House of Lords
Sudan
(11 years, 3 months ago)
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Baroness Cox
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what further representations they have made to the Government of Sudan regarding bombardment of civilians and denial of access to humanitarian aid.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, we regularly raise the Government of Sudan’s conduct of military operations and make it clear that the targeting of civilians is wholly unacceptable. We have pressed the Government of Sudan and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North to negotiate a cessation of hostilities and unfettered humanitarian access in South Kordofan and Blue Nile states. We will continue to work with our partners in the UN Security Council and with the African Union to achieve this.
Baroness Cox
My Lords, I thank the Minister for his reply. Is he aware that I have just returned from Blue Nile and South Kordofan, where I witnessed daily aerial bombardments by the Khartoum Government that directly targeted civilians with 500-kilogram and incendiary bombs, destroying villages, markets and schools, inflicting death and injury on women and children, forcing thousands to hide in caves with deadly snakes and to die from hunger and disease with no health care; and causing nearly 200,000 refugees to flee to camps in South Sudan? Will Her Majesty’s Government assist with the provision of life-saving aid to these regions? Our NGO, HART, has used reliable ways of sending food and medical supplies to people dying of hunger, injury and disease. In response to the reluctance of other donors to send life-saving aid, one local doctor emphasised that:
“Deliberately to refrain from sending life-saving aid can be construed as a crime against humanity”.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, I am well aware of the noble Baroness’s recent visit to the region. It is a constant experience for those of us on the government Front Bench to answer Questions from noble Lords who have much more detailed knowledge of what they are asking about than those of us who answer. I thank the noble Baroness also for sending me a report of her findings, which are a stark reminder of the appalling conditions that the people of these regions now face. Somewhere between 750,000 and 1 million people have been displaced. Some of them have crossed the frontier and some are living in caves and elsewhere. The impact on the civilian population of indiscriminate military tactics, food shortages and lack of access to basic services is of course completely unacceptable. The Minister for Africa will attend the AU summit this week. The Parliamentary Under-Secretary at DfID is currently in Sudan. We are making our concerns very clear to the Government of Sudan, as well as urging the AU to lead the way in resolving the issue over the next few months with our full engagement.
Lord Elton
My Lords, the noble Lord said that we were exerting ourselves on the United Nations Security Council. Surely this is a clear case of genocide and should be treated by the Security Council as such. Will the noble Lord undertake to get the Government to urge the Security Council to treat it as such and to set up a committee of inquiry to establish what is going on and to secure free access of humanitarian aid?
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, we have to be very careful before we use the genocide label. There are some very nasty conflicts going on across the new and still not entirely settled border between South Sudan and Sudan. Some aid is going into the region from South Sudan but it is a dangerous area to cross. NGOs that have done so have found themselves in considerable difficulty. We need, therefore, also to work with the Government of Sudan to achieve, as far as we can, an end to the conflict.
Baroness Kinnock of Holyhead
Does the Minister agree that, while Darfur no longer commands the headlines, no one should assume that there is peace and security in that region of Sudan, where the peace is being regularly violated and civilians are attacked on the ground and from the air? Is the Minister aware that the International Criminal Court prosecutor has told the UN Security Council that it has failed to take decisive and tangible action on Darfur and that she is considering further investigations and additional arrest warrants? Will the UK Government support this approach?
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, we are well aware that the situation in Darfur is also unresolved. There are, of course, outbreaks of conflict in Jonglei in South Sudan. Part of the problem is that neither of the Governments in Sudan or in South Sudan entirely control their own territories or necessarily entirely control their own Governments and armed forces. There have been two agreements between the heads of Governments and state of Sudan and South Sudan in the past four months: whether or not they will be accepted and implemented by those who are asked to do so is not entirely clear.
Lord Chidgey
Is my noble friend aware that both Sudan and South Sudan and the AU High-Level Implementation Panel are less than convinced that they made any progress in their negotiations last week in Addis? With the UN now describing the humanitarian status in Abyei as truly appalling, with thousands dying from hunger and disease, will the Government make it clear that without progress the UN will be called on to reconsider Security Council Resolution 2046 for more robust and effective action when it meets on 25 January—this Friday?
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, as I have already said, the two presidents meet and say that they have agreed and that matters will now be implemented—and then too little has happened. We are fully engaged with the Government of Sudan and with the Government of South Sudan and are working with others to bring as much pressure to bear as we can.
Lord Alton of Liverpool
Although the Minister is anxious about using words such as genocide, does he recall that it is exactly year ago when Dr Mukesh Kapila, who is one of our senior officials in Sudan—indeed, he was an official at the United Nations—used precisely that word to describe what is happening in South Kordofan and Abyei? Having listened to my noble friend a few moments ago describing what is happening now, a year later, in a regime headed by Omar al-Bashir, who is a war criminal indicted by the International Criminal Court, surely we should be stepping up the pressure for at least the ICC investigations, to which the noble Lord, Lord Elton, referred earlier, to be extended to cover Abyei, South Kordofan and Blue Nile?
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, we have already stepped up the pressure and are very much engaged. We are working with the African Union and the high-level group, with Mr Mbeki as the co-ordinator, to see what pressure we can bring to bear on all concerned. We are all conscious that this conflict is taking place across the great dividing line between the Arab world and the black African world—a situation that we see also in Mali—and this is an area where we have to engage actively but carefully.
Lord Triesman
My Lords, I would say with respect that I do not think that the Minister is going far enough. The warrant has been around for some time and I can say from first-hand experience that the one thing that President al-Bashir was consistently concerned about was that someone might act on that warrant on any occasion when he was outside Sudan—and he is outside Sudan reasonably frequently. What pressure will we exert at the United Nations to ensure that he is arrested when he is outside Sudan?
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, our first priority at this point has to be to find a way of resolving the interconnected conflicts between Sudan and South Sudan. We also have to be concerned not to drive the current regime in Khartoum further into the arms of Iran. As the noble Lord will know, an Iranian ship has visited Port Sudan and there are various reports of Iranian financial support for the current Sudanese regime. That is our priority at the present moment.
Children: Suicide and Self-harm
Baroness Benjamin
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what action they are taking in the light of the ChildLine report, Saying the Unsayable: What’s Affecting Children in 2012, which highlighted a significant increase in the number of children contacting ChildLine about suicide and self-harm.
Baroness Garden of Frognal
My Lords, helplines provide a vital source of support and advice for children who are suffering abuse, worried about something or concerned about someone they know. For the period 2011-15 the Government have invested £54 million in the Children and Young People’s Improving Access to Psychological Therapies project to transform mental health services for children. For 2011-15 we have awarded the NSPCC a grant worth £11.2 million for investment in ChildLine and the NSPCC helpline.
Baroness Benjamin
My Lords, I thank my noble friend for that encouraging Answer. Over the past 25 years, ChildLine has saved the lives of many children and young people. However, there are serious concerns that, last year, 92% more counselling was given to girls on self-harm than in the previous year, mainly because of depression, bullying and sexual abuse, especially for those who do not comprehend the nature of grooming and blame themselves. Will the Government put greater emphasis on tackling suicide and self-harm, focusing on prevention and the implications for schools, support agencies and professionals working with children who are vulnerable to sexual exploitation, to give these young people hope, confidence and self-esteem?
Baroness Garden of Frognal
My noble friend has raised important issues and I assure her that the Government take them very seriously indeed, including the alarming stories about the grooming of young girls. However, each case of self-harm is the result of a complex mix of problems and there is no quick fix. Departments and services are looking actively at joining up information in order to provide integrated care and personalised services so that an individual’s problems can be tackled together and they are supported in finding a way out of self-destructive patterns of behaviour.
Baroness Massey of Darwen
My Lords, what percentage of schools have access to either a school counsellor or a school nurse? Can the Minister also say whether that percentage has gone up or gone down? I realise that this is a fairly technical question, so if she does not have the figures now, perhaps she will write to me.
Baroness Garden of Frognal
I thank the noble Baroness. In fact, I do not have the statistics in front of me, so I will write to her. However, we do of course recognise the incredibly valuable work of school nurses and others in performing a pastoral role within schools.
The Lord Bishop of Ripon and Leeds
My Lords, from successive reports, has the Minister noted the role of alcohol in the phalanx of causes of self-harm among children? What is being done to reduce the availability of alcohol to teenagers?
Baroness Garden of Frognal
My Lords, the right reverend Prelate will be aware that the question of how one can reduce the incidence of alcohol consumption has been under discussion for some time in other departments. In almost any town or city centre these days one can see young people, particularly young girls, under the influence of alcohol. I would say that broadly it comes under the same scope of giving young people self-respect and trying to encourage a sense of their own worth through improved behaviours delivered by proper education and guidance.
Baroness Walmsley
Is my noble friend aware that the cluster of young suicides in Bridgend, south Wales, was no coincidence? It was preceded by the dissemination of very worrying images of suicide not just on internet sites but also in films and plays? What can the Government do to make theatre and film companies aware of the potential for damage to young, vulnerable and immature minds when these dark subjects are explored, so that it is done responsibly, if at all?
Baroness Garden of Frognal
My noble friend raises wider issues in this debate, which are of course entirely relevant but must always be balanced with freedom of speech and of information. That is a delicate balance to strike. Ministers from three departments—the Home Office, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and the Department for Education—are working with the media and with the internet industry, particularly through the UK Council for Child Internet Safety, to try to find ways of keeping children safe online. The Department of Health is also involved in that. The broader debate about further media is one that could be very profitably taken up within that.
Lord Laming
My Lords, can the Minister assure the House that the Government will do all they can to ensure that attempted suicide, or suspected self-harm, is taken seriously by all the services and ensure that the proper range of counselling is provided for these young people at a critical stage in their lives?
Baroness Garden of Frognal
The noble Lord raises a very important point. It is increasingly vital that the different departments and services that work with children join up the information so that a holistic picture of a vulnerable child can be built up, and to avoid information slipping through the net, as has happened in one or two high-profile cases.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford
My Lords, we know that speedy access to psychological and therapeutic services for distressed children is extremely difficult in some areas, and likely to get worse when responsibility for commissioning children’s health services is broken up between different organisations, as will happen under the Government’s health service reorganisation. Can the Minister tell the House which organisation, in future, will be responsible for commissioning and improving psychological and therapeutic services for children?
Baroness Garden of Frognal
Again, I am afraid that I cannot directly answer the noble Baroness. However, I know that there is an increasing amount of joined-up discussion between departments to try to ensure that such issues are covered, and I will of course write to her if I can get a direct answer. I know that the Chief Medical Officer has put a high priority on well-being, particularly among children and young people. It will be a cross-departmental responsibility to ensure that happens.
Baroness Greengross
My Lords, I have watched the work of ChildLine with great interest and admiration over the years. It has been quite remarkable in changing the attitudes and sensitivities that children face when they are abused. I am also delighted that the founder of ChildLine, Esther Rantzen, has now started another line, called the Silver Line, for abused or damaged older people. Can the Minister assure us that this will be taken seriously and the same level of encouragement and support given to it in the future as has been given, quite rightly, to ChildLine?
Baroness Garden of Frognal
I can reassure the noble Baroness that abuse of any vulnerable person, whether a child or an adult, is taken very seriously by the Government and any measures that are proposed to counteract it will be supported. As she says, ChildLine has developed its services to meet the needs of children today. One of the reasons why the number of children approaching it has increased is that there is now an online facility, and many children find it easier or more acceptable to express their troubles online than over a telephone. That is providing a very helpful and vital service to vulnerable children.
Bank of England
(11 years, 3 months ago)
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Lord Barnett
To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they agree with Mark Carney, the new Governor of the Bank of England, that the Bank’s target should be changed from inflation to nominal gross domestic product.
Lord Newby
My Lords, the Chancellor set the remit for the Monetary Policy Committee at Budget 2012 to target inflation at 2%, as measured by the 12-month increase in the consumer prices index. The Government have no plans to change the inflation-targeting framework.
Lord Barnett
That was not really an Answer to my Question. I understand what is in the current Monetary Policy Committee target and that it has not changed. However, is the Minister aware that the ONS has recently found that GDP—real GDP, that is—was 3% less than it was before the recession and that growth, as most forecasters are saying, is not likely to be very good? So at least it would be helpful—if anybody can do anything about it—if the man whom the Prime Minister described as the best in the world was given these additional powers. Does this mean that if the Governor took those powers to himself, the Chancellor would override them with the current powers that he has?
Lord Newby
My Lords, the Question that has been raised, about whether to change the inflation target, is an important one. Before any change is made, however, the question that we have to answer conclusively is: what could the MPC do under that target that it cannot do now? A debate is currently going on that is academic in part and in which all the commentators are involved. For the time being, however, we see no reason to change the current framework.
Lord Bilimoria
My Lords, the Government should be congratulated on appointing Mark Carney and for the first time bringing in somebody from outside the United Kingdom to serve as Governor of the Bank of England. It shows not only what an open country and economy we are but that we can get a fresh input of ideas—such as the suggestion that we should look at GDP as a target as well as interest rates. I think that the noble Lord, Lord Barnett, probably meant to ask whether the Bank of England should look at inflation targeting as well as targeting GDP—as the Fed in America always has—to help growth in the economy.
Lord Newby
My Lords, I am extremely grateful to the noble Lord. The House will be aware that under the Bank of England Act the MPC has to meet, or aim to meet, an inflation target. Subject to that, it has to aim to promote the Government’s broader economic objectives. It is worth pointing out that in the past 20 years, the vast bulk of which have been conducted under the current regime, we have had an inflation target of 2%, inflation having been one of the main economic problems facing this country over recent decades. Against a target of 2%, the outturn has been 2.1%, so it has been a pretty effective target.
Lord Peston
My Lords, would the Minister care to reflect on the irony of what he and government spokesmen are generally saying? The Europhobes on the government Benches are terribly upset with the idea that Brussels wants to get, and is getting, too involved in the determination of our economic policy, but is not our economic policy being driven by a quite different group—namely the credit rating agencies, which have no democratic legitimacy whatever and whose operations would not bear the slightest scrutiny if ever we were able to examine them properly? Is it not about time that the Government put the needs of our economy first and not the needs of the credit rating agencies?
Lord Newby
My Lords, the Government do not put the needs of the credit rating agencies first. The Government are seeking to promote growth within a stable framework while reducing the deficit. We do not know what the credit rating agencies are going to do, but I can assure the noble Lord that people in the Treasury are not spending every night awake worrying about them. They are expending their efforts on promoting growth on the basis of a reducing budget deficit and a credible long-term macroeconomic policy.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
My Lords, is it not obvious to everyone that inflation targeting has failed? The Bank of England has consistently failed to meet its inflation targets and we have zero growth in the economy. Would it not be sensible for the Government to listen to Mr Carney’s suggestions?
Lord Newby
My Lords, the Government will listen to Mr Carney’s suggestions. Mr Carney has said that he will not comment on the position in the UK until he arrives. His key speech on this issue was made in February last year before he was appointed. In that speech, he said among other things that,
“if nominal GDP targeting is not fully understood or credible, it can, in fact, be destabilizing”.
There is no quick and easy answer—
Lord Newby
There is no quick and easy answer to dealing with these issues, but the Government will listen very carefully to what Mr Carney says when he arrives.
Lord Davies of Oldham
My Lords, is it not abundantly clear that monetary policy can only do so much and that the whole question of the rate of inflation is marginal to our position in terms of the need for growth in the economy, as the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, indicated? When will the Government realise that, as we tremble not on our fiscal cliff but on the brink of the possibility of a third recession, it is necessary to address the real economy and abolish plan A?
Lord Newby
My Lords, I do not think that people struggling to make ends meet think that inflation is irrelevant. Keeping inflation down is a central aim of government policy. In terms of what is happening in the broader economy, I remind the noble Lord that the CBI industrial trends survey published today echoes the views of the British Chambers of Commerce quarterly economic survey published a couple of weeks ago: namely, that there is an improvement in confidence; that orders are increasing; and that employment expectations are improving. The noble Lord should not overdo the doom and gloom.
Helicopter Flights: Central London
(11 years, 3 months ago)
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Lord Faulkner of Worcester
To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they will review the extent of helicopter flights over central London.
Earl Attlee
My Lords, helicopter operations in central London are strictly controlled, and last week’s accident was the first fatal helicopter accident in London since civil aviation records began in 1976. We are waiting for the Air Accidents Investigation Branch to complete its investigation to ensure that the reasons for the accident are understood before we consider whether any further measures are necessary. There is no reason to believe that helicopter operations over London are unsafe.
Lord Faulkner of Worcester
My Lords, the safety record of helicopter flying in London has indeed been very good, as the Minister said, but does he not agree that the number of new high-rise buildings around Vauxhall Cross has made the approach to Battersea heliport increasingly hazardous? Can he give an assurance that the inquiry into last week’s accident, which could have been so much worse, will include consideration of whether that heliport should continue to operate?
Earl Attlee
My Lords, it is not for me to prejudge the result of the investigation or to tell the Air Accidents Investigation Branch how it should conduct its operation, as I am sure the noble Lord understands. The Civil Aviation Authority is closely involved in the planning process, and it is unlikely that planning permission would be granted for a high building in the face of opposition from the Civil Aviation Authority.
Lord Glenarthur
My Lords, I declare an interest as president of the British Helicopter Association, which is the trade association for the helicopter industry. Does my noble friend agree that there should be no knee-jerk reaction to this tragic accident? We need to understand the facts. These are always complex, and the Air Accidents Investigation Branch will be able to deduce what all the reasons were. Does my noble friend also accept that helicopter flying into and over London provides health support through the work of the Helicopter Emergency Medical Service, security through police helicopters and some of the military, and also contributes to the wealth of the capital through general helicopter traffic in support of business?
Earl Attlee
My Lords, I agree with everything that my noble friend has said. In addition, I point out that the Civil Aviation Authority considered the operation of helicopters over London in 2005, and we are currently operating under the regime it recommended.
Lord Berkeley
Are not these helicopters known to everyone as being incredibly noisy? Surely, apart from the police and health helicopters, there is no argument for having a commercial heliport in central London. There is a perfectly good public transport service within London. Cannot these very important people use airports instead?
Earl Attlee
My Lords, we are not aware of any horrendous problem with helicopter noise, although I have answered an Oral Question in your Lordships’ House about it. The number of helicopter flights over London has almost halved over the past few years, and the level of noise disturbance has reduced accordingly—although, of course, the economic situation may be impacting on that. It is also clear that helicopters benefit the city both by supporting the economy and by providing essential support to the emergency services.
