces a climate emergency—a fact that the Conservative Government have belatedly woken up to. Having spent a decade trying to cut the “green crap”, in the words of their former leader, the Conservatives have recently made encouraging moves towards recognising that the climate crisis is real, our environment is degrading, and it is high time our Government got on and did something about it.

Among the most urgent challenges facing us, not just as a nation but in partnership with other nations across the world, is that of cutting our carbon emissions. I welcome the Government’s commitment to achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050. That commitment was underlined by the Prime Minister’s announcement of his 10-point plan last month. There was also an announcement on renewables in yesterday’s energy White Paper. However, all those announcements are missing the details of the actual plan to get there. Where are the policies? Where are the interim targets? Where is the funding?

The areas that need to be tackled are well known. We need to decarbonise our transport, power generation, agriculture and industry; but above all we need to decarbonise our housing. We need a step change in how our homes are built, how we heat them and how we cook our food. There are two key approaches we need to take to combat carbon emissions. The first is to upgrade existing homes with better insulation and sources of heating and power. The second is to ensure that all new homes are built to net zero carbon standards. That standard was ready to go in 2015 when the Liberal Democrats left government but was rejected by the Conservatives in 2016. The Government are now returning to it, but promise only a 75% decrease in carbon emissions by 2025. A million homes have been built since 2015. In itself that is hardly suggestive of a planning system that impedes development. Those homes have been built without a zero carbon homes standard. All of them will need to be expensively upgraded in the future.

[Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)]

I am grateful to my near neighbour for giving way. She mentioned going back to existing buildings. Is she aware of the Architects’ Journal campaign to retrofit? That could be an idea. Does she share my concern that often design is sacrificed in all this? There was a report last year by the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission, but it feels as if there is a possibility of ushering in the slums of the future. We need to emphasise more retrofitting stuff—and beauty, properly.

[Sarah Olney]

The hon. Lady makes some interesting points. The Liberal Democrats are absolutely committed to supporting policies for retrofitting—or upgrading, as I prefer to call it, as it is a slightly more future-focused look. I believe that the particular value of that policy is that it will benefit our lowest-income families the most. They are the ones who are living in the worst housing and who will benefit most from the reduction in heating bills that will result from, for example, better insulated homes. I am glad that she mentioned building design, because that is precisely the point I am making. If we can design our buildings from the start to achieve a net zero carbon output, those benefits would be there from day one and could be seen both in reduced carbon emissions and reduced heating bills.

The planning White Paper is a missed opportunity to do much more to embed this net zero carbon ambition into our planning policy and thus facilitate the step change that we need to see in our new housing developments. It is only through the constraints applied by the planning system that we can hope to see net zero carbon homes built by private sector housing companies that want to build cheaply and quickly.

The legislative framework already exists if the Government would only use it. The proposed planning reforms should bind together the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 and the Climate Change Act 2008 to confirm that local planning authorities have a clear and specific duty to address climate change in their planning decisions. Carbon reduction would then become a material consideration in the planning process, enabling local authorities to reject applications that would not seek to achieve net zero carbon in the resulting developments, and the law could enable local authorities to go further if they wished by allowing them to put carbon reduction targets in their local plan.

The failure of the White Paper to explore opportunities to achieve net zero carbon in our housing is indicative of the Government’s failure to provide a proper plan to achieve their overall target of net zero carbon by 2050. However, it is not just a climate emergency that we face; we are also confronted by an environmental emergency. The threat to our natural environment has never been greater and the Government must do much more to tackle it. There could not be a better opportunity than a planning White Paper to make proposals about how we balance our need for housing and economic development with our need to protect our green spaces and wildlife.

There is a very real environmental pressure in every part of the country and the Government urgently need to set policy on it and provide a clear lead. However, in proposing a zoned approach to development, they are heading in precisely the wrong direction. By allowing the automatic granting of planning permissions in growth and renewal zones, the planning process will no longer be able to mitigate against environmental damage in those locations or restrict development where environmental damage cannot be mitigated.

I would struggle to think of a single part of my constituency that could be designated as an unrestricted growth zone, where development would need to take no account at all of environmental impact. The proposal to introduce such zones rides roughshod over the many small decisions that can be made by those who know their local areas and can arrive at the best solution for the local population and the local environment.