Planning and Housing Supply

Tony Baldry Excerpts

Thursday 24th October 2013 Westminster Hall

[Sir Tony Baldry (Banbury) (Con)]

I last raised concerns on planning and planning guidance in a debate I initiated in the House on 18 January, which can be found at Official Report column 1218. I will not repeat what I said in that debate, and I will put the full text of what I intend to say this afternoon on my website, www.tonybaldry.co.uk.

In January, I expressed concerns that developers were making opportunist planning applications in the hope of securing planning permission before the adoption and introduction of a new local plan, and I also observed that if localism and neighbourhood planning were to have any meaning, local communities must have the opportunity and a reasonable period of time in which to draw up neighbourhood plans. I drew the House’s attention to four specific planning applications in my constituency, all of which clearly ran counter to Cherwell district council’s local plan.

Following that debate, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government decided to call in all four planning appeals. As a former Planning Minister, I am well aware of how rarely Ministers call in planning applications, so I assumed that the Secretary of State had called in the applications because he wanted to give an indication on the weight that the Planning Inspectorate should give to draft and emerging local plans, a point raised by my right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert).

I assumed that the Secretary of State would also want to give some indication on how the Planning Inspectorate should calculate the five-year housing supply and would take the opportunity to reinforce the Government’s belief in localism and commitment to neighbourhood planning. In the event, the Secretary of State did give a clear indication on the weight that should be given to the draft local plan: absolutely no weight whatsoever, according to the decisions in all those appeals. By allowing all four appeals, the Secretary of State also made it clear that no weight or consideration should be given to localism or neighbourhood planning.

Given that those appeals all ran so clearly counter to the provisions in Cherwell district council’s draft local plan, they not surprisingly provoked a good deal of anger from local residents, local councillors and indeed myself, and given that all the decisions were made by the Secretary of State, they not surprisingly attracted press coverage. In response to journalists’ questions on why the appeals had been allowed, in one article the press spokesperson of the Department for Communities and Local Government observed that the appeals had been allowed because Cherwell had not made

“sufficient progress with their Local Plan”.

I will examine that proposition. A draft local plan is not something that can be whistled up overnight on the back of an envelope; it requires consideration and full and proper consultation with local people and house builders. If the local planning authority gets the local plan wrong, it is liable to judicial review.

One of my many frustrations with the Secretary of State’s decisions is that Cherwell, after careful, widespread and considered consultation, had managed to produce a draft local plan to which there is practically no opposition among local people. I would have understood the Secretary of State’s decision to allow all four recent planning appeals if there was a scintilla of a suggestion that my constituents or Cherwell district council were in any way wanting to frustrate local housing development. The reality is quite the contrary.

Over the past 25 years, Banbury and Bicester have been two of the fastest growing towns in Oxfordshire and everyone accepts and recognises that Banbury and Bicester will continue to develop with new housing growth over the next 20 years. Indeed, I can only assume that Ministers in the Department for Communities and Local Government simply do not talk to each other. That may be a consequence of the fact that, unlike in my day, when Housing Ministers—as the Chief Whip, the right hon. Member for North West Hampshire (Sir George Young), who was here briefly, and I were—were also Planning Ministers, those roles now seem to have been separated.

If Planning Ministers had spoken to Housing Ministers, they would have learnt that Housing Ministers had made numerous visits to my constituency over the past couple of years to support and encourage the numerous housing initiatives in north Oxfordshire, including: one of only two eco-town projects left and being developed, which in due course will deliver approximately 5,000 houses; probably the fastest turnaround to grant planning permission for new housing on a major Government surplus brownfield site on former Ministry of Defence land at Bicester, granting planning permission for 1,900 houses; and one of the largest, if not the largest, proposed self-build housing projects anywhere in the country. Indeed, the Minister’s Department and the Homes and Communities Agency tell me that what we are proposing at Bicester will be the largest self-build scheme by a long way anywhere in the country and will deliver up to 1,900 houses. Cherwell district council is so keen to get house building going in north Oxfordshire that it has offered to buy the surplus MOD land from the Government, so that it can ensure that new house building takes place there as speedily as possible.

This very Monday, Cherwell district council agreed its local plan for submission to the Secretary of State at a meeting of the full council, which endorsed it with a unanimous vote. No responsible local authority could have produced a local plan more quickly. The agreed plan makes robust provision for housing until 2031 and envisages 16,750 new houses being built in Cherwell district during the survey period up to 2021. That is in a robust and deliverable local plan that has been adopted unanimously and without any significant local opposition. Moreover, the House might be interested to know that more than 50% of the planned houses are already being built or are subject to planning applications under active consideration by the district council. Cherwell not only has an agreed local plan, but is doing all that it can to deliver on the provisions of that plan.

The whole point of local plans, however, is to enable local councils and local communities to decide where new housing provision should go. Cherwell’s local plan focuses development growth on the towns of Banbury and Bicester, while avoiding coalescence with villages by introducing new green buffers around the towns. That seems to be a wholly commendable policy aspiration on the part of district councillors.