Lord Broers
My Lords, can the Minister tell us how often the charts are updated and whether pilots are tested for their knowledge of the charts? That building has been there only a few months. I declare an interest in that I live right next to it. I have just been waiting for this to happen.
Earl Attlee
My Lords, first, I am confident that the charts are up to date. Secondly, when any new structure —or a very tall crane—is put in place, if it is necessary aviators are warned about it through a well understood mechanism.
Baroness Walmsley
My Lords, is my noble friend the Minister aware that the planning application for the very tall tower into whose crane the helicopter may have crashed was turned down by Lambeth Council following massive objection from local residents? It was then passed by the Planning Inspectorate. I declare an interest as a local resident. Do the Government think that the criteria used by the Planning Inspectorate should take more account of local objections before overturning local authorities’ planning decisions, and does not this disaster demonstrate that local people usually know what they are talking about?
Earl Attlee
My Lords, when we have a disaster such as this we need to look at the technical aspects and listen to the advice from the Air Accidents Investigation Branch and the Civil Aviation Authority. As to the planning system, that is a rather different question; we have debated planning quite a lot recently in your Lordships’ House.
Lord Davies of Oldham
My Lords, one feature of the response to the crash was the speed and efficiency with which the emergency services dealt with the accident. Is the Minister aware that the fire appliance that arrived there early came from Clapham fire station, which, under the mayor’s proposals, is due for closure? Will the inquiry examine that point? Does not this crash indicate how dangerous it is to cut back on our essential emergency services?
Earl Attlee
My Lords, it is for the Air Accidents Investigation Branch to choose whether or not to comment on this matter. Provision of fire cover in London is a matter for the mayor under the legislation introduced by the party opposite.
Lord Hamilton of Epsom
Does my noble friend accept that many of the helicopter flights over London are carried out by the police when they carry out surveillance? It is an astronomically expensive way of doing it. Have the Government considered using drones for this activity?
Earl Attlee
My Lords, I am not aware of whether the police have considered using drones; that is a matter for them. I did ask whether balloons could be used rather than helicopters. The difficulties are, first, that balloons are more vulnerable to wind conditions and, secondly, that the helicopter needs to be able to manoeuvre over a street to get a good view of it. The advice I received is that a helicopter is the ideal way to undertake surveillance operations.
Welfare Benefits Up-rating Bill
Partnerships (Prosecution) (Scotland) Bill [HL]
The Chairman of Committees
That, as proposed by the Committee of Selection, the following Lords be appointed to the Special Public Bill Committee on the Partnerships (Prosecution) (Scotland) Bill [HL]:
E Attlee, L Bates, L Browne of Ladyton, L Cullen of Whitekirk (Chairman), V Hanworth, B Liddell of Coatdyke, E Lindsay, L McAvoy, D Montrose, L Stephen, L Wallace of Tankerness.
That the Committee have power to send for persons, papers and records;
That the Committee have power to adjourn from place to place within the United Kingdom;
That the evidence taken by the Committee shall, if the Committee so wishes, be published.
Arrangement of Business
Baroness Anelay of St Johns
My Lords, my noble friend Lord Astor is shortly to repeat a UQ from another place under our new procedure, which was approved by the House. It is only the second day on which it has occurred; it is an experiment until the springtime. I am told by those who participated last time that it worked very well. That may have something to do with the fact that a great number of the Opposition managed to get their questions in.
The procedure is as follows: my noble friend Lord Astor will repeat the Statement made by a Minister in another place and it is only after he has sat down that a 10-minute period is started by the clerks. In that period, we operate as if it is an Oral Question so questions are put to the Minister. When this was agreed by the House, the expectation, the House said, was that the first question may normally be asked by a member of the opposition Front Bench. That was observed very well last time round.
Of course, on occasions such as today, when a Minister for Defence will be carrying out this procedure, sadly, it may be that we must mark the death of those who fight on behalf of their country. I am sure that if that is indeed the case today, as I suspect, colleagues will do as we always wish to do: to remain seated until my noble friend has read out the names of the fallen.
Armed Forces: Redundancies
(11 years, 3 months ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Defence (Lord Astor of Hever)
My Lords, first, I am sure that the whole House will wish to join me in paying tribute to Kingsman David Robert Shaw of 1st Battalion The Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment, who died in the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham on Wednesday 16 January 2013 from wounds received in Afghanistan on Monday 14 January, and Sapper Richard Reginald Walker of 28 Engineer Regiment, attached to 21 Engineer Regiment, who was killed in Afghanistan on Monday 7 January. My thoughts are also with the wounded and I pay tribute to the courage and fortitude with which they face their rehabilitation.
In reply to the Unstarred Question asked in the other place today, my honourable friend Mark Francois said:
“As the House will be aware, the Government announced the process and outline timetable for the Armed Forces redundancy programme on 1 March last year, the need for the programme being born out of the Strategic Security and Defence Review and subsequent activity to balance defence books. While in an ideal world we would not need to run a redundancy programme, defence, like all areas of government, must live within its means.
Today’s announcement represents the start of the third tranche of that programme and affects only Army personnel. Announcements about who has been selected will be made on 18 June this year. Applicants will then be given six months’ notice and non-applicants 12 months’ notice before they leave the service. While we need to make up to 5,300 Army personnel redundant, the programme will not adversely affect operations in Afghanistan. As with previous tranches, there are a number of important exclusions from the programme. Critically, those preparing for, deployed on or recovering from operations on 18 June will be exempt from the tranche. Similarly, those personnel who are below the necessary medical standard for continued service will be ineligible for redundancy and, if necessary, will be discharged through the standard medical process.
The House will wish to note that because of the drawdown in Afghanistan that we have already announced, a final decision on those who will be deploying there in autumn this year will not be made until April. As a result, the final decision on personnel who are excluded as a result of preparing for operations will not be made until then.
We expect, at this stage, there to be a further tranche of redundancy in 2014. This would likely affect Army personnel and a small number of medical and dental officers from the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force.
Throughout the process, the Army will seek to maximise the number of applicants. At the same time, we have cut back on recruiting as far as it is safe to do so but, as the House will recognise, the services are recruited from the bottom up, and therefore a steady inflow of Army recruits will continue to be required.
It is worth highlighting at this stage that the majority of those leaving the services as a result of tranches one and two have enjoyed significant success in moving to civilian jobs. All those who have been made redundant, whether applicants or non-applicants, will enjoy the benefits of the career transition programme. This includes career transition workshops; up to 35 days of paid resettlement training; and financial support, education and training up to 10 years after leaving. This programme has proved very successful in assisting service leavers to find work outside the Armed Forces. Historically, 93% of those who look for work are in full-time employment within six months of leaving, rising to 97% after 12 months. To that end, 91% of tranche one applicants—that is over 1,500 people—have already found employment, this being testament to, and a reflection of, the training and quality that we as a nation continue to find in our service personnel”.
Lord Rosser
My Lords, I express our sincere condolences to the families and friends of the two brave members of our Armed Forces who have lost their lives as a result of action in Afghanistan in the service of our country.
I thank the Minister for repeating as a Statement the Answer given in response to the Urgent Question asked in the other place on Armed Forces redundancies. With these further redundancies, how will the Government ensure that the specialist skills that will be required more than ever in future in, for example, North Africa, in intelligence capability and foreign languages, as well as in our Special Forces, are retained, not lost in the continuing reduction in the size of our Armed Forces?
Secondly, the reduction in the size of our Regular Army also assumes an increase in the size of our Reserve Forces. That will require incentives for employers to employ and retain reservists and cast-iron guarantees for reservists that they will not be discriminated against in their employment. What assurances can the Minister give on these two points, without which achieving the required strength of our Reserve Forces is likely to prove very difficult?
Lord Astor of Hever
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for his comments at the beginning of his speech. He asked how we ensure that we retain the skills that we need. There are certain pinch-point skills that will be excluded from the redundancies. Off the top of my head, they are the intelligence corps, a certain number of Royal Engineers, particularly IEDs, language skills, which the noble Lord mentioned, and, of course, the Special Forces, which we do not talk about. They will be excluded.
Turning to reservists, as the noble Lord knows—we had a debate on this subject the other day—we expect to have a White Paper on this issue in the spring. We spent a lot of time debating this issue. This is a subject in which I personally take a great deal of interest. I have been involved with the reserves for a number of years, and I am confident that we can do everything possible to get up to the number we want, which is 20,000 by 2018.
Lord Palmer of Childs Hill
My Lords, from these Benches, I join the commiserations expressed by my noble friend. In the short time available, perhaps I may say that the Government are rightly proud of getting the inherited defence budget in balance, but unfortunately events take place and nothing has more events than defence. Does the Minister not think that the Prime Minister’s Statement yesterday about the willingness to use force in Mali and other places shows that you cannot use a budgeting system on defence in quite the same way that you can in other departments because events take place that need action or no action? With a force depleted to 82,000 personnel, the headlines today of what we are probably going to do in Mali might not be possible in two years’ time.
Lord Astor of Hever
My Lords, my noble friend makes a very good point. We prepare for events, and we are confident that we can handle most things that are thrown at us. Certainly, the National Security Council is meeting as we speak and considering the situation in Mali. I am confident that we can prepare for any eventuality.
Lord West of Spithead
My Lords, did the National Security Council review the strategic defence and security review 2010 in the light of the Arab awakening, the Libya crisis et cetera? If it did, did it then agree that there should be a further £1.3 billion cut in the defence budget, which is, in fact, what has happened?
Lord Astor of Hever
My Lords, it is my understanding that the National Security Council meets on a very regular basis and considers every eventuality, but it is not for it to decide the cuts. They are a matter for the Treasury.
Lord Dannatt
My Lords, I know that Members on the Cross Benches would like to be associated with the message of condolence to the families who have lost loved ones in recent operations. With regard to the matter in hand, does the Minister accept that everything practical and affordable is being done to ease the transition of those who are going to be made redundant, either voluntarily or compulsorily, under this round?
Does he also accept that there is a need, to which other noble Lords have already alluded, to keep current world events under close review in the forthcoming comprehensive spending reviews and the work towards the next defence review? If the world does not looks as safe in the next five, 10 or 15 years as one might perhaps hope, is there not a need for the numbers in our Armed Forces, particularly in our land forces, to be kept under review? Must not the possibility of increased spending in defence, maybe from somewhere else across government, be a possibility and not always the downward effect that we seem to see?
Lord Astor of Hever
My Lords, as I said earlier, the National Security Council is meeting at this moment. It will obviously be considering world events as they evolve. We are confident that we have the members of Armed Forces to deal with any situation. As the noble Lord knows, we are reducing the numbers next year, coming back from Afghanistan. We have plenty of members of the Armed Forces to deal with these eventualities.
Lord Davies of Stamford
My Lords, the Government’s record in this area is not a good one. Within a few months of getting rid of our carrier strike capability, we found ourselves regretting the absence of a carrier in the Libyan operation and were forced to spend even more money hiring an Italian naval base and providing in-flight refuelling which we would not otherwise have needed. In the present state of affairs, is there not all too great a chance that we might soon regret this hasty decision to reduce our Army, which was taken in rather different circumstances a couple of years ago?
Lord Astor of Hever
My Lords, I am sorry to hear that from the noble Lord. These redundancies are not new, and were part of the difficult decisions that had to be made to tackle the multi-million pound defence deficit which we inherited from the previous Government.
Lord King of Bridgwater
My Lords, does my noble friend agree that the challenge faced by the Ministry of Defence and the Army now is whether they can produce the number of reservists who are to take the place of those made redundant from the regular Army? That will need to be kept under review.
Is not the lesson of current events—not least in Mali and perhaps leaking over into Algeria—and of events in Afghanistan that there is definitely a time limit for the use of foreign troops in other people’s countries? The real challenge here is to make sure that we can train local military competence, whether in west Africa or elsewhere. Increasingly, they are the people who want a more ordered and stable world. The local people will increasingly have to be responsible for their own defence.
Lord Astor of Hever
My Lords, on the first part of my noble friend’s question about reservists, we are confident that we can get up to the number of 30,000, which is our ambition. When my noble friend was Secretary of State, the numbers were about 72,000, of which 30,000 is less than half.
My noble friend makes a good point on training. Much more of the emphasis of our Armed Forces in future will be on training and mentoring our allies throughout the world.
Baroness Falkner of Margravine
My Lords, in the light of previous questions about the funding of unanticipated deployments—action is potentially necessary in Mali— can my noble friend confirm to the House that such eventualities are dealt with through funding from Treasury reserves and not from the MoD’s assessed budget? If he does not have the answer here, can he please write to me to explain?
Lord Astor of Hever
My Lords, I will certainly write to my noble friend on this issue. It is my understanding that most of these events are covered by the Treasury reserves.
Lord Stirrup
My Lords, the Minister has said that the Armed Forces should have sufficient numbers to deal with most eventualities in future. Those numbers were set out as part of Future Force 2020 in the defence review. Will the Minister reconfirm to the House that, as the Prime Minister stated when he announced the outcome of the review, it would only be viable if we had real-terms increases in defence expenditure from 2015 onwards? Without those real-terms increases, Future Force 2020 will not be achievable.
Lord Astor of Hever
My Lords, I can confirm to the noble and gallant Lord that that is indeed what the Prime Minister said. I cannot envisage the outcome of the next SDSR, which will be after the next election, but I very much hope that that is what will happen.
Growth and Infrastructure Bill
Lord Adonis
My Lords, on the Motion to go into Committee, perhaps I may raise a concern of which I have given the Minister notice. At Second Reading, the noble Baroness undertook to send noble Lords important material relating to the proposed shares-for-rights scheme in Clause 27. In particular, she said that we would be sent the draft guidance for decision-makers in DWP in respect of benefits claimants who decline to accept jobs with no rights and who stand to lose their benefits in consequence.
On 8 January, at col. 109 of the Official Report, I took the noble Baroness to say that we would be able to discuss the guidance in Committee because we cannot properly discuss Clause 27 without it. We are now in Committee and noble Lords have heard nothing from the noble Baroness either about the DWP guidance or in reply to my letter of 9 January, in which I set out a number of other essential factual matters in respect of Clause 27 on which we need information for our examination in Committee. The noble Baroness has not even acknowledged my letter, still less replied to it. She is the last person to be disrespectful to the House, so perhaps she could tell us what is going on.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Communities and Local Government (Baroness Hanham)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for giving me notice that he was going to raise this point. I also apologise that he has not received a reply to his letter of 9 January. Unfortunately, it was forwarded from my office to BIS, which is responsible for this clause, and I understand that my noble friend Lord Younger is in the process of replying now. I admit that the discourtesy is mine for not having told the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, that, and I apologise.
Of course, we will not be discussing Clause 27 very soon. I suspect that it will be towards the end of Committee. Therefore, I probably just about fulfilled my obligation when I said that I thought we would be able to discuss it in Committee. Clearly, we will not be able to do so today. The noble Lord has not had that information. However, also clearly, Clause 27 will not be debated today. Perhaps I may stick to the assurance that I gave him at Second Reading when I said that by the time,
“we reach Committee stage, we will be able to deal with some of the more detailed points”.—[Official Report, 8/1/13; col. 109.]
I stand by that.
Lord Adonis
Clarity is very important on this matter. Will the noble Baroness undertake that the DWP guidance for decision-makers in respect of those who stand to lose their benefit will be available to us by the time we get to our discussions on Clause 27?
Baroness Hanham
My Lords, I am not going to make a firm promise. As I have said, I will do my best to ensure that it is. It is not entirely in my hands, but I understand the point and I will make sure that we should be in a position to be able to do it.
Lord Adonis
I am sorry to take the time of the House again but it is only right that I give the noble Baroness notice that there will be very significant concern on the part of noble Lords across all parts of the House if this absolutely vital information is not available to the House by the time we come to discuss the clause to which it refers.
“(za) the local planning authority has been given 18 months prior notice by the Secretary of State ahead of their designation for the purposes of this section;”
Lord Tope
My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendment 32 in the name of my noble friend Lord Greaves and to which I have added my name. Clause 1 gives the power to the Secretary of State to designate a local planning authority as deemed to be failing, thus enabling applicants for major projects to apply direct to the Planning Inspectorate should they so desire. I said at Second Reading, and I will say again, that I am very grateful to Ministers in the other place for the assurances that they have given for the criteria that have been proposed and for the reassurance that the clause is not quite as bad as it seems. But I still say that it is directly contrary to the spirit of localism, which we have spent many happy hours discussing in this House.
I understand that the Government are determined to keep the clause in the Bill and, of course, I respect that. The Local Government Association has described it as using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. I am bound to say that I am inclined to agree with that description. However, if we are to have the clause, it is the role and duty of this House to make it as workable as it can be—some might say, to make it as harmless as it can be. The Government have said that they wish to keep the clause as a deterrent. I would feel happier if we could approach this on the basis of keeping it as an incentive. The latter approach calls for a different state of mind. The Government are adopting a sort of target-led approach whereby an authority that does not meet certain criteria will be designated. I think we all accept that there have been, are, and sadly probably always will be some local planning authorities that do not perform as well as they should. There is a different debate to be had about exactly what we mean by performance and how we measure it, but let us start from that basis.
I believe that the best way to improve a poorly performing authority with regard to planning as to most other things is first and foremost through what is normally called sector-led improvement to enable it to improve itself, not to punish it in some way by taking away its authority. The purpose of Amendment 1 is to require the Secretary of State to give 18 months’ notice of designation. That 18 months would allow the local authority to look at how it can improve its performance and then to be judged on the way in which it improves, not on the way in which it has performed in the past.
I am aware that Amendment 32, to which I have given my support, suggests a period of 12 months rather than 18 months. At this stage I do not want to get too hung up on the difference between 18 months and 12 months. The important principle with this amendment is that the Secretary of State should give a lengthy period of notice to enable a local authority to improve itself, helped and assisted by other local authorities and, indeed, by the Local Government Association. The Local Government Association thinks that 18 months is probably a more appropriate period, primarily because it enables better and more realistic data collection so that we can see the direction of travel that that authority is taking. Is it gradually improving? If it is improving over that period, designating it would be a considerable disincentive, not an incentive. If it is making no improvement, or indeed even getting worse, that is more justification for the designation.
A poorly performing local planning authority may well need to recruit better planning officers and better staff to enable it to improve its performance. However, it takes considerable time to recruit and embed those staff and for the improvements that we hope they can bring about to work and be seen. It takes time, of course, to engage effectively with other helpful authorities or outside sources in order to improve. For all those reasons, the Local Government Association thinks that an 18-month period is more appropriate. However, the important point is that we have a lengthy enough period—be it a year or 18 months—to enable a local planning authority to improve itself before the imposition of the final, and frankly draconian, measure of designating and taking away its right, and therefore the right of the local people, effectively to decide their own major planning applications. I beg to move.
Lord McKenzie of Luton
My Lords, we have Amendments 36 and 37 in this group, which I shall come to in a moment. If I may respond directly to the noble Lord, Lord Tope, he said that the Bill is not as bad as it seems. We may part company on that proposition but I think that we share company in wanting to mitigate its worst effects, if we cannot get rid of it in its entirety.
As regards Amendment 1 and the 18 months’ prior notice, certainly the thrust of this amendment is one which we can support, although it begs the question of the criteria for designation. However, I know that we are going to come to that point in due course.
As proposed in the consultation document, a designation would follow automatically from the criteria. The first is planned for October 2013, based on performance data for 2011-12 and 2012-13. On this basis, an 18-month lead time would mean designation in January or April 2015—not necessarily a bad thing if the authority has to wait that long. Obviously, the 18-month notice would give it time to improve its performance, but there would be only one more year of performance data. Some process of representation on improvements is needed, and we have amendments to cover this.
Amendment 36 requires the Secretary of State to,
“serve a notice of intention to designate”—
a parallel proposition—and for the local authority in question to have the chance to make representations as to,
“why designation would be inappropriate”.
We should be clear that our preference would be for the clause not to proceed at all but, if it does, it has to have a range of necessary safeguards built in.
It is the Government’s expressed intention that designation will be automatic following publication of the statistics relating to speed of determination and levels of successful appeals, although there will be an opportunity in year one to correct gaps or errors in the existing data. It is accepted that this would have the merit—if one could call it that—of providing information to authorities on how close they were to being designated, but this approach would not impact all authorities equally, which is why we consider that the opportunity to make representations should be allowed. This might be particularly important for smaller districts where the numbers of applications for major developments might be quite small. Indeed, we received some data a short while before Committee today. I do not know if all noble Lords received it, but some authorities in the year to March 2012 received as few as two major applications to deal with. Others received more than 160. Therefore, this process will not impact on all authorities equally. One or two applications might have a significant impact on an individual authority’s metrics and the circumstances may be outside its control. The delay may be down to the applicant or consultees; indeed, if problematic applications are in the pipeline, someone might try to game the system to push an authority towards designation. The delay might also be down to community issues. Applications relating to Gypsy and Traveller sites seldom go through on the nod.
Amendment 37 requires the Secretary of State to bring forward an improvement programme before designation can take place. This is an alternative formulation to that in the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Tope. The programme could be a sector-led improvement or a combination of processes to ensure that local authorities have the opportunity to improve. However, what we must be clear about is that the clause cannot stand in its current formulation, and we need, one way or another, a range of the sort of protections that are dealt with in these amendments.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, this is the first day of Committee and a new stage; according to the rules, I therefore need to repeat the declarations of interests that I made at Second Reading. I remind the House of my membership of a local planning authority and of two development management committees. I am also a vice-president of the LGA.
I have tabled Amendment 32, to which my noble friend Lord Tope was good enough to put his name, whereby if the Government wish to designate an authority they should set out a notice of intention to do so. There is agreement across the amendments in the group that this is a good idea. I have tried to flesh out the broad principle set out in the lead amendment and some others. My amendment states:
“Before designating an authority under this section, the Secretary of State must serve a notice of intention to designate … The notice must … specify the reasons for serving the notice, all of which must have regard to the criteria that the Secretary of State has published”.
It should,
“specify those actions by the authority which the Secretary of State believes are necessary to satisfy the reasons for serving the notice; and … give the authority a period of twelve months in which to take the specified actions”.
Whether the period should be 12 months is debatable but I took the view that the Government would not want it to be too long. The amendment continues:
“At the end of the twelve month period, the Secretary of State must publish a report which sets out the extent to which the reasons for serving the notice still apply or no longer apply”.
At that stage, the Secretary of State may confirm the designation and take over relevant planning applications or withdraw the designation because, in his opinion, the authority has pulled its socks up, or he may give the authority another six months in which to do so.
It seems to me that this whole process, for the first time, takes away planning powers from local planning authorities and vests them in the person of the Secretary of State on the basis of alleged or perceived poor performance by a local planning authority. This is quite new and the process needs to be absolutely transparent. People need to understand why the decision is being made and how the situation can be remedied.
Like other noble Lords, I would much prefer this provision to be taken out of the Bill. However, if it is going to be there, there needs to be a clear choice between a degree of perhaps heavy-handed, detailed intervention in the running of an authority to sort out the problem and the draconian and complex process of an almost immediate central takeover of some of the development management functions of that authority. Surely the first of those must be the way forward. However few of these authorities there may be, the Government are proposing to nationalise some of their planning functions. It is interesting that a Government with a majority of Conservatives are sometimes so interested in nationalising things which up until now have taken place at a local level.
The amendment puts forward a gentle nutcracker, not a sledgehammer, if there is a nut to be cracked, and I hope that something along these lines will find favour with the Government. In particular, even if they do not want to put something on the face of the Bill, I hope that they will give very clear commitments along the lines of the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie of Luton, so as at least to give authorities the right to defend themselves and to explain what they can do, and also to give them a period of time in which to improve their performance so that we do not have to go through this rather draconian and undesirable rigmarole of the Planning Inspectorate—bless them—taking over detailed local planning functions.
Lord Beecham
My Lords, I also declare interests as an honorary vice-president of the Local Government Association and a member of Newcastle City Council. During my service on that local authority, I was leader of the council for some 17 years and was heavily involved in major development decisions. Subsequently, I was chair of the development committee and, after that, I served as a member of the development control sub-committee. Therefore, I have some working knowledge of the role of the local authority in planning.
I join my noble friend Lord McKenzie in broadly supporting this group of amendments as a way of ameliorating what seems to me a very badly drafted Bill. It would be preferable if the Government would abandon this whole proposal. I say that because there are many questions around the reasoning behind the Bill.
In the impact assessment there is reference to the financing costs to the development industry of the present planning system, which one Professor Ball estimates at £1 billion a year in respect of delays in planning permission and another £1 billion for, as he puts it, holding assets for which at the moment development does not seem to be possible. That seems to ignore completely the outstanding permissions—as I recall, some 400,000—which have not been activated by that industry. Therefore, it seems that the professor has a somewhat skewed view. Even if he were right, would the Minister be able to indicate what the impact of these proposals would be on the figures that the professor has produced, on which the Government seek to rely in the impact assessment? What would be the reduction from the £1 billion figure, or indeed the £2 billion figure, if one takes into account land which developers do not seem able to bring forward?
Lord Jenkin of Roding
My Lords, I am grateful to my successor as Secretary of State for the Environment a good many years ago for giving way.
I was unable to speak at Second Reading because I could not be here, but I declare an interest as a vice-president of the Local Government Association and a joint president of London Councils. I have considered whether to make these remarks, which will have a somewhat different tone from what we have heard so far, now or leave them until the Clause 1 stand part debate. In the light of the speech made by the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, it seems to me that it would be appropriate to say what I want to say now.
Of course, I have read all the briefing and have had meetings with the Local Government Association, which has expressed clearly its view that it would very much prefer this whole clause not to be in the Bill. It has suggested a number of amendments that we shall come to later. I put it to the association that I do not think that it has paid sufficient attention to the significant volume of evidence that is set out in the impact assessment, published last month. The noble Lord, Lord Beecham, referred to bits of it, and I shall do so as well, but perhaps drawing a somewhat different conclusion.
He referred in somewhat disparaging terms to the work of Professor Ball at Reading University, who has produced a report that seems to support the view that there is a very substantial body of opinion that regards the planning system as one of the barriers to growth. Professor Ball stated on page 12 of the impact assessment that the transaction costs of development control for major residential developments may be as much as £3 billion a year. He gave evidence recently to the Communities and Local Government Select Committee and advised that the actual costs were likely to be much higher than this. He went on to talk about the value of development that has been delayed by the planning system and stated that, taking into account both direct and indirect costs to the economy, the total cost of development control could be expected to run to several billion pounds. This is the view of a very respected academic who was consulted by the department and who gave evidence to a Select Committee in the other place.
I recognise the point made by the Local Government Association that planning is by no means the only barrier. Certainly the availability of finance, particularly for housebuilding and some forms of industrial and commercial development, has been a considerable problem. Of course, that is being addressed by the Government through a number of other measures that are not necessarily in the Bill. However, we all have evidence from bodies such as the Chambers of Commerce, the Home Builders Federation and the Confederation of British Industry. They are the investors who are affected by planning controls. Everybody seems to agree that what we need now is more investment in our infrastructure. They are the people who will do it and they have provided strong evidence, from surveys of their members, of the barriers posed by the planning system. On the measures taken in the planning Bill, in particular the National Planning Policy Framework document, I have nothing but the highest praise for my right honourable friend Greg Clark, who took it through. I notice my noble friend on the Front Bench nodding. Mr Clark did a splendid job. Despite that, these complaints are still being made. In these circumstances, the Government are right to take account of them.
Nobody is arguing for a moment that this is a magic wand that will remove all difficulties. The Minister said that the Bill was not likely to achieve that by itself. However, it contains a number of measures that will improve growth in the economy and remove barriers to investment. In these circumstances, one has to look very carefully at amendments that are designed to make the process outlined in Clause 1 more difficult. I do not say for a moment that it is all right. I will listen to the debates on amendments. I have put my name to some of them and, when the Marshalled List is reprinted, it will be seen that I have added my name to others. At the same time, I do not want the Committee to feel that I share the views of those who would rather see Clause 1 removed.
Lord Greaves
My noble friend is eloquent and has a very established knowledge of these matters. However, if it is true, as Professor Ball suggested and my noble friend seems to accept, that there is a major problem of delay in the planning system in all sorts of places, how will that be solved by a clause in the Bill which, according to the Government’s consultations and the criteria that they are known to be thinking of setting out, will affect only a very small number of very small planning authorities?
Lord Jenkin of Roding
I am grateful to my noble friend for raising that point. I am sure that, like me, he has studied the impact assessment and the consultation document, which was also published last month. The consultation period is now closed and I agree with the Constitution Committee’s recommendation that we must have the Government’s response to that consultation paper by the time we get to Report. I am sure that my noble friend has taken that very much on board.
I have mentioned only one or two parts of the impact statement, which further states on page 10:
“In 2011/12 councils determined 435,000 applications. The majority of these are determined in a timely manner and most are approved. In 2011/12 the proportion of minor and other applications determined within the statutory 8-week timetable was 85% and 93% respectively. However, performance against the statutory time frame for determining major applications”—
I am grateful to my noble friend for giving the most recent figures of the number of major applications that have been handled by local authorities—
“has been in decline. In 2011/12 only 58% of major applications were determined within the 13-week timetable compared to 71% in 2008/09”.
It goes on to say:
“There are very significant variations in the performance of different councils”.
A number of noble Lords have made the point, and it has been firmly stated by the Government, that the clause is aimed at those who fall significantly short of the standards required. I accept that. I also accept the Constitution Committee’s view that we ought to see more details about that in the Bill, but we may have to wait for the Government’s response to the consultation paper. However, that does not mean that there is not some value in putting additional pressure on local planning authorities to make sure that they recognise the problems created for investors by delays—long delays, in many cases—in applications for planning permission.
Lord Adonis
The noble Lord referred to the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee report on Clause 1 and said that it raised issues. Those issues are fundamental. The report states:
“The Bill specifies no criteria for designation … though each local planning authority might be designated individually, the power may be used by this or a future Government to designate a significant proportion of local planning authorities, based on criteria which have no relevance to poor performance”.
I assume that the noble Lord is not happy with that state of affairs.
Lord Jenkin of Roding
I have already referred to two recommendations in the Select Committee’s report which I support. My noble friend Lady Hanham made it very clear at Second Reading that the expectation is that, in the event, there will be relatively few—indeed, very few—local authorities for which a designation will be made. Surely the existence of the power will itself impress on local authorities the need to improve their performance. What is wrong with that?
Lord Adonis
My Lords, if that is the case, why does the Bill not say that designation is dependent upon poor performance? It does not say that at the moment.
Lord Jenkin of Roding
This is what consultation is about. I am sure the noble Lord has read the consultation paper. The consultation closed on 17 January and I have already made the point that I hope, and ask my noble friend to confirm, that the Government’s response to the consultation will be available by the time we come to deal with the clause on Report. They have spelled out quite clearly their thinking on the criteria for designation and that it is unlikely to apply to more than a very few local authorities. Indeed, Ministers have said that they hope there will not be any. But if there is a wide variation in the planning performance of different local authorities are the Government simply to sit back and to do nothing?
Lord McKenzie of Luton
The noble Lord raises an important question in asking whether the Government should sit back and do nothing. The answer is clearly no, but is not the right approach to try to put some resources into understanding what is happening to differential performance and why the metrics have declined in recent times? Those issues should be addressed rather than make the assumption that authorities that fail the test—it is all to do with the speed of dealing with applications and nothing much to do with the quality of decisions being taken—are somehow failing.
Does the noble Lord not think that the upheaval in the planning system in recent months may have had an impact? We have had the Localism Act, the NPPF, the demise of regional spatial strategies and all that goes with that. Those are very considerable changes, and of course local authorities are facing the horrendous cuts to their budgets, the worst that have been experienced for generations. Perhaps these factors are having an impact on what is happening. Is it not better to address them rather than make a spurious judgment that it is all to do with the speed of application? Is it not also right that, when there is non-determination within six months of an application, the Secretary of State has the power to call it in and deal with it anyway?
Lord Jenkin of Roding
I understand the points being made by the noble Lord. The question of the pressures on local authority finances and therefore on local authority staffing is important, but of course authorities do charge. My noble friend Lord Tope made the point that some local authorities could improve by hiring better quality staff. These are the kind of things where, if there is some form of longstop provision of the sort that is in Clause 1, minds will be concentrated. I am not saying that the clause needs no amendment and I have already made the point that I have put my name to several amendments that we will come to, but I would not be happy to join forces with those who would prefer to see it removed altogether. I thought it right to make my views pretty clear at this stage of the Bill.
The Bill is a miscellaneous set of measures rather than a large and comprehensive Act like the Localism Act that we have passed. It contains a number of disparate and separate measures that are aimed at meeting the increasingly vocal call for the Government to do something to improve the growth of the economy. None of the provisions is a golden one, likely by itself to make a huge difference, but taken together they are a brave attempt to try to find out what the obstacles are. Many noble Lords will have seen that there is plenty of evidence about the barriers, and I want to make it clear that in the interests of growth and of improving the planning system, the broad thrust of this Bill is right, as indeed is Clause 1. If it is put to a vote, I shall certainly support the Government.
Lord Deben
My Lords, I declare my interests as the chairman of a company that tries to help in terms of sustainable development, as an officeholder in the Town and Country Planning Association and as an honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects. Above all, I was my noble friend’s successor as Secretary of State. I fear that I have to say to him that I disagree deeply with his assessment of the Bill.
I am sorry that we cannot have an automatic discussion about its Title because I am always suspicious of Titles which are difficult to vote against. It seems that more time has been spent on getting the Title of this Bill right than on any of the clauses because the difficulty we have here is that of a half-baked Bill. At no point do we have the information needed to make any of the clauses meaningful. I do not think that it is easy even to table amendments to this clause without understanding what the criteria will be. If it is possible to put criteria into the consultation, it seems to me that there ought to be a mechanism for then translating such criteria as survive the consultation into the Bill, so that we know where we are. I fear that we really do not know where we are.
I want to challenge that fundamental argument—a historic argument that has come from the Treasury since time immemorial—that the planning system is the only thing that you have to deal with if you want to get growth. I remind the House that the planning system is there precisely to make places better for the people who live there. There is a price to pay for that. If you have a planning system it will cost money in the sense that if you did not have one, developers would not have to pay the costs of putting forward a planning application. It seems to me that those figures are pretty much nonsense, because all they are is an adding up of what it costs to have a system in which the public have some say in the conditions and the places where they live. That is a fundamental part of the life of any community. My concern is that it is difficult enough now for communities to plan their future, and that this is going to make that significantly worse.
This comes at a time when we have just discussed and debated the Localism Act. I feel like putting down an amendment that asks for the repeal of the Localism Act, because that seems to be what this first clause actually says. It does not seem to sit with all the rest of what the Government have been putting forward—which is something that I have been going up and down the country defending and believing in. I know that it is difficult to be local and that people at the top know best, or think they know best, but in the end I want the people of Suffolk to have some say in the Suffolk of tomorrow, and not to be told by somebody outside that they have to have this because it is good for them or good, in a curious general way, for growth.
I remind the House that two things are important. First, there is no discernible distinction between good and bad planning authorities on party political grounds. I go round the country and I know that you cannot say that Labour authorities are better or worse than Conservative authorities. There are very good Conservative authorities and very much less good ones, and very good Labour authorities and very much less good ones. The Liberal Democrats of course find themselves, as usual, in every possible place. I cannot resist a lifetime of teasing.
The words of my noble—and real—friend seem to give away the reality of the matter, which is that it is always about people’s vocal belief that this is so. People are vocal and always have been. All the time I was Secretary of State—and I am the longest-serving Secretary of State—they were vocal about it. Everybody always is, in particular if they do not win. I am afraid that we have to put up with that vocality, if there is such a word. There are many things wrong with the planning system. I believe that large infrastructure projects should always be done centrally and that it is nonsense to have another debate about the safety of nuclear power every time you go round the country. That is barmy. It is barmy to accept that if you want to build a railway or something of a serious nature, you have to deal with every single bit, because it is not the bits that count, it is the whole. There are very obvious examples of that, which I support and am enthusiastic about.