One of the recent planning appeals decided by the Secretary of State, however, drove a complete coach and horses through that policy aspiration of developing green buffers, by allowing development in an area that the district council had allocated as a green buffer in the local plan. In effect, the Secretary of State has allowed a policy of first come, first served, with planning permission being given to whichever house builders or developers happen to get their planning applications in earliest. This is not plan-led development; this is not central planning policy—this is planning anarchy.

My hon. Friend the Minister will say that the Secretary of State, having granted planning permission, now has no locus on those decisions. In law, that is correct, although Cherwell district council is not surprisingly considering with leading counsel whether there are good grounds to take the Secretary of State to the High Court for judicial review of his decisions. Ministers may no longer be legally accountable for their decisions, but they are politically accountable.

Ministers say that one reason for allowing the appeals was because, at the time the planning applications were made, the district did not have adequate five-year housing supply. One of the main reasons why the district did not have adequate supply, however, was because, on a number of significant sites where developers had been granted planning permission, they had simply not started building work. Local authorities and local people, having granted permission on significant sites, are not to blame if the house builders decide not to build until some time in the future, for whatever commercial reasons of their own.

From what the Secretary of State decided in the four appeals, it appears that the local plan will have no weight until it is actually adopted. It cannot be adopted, however, until after the process of examination in public. District councils such as Cherwell are in no way in control of when the Planning Inspectorate will undertake and complete the continuous improvement plan. Until then, we are all vulnerable to continuing opportunist planning applications by developers who strongly suspect that they will be allowed by the Planning Inspectorate or by the Secretary of State on appeal.

--- Later in debate ---

[Nick Boles]

My hon. Friend makes a good argument, and he has made a good argument generally, which he will have every opportunity to make in the examination in public. He will be able to say why he thinks that the projections done by his local authority are way out of line with any realistic possibility and to challenge those projections. He will be able to require the local council to demonstrate to the inspector the reasons it needs to supply those numbers, which cannot be that it is ambitious or that it is going for growth. If it has no good arguments or good evidence, there will be every reason for him to say that it is a plan to meet not need but ambition and dreams, which is a great and lovely thing but not what plans are meant to do.

A great many of my hon. Friends are concerned because they see that, in the absence of a local plan that has been fully adopted after an examination in public by an inspector, many decisions are being made that local people are not content with and their local authorities have opposed. It will be of no reassurance to them, but it is interesting that there is not a single person who has spoken in this debate who is from an area that has a recently adopted local plan. There is a reason for that: once there is a recently adopted local plan, the authority is then in the driving seat. It may well have gone through a process, as my hon. Friends the Members for Cheltenham, for Tewkesbury and for West Worcestershire (Harriett Baldwin) have—[Interruption.] No, let me finish my sentence. It may well have gone through the process of putting together that plan, which would be painful because it requires someone to carry out the contentious job of identifying the sites. Once the plan is in place, that is the point at which local authority decisions—[Interruption.] I hear lots of rumblings. If I could just finish the argument, I promise to take some more interventions. At that point, the authority will find that appeals are not going against it. I accept that there is a certain amount of scepticism about the figures, but I am giving Members the facts. In 2012-13, the number of planning appeals in which the inspector backed the local council and rejected the appeal was 67%. In 2011-12, it was 68%, and so far this year it has been 67%. In two thirds of all appeals, the inspector is backing local decisions, because the council has made local plans that meet the requirements, so it can be trusted to make its decisions.

[Sir Tony Baldry]

The Minister knows that, for historic reasons, almost half of all local planning authorities in England do not have an up-to-date local plan. They started to get that going with the introduction of the national planning policy framework. I suggest that most of them are doing so with all due speed, as is evidenced by my local authority, which adopted its local plan on Monday. My concern, and the concern of many Members, is that the Minister and the Government are not giving any protection or taking any notice whatever of emerging local plans. As a consequence, they are not giving any consideration to the efforts by local communities and local councillors to ensure that they have robust local plans.

[Nick Boles]

I thank my hon. Friend for that. I understand what he is saying. It is difficult and painful, especially in an area of high demand, to produce that local plan. Many local authorities have been making excellent progress, which is why the number of local plans has risen from about 30% when the national planning policy framework was passed to more than 50% now, and many more will be adopted over the next few months. The difficulty is that there are cases—I am afraid that some of those cases are represented in the Chamber—in which the local plan, despite what the local authority might have said, does not meet the requirements of the Localism Act 2011 and of the national planning policy framework, and does not provide a five-year land supply.

In some cases, that is because local authorities put too many eggs in one basket. They identify one big site to which they attach a lot of hope value, and which might make a fantastic development, but which, in reality, has no immediate prospect of being developed. It therefore cannot count as a site in a local plan. Sometimes, they make estimates that a site will build out over two years, when it clearly will not do so in less than five. It is not surprising, therefore, that the inspector sometimes says, “I’m sorry, but that is not a robust plan, because the sites you have identified will not deliver what you say they will deliver in the established time frame.” Then he asks the local authority to go back and revise the plan. That is happening in many local authorities represented in this Chamber, and is causing some of the frustration.