My problem—which is why I support these amendments—is that this particular clause seems to be inapplicable, in the proper sense of that word. First, if we are not going to deal with more than a handful of authorities and a handful of applications, then it does not meet the vocality. It does not meet what people are complaining about, so they will go on complaining. No doubt, as the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, said at Second Reading, we will have another Bill—because we always do—and there will be another way of not achieving what those who are vocal want. The reason is that it is not achievable. What they really want is something that distinguishes between planning applications not on the grounds of merit but on the grounds of speed. That does not seem a very sensible basis on which to do it. Of course, bigger planning applications take longer. Anyone can decide about a car port in a short period. A complex decision on mixed development in an area of outstanding natural beauty, with difficulties of infrastructure, takes time. If it happens to be in a small district council, it takes longer, because the district council is unlikely to have spare capacity to deal with it.
Lord Burnett
My Lords, I start by declaring my interests. I have considerable sympathy with the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin of Roding. From the tenor of the debate, I would say that it is a stand part debate. I believe that the clause, as possibly amended to ameliorate the time limits, could very well be a spur to improving the planning system.
The noble Lord, Lord Deben, asked whether anyone can suggest some draconian questions that should be asked of local authorities. I can suggest one or two. Some adopted local plans are lamentably out of date. That is a criterion of performance and one that developers find incredibly frustrating if it is not met. I understand the position of local councillors, although I have never been one. Some matters are incredibly difficult for them to decide. Sometimes cases go to appeal and the planning inspector will decide them. When you are trying to propose housing, commercial or shopping development, and so forth, you cannot really be expected, as a developer or a builder, to rely on a local plan that is seven, eight, nine or 10 years old. That is just impossible.
That could be one measure. Another that I referred to in my Second Reading contribution is that greater attention must be given to measures of housing need. With the demise of regional spatial strategies, each local authority will face the task of assessing housing need in its own authority. There should be a clear, intelligible and compelling basis for assessing need. The underlying basis and calculation should be publicly available—and should be available to challenge by the customers of local authorities. It is not good always going for the lowest number when in fact that is not appropriate.
In many parts of this country, the south-east and south-west in particular, a great many people do not want to see development for one reason or another. Perhaps that development is not appropriate, but just to deny need without proper evidence is not fair. It is not fair on the thousands and millions of people who are looking to get on the housing ladder and to buy houses.
I hope these two measures are two draconian questions that this clause will ask of local authorities and that they will ensure that adopted local plans are up to date and that there is a clear measure of housing need. All of us in this House want to see houses become more affordable. We all know that there is a severe housing crisis in this country. Can my noble friend the Minister give me some response on those two matters when she replies to this debate?
Lord Greaves
Would my noble friend be surprised to learn that his remarks about local plans and the delays to them are ones that I agree with completely? Does he agree, and would the Minister perhaps agree later on, that the main delays in the planning system are to do with the local plan system and the production and development of local plans, rather than in dealing with applications for planning permission?
Lord Burnett
I am extremely grateful to my noble friend. I feel supported and vindicated in the thrust of the points that I was endeavouring to make to the House.
Baroness Turner of Camden
My Lords, I support the amendments spoken to by my noble friend Lord McKenzie this afternoon. Clause 1 gives the Secretary of State powers to take over planning application decisions, as I see it. Why? I thought that the Government were in favour of localism—a point that has been made by a number of speakers already. Planning applications are surely best handled locally. They should normally involve a consultation process involving the local community. That is certainly the situation in our area.
There is a housing crisis in London. Everything has become incredibly expensive, and developers have become very greedy indeed. They take over large houses when they become available and attempt to extend and develop them, often to the disadvantage of adjoining property. They are not developing affordable housing—quite the contrary. When local residents object, the local planning authority has to pay attention to what the local community has to say.
As a matter of fact, I have recently been involved in such a situation in an area where there are quite old houses, and where the developers are attempting to build basements in places that were never intended to have basements. This destabilises the houses next door, and of course the residents have all been objecting. If the Government really respected localism, they would not attempt to undermine the procedures that are provided by Clause 1. The residents in the case I refer to are certainly not against social housing. They are simply against a large fortune being made by developers trying to profit from scarcity, which is the situation in London.
In the circumstances that have been explained by a number of speakers this afternoon, the amendments submitted by my noble friend Lord McKenzie would substantially modify the provisions of Clause 1, and that would be to everyone’s advantage. It would give the local authority the right of representation before the powers were assumed by the Secretary of State, and there is provision in Amendment 32 for a proper consultative process. I therefore hope that the Government will look with some favour on these amendments, because they modify the thrust of Clause 1, I think to the advantage of everyone.
Lord Best
My Lords, I declare my interest as president of the Local Government Association. We are not actually discussing the stand part debate at this moment. We have a bunch of amendments on which I detect that everyone, including both the previous Secretaries of State who have talked on this, actually agrees—namely, that if the Secretary of State is to have the power to take away powers currently in the hands of local authorities for planning, then we may need to put in place some constraints on the use by the Secretary of State of that new power. These amendments are all about putting some constraints on the Secretary of State, and they seem to be entirely reasonable and proper. Nick Boles, the Minister may get his way; he says quite clearly, and I am sure that he is right to do so, that Clause 1 is intended as a deterrent and that,
“it would, in fact, apply to very few authorities. Indeed, I hope it would apply to no authorities, should they improve their performance”.—[Official Report, Growth and Infrastructure Bill Committee, Commons, 27/11/12; col. 242.]
Fair enough; there may be a requirement on some local authorities to do better than they do at the moment. But if they can show that improvement, then I think we would all be clear that the Secretary of State would not be able to use a new power.
The consultation paper suggests that there are really two criteria here on which local authorities would be judged. The local plan does not feature very prominently but they are about the performance at appeal; quality, which is measured by the approval rate by local authorities; and speed—how fast they do it within the timetables that have been set. On the first of those measures, the performance at appeal, it is fair to say that no local authority at the moment would fail this test at all. If you take account of the fact that a local authority is quite entitled to come up with a negative view, even if the inspectorate goes against it later, it is only really where costs are awarded against a local authority that one could say that that local authority had not been behaving in a proper and sensible manner.
There are so very few cases of costs being awarded that I do not think anyone would fall on performance at appeal. It is speed—timeliness—on which local authorities are likely to be judged to be failing. Here it is possible for local authorities to change their ways in order to speed up. At the moment there is no intimation that those that are already demonstrating in their direction of travel that they are improving their performance will be acknowledged or taken into account. Northumberland County Council’s performance under the speed/timeliness measure has improved in the following way over the past 12 months, for example: it had 30% of its major applications determined within 13 weeks in the third quarter of 2011 and that was improved to 48% the following quarter, 52% the quarter after that and 57% the quarter after that. Improvements can happen. Clearly, local authorities need to be given the time, the space, the opportunity and the support to make those improvements before a very heavy-handed removal of powers ever takes place.
I offer here, as I think that I am mandated to do so, the helping hand of the Local Government Association in trying to secure those improvements. It has furnished me with a whole list of recommendations from local authorities that, in various respects, have been able to dramatically improve performance using the techniques, the peer-group opportunities, that the LGA brings. I think there is agreement in this House—and I hope the Minister will be able to go with this tide of approval—wherever we come from on the bigger point of principle, that there must be constraints and opportunities for local authorities to demonstrate improvement, given plenty of time and opportunity to do that, before the Secretary of State even contemplates doing what we are told he does not really want to do in the first place: use this new power.
Lord True
My Lords, I must also declare an interest as leader of a London local council that is a planning authority and as a member of the leaders committee of London Councils, but I should make it clear that I in no way speak on behalf of London Councils.
I shall not follow the Second Reading or clause stand part tone of the debate because I think the noble Lord, Lord Best, has summed up rather well the mood of the Committee on this. My noble friend Lord Jenkin of Roding made a very wide-ranging speech which cited a series of people with great acronyms and of great importance, including a professor, saying that the planning system is a great economic drag on the country and we must do something. One could say such things of employment law, health and safety, transport regulations or any number of things. It is not in itself an argument to remove elements of a system. The question that we must ask in this Committee is whether the remedies are proportionate, whether their administration is going to be objective and whether, overall, they will be conducive to the public good. I actually think that some of the things in the Bill answer that test positively and a number, as I said at Second Reading, resoundingly negatively. We must find the balance in Committee.
I must apologise to your Lordships in advance that I will be limited in the time that I can be present in the Committee, which may come as welcome news to some. I have a council meeting this evening. Doubtless I shall pass the scoutmaster’s hut on the way to the council meeting—that was something for the chairman of my party to note. I will also be unable to participate in Committee sittings next week. I apologise to your Lordships and to the Minister for that. I know the Minister will be listening courteously, as she always does, to everything said.
I want to make a relatively narrow point on important amendments that my noble friend Lord Tope and the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, have tabled. We will come on to discuss the criteria in the next group. The point that the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, made about the criteria is accurate. I made the same point at Second Reading. It is not enough for a current Minister to say, “I will only use these criteria”—which we have not yet seen—“for a limited number of purposes”. A future Minister given extraordinarily wide powers by your Lordships could use them in a very different way. I am sure that is something that we will examine later as we proceed. As Committees of your Lordships’ House have said, greater defences need to be built into the system.
I also think that a period of notice is a useful and important defence to build into the system, not only for the reasons that have been cited. I am not going into the question of whether it should be 18 months or 12 months or of what it should be, but what the noble Lord, Lord Tope, has put before us is a very important point, as the noble Lord, Lord Best, said. That period is a safety margin in which a local authority can improve, but it is also a brake on precipitate action by the Secretary of State. It may be that I can be disabused by the Minister either now or on Report, but it looks as though the Secretary of State can just pop up, presumably on the basis of the criteria that we will have seen by Report, and say, “Toytown Borough Council, you are hereby designated”, and the next day a developer can whack in an application to the Secretary of State and, heigh-ho, off we go, everybody is happy, particularly the developer. It may be that in existing law and in the Bill there are things that prevent that, but if that can happen, there is a great moral hazard in any Executive having this sort of power. The noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, used a phrase: he said that people might “game the system”. I do not know whether that is true, but I dare day that there are ways in which you could game a system to make it look as though a local authority was not performing well.
I am slightly more worried that somebody might play the system and say, “We are having terrible trouble with these people”. Perhaps they would go along to the Treasury or some other place and say, “Well, Toytown Borough Council is not performing. It needs to be designated”. Somewhere—I would prefer via Parliament by law, in either primary or secondary legislation—there should be some brake on the moral hazard of the Executive saying, “We are designating these people, and we are going to do it tomorrow”.
That is another potentially useful aspect of time. When we have a planning application before us, we have to put online all the representations that are made. Where will be the representations that are privately being made to Ministers about bad authorities? Will they be placed online by the department as they are submitted, prior to the Secretary of State making his decision? I do not know, but I think that this aspect of potential designation should be considered. A pause, a warning, or a period in which the Secretary of State can be challenged to justify the action he proposes to take, beforehand as well as afterwards, would be useful.
There is a case for Clause 1. I do not agree with those who would like to see no long-stop power. However, the line of argument which the noble Lord, Lord Tope, has opened up is very fruitful. It would be good for local authorities and the planning system, and it might be good for future Governments as well.
Lord Shipley
My Lords, I declare my interest as a vice-president of the Local Government Association. I agree entirely with my noble friend Lord True and support the four amendments in this group.
The report of the Select Committee on the Constitution, published on 18 January, refers to Clause 1 being,
“a novel provision in the context of town and country planning”.
“Novel” might mean “new”, but it might also mean, “very different and therefore very important”; I think that it is meant to be the latter. It is novel and, as a consequence, it must be properly understood. A centralised form of front-line decision making is being introduced at the expense of localism, as the Select Committee has made clear. I do not find that good. In particular, I draw your Lordships’ attention to the fact that there would be no appeals system other than judicial review to a decision taken by the Planning Inspectorate. In the context of democratic control of decision making, simply to pass a decision without the right of appeal to the Planning Inspectorate is not right.
I was then particularly concerned by paragraph 10 of the Select Committee report, which is important and says:
“We have consistently expressed the view that executive assurances about how statutory powers will be exercised are no firm basis on which to legislate. Constitutionally speaking, they are no proper substitute for clarity in the statutory provision”.
The Select Committee concludes:
“In our view, the Government’s own policy intention of designation under clause 1 only in exceptional cases”—
as Ministers have been making clear—
“should be made clear on the face of the bill. The House may also wish to consider whether the criteria and procedures for making or revoking a designation should be set out in secondary legislation”.
I think I have concluded that in both cases they should and I very much hope that shortly we will hear confirmation that the Minister at least will look at this question again. The Government’s aim should be never to use their powers.
Baroness Hanham
My Lords, I do not know whether to start replying to a Second Reading debate or to a clause stand part debate. We effectively have had a round-up of all the aspects that appear in Clause 1. I am in some difficulty because some of what has already been said will be said all over again as we go through the full Committee stage. I am very tempted to do as the noble Lord, Lord Best, invited me to do; namely, to stick purely to the amendment which seeks to delay any designation for 18 months. Taking a short breath, I have decided that I will do a bit of both because some areas have come up that are relevant to the designation. I am sure noble Lords would agree that it probably is not appropriate for me to answer every single aspect at this stage, otherwise we might as well move on to Report now.
I should like to draw the attention of noble Lords to what Clause 1 states:
“A relevant application that would otherwise have to be made to the local planning authority may (if the applicant so chooses) be made instead to the Secretary of State if the following conditions are met at the time it is made … the local planning authority concerned is designated … the development to which the application relates … or the development for which outline planning permission has been granted … is of a description prescribed by the Secretary of State”.
That does not mean, as many noble Lords have tried to indicate, that all the powers of planning are being taken away from local authorities. I tried to make that extremely clear at Second Reading. This is a very constrained part of planning changes. It is a contribution —if I can put it like that—to ensure that planning and development takes place. No one is saying that this is the one thing that will absolutely shift and move planning on and will make it easier for developers to achieve what they want. That is not the situation.
Lord Adonis
Will the Minister tell us where in Clause 1 it says that the power is very constrained. It simply says under subsection (1)(a) of new Clause 62A to be inserted in the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 that,
“the local planning authority … is designated by the Secretary of State”.
It does not say that it is constrained.
Baroness Hanham
Being designated is a constraint because when we eventually get to it, the noble Lord will know that the consultation lays out the criteria for designation, and we will discuss that. The designation by itself is the control and the constraint.
I was trying to say that this was not the only area and aspect that would help planning, development or growth. We have had suggestions at other stages that things such as mortgages and lack of finance are holding up and constraining planning, and I accept that that is the situation. However, concerns have been highlighted about the amount of time it takes for a limited number of authorities to get a planning application through or the quality of the application decision resulting in more appeals being allowed through the system than is acceptable. The purpose of the measure is to deal with a very limited number of authorities which are not measuring up to appropriate standards.
When the designation is made under the criteria which we will discuss at a later stage, it will be done against the background of the two preceding years. The figures will be taken from 2011-12 and 2012-13, so by the time we get to Royal Assent, the 2013 figures will be in. Those will be the two preceding years. The figures will be based on the criteria so we will be able to see what is coming up and local authorities will be able to judge whether or not they are likely to be designated. In terms of delaying the decision—
Lord Greaves
I am very grateful to my noble friend. I know that she is always very diligent in listening to the House and this Committee. If the relevant years are the two previous years to the end of March 2013, which is only just over two months away, and a local planning authority cannot do anything about the figures in the time that is left, is it not unreasonable to tackle this issue in the way that is proposed, which is what these amendments are all about? One could say to a local authority, “Yes, the figures in these two years are those which apply but you now have a period of time”—12 months, 18 months or whatever—“to put things right”. Is that not the reasonable way to approach this issue?
Baroness Hanham
My Lords, you can also approach this matter from the standpoint that the planning authority has not performed correctly over the previous two years and has been on notice of that. If you delay the designation for 18 months, you further delay the possibility of improvement taking place. I hesitate to suggest that we should agree to the delay proposed in the amendment as I think that designated local authorities will begin to improve their performance.
The noble Lord, Lord Best, and other noble Lords asked about peer help. We have already made it clear that we accept very much that the Local Government Association has a role to play in helping designated local authorities to improve, and to do so even within the period of designation. As we will discuss later, that period will be reviewed annually, so local authorities can get out of this situation in a very short time. This clause—
Lord McKenzie of Luton
If the Government are very happy to see local planning authorities supported through the LGA or whatever, why do that only once designation has taken place? Would it not be better to make sure that that support is available to help them to improve before they are designated so that they avoid this process, which, on anyone’s score, will be costly, convoluted and administratively complex?
Baroness Hanham
My Lords, this is a matter of view between us. Our view is that things will become clearer over the coming months and local authorities will know whether they are bordering on designation. They will know that help will be available if they are designated and that they will be encouraged to improve. That will be the tension. The designation can cease following an annual review. I do not think that that will be too much of a tension if we decide not to accept the amendment and the promoters agree with that.
I have an enormous number of points here in front of me on questions that have been quite general. I could make a Second Reading response if the Committee would like that, but we are trying to deal with the performance of local authorities and planning authorities. We also note that some local authorities will receive only a small number of applications, and that is one reason for looking at the figures over two years. We accept that there are differences between one local authority and another.
My noble friend Lord Deben, who is my real friend, also suggested that this power was anti-localism. It is not. It does not take away a local planning authority’s ability to continue to deal with planning applications, but it provides that if an authority is designated, a developer has the right to decide whether it wants the local authority to carry on dealing with the application or take it to the Secretary of State. Developers already have the right to go to the Secretary of State if an application is not completed within 13 weeks. That will of course be one means whereby local authorities can be designated if they are not performing within a statutory area.
Lord Campbell-Savours
I have sat through the whole debate and I keep asking myself a simple question: how can we be sure that there will be no political consideration when a Secretary of State decides who is to be designated? How would one authority know that it had been treated as fairly or unfairly as another, given that the information is to be held within the department regarding the extent to which an authority breached the criteria that are the subject of the consultation?
Baroness Hanham
My Lords, that relates to the consultation, which we are moving on to in Amendment 2. Perhaps we might follow the amendments in order, because people have gone to a lot of trouble on that.
Lord Greaves
My noble friend rightly said that in a normal case, if a major application is not dealt with by the local planning authority within 13 weeks, the applicant has a right of appeal to the Planning Inspectorate. What happens if the inspectorate, on behalf of the Secretary of State, fails to determine an application within 13 weeks? What recourse does an applicant have? Can the application be sent back to the local authority to sort out? What will happen?
Baroness Hanham
My Lords, the expectation is that the Planning Inspectorate will perform against the statutory criteria.
The noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, asked whether there would be democratic involvement as applications go forward. Local residents will have their normal ability to comment and all the normal planning processes can take place. All that will happen is that the decision will not be made by the local authority at that stage but by the Planning Inspectorate, which may very well have had to pick up the application if the local authority was not performing within the 13 weeks. There is nothing to be gained by delaying the designation. Our intention is to ensure that if a local authority is designated, it is in and out of that designation as soon as possible, given the help, support and encouragement that will be available from the Local Government Association and other planning means.
Lord McKenzie of Luton
Perhaps I may focus on one other point. Clearly, the criteria are going to be driven by the speed at which applications are dealt with. That is very clear from the consultation document. If, in the Government’s eyes, there is a delay in dealing with an application, why do they attribute blame only to the local planning authority? The cause could be due to the developer or other consultees in the community engagement. Why is blame attributed solely to the local planning authority? That is basically the conclusion to be drawn from what the Government are proposing.
Baroness Hanham
That will not be entirely the case. There are usually reasons why planning applications are delayed, and one may be that an application will take longer than the normal consultation period. Before an authority is designated, it will be allowed to put that view forward and say that it has not been able to deal with certain applications because it has agreed that the process will take longer, or there may be some other reason. A portcullis will not just come down; discussions and explanations will be possible.
Lord McKenzie of Luton
There is a very important point—it may be a new point. I understand that, where performance agreements are entered into, they will be taken into account. However, is the Minister saying that there will be an additional process whereby a local authority can make representations about the prospect of it being designated because of circumstances that have occurred locally?
Baroness Hanham
My Lords, before they are designated, local authorities will have the opportunity to explain, first, their figures and, secondly, if necessary, the length of time that an application has taken due to specific reasons. That will be the case with either a formal or an informal planning application, but they will have to note that that is what it is so that they can use that as an explanation.
Lord Deben
Would it not be better if that were set out in the Bill? If the Bill said, first, that the issue is largely one of timing—that would make me much happier, because I am worried about other criteria—and, secondly, that the local authority would have a period of time, whatever it might be, to have a discussion about it, I think that many of us would not be so unhappy about not agreeing to these amendments. The amendments are designed to put in place exactly what my noble friend has put forward, so would it be possible to have that in the Bill? It seems to me that we would all be very much happier if it were.
Baroness Hanham
My noble friend has greater experience than I have of putting forward legislation, and he will know that not all measures are put into a Bill. Some are in secondary legislation and some are in planning guidance. I have no doubt at all that it will be made clear to local authorities how that designation is going to come about and what they will be able to do to ameliorate it. Therefore, I hope that the noble Lord will feel able to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Jenkin of Roding
A number of noble Lords asked whether we were going to have the Government’s response to the consultation with the details of the criteria before Report, which seems likely to be in about the middle of February. That does not give the Government a great deal of time because, as has been said, the consultation finished only last week. However, I think it would be much more helpful to the House if we could see the criteria. The Minister has laid great stress on the fact that local authorities will know what the criteria are, but will noble Lords know?
Baroness Hanham
My noble friend would know what they are if he had read the consultation document, which, knowing his experience, he will have done. The criteria put out to consultation are that local authorities will be designated if they should not have achieved the statutory requirement in 30% of applications and if they have had 20% of appeals overturned. I think that those are the figures in the consultation, and the consultation is where the criteria stand at the moment.
As regards the other information, the consultation has just closed. It will probably be quite difficult to get a full response by the time we get to Report, but we can certainly give noble Lords an indication of the responses to the consultation, which may be helpful. I am not going to guarantee that we can give the Government’s response by Report, because I think that it may require more consideration than the time available allows.
Lord Tope
My Lords, I am very grateful to all who have taken part in this debate over the past hour and a half or so. I think it is customary, if undesirable, that the first debate on the first amendment in Committee tends to range just a little wider than the precise nature of the amendment. That has certainly been the case today and it has been none the worse for that.
The noble Lord, Lord Deben, has introduced me to a new word: “vocality”. Like him, I do not know if such a word exists, but I remember looking up “localism” in the dictionary and finding that it was not there at all, so I now look forward to the “Vocality Bill” in the next Session.
I will try to deal simply with the amendments, particularly Amendment 1 in my name. It struck me that when the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, got up to speak, she referred to it as the amendment which sought to delay designation. I thought that was quite telling; I have to accept that that is certainly the effect, but it is not actually the intention. The intention is to find a better way of dealing with the problem that the Government perceive. Its intention is to try to help the Minister achieve the aspiration of never having to use this provision. The designation is not about seeking to delay—although that is the inevitable effect—it is about seeking a much better and more effective way to bring about the improvement that, in fairness, everybody wants, not just the Minister.
The Minister will have heard—and I am sure that she will take this away from this debate—considerable concern on all sides of the House about the clause as it presently stands and the support from all sides of the House for these amendments in order to bring about the objective to which I referred: namely, to find a better and more effective way of bringing about the improvements that we all seek. Obviously we are going to return to this clause on Report; I do not know what will happen then or what noble Lords will say. However, if it is to be supported by many sides of this House, we need to have some reassurances in the Bill from the Government along the lines of those that we are talking about today.
We have proposed criteria which I am told would currently catch only six local authorities; I would be very interested to know which six local authorities they are. I wonder whether those authorities themselves know that they are, in effect, on a danger list. I would like to know what size of authority they are, and to what extent and in what way they are apparently failing to meet the criteria. Is the failure on the quality, if that is the right expression, of their losing appeals—I think not, from what the noble Lord, Lord Best, has said—or is it simply on the time measure? All these things are of interest and relevance.
The criteria are not going to be in the Bill, and it is certain that at some stage during the lifetime of the Act, when this Bill is enacted, those criteria will change; they are bound to change. It is equally certain that the Planning Minister will change in the lifetime of the Act; it is even possible that the Government may change in the lifetime of the Act, and we may find a time when we have a less benevolent Planning Minister, a less benevolent Secretary of State and even possibly a less benevolent Government. Therefore, when we legislate here, we need the assurances that these amendments seek to achieve. They may or may not be the right way or the best way to achieve them, but I discern from this debate that noble Lords on all sides of the House are seeking those assurances before we pass this clause. I hope the Minister will take that concern back to her ministerial colleagues and see what the Government can bring forward to meet the concern that has been expressed. In the mean time, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord McKenzie of Luton
Lord McKenzie of Luton
My Lords, I shall also speak to Amendments 27, 28, 29 and 35 in the group. Amendments 2 and 35 have to an extent been the subject of some discussion on the prior amendments. The 11th report of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee draws the provisions of Clause 1 to the attention of the House. Specifically, it emphasises the point that, whatever the declared intent, the Bill does not specify the criteria for designation or provide for them to be set down in an instrument subject to parliamentary procedure. That is what the amendment seeks to rectify. Amendment 35 requires that there is an affirmative procedure. To emphasise that point, Clause 1(8) states:
“The Secretary of State must publish (in such manner as the Secretary of State thinks fit) … the criteria”.
It is good that they must be published and not kept secret but there is no parliamentary process attached. Whatever the Secretary of State wishes to publish in accordance with the Bill, he can do so.
While the clause has been represented as having very limited application, it enables a profound shift in process and, indeed, in principle by removing from democratically elected councils the first engagement with a planning application, undermining the role of local accountability. We will debate elsewhere whether such a designation process should apply and what the appropriate criteria should be, and we will pursue the point that planning should be not just about process but quality outcomes. The Delegated Powers Committee said that they must merely be published. Accordingly, although each local planning authority might be designated individually, the power may be used by this or a future Government to designate a significant proportion of local planning authorities based on criteria that have no relevance to poor performance. My noble friend Lord Adonis made that point. Essentially the door would be open for a fundamental undermining of the planning system as we have known it since 1947. The Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee was absolutely right to express its concerns.
In its consultation document, Planning Performance and the Planning Guarantee—the consultation has ended, as we have heard, although we may not get the full response by Report—the Government set out their view on the threshold for very poor performance, when,
“30% or fewer major applications have been determined within the statutory period or more than 20% of major decisions have been overturned at appeal”.
However, paragraph 45 of the document very clearly states:
“We also propose raising the bar for the speed of decisions after the first year”,
so who knows where this will end up if it is just up to the Secretary of State to publish what is in his mind at any one point? Whatever the current Secretary of State’s intentions we must not have such a wide and unfettered power unchecked in primary legislation.
Amendment 29 requires the length of the designation to be identified and, more importantly, what must be achieved for the designation to be removed. It should mean that a qualitative assessment must be made on a case-by-case basis of where a local authority is failing. LPAs that fail on the designation criteria in the Government’s terms will not necessarily all do so for the same reason. The government consultation suggests that designation will last at least for a year but will be subject to review before the end of the year. This is all very well, but if there is no initial assessment of the problems a local authority faces, how will improvement be judged? Speed of dealing with minor applications may be irrelevant; indeed, this aspect of activity may already be more than satisfactory on the Government’s criteria. Once designation is made, whether the local planning authority can show any improvement in handling major applications is entirely outside its control. The noble Baroness made the point in response to the previous debate that it will depend on whether any applicants choose to submit locally, and how many to the Secretary of State. Improvement should be about focusing resources, skills and culture, and performance, and it is also about the training of counsellors. If central government is to remove planning powers for a local authority it must be incumbent on the Secretary of State to make a proper case-by-case assessment of why and how the authority is failing, and how it can be supported.
Amendment 28 is very much by way of a fallback position. If the Secretary of State is to proceed by just publishing criteria, as the Bill currently allows, at the very least for that to happen, there must be a proper consultation. The Secretary of State may argue that one has just closed, but, sadly, it looks as though we will not see the full government response to it before we complete our deliberations. Amendment 27 rightly subjects these provisions to the need for a parliamentary process, which is provided for in Amendment 35.
There are three other amendments in this group, but I will not deal with them in detail until the noble Lords who tabled them have had a chance to speak to them. We support the thrust of Amendment 8, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Tope, and of Amendments 33 and 34, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, which spell out issues in a very helpful and focused way. I beg to move.
Lord Tope
My Lords, Amendment 8, standing in my name, is in this group. It largely speaks for itself. It requires the Secretary of State to take into account improvements—or otherwise—that the planning authority has made in the five years prior to his considering it for designation. The purpose is that the Secretary of State should not just take a snapshot, or even just take into account the two-year period that has been referred to, but should look at the direction of travel of the planning authority. Has it remained poorly performing over a significant period? Has it got worse over that period? In that case, the Secretary of State must truly be looking at designation. However, if an authority is making significant improvements over that period—in our previous debate, the noble Lord, Lord Best, referred to Northumberland making significant improvements over time—it would be heavy-handed, and I would say quite wrong, to consider that it should be designated. If it shows evidence over a significant period that it is putting its house in order and improving its performance, surely the Secretary of State must take that into account.
Amendment 34 is in the name of the noble Lord, Lord True. As he explained in the previous debate, unfortunately he had to leave just now to attend a meeting of his local council, of which he is leader. As my name is on the amendment and I support it, I will refer to it and say that the concern is that time taken over legal proceedings under judicial review should not be counted in this regard. He would like the Minister to take account of this and will welcome her comments, which he will be able to read in Hansard, before we consider what action we may wish to take on Report.
Lord Jenkin of Roding
Encouraged by the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, I will say something about Amendment 28. When I was Health Secretary, I had to suspend the Lambeth, Southwark & Lewisham Health Authority because it was refusing to live within its cash limits. That suspension was overturned by the High Court on the grounds that I had put no limit on the time of suspension. The embarrassing consequence was that I had to bring legislation before Parliament to validate what the commissioner whom I had appointed had done in the intervening period. Has my noble friend taken into account what the courts might say about what would appear to be an indefinite period of designation, or does she envisage that a designation will always include a time limit during which it could be considered, reconsidered and if necessary renewed? I was stung once, and one can use one’s experience to ask what I hope is a not wholly frivolous question.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, my Amendment 33 is in this group. I certainly support the amendment in the name of my noble friend Lord Tope. Before I speak to Amendment 33, I will say that I strongly support the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie of Luton, which sets out that the criteria for making decisions should be in regulations that are subject to parliamentary approval. We can argue about whether approval should be by affirmative or negative resolution, which is the argument we normally have, but here we are arguing about whether the criteria should be in parliamentary regulations and statutory instruments or whether the Secretary of State should have the power to issue an order stating what the criteria will be, or simply to publish the criteria. This is unsatisfactory.
Many development orders made in the planning system are not subject to parliamentary approval. This is part and parcel of the planning system and relates sometimes to planning policy and often to the way in which the system works. This legislation is different because it would take away the statutory powers of authorities to carry out their planning functions and transfer them to the Secretary of State. It is on a different level from normal development orders and it is right and proper that the criteria should be subject to parliamentary approval—not the decisions as to which authorities should be designated but the criteria that the Secretary of State has to follow to carry out a designation. Unless they are, the opportunities for judicial review might be substantial simply on the basis of something that has been published. However, in principle, the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, is right.
My amendments seek to probe in detail some aspects of the criteria that the Secretary of State will look to when deciding whether or not to designate an authority, and particularly some of the criteria that will count against designation because they might be unreasonable. The Minister touched on some of these in her reply to the previous group of amendments but I hope that she will look at the amendments one by one and give the Committee an understanding of the Government’s thinking on them.
In the discussion on the previous group of amendments, the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin of Roding, referred to the wide variation in performance of local planning authorities. I have no doubt that, as in many other aspects of their work, there is a substantial variation in the performance of different local authorities. That is inevitable where you have hundreds of local authorities around the country carrying out their functions in different ways with different degrees of efficiency and effectiveness. It is part and parcel of local democracy.
However, in this area there are two issues involved. One is the genuine underlying difference in performance, which no doubt will and does exist. The other is what the statistics show and whether those that we have at the moment on delays in determining planning applications have any underlying meaning. In many cases, they are based not only on different levels of efficiency in dealing with planning applications but on the different practices of local authorities. For example, on major applications, the level and depth of the pre-application discussions that take place vary from one local planning authority to another. Some local planning authorities will wish to extend the pre-application discussions until they have got to a point where they think they can put an application through the system and probably get a decision in favour. That will mean that the submission and registration of the application will take place later than in other authorities which take the view, “Let’s get the application in and, once it is in, we can have a great deal of discussion and debate about it”. Of course, it will be more difficult to keep that within the 13 weeks.
Therefore, not all authorities that take longer than 13 weeks over many major applications are necessarily making the decision later than authorities that appear to make the decision within the 13 weeks. It is a question of when the application is submitted and registered. There will be authorities that register an application almost as soon as they get it, while others will accept the application when it is submitted, look at it, and then say, “You have not provided this and that, so we are not going to register the application until you have provided it all”. All this is done with the agreement of the applicant. The second group of authorities will fit within the 13 weeks more easily than the former group because they will spend time gathering information after the application has been registered.
Where an application is generally all right with only a few details to be sorted out, some authorities will give the developer a nod and a wink and come to an agreement that the application is rejected. Instead of lodging an appeal, the developer spends a little time sorting out the application and then resubmits it. I think that developers have a right to resubmit within 12 months without paying an extra fee. Different practices mean that authorities generate different statistics in terms of whether they deal with applications within eight or 13 weeks. The statistics are not based on differences in the underlying efficiency of authorities, but if the period of 13 weeks becomes more important because authorities do not want to be designated, they will use these processes to reduce to a minimum the work that actually has to take place within the 13 weeks and do as much of it as possible in advance. That does not mean that the final determination will be made any later or any sooner. All this is the practical stuff of how things happen. However, if people are given targets, they will find ways of achieving them. Some will do so by becoming more efficient and others will do so simply by changing their working practices and doing what other councils do.
Amendment 33 sets out some of the criteria referred to by the Minister in responding to the last amendment. They are the criteria that the Secretary of State will have to look at when deciding whether to designate a council. Subsection (9)(a), which will appear in new Section 62A of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 proposed in Clause 1, refers to,
“planning performance agreements … entered into … before the submission of an application”.
The Minister has suggested that such agreements will be an acceptable reason for taking longer than 13 weeks, but it would be helpful if she would confirm that. Proposed new subsection (9)(b) refers to any,
“agreements that have been entered into following the submission of an application”.
Will this be an excuse not to be designated or will the local authority be told that once it has registered the application, the clock starts ticking remorselessly? Proposed new subsection (9)(c) is important in many cases, and refers to,
“informal agreements that have been entered into between applicants and the local planning authority to delay the issue of a decision”.
It is often in the interests of both the applicant and the local planning authority, along with everyone else, to sort things out before a decision is made. If things are not sorted out, there is a greater risk of a refusal which causes further delay through an appeal or a resubmission. Particularly on major applications, negotiations always take place between the applicant and the local planning authority to cover the detail and conditions of the application, such as those which may arise from a Section 106 agreement. If those discussions are artificially brought to a close before they are properly agreed, we will see worse decisions being made. Proposed new subsection (9)(d) refers to,
“any delays that have been caused by the failure of statutory consultees to respond within the specified time”.
The local planning authority is perfectly entitled to determine an application if it has not had a response from, for example, the Highways Authority, but it would be very foolish for it to do so if the application will have an important impact on the local highways network or even if it is just a matter of connections to the local network. If the Environment Agency is late in responding, what do you do? Do you pass the application anyway or, when you get a late response from the Environment Agency saying that it does not like the drainage system which is being proposed and that, as it stands, it would recommend refusal, do you refuse it on that ground? Alternatively, do you say, “No, we need more time for the applicants to work together with the planning authority and the Environment Agency to sort it out”? These are the kind of decisions and practices which take place time and time again on major applications.
Lord Deben
My Lords, I hope that the Minister will take all these amendments into account but will not go down the detailed route that the noble Lord who spoke last has suggested to her. However, I hope she will realise that the reason that these amendments have been put forward is because of the lack of precision in the Bill and that she will take away from this debate the very strong feeling, on all sides of the House, including among those who have been largely supportive of her, that we really need a greater degree of knowledge. These amendments have been put down to make sure that we understand the criteria, that they are fairly and objectively used, and that local authorities understand how they can recover their position when they have been used.
We make no criticism, I think, on either side of the House, of the credibility or competence of present Ministers. However, there have been times in the past, in all political parties, when Ministers have perhaps been less than perfect and there may be such times in the future. I think the House would be very happy if the Minister said that she would seek to ensure that there was at least a reasonable degree of certainty—if not on the face of the Bill, in the secondary legislation that is indicated in it—so that we are not breaking what the Constitution Committee quite rightly suggested was the fundamental rule that you cannot rely on the generalities and assurances of Ministers to bind their successors. That is just a fact. If she were able to help us in that way, a great deal of the criticism on the first clause, at least from those who are not as fundamentally unhappy about it as I am, would in fact be removed.
The Earl of Lytton
My Lords, this is the first time I have spoken on this Bill and I have a number of interests to declare. Unfortunately I was not able to be present at Second Reading, having been laid low by one of those 24-hour bugs which one hears so much about. I am here not to make good my Second Reading speech but to pick up on the specifics of this group of amendments. In so doing, I declare my interest as a practising chartered surveyor with an involvement with the planning system. I am also the president of the National Association of Local Councils, which is the national parent body of parish, town and neighbourhood councils.
I have been following the issue of planning and how it has unfolded from the times when we had county structure plans, and the planning system under that regime, through the local development frameworks and regional spatial strategies, and now into this new era of local plans and the National Planning Policy Framework. As with all these situations, we are now in a transition. I fully recognise that and can understand some of the reasons why the Bill is framed in quite general terms. Picking up on the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Deben, I think that there is a lacuna here, but it is slightly different from the one that he referred to.
There are lots of duties in the planning context but I see two particular ones in local plans. First, there is the duty to deliver on the national strategic needs, to which a local plan must have regard. We know what some of those needs are—housing, for instance, because of the statistics on household formation. The second thing, of course, is making local decisions for local people. Having not been able to deliver my Second Reading speech in person, I gave it to the Minister in writing. I have just had her reply, for which I thank her. I asked a question about what I saw as a lacuna between the National Planning Policy Framework, and what the Secretary of State is putting in place in that respect, and what has to be decided at local level in the local plan.
Picking up on the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, I would say that there is a high degree of variation between different planning authorities, be it geophysical, social or economic, and we cannot necessarily second-guess how those will bite. By virtue of localism and there being a greater say at community and neighbourhood level, the chances are that the way in which those are cast into the local plan will be different from what we have experienced hitherto.
However, the larger strategic and supra-local issues and imperatives cannot so easily be dealt with by localism in terms of the local plan if you are looking for a local voice and a local view. You require for that purpose the local view to be better informed and to look outside its own local existence in a way which I suspect is not the received wisdom of the fruits of localism being passed to communities and neighbourhoods. Some of these supra-local issues are going to be the least palatable to communities, particularly where they exceed the criteria for local organic need.
In putting in place the National Planning Policy Framework—here I echo what the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, said earlier—it was necessary to try to render down a lot of the guidance and everything else into a matter of simple arithmetic. My fear is that it has gone slightly too far in that respect and that some of the more specific guidance about growth and targets—those things that local plans needed to build into their criteria that sat above the strictly local level—is not so well informed under the National Planning Policy Framework. There is insufficient definition of those issues in the framework, as opposed to the laudable aspirations that it contains, for a local planning authority to be able to resolve them.
Housing need as an organic local construct, as against the national imperative of household formation, was a matter that I raised with the Minister. She did not answer that question. I referred to a local authority of my acquaintance. I shall not name it and I would not be the judge of designation in such circumstances, but I have seen the numbers go up from one figure to another figure and back down again. This oscillation has taken no account of what has happened during the many years that have passed in the period starting with country structure plan targets and going on to regional spatial strategies. We are now back to a figure for that particular authority that is below the figure considered by the country structure plan and the SERPLAN decision-making process, yet we know that the numbers likely to be required, particularly in growth areas and key areas of economic growth, which is the circumstance of the authority that I had in mind, are mounting all the time—and there are aspirations. What has happened with the National Planning Policy Framework is simplicity—yes—but I am less sure that there is guidance that is of real use in informing local plans.
Baroness Hanham
My Lords, I thank noble Lords for their contributions on this amendment. Some of the ground was covered previously, but not substantially, so I am grateful for all the views that have been put forward. What is being underscored here is that a local authority should not be penalised for something which is well outside its own control. As I said in response to the previous amendment, it would be our intention that where a local planning authority was on the bar for designation it would at least be able to discuss some of the reasons for why it thought that it was slow, particularly over one or two applications. The noble Lord, Lord Greaves, is right: there are a number of areas where local authorities simply cannot do anything about that.
They can under the new planning agreement, however, as they will be able to say to a developer that there are areas which are outside their control and may take longer to consider. That can be a formal agreement, or there can an informal agreement saying the same thing, and it can take place at any stage in the planning process. If you get to a certain stage and discover that you have not got the response that you need, the planning agreement could be that you think that a few weeks might be needed to bring that in and it could be delayed. This is not about planning applications where we know that things go wrong; it is where the normal process of considering an application is deliberately slow.
I hear very clearly what is being said about this, and I hope that we will be able to make clear either in guidance or in some other way what would be excluded, because that is important. We have noted, too, what your Lordships’ Select Committee on the Constitution and the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee had to say about this. We need to take note of that, consider it and come back at Report if there is anything that we can do to respond to it.
The noble Lord, Lord Greaves, has set out a substantial list. I do not think that he really believes that it would be sensible to have that in the Bill. We need to understand where the exceptions and difficulties are. I am sure that we will think about that after the sitting.
Amendment 34, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord True, and to which the noble Lord, Lord Tope, spoke, concerns the question of judicial review and proposes that any judicial review should be excluded from any assessment of speed. An absolutely minute number of planning applications are subject to judicial review and, in the vast majority of those cases, the proceedings are instigated once the application has been determined. They do not take place during the course of the review, which might take up time. I do not think that judicial review will impede councils’ performance on the consideration of the application. It is therefore unnecessary to make special provision for applications subject to judicial review in any way. I suspect that if it happened in the middle of a process it would be as relevant to have that as a planning agreement to be sorted out as any other. I need to check that, but that seems a pretty logical conclusion.
We have dealt a little with an authority’s past improvement in performance, and the proposal that any designation should be based on five years. That would be far too long. We are looking at the figures for two years because we are concerned about the performance occurring now, not about whether the authority has improved over five years, because if it is still not at the criteria level now, it will make no difference whether it started from nought or not or whether it has gone up or down. It is better to set a bar of two years and not much more so that we get a really clear impression of what is happening at present.
Where local authorities are deemed to be failing under the criteria, we do not want to hang about. We do not want them to be under pressure about it; if they are to be designated, we want them to be designated, the help to be put in place and the opportunity to be de-designated at the year review to be put in hand immediately. I keep saying this, but we do not want local authorities to be designated; we would much prefer that they were not. We need to ensure that if they are not performing well, they start to perform well or better very quickly.
We have made clear that we will take a picture of each authority’s performance over the most recent two-year period to even out any fluctuations in the data and account for the fact that some authorities deal with more applications than others. I said that in debate on a previous amendment. We recognise that that there are authorities, such as the national parks authority, which deal with a limited number of major applications during the course of a year. Of course we must take that into account compared with a local planning authority which is dealing with any number of major applications.
We have just completed a consultation. As I said, we will try to ensure that noble Lords at least know before the next stage what were the responses to it. If we can get any further than that, we will. We will consult again in future if the approach to the criteria should change. That was a point picked up by the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie: what is to stop future Secretaries of State suddenly deciding that they want to raise all the criteria? What is to stop them is that they would have to go out to consultation; they could not just do it. That does not need to be in the Bill either.
I think that I have answered the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Greaves. If elements within the 13 weeks justify delay, we will certainly ensure that that is taken up. We shall consider very carefully the responses to the consultation. I hope that that covers the points made by noble Lords.
Lord Jenkin of Roding
My Lords, on Amendment 29, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, I raised a point about the length of time of the designation and drew attention to the fact that I was subject to judicial review because I had not included length of time for the suspension of the health authority. There is a parallel.
Baroness Hanham
In the consultation, it is suggested that the length of designation should be reviewed after a year. I think that the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, is asking whether you could keep on renewing it so that there would be no end to the time. I do not know the answer to that, and I will drop the noble Lord a note, if I may.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, very briefly, I welcome what I think is a positive response from the Minister about local authorities not being put in a perilous position for reasons which are not their fault. I accept that my amendment was a typical Committee amendment to set out some of the issues in black and white; I did not expect it all to appear in the Bill. However, the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Deben, was that at the moment there is nothing in the Bill. If something can be included in the Bill to give me some reassurance and guarantee that the thinking—I am always in favour of thinking; it is what makes humans progress—that the Minister promised will take place on these matters, that would be extremely helpful. That could be by introducing regulations.
The only other pebble that I want to drop into the pond at the moment is to ask whether there is a danger that by emphasising formal planning performance agreements for major applications, the mere negotiation of those agreements in a much larger number of cases might cause more delays.
Lord McKenzie of Luton
My Lords, like the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, I take a small degree of comfort from the Minister’s response to considering reports on parliamentary process. That is the most important point to flow from this group of amendments. I am sure that the noble Baroness will be well aware that if the Government do not signal that they can meet our aspirations, we will return to that matter on Report in any event.
It seemed to me that pretty much every other noble Lord who spoke broadly supported this group of amendments. To be clear, we are happy to support each of Amendments 8, 34 and 33—I think that I attributed Amendment 34 to the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, but it was tabled by the noble Lord, Lord True—as well as our amendments in the group.
I am disappointed that the Government do not feel that they should look at the direction of travel of an authority, because it seems to me that that is at least an indication of its capacity to improve, which is what this should all be about. The noble Baroness referred to Secretaries of State and asked what is to stop them changing the criteria in future. As I understand it, the point about the consultation is that there is a positive plan to change it after the first year—to raise the bar. That is what the consultation document states. It asks questions about what the enhanced criteria should be.
On the need for more guidance and clarity, the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, gave us an historic sweep from county structure plans through to the NPPF and, in particular, the NPPF’s need for guidance to bolster it, especially given its newness.
I thought that the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, was particularly helpful. Not only does it demonstrate his now acknowledged expertise and practical understanding of what happens in authorities; it sets down a range of things which could impact on how the metrics come out for any local planning authority. It must surely be right that, one way or another, those are taken into account. It would be difficult to carry them all in a clear way within the Bill. However, either there has to be some process of representation so that local authorities in danger of being designated, armed with what has actually happened on their patch, could come and say “Don’t do it”, or we need to have some real clarity in guidance about this range of issues being taken properly into account.
This debate has, I hope, moved matters on. I hope that the Government will reflect seriously on this because if this clause is to go ahead—we hope that it does not but suspect that it might—we need to make these improvements and have some clear indications of how that might be accomplished. Having said that, I—
Baroness Hanham
Before the noble Lord withdraws his amendment, I hope I made it clear that if a local authority is going to be designated, it will be able to put forward the sort of points that he and the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, have suggested as a reason for why their applications have been slower than others. I hope that is clear.
Lord McKenzie of Luton
That is very helpful, but can we just be clear on the consequence? Notwithstanding that it might be close to the end of the year and that 30% of the applications will not be received within the designated time, can an authority come and say, “Because of these applications, these circumstances, these issues with a developer or these issues with the community”, so that designation may not then take place, even if the criteria have been breached? I am not sure whether the criteria are met or breached in these circumstances. However, that would be a way to avoid designation, and of doing so notwithstanding there being no formal and informal agreements. Obviously, those cannot now be dealt with in retrospect. Is that what the Minister is saying? That is actually very helpful; for me, it is a new point.
Baroness Hanham
I am saying that an authority could put that forward and have it taken into account. Whether it would actually stop the designation would depend on a whole number of other factors, but it is a fact that it would be able to make those representations.
Lord McKenzie of Luton
Lord McKenzie of Luton
My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendments 5 and 25 in this group. These amendments would preclude the Secretary of State from including in the types of application that can be made to the Secretary of State, rather than a designated authority, certain types of developments. We have a parallel amendment grouped with this that would preclude any planning authority with responsibility for all or part of any of these areas from being designated. These include developments affecting flood risk areas, world heritage sites, national parks, areas of outstanding national beauty and sites of special scientific interest. Our natural environment and our heritage are precious assets that require special consideration in this context. Indeed, issues around conserving and enhancing the natural and historic environment, and meeting the challenges of climate change, flooding and coastal change, rightly feature robustly in the NPPF.
Our major concern, not allayed by discussion at the other end on this matter, is that the focus on process and timing under Clause 1 will drive the behaviours of local planning authorities and the speed of decision-making to run contrary to a wider, quality-led approach, which the NPPF demands. What it demands entails significant engagement, and not just from the applicant. It is clear from the Government’s consultation document that they see the speed of decision-making as paramount and are intent on increasing the threshold for designation in subsequent years, so excluding these situations from designation entirely is a necessary protection.
The Government have made great play of having clarity over designation, indicating that it will follow automatically after some transitional issues. However, we may have a qualification on that as a result of our last exchange. There seems no scope for local planning authorities charged with these responsibilities to explain their position on a case-by-case basis. From what the noble Baroness said a moment ago, perhaps she will say that that is now not the case.
I will comment in due course on Amendments 6, 7 and 26 when they have been spoken to, but it looks as though Amendments 7 and 26 have a substantial overlap with our Amendments 5 and 25. Clearly, we expect to be able to support them on that basis. I beg to move.
Lord Tope
My Lords, Amendment 6 stands in my name and has been suggested by both the Local Government Association and the Campaign to Protect Rural England. It would of course mean that only local authorities which do not already have a local plan in place could be designated as poorly performing. In other words, it would immediately remove from the possibility of designation all those authorities that have a local plan in place. As we all know, the preparation and adoption of a local plan is a lengthy process. It is sometimes too lengthy a process but it is fully democratic and shows that the planning authority concerned is performing to proper democratic accords. On that basis, it is believed that they should be excluded from this threat.
Good, sensible local plans are forward-looking. They are intended and designed to encourage and stimulate growth. It is felt that they are in themselves probably a better measure of how well an authority is performing than individual planning applications—I think that this point has been made in earlier debates today—however major the project for which they are submitted. As I said, the intention of this amendment is to exclude those authorities that have adopted a local plan over the previous 20 years, as it suggests.
Lord Beecham
My Lords, is 20 years a reasonable period? The point has already been made in debate that there is an issue with the effectiveness of local plans. If we are going back as long as that, it could be argued that that is not really a sufficient incentive to authorities to bring their plans up to date. They cannot be done annually but two decades is an extremely long time.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, I apologise that I missed the speech by the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie. He was moving an amendment that is very similar to my Amendments 7 and 26, which are in this group. I am sure that I agree with everything that he said about Amendment 3, since in effect it says almost the same thing as my Amendment 7, so I will say no more about that.
I want to say something briefly about national parks. There are two issues here. One concerns planning applications that may not become relevant applications and are therefore referred to the Secretary of State, as in the noble Lord’s amendment and my Amendment 7. My Amendment 26 says that authorities that may not be designated should include,
“a national park authority or the Broads Authority”.
The helpful information that we got about the number of major applications in the past year shows clearly that there are not very many in national parks. I think that the Minister referred to this; in some cases, the figure is as low as two. The statistics there could very easily be distorted.
However, there is more than that. National parks are very special places that have been designated for very special reasons. The national park planning authorities are already different from ordinary local planning authorities. They are not the ordinary district councils; they are the national park authority, which is a planning authority in its own right. A substantial proportion of the members of national park authorities are already nominated and appointed by the Secretary of State; I think it is the Defra Secretary of State, but is definitely a Secretary of State.
To take functions such as major planning applications away from the national park authority, in these very special places with their very special landscapes, and put them in the hands of a different Secretary of State —the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government—with a quite different agenda risks the balance of decision-making on these applications in national parks, shifting away from the importance of nature and landscape and towards development. Clearly, there always has to be a balance in every sort of area and national parks have to have development, but the criteria on which planning applications in national parks are assessed and decided are materially different from the criteria in much of the rest of the country. That is why they have been designated as national parks. The national park authorities have the responsibility for looking after those parks and for ensuring that those criteria are applied, in the interests not just of the landscape but of the people who live there. To take that away from them on technical operational grounds, based on the proportion of planning applications that were dealt with and determined within a two-year period or on other similar criteria, would be quite wrong.
This proposal is causing great alarm among the people who care for and about national parks, and I hope that the Minister will make it clear that they are not to be designated under any circumstances—and, preferably, will do so in the Bill.
Lord Deben
My Lords, on this occasion I hope that the Minister will not accept any of these amendments because they do not stand up at all. As she knows, I am not happy about this clause, but the national park authorities have one of the worst reputations when it comes to dealing with applications—we cannot avoid that; when I was Secretary of State I had a constant stream of particular authorities that were quite unable to do these things properly—and the idea that somehow or other they should be put aside seems to be unacceptable. If, as we are beginning to understand, the criteria are largely those of speed, it would do the national parks quite a lot of good to get their answers in rather more quickly than they do at the moment. The idea that they have to be slower than anyone else is not an acceptable position as far as national parks are concerned. If we accepted the quantum of these amendments, there would hardly be any application anywhere in the country that would not find itself in one way or another touched by one of the designations that we are talking about.
We ought to concentrate on the issue that really matters, which is how we make the clause work in a sensible and transparent way. That is what we have been pressing for, and to try to avoid its implication by putting a series of designations outwith it does two things that are dangerous: first, it would remove any value that the clause might have, and, secondly, it would detract from the things that we are trying to say elsewhere. I want a regime that can work properly wherever in the country it is applied. I hope therefore that the Minister will not accept these amendments but that she will recognise that the reason for them fundamentally is this unhappiness with the uncertainty of the basis upon which this clause is going to be imposed.
If everyone were happy about the objectivity, correctness and clarity of the basis on which a planning authority will be designated, there would be much less of a problem. It is the unhappiness with that which lies behind most of our concern. If the Minister could put that right, I think most of us would accept that within those contexts it is perfectly reasonable to ask the planning authority of a national park to do its job within a reasonable amount of time. If it has only two planning applications a year, then obviously no Minister is going to say, “We’re going to apply the 30% rule”—I am not sure how you would apply that—and I am not too upset about that; it does not worry me too much as long as it is in the context in which all these things are dealt with in an objective and manifestly properly constituted way.
Lord Tope
My Lords, before the Minister responds, may I respond briefly to the noble Lord, Lord Beecham? He questioned whether the 20 years suggested in my amendment might be too long. He may well be right and it may well be so. At this stage, my consideration is more to get the principle accepted rather than a specific time period. Part of the reason for that is that I think we would all want to incentivise the surprisingly large number of local authorities that still do not have a local plan in place. The positive intent, if you like, of the amendment is to provide that incentive. I suggest that whether the period is 20 years, 15 years or any other period is less material at Committee stage than the principle that the amendment is trying to achieve.
Having said that, perhaps I could comment on what the noble Lord, Lord Deben, has just said. Again, I think that most of us who propose amendments in Committee do not expect that they will eventually appear in the Act, but they cover the particular issues that we wish to raise in order to air our concerns, to hear the Minister’s response and, most importantly, for the Minister to be able to take it back to her ministerial colleagues so that the Government can come back on Report in exactly the way that the noble Lord is suggesting.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, I wonder if I can respond very briefly to the noble Lord, Lord Deben. Surely it is the case that because the criteria for granting planning permission in national parks are much more rigorous and strict than in many areas, many developments will actually need more time for negotiation and discussions with the applicants to make them acceptable within a national park context. In national parks particularly, it may well be that some of the authorities are not as efficient as they might be—I can quite believe that—but in general I would expect that similar applications in national parks will take longer than in what I might call ordinary areas, for those reasons.
The statistics are interesting and worth putting on the record. In the past year the Lake District had 19 major planning applications—far more than most others, which is interesting—and the Broads Authority had 13. Of the rest, Dartmoor had two, Exmoor had two, the New Forest had seven, the North York Moors had seven, Northumberland had two, the Peak National Park had five and the Yorkshire Dales had three. With that level of application, it would clearly be ludicrous to apply anything like a strict 30% rule or any other simple cut-off.
Lord Jenkin of Roding
The fact of the matter is that this table is about decisions, not applications. The decisions may well have been refusals. Indeed, in many of the national parks, that is what happens. These are major applications, over so many hectares and so on. The national parks are planning authorities in their own right, as are bodies such as the London Docklands Development Corporation. They should be subject to the same sort of discipline as anybody else.
Lord McKenzie of Luton
My Lords, when Amendment 6 —which was spoken to by the noble Lord, Lord Tope— was debated in the other place, my colleagues tabled a similar amendment and it was pointed out by the Minister that only one authority in the land had not had a local plan for 20 years. I am not sure how it got away with it for that long.
Lord McKenzie of Luton
Indeed. My point was going to be that if this is a way of wrecking the clause, I am all in favour of that, but let us do it at clause stand part and do it properly. If it is structured as a means of incentivising people to get on with their local plan, I would have more sympathy.
I side with the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, on the national parks. The number of applications seems relevant because you might have two applications to deal with in a year, which several of these authorities did. If you determine each within 14 weeks of application, you would be designated. I think that would be the consequence of the fairly strict rule.
The noble Lord, Lord Deben, said that it is important that we are happy about this because it is objective. We say yes to an objective approach, but that does not mean a blanket approach where exactly the same criteria apply to all because if that 30% criterion applies, when you have authorities with a very small number of applications, it could work in a perverse way.
Baroness Hanham
On this amendment I shall satisfy my noble friend Lord Deben and practically nobody else because I cannot accept it. I do not suppose many noble Lords will be surprised at that because, as the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie of Luton, said quite properly and rightly, if this amendment were agreed to, that would be the end of Clause 1 because there would be virtually nobody left to be designated. If that is the purpose, I understand that, but if it is not, that is what the effect would be.
Amendment 6 would prevent the submission of applications directly to the Secretary of State in any area where the planning authority had not adopted a local plan within the past 20 years. I can advise noble Lords that the city of York is the only one that falls into that category. I am not sure that we want to allow that.
Quite apart from preventing the effective operation of Clause 1, these amendments are not entirely logical. Where applications are submitted directly to the Secretary of State, the planning inspectors dealing with them will have to have regard to flood risk and any designations that affect the site, and to the national policy that enshrines those important protections where local plans are not up to date. They are required to do so by law, just as the local planning authority is. Similarly, there is no logic in saying that local authorities should be exempted from designation just because they have responsibility for protected areas. Applicants for planning permission and local communities should be served by an effective planning service in these areas, just as much as anywhere else.
I note the arguments that noble Lords made about the specific circumstances of national parks. I heard very clearly what my noble friend Lord Deben said about this. We want the process of assessing performance to be fair, which is why the consultation proposes looking at this over a two-year period to ensure that judgments are based on sufficient data. We will, of course, be looking carefully at what the consultation responses say about this, but I do not think a case could be made to exclude national parks from possible designation just because they are national parks and because they may not deal with an enormous number of applications. The noble Lord, Lord Greaves, read out the list that I have had passed to me, and it is clear that some have more than others. The same argument can be made for all the other areas that noble Lords want to exclude. I guess most, or a great part, of London is in conservation areas, and I am not sure that we necessarily think that it would be a good idea to exclude them all.
I do not believe that these amendments are necessary. Their effect would be such that I would not be able to accept them because they would make Clause 1 redundant.
Lord Greaves
The table I have is headed “total major decisions” not “total major approvals”. This needs clarifying perhaps, but I would not want to clash with my noble friend Lord Jenkin of Roding over a technical, statistical thing when neither of us knows whether it is right.
Lord Jenkin of Roding
I entirely recognise that they were both approved and not approved. They were decisions.
Lord McKenzie of Luton
My Lords, I think we have debated this group sufficiently. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord McKenzie of Luton
“(1A) The Secretary of State shall consult representatives of local government and others who he considers appropriate before laying such regulations which shall be subject to approval by both Houses of Parliament.”
Lord McKenzie of Luton
My Lords, under new Section 62A, an applicant can bypass the local planning authority and make an application directly to the Secretary of State. As a practical matter, it is expected that this means it will be dealt with by the Planning Inspectorate, although it does not have to be the Planning Inspectorate, as I understand it, to which the Secretary of State delegates this task. To be able to do this, the local planning authority in question must have been designated and the development in question must be of a description prescribed by the Secretary of State. The prescription is by way of an order subject to the negative procedure. This amendment seeks to clarify in the Bill that the application must relate to a major development. I think the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, has a parallel amendment requiring that before prescribing any types of application there should be consultation with local government and that the regulations should be affirmative.
The power for the Secretary of State to decide which applications he wishes to determine is very wide. The Government state that it will be limited to applications relating to major developments, but the Bill places no such limitation on the power to prescribe, just as the Bill places no limitation on the type of planning authority that might be designated. This is frankly not good enough. This is in line with the other discussions we have had. Indeed, as matters stand, there seems to be nothing to prevent a local planning authority being designated because of perceived poor performance on the timing of decisions on major applications but all its applications being open to be determined by the Secretary of State.
We are encouraged to believe that there will not be many applications that, as a result of these proposals, find themselves being determined by the Secretary of State or the Planning Inspectorate, but the impact assessment states that there is no evidence to support the Government’s assumed diversion to the Planning Inspectorate.
Limiting the rights of prescription to applications for major developments would still potentially encompass a wide range of circumstances. The definition of a major development is interesting and worth reflecting on. It includes,
“the winning and working of minerals or the use of land for mineral-working deposits … waste development … the provision of dwellinghouses where … the number of dwellinghouses to be provided is 10 or more; or … the development is to be carried out on a site having an area of 0.5 hectares or more and it is not known whether the development falls within sub-paragraph (c)(i)”—
that sub-paragraph relates to the number of dwellings—-
“or … development carried out on a site having an area of 1 hectare or more”.
Therefore “major developments” are not necessarily mega-developments. Developments as small as 10 or more dwellings would be included.
It is appropriate that we make clear that it is major developments that can be designated for this process by the Secretary of State, and that there should be a proper parliamentary process to deal with that. I think that accords with the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, which we expect to be able to support. I beg to move.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, as the noble Lord said, I have tabled an amendment with exactly the same effect as his; I will therefore not repeat what he said. “Major development” means to me those applications which automatically come to committee in our authority. I can confirm that some of them are not all that major, but they are nevertheless important in the community and the area. We need to be absolutely clear about this.
While I am on my feet, we have been talking about 13 weeks on major developments. Can an authority be designated because it is failing to meet the 30% on non-major developments in relation to the eight-week timescale for dealing with applications? It would be rather odd if it was designated because minor applications were not being dealt with within eight weeks, but major ones then got sent off. I wonder if that can be clarified.
Baroness Hanham
My Lords, I am happy to clarify the question of the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, immediately: it does not apply to every single application. This clause applies to major applications. Minor applications would not be included in any consideration for designation. Major developments, as the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, has said, are already in secondary legislation. They are precisely as he read them out, and they would be the criteria by which we would seek to move ahead; that is the basis on which we are defining “major development”.
This is another point of consultation. The noble Lord is suggesting that “major” should be in the Bill. I would rather see all the replies to the consultation and come back on that, but the noble Lord has raised an important point.
Lord McKenzie of Luton
I am grateful to the noble Baroness for that response. We look forward to further discussion on that on Report.
I think that it is right, as I have indicated, that the Secretary of State does not have to delegate to the Planning Inspectorate, but could delegate to others. Is that correct? Are there any proposals to do that at all? Whom might those others encompass?
Baroness Hanham
My Lords, I think that it would be the Planning Inspectorate, but nods and winks from over there suggest that I should write to the noble Lord as to whether there is another area to which it could go.
Lord Adonis
My Lords, while the noble Baroness is writing to us, can she also give us the statistics that have been mentioned several times and are quite important to this discussion: the proportion of major applications that the Planning Inspectorate itself determines within 13 weeks? Perhaps the noble Baroness has the figure to hand but, if not, could she let us know?
Lord McKenzie of Luton
My Lords, again, I am grateful to the Minister and beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Greaves
Lord Greaves
My Lords, this amendment is about connected applications, which are dealt with in Clause 1(3). I also have Amendment 12 in this group, and there are two amendments from the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie.
Connected applications are those where a local planning authority has been designated so that major applications, we now learn, can be made to the Secretary of State and not to the authority. Where a major application goes to the Secretary of State and a further application is then submitted that relates to the relevant application, it is called a “connected application” in the Bill. Clause 1(3) states that a connected application is determined as such by the opinion of the applicants. This may be made direct to the Secretary of State, or it could be made to the local planning authority. The Bill states that this applies to listed building consents and applications for conservation area consent, which are applications under the Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act 1990, or, and this is the question behind my amendment,
“an application of a description prescribed by the Secretary of State”.
This is a probing amendment to find out what kind of applications might be prescribed by the Secretary of State which are not among those set out in the Bill. For the life of me, I am not quite sure that I can think of what they might be. No doubt the Minister can tell us.
Where does the applicant get advice on whether a connected application is connected before submitting it? Does that advice come from the local planning authority? In particular, where do applicants go for pre-application advice before they know whether the application has been accepted by the Secretary of State as a connected application? Clearly, if an application is submitted to the Secretary of State and then rejected and sent back to the local authority because it is not connected, it might well cause further delays.
Amendment 12 refers to Clause 1(4). If the Secretary of State has an application submitted as a connected application but considers that it is not connected, what happens? The Bill says that the Secretary of State “may” refer it to the local planning authority to determine. Mine is a traditional, old fashioned may/must amendment and says that he “must” send it back to the local authority. Under what circumstances might the Secretary of State presumably decide to determine it himself, or through the Planning Inspectorate? The Bill does not actually say that that is what would happen, just that he “may” send it to the planning authority. That needs clarifying. In particular, how come an application that is not connected should nevertheless be dealt with by the Secretary of State? These are probing questions to tidy up and understand exactly how the Government think that this would work. I beg to move.
Lord McKenzie of Luton
My Lords, we have Amendments 11 and 17 in this group. Amendment 11 refers to circumstances where a connected application is made to the Secretary of State. It would clarify that the Secretary of State will be responsible for ensuring that all statutory requirements which a local planning authority or hazardous substance authority have to meet will be met by the Secretary of State. Perhaps the Minister can confirm that.
Amendment 17 is very much along the same lines as that pursued by the noble Lord, Lord Greaves. It would bring some clarity to the boundaries of what counts as a connected application. The Bill clearly includes listed building consent and conservation area consent, but otherwise means,
“an application of a description prescribed by the Secretary of State”.
This prescription will presumably be via some parliamentary process. Our amendment would require a consultation to be held. However, the particular purpose of the amendment, like the probing amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, is to get more on the record concerning the Government’s approach to this. It is understood that this may be driven, at least in part, by the Penfold review, but that was looking at non-planning consent, so I am unsure how that would fit; indeed, some of the other recommendations of the Penfold review are being carried forward in the Bill. Can the Minister say whether anything is in contemplation under Clause 1(3)(a)(ii)?
We support Amendments 10 and 12 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, which would make it mandatory to refer a non-connected application to a relevant planning authority or hazardous substance authority. If it were not mandatory, I am not sure where it would go.
Baroness Hanham
My Lords, I need to start by explaining why we have made provision for connected applications in subsections (3) and (4) of new Section 62A to be inserted in the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 under Clause 1. In the few cases where a planning application is submitted directly to the Secretary of State—that is, at the behest of the developer—it is important that if there are any other consents that need to be obtained under the planning Acts, and which are directly connected to the scheme concerned, it makes sense to have the ability for them to be considered by the Secretary of State at the same time. That would be a normal planning process. This is not a hidden provision that would allow an expansion in the use of Clause 1 by the back door but a common-sense measure to minimise bureaucracy and to streamline the process.
We have not sought to specify every single consent that could conceivably fall into this category but have instead cited the principal ones and given the Secretary of State the ability to prescribe any additional consents that may need to be dealt with in a similar way, which might include, for example, hazardous waste, advertisement consent or tree preservation order consent. There probably are some others but those would be the main ones.
This is a common approach in legislation, which avoids the Act becoming unnecessarily detailed and complicated. In practice, it will relate just to a small number of applications and consents that are required only occasionally, and which are, additionally, limited to consents required under the planning Acts and not under any other legislation. Nor is there any need, as Amendment 11 seeks to do, to say in the Bill that in dealing with such applications the Secretary of State should comply with relevant statutory requirements. We will ensure through the secondary legislation that all statutory requirements apply, whoever the decision-maker is.
Amendment 17 seeks to make decisions about the submission or transfer of connected applications subject to published criteria. Once again, I do not think that placing such a requirement in the Bill is at all necessary. It usually will be a matter of common sense as to whether a particular consent is “connected” or not. Therefore, we do not need to add to the mountain of planning guidance that already exists. Indeed, as noble Lords will know, the Government are undertaking a radical streamlining of the planning guidance under the noble Lord, Lord Taylor. He probably would not welcome our adding any more to his work.
I can deal quite briefly with Amendment 12, which, as the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, has said, concerns the language—we have discussed this on many occasions as regards many amendments—and whether it should say “may” rather than “must”. However, this is consistent with the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, which is the legislation that this clause would amend. This is a matter of drafting convention that we should respect. The noble Lord, Lord Greaves, asked me where the advice would come from and whether an application is connected. We would expect that that would be covered in any pre-application discussions either at the time the application was moved to the Planning Inspectorate or initially.
I would like to reassure noble Lords that there is absolutely no question of the Secretary of State holding on to a “connected application”, should it be found to be unrelated—unconnected—to the planning application that he is considering. There would be no reason for him to do so and it clearly would not be at all sensible. I hope with those explanations that the noble Lord is willing to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, I think I have got the answer that I was seeking on the “may/must” issue: the Secretary of State would send it back to the local planning authority and there would be no question—I think that those were the Minister’s words—about that, which is okay. As someone who believes that words must mean what they mean, I do not understand why it should say “may”. Nevertheless, I accept the Minister’s assurance.
I can understand how the conservation consents and the listed building consents fit naturally with the relevant application with which the Secretary of State is dealing. I started to get a bit alarmed when the Minister referred to advertisement consent and TPOs. Advertisement consent tends to concern things that happen over a period of time. For example, at the beginning of a big new development, there will be some adverts. But what happens if someone comes along two years after the development has taken place and asks for more or different advertisements, or whatever? Because the application originally had been a relevant application dealt with by the Secretary of State and assuming that the authority was still designated two years later, would it still go to the Secretary of State or would it be regarded as a completely new application, although not a major application because it refers to just advertisement consent, and be dealt with by the local authority in the normal way? In other words, what would the system be for minor additions or changes to the development once the development had been completed and signed off? That is the question that arises in my mind.
Baroness Hanham
My Lords, there is always a danger in being clever. I found a briefing note about the extra provisions and I thought that it would be sensible to read it out. I am now regretting it enormously because the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, has raised further perfectly sensible and relevant questions about it. As regards the tree preservation order and the advertisement consent, I can see how they could be connected applications but the noble Lord might be happier if he gets a proper response and I will make sure that he does. I am very sorry but I have completely forgotten what else he asked me.
Lord Greaves
I asked about what will happen when further minor applications or advertisement consents come up—for example, if a big development has taken place and people want to change it or to put up adverts.
Baroness Hanham
I apologise for that. I was getting the small things right. They would be new applications and therefore they would be considered in the same way, depending on whether the authority at that stage was designated or not.
Lord Greaves
Perhaps the Minister would include that in her clarification letter. Clearly, if the authority is no longer designated, it would deal with applications because there would be no procedure for sending them off. But if it was still designated, at what stage does a development break free from being a relevant development and is treated like any other development?
Baroness Hanham
My understanding is that any fresh application, even one which is associated with a development, would be considered to be a new application. It would therefore fall to be considered on the basis of whether or not the authority was designated and whether the developer under those circumstances wanted to take it back to the Planning Inspectorate. If that is not correct, I will let the noble Lord know.
Lord Greaves
We could go on talking about this for a while but I think that it would be better to clarify it outside the Chamber. I am very grateful for the answers that I have been given. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Greaves
Lord Greaves
My Lords, Amendment 13 and this group of amendments are about money and the extent to which local planning authorities will be recompensed for work that they do which is related to applications that have been referred to the Secretary of State as relevant applications. Amendments 14 and 23 in this group also stand in my name and other amendments in the group stand in that of the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie.
Amendment 13 is an even more classic traditional amendment, which seeks to leave out “and”. However, the grouped Amendment 14 is rather more significant. It also concerns connected applications. If somebody lodges a connected application with the Secretary of State and the latter, after due consideration, decides that it is not a connected application and sends it back to the local authority—as the Minister assured us would happen when we discussed the previous group of amendments—what happens to the fee that has been paid when that application was lodged and submitted? Is that fee returned with the application to the local authority or is it returned to the applicant and the latter is told to make a new application with an appropriate fee to the local planning authority? This is a technical issue but one that needs to be cleared up.
Amendment 23 refers to Clause 1(6), which, again, is where the Secretary of State takes over an application as a relevant application from a designated authority and gives directions,
“requiring a local planning authority or hazardous substances authority to do things in relation to an application made to the Secretary of State under this section that would otherwise have been made to the authority; and directions under this subsection—
(a) may relate to a particular application or to applications more generally; and
(b) may be given to a particular authority or to authorities more generally”.
One can imagine that it is most likely to happen in the case of the local planning authority which has been designated and which will still be in existence. As lots of local work has to take place, perhaps on consultation or whatever, that authority is instructed by the Secretary of State, no doubt after discussions, to carry out that work. It seems to me that this is a perfectly reasonable way in which the new system might work: namely, that the planning inspectorate has somebody dealing with applications in a particular authority, but dealing with them through that authority’s staff. Perhaps this would be a way of giving support and training to help that authority become more efficient.
In an extreme form, one might imagine the Planning Inspectorate putting its own man in the town hall and that person handling those applications with the help of the council’s staff. It would be interesting to know whether the Government are considering that scenario in relation to designated authorities and relevant applications or whether they will try to run all this—all the local consultation and all the rest of it, including the fact-finding on the ground—through somebody based in Bristol, presumably living in a local hotel for the duration. It would be interesting to know how the Government see this working.
Whatever happens, if the local authority has to do work in relation to an application for the Secretary of State and the Planning Inspectorate, it will cost money. However, the fee for the application will have gone to the Secretary of State. Therefore, my proposed new subsections (6A) and (6B) suggest ways in which an appropriate amount of that money should be handed over to the local authority to enable it at the very least to cover its costs. Otherwise, we will have a poorly performing authority, on the Government’s criteria, which may be robbed of its major source of planning income—the major applications—and is struggling to keep going with its staff. It is very difficult to downsize an authority by, say, 20% if you have only three planning staff. How will this work? How will the Government ensure that authorities are not severely financially affected by being designated? I beg to move.
Lord McKenzie of Luton
My Lords, we have Amendments 20, 21, 22 and 24 in this group. Amendment 24 simply requires the Secretary of State to reimburse the local authority any costs it incurs,
“in carrying out directions given under subsection (6)”.
From that point of view we are being somewhat more ambitious than the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, who is simply looking to share the fee.
In Committee in another place, the Minister was taken to task over the rather strange wording of this provision under which the Secretary of State can give a local authority or hazardous substances authority a direction to do things in relation to an application. Such a loose and potentially open-ended obligation obviously gives rise to uncertainty about resources and costs. Later amendments require that there must be set out in regulations the range of responsibilities which can be imposed on a local authority under these provisions. The Minister in the Commons prayed in aid the planning performance and planning guarantee consultation, which has been much referred to this afternoon. As we have discussed, that consultation has now ended. We may know the outcome by the time we get to Report. The consultation suggests that a small number of administrative functions will need to be carried out locally, including: site notices and neighbour notification; providing the planning history of the site; and notification of any cumulative impact considerations, such as where environmental impact assessments or assessment under the habitats regulations are involved.
The local planning authority would remain responsible for maintaining the planning register. The discharge of any planning conditions would remain the responsibility of the local planning authority. If this is the range and type of functions envisaged, they should be clearly set out and subject to some process. At the very least we need something clearly on the record but the Bill is much more open-ended than this and needs to be constrained.
As for reimbursement of costs, I anticipate that the Government’s response will remain that planning fees will go to the Secretary of State or the Planning Inspectorate and there will be no need for any sharing of these. The logic seems to be that as planning is a loss-making activity for local authorities, notwithstanding the recent increase in fees, they will be relieved of this loss and in any event are funded by way of grant for these activities. Will the Minister update us on the position of grant support for local authorities under the current government settlement, given the draconian cuts that they have endured?
Amendments 21 and 22 seek to make sure that the authority which can be instructed “to do things” is in fact a designated authority and that the applications concern designated authorities. I seek clarification on that point.
Baroness Hanham
My Lords, I understand and agree with the intention behind Amendments 13 and 14. We have no argument with the suggestion that the fee for any connected application should be transferred to the local planning authority or the hazardous substances authority if it is found that the application is not, in fact, connected and the authority is the most appropriate body to determine the application. I hope that that covers those points. That is not, however, something that we want to provide for in the Bill, because such matters are most appropriately dealt with, alongside other fees issues, in the appropriate secondary legislation. It will be in secondary legislation and I should like to reassure noble Lords that that is what we intend.
Turning to the other amendments in this group, it is our intention that the Planning Inspectorate will deal with as many aspects of an application made directly to the Secretary of State as possible. In these circumstances, as the consultation document makes very clear, we intend to ask a designated planning authority to carry out only some basic administrative tasks. These include entering the application on the local authority’s planning register, undertaking neighbour notification and posting site notices. Therefore, subsection (6) of this clause has probably generated more excitement than is merited because none of these situations is very cost-intensive. While the provision indeed gives the Secretary of State a direction-making power in relation to designated authorities, it is intended to be used in a manner strictly limited to those aspects of handling an application for which it makes absolute sense for the job to be done locally. While I agree with the sentiment behind Amendment 20, I am not convinced that it is necessary to put such a requirement in the Bill.
I am also confident that there is no need to add “designated” before “authority” in subsection (6)(b), which Amendments 21 and 22 seek to do. The subsection can apply only to applications made directly to the Secretary of State, which would be possible only where an authority has been designated under this clause. It follows that the additional words are unnecessary.
In relation to Amendments 23 and 24, the local authority planning service is funded not only by fees from planning applications, which the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, alluded to, but from the local government grant, which authorities will continue to receive to help cover these basic administrative costs. There will be no diminution there. The cost of the work will be minimal but the potential need to meet these costs should be seen as part of the disincentive to performing poorly.
Lord McKenzie of Luton
I am sorry to interrupt the noble Baroness. She referred to the grant made available to local authorities and said that there will be no diminution in it. Are we talking about a separate grant or one that is paid as part of the business rate retention scheme and revenue support grant? How does that come through, particularly given the assertion that it has not reduced?
Baroness Hanham
My Lords, I think that I am talking about just the main local grant that comes with the formula grant. I may need to write to the noble Lord on that aspect. With that reservation—it needs to be part of the compendium that will come after this session—I hope that noble Lords will withdraw or not move their amendments.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, there used to be something called the planning performance grant, but my understanding is that it had been abolished. I do not know if any answer on that will be forthcoming, but it would be helpful.
Local authorities will have this extra cost because their income from planning applications, particularly major applications, will decrease or be taken away. The authority will therefore have no choice but to attempt to downsize its planning department. However, downsizing a small department and saving money is not always easy because the authority may have staff in whole numbers and it may not be possible to split them up into part-time staff. The authority may have to choose, if it has four development control staff, to get rid of a whole person. That may be more of a reduction than is reasonable for the continued efficient operation of the department. Who knows? All circumstances may be different but it is ambitious for the Government to suggest that costs will be minimal.
In addition, confining the department to performing basic administrative tasks simply may not be possible in reality because, with the best will in the world, the Planning Inspectorate will as much as possible want to tap into local information and knowledge, which will reside within the local planning department; there is no doubt about that. Is the idea that the department will perform only a few administrative tasks and that staff will not receive telephone calls, e-mails or whatever asking for more information? When you are dealing with a major planning application, all the time you are seeking lots of information from lots of sources, and some of it will be ambiguous and you will want to know its planning history. You will therefore go to the local planning officers to get that information. That will inevitably take up their time and some of the resources of the local authority. The idea that the local authority planning officers simply bang up a few notices on site or put them in the local paper is utterly unrealistic. They are going to get involved because it will be in the interests of the Planning Inspectorate that they do so; and that will be the way to get a good, quick and efficient decision. The inspectorate should not have to seek information from scratch when it is there within the local planning department. That will happen all the time and it will cost money. We may continue to talk about this and—
Lord McKenzie of Luton
Before the noble Lord withdraws the amendment, perhaps I may follow his point about the extent of the engagement of the local planning authority, which is important. He has opened up some real questions. As I understand it, the planning authority will still be able to—it may be expected to—make representations to PINS or the Secretary of State about a particular application. The authority would presumably want some public engagement to be able to formulate its views. Are those activities that the local authority will have to carry out in addition?
The consultation document makes reference to Section 106 negotiations, which it seems to suggest will not be dealt with by the Secretary of State or the planning inspector and will go back to local authorities. There was also the suggestion that such negotiations are carried out at the end of the process. I am not hugely familiar with some of the detailed processes of Section 106 negotiations but I wonder whether they always happen at the end or along the way as part of the application. There seems to be other potential activity that the local planning authority will, of necessity, be involved in.
Baroness Hanham
My Lords, the question of whether the Section 106 procedure is carried out by the local authority or the Planning Inspectorate will depend on where the negotiations take place, because they sometimes take place during the process of the application. I need to obtain a firm response on whether, in some cases, that will be done by the local authority, subsequent to the planning decision. It is my recollection—this is not from the officials—that the Section 106 procedure is usually, at the end of the day, part of the conditions of the permission. It would therefore make sense that it had to be negotiated during the course of the application. If that is not correct, I will let noble Lords know before the next stage. However, that is probably as near as I can get at the moment.
Lord McKenzie of Luton
That would be helpful. The noble Baroness has prompted another thought: will the discharge of conditions for planning consent be left with the local planning authority, not dealt with by the inspectorate?
Baroness Hanham
Local residents will of course have the same right to put their representations directly to the Planning Inspectorate as they would to a local authority.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, has raised some extremely important issues. Perhaps this is a matter on which we could receive a letter but my understanding is that the imposition of conditions will be part of the planning permission. I am not sure what “discharge of conditions” means, but if it means checking that they are taking place, and monitoring and supervising that, if the local planning authority is to carry that out, depending on what the conditions are, it will take time and resources—particularly staff time. If there are then complaints from anybody that it is being done wrongly, the local authority will be responsible for enforcement. That costs money, which, in a normal state of affairs, would be partly paid for by the planning application fee. In the case of big applications, the fee can be considerable.
The other thought that I had when the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, was questioning the Minister was that it is inconceivable that a local planning authority—by which I mean the councillors—will not want to act as a consultee if it is a major planning application. It is inconceivable that the planning management committee, or whatever it is called in a particular area, will not consider that application, just as the local parish councils will do. In doing so, it will want quite a lot of solid evidence from its officers. It will not be prepared to behave like a parish council that simply gets the application and talks about it but does not really have any expert advice, the advice being based on local knowledge and so on; it will be a planning committee which expects a proper report and which expects to make representations to the Secretary of State—or Planning Inspectorate—who makes the decision. It is inconceivable that that would not happen.
As a councillor, I do not envisage that my authority will be designated. I would be ashamed if it were and I am sure that it will not be. However, if I was on a council that was designated, as a councillor it is inconceivable that I would not want the councillors to put in their two pennyworth. That, too, will cost money, and for the Government to say, “Oh well, that will just have to come out of the general funds”, is very unsatisfactory.
I am very grateful to the Minister for her response to my first amendment and I raise my glass to her on that. I think that there is more to be talked about on the general financial issue between now and Report and, on that basis, I am pleased to—
Baroness Hanham
Before the noble Lord withdraws his amendment, I need to correct what I said so that we are absolutely clear. I should have remembered that the proposal in the consultation is that the planning authority will continue to deal with Section 106 and the discharge of conditions, although we will of course need to look at what people have said in the consultation. However, the proposal is not as I think I presented it; it is that the planning authority will continue with Section 106.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, this gets a bit more mysterious. The decision on whether or not to grant planning permission sometimes depends on whether a satisfactory Section 106 agreement is available. That is what tips the balance one way or the other if it is a marginal application. Certainly, I do not know what “discharge of conditions” means. Perhaps we need to understand that, as I have already said. However, the decision as to what the conditions are is an integral part of granting planning permission. You do not grant planning permission and then sit around thinking, “What conditions shall we put on it?”. You discuss the conditions and all the arrangements and then, on the basis of the whole package, you say, “Yes, that’s okay”. You might take off one condition that is proposed and put on another, or you might say, “We’ll have another condition to make it reasonable for people within that particular street”, or whatever. That is how it works, and I simply do not understand how the Planning Inspectorate can give planning permission without conditions. I do not believe that it is going to do so because, with regard to appeals, when an application is turned down the inspector decides what conditions to put on at that stage. He will always ask the local planning authority that turned down the application for a list of possible conditions if he decides to approve it. That is how it works. I think that we need some clarity on this. Having said that, I shall make a further attempt to beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Greaves
“( ) Where an application is made to the Secretary of State under this section, the provisions of paragraph 8 of Schedule 1 shall apply to the Secretary of State as they apply to a local planning authority when determining applications for planning permission.”
Lord Greaves
My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendments 30 and 31. Again, the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, has amendments in this group.
These amendments concern information and publicity. They are about notification, consultation and the treatment of representations. I think that all those things fit together neatly because they can potentially cause a considerable amount of confusion and difficulty locally in particular. The question is: how are all these matters going to be dealt with when a relevant application goes to the Secretary of State? It has been suggested that some of them might be dealt with by the local planning authority, and that needs to be clarified.
Amendment 15 is a specialised but important amendment. It concerns the current practice of the notification of planning applications to parish and town councils so that they can put in their two pennyworth—or perhaps more—in the local consultation process on those applications. I am grateful for support on this amendment from not only my noble friend Lord Tope but the noble Earl, Lord Lytton.
The amendment states that paragraph 8 of Schedule 1 to the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 will apply to relevant applications determined by the Secretary of State. This is slightly odd because most of the consultation rules for planning applications are set down in secondary legislation. However, this one appears in the schedule to the primary legislation—the main Act—and it sets out the rules for notification to parish and town councils of planning applications and any significant amendments to planning applications. It is a procedure that is well established and well understood, and it happens because it is in the legislation. Local planning authorities are geared up to do it, and it is obviously now easy enough to do so with electronic communications. It is absolutely vital that the Secretary of State is given the same duty. Given that this duty lies on the face of the 1990 Act, it seems sensible also to put the duty on the Secretary of State into this Bill and not simply to rely on promises, assurances and so on.
The remaining amendments refer to publicity; consultation, including with statutory bodies; the period for receiving representations; and the procedures for making representations. They say that the procedure for applications which are dealt with by the Secretary of State should be the same as that for applications which are dealt with by the relevant designated local planning authority. Some local planning authority applications may still be major applications that people have preferred to submit locally, and some will be relevant applications that go off to the Secretary of State. The important principle is that all the bodies consulted should be the same in both cases. In most cases they will be because most of the consultees are statutory. For example, there is the local highways authority and the Environment Agency and so on, and they have to be consulted, but practice varies in different areas. In some, local organisations will be consulted because of local circumstances—for example, the internal drainage board. One can imagine all kinds of local bodies that the local planning authority has decided at some stage are important enough locally to be added to the list of consultees, and so the consultation goes off automatically with all the rest.
It is very important that the system and the list of bodies is the same as it would be if the local authority was dealing with the application, even if it is the Planning Inspectorate that is involved. People need to know where they stand; they get to know the system and it ought to be the same.
A further part of this amendment refers to the rights of ordinary members of the public—citizens—to make representations about planning applications. It might be a big application and they might have strong views on how it might affect their area or their town, they might be in favour of it because of the extra jobs, or they might be against it because it is being built in an area that they value. In every area, there is a system by which people can put forward their views; it varies from council to council because councils over the years have brought in different ways in which people could make representations. In particular, in some areas, people have the right to make representations in person to the decision-making body—the committee which has responsibility for determining applications. If that right is to be taken away, or other similar rights are to be taken away because the application is being dealt with by the Secretary of State nationally, at the very least, that is not going to go down very well in those areas. It is unnecessary and a publicity own- goal. It means that the Planning Inspectorate has to make some arrangements whereby people can make representations direct to the planning inspector who is primarily dealing with this application. If that does not take place, then there is a dysfunction between the rights that people have—the rights in the general sense—and the rules that apply to the way in which they can put forward their views on planning applications in an area.
Amendment 31 is related to the ability to inspect documents. Again, there will be a system locally and people will know what that system is. They will know that if they want to inspect documents, they have to go to the town hall or perhaps the local library, or wherever it is. The council may have district offices where relevant planning applications in an area are provided. It is very important, if this system is to work smoothly, that people can find the applications in the same places, under the same terms, even though the application is being made to the Secretary of State and not to the local planning authority.
Nowadays, a lot of people look on the internet for this information, so it is important that whatever system there is locally, access to information on the internet—including all the planning documents related to the application—applies to a planning application made to the Secretary of State. This must not be on some obscure website that people cannot find because it is a government website hidden away somewhere when they are used to finding local planning applications on the local authority’s website. It can be made perfectly clear who is making the decision on the application—who is determining it—but the information provided to the public needs to be provided in the same places and in the same way as it would if the application were being dealt with locally. I beg to move.
Lord McKenzie of Luton
My Lords, we have Amendments 16 and 18 in this group; I will start in reverse order with Amendment 18. This requires the Secretary of State,
“to ensure that there has been adequate consultation with the local community”.
Both of these amendments were pursued as amendments in Committee in the Commons.
The consultation document, hot off the press at that time, acknowledges that the planning committee stage obviously will be denied these processes. It is at this stage that the merits of any proposal would generally be considered in public. However, in a case which circumvents the local planning authority, it seems that the process for engaging with the local public will be left to the Planning Inspectorate to determine on a case-by-case basis. The presumption is that applications will be examined principally by written representations, with the option of a short hearing to allow the key parties to briefly put their points of view. These strictures do not seem to be supporting community engagement in a very fulsome manner. Is it not likely that, given a choice, a developer with a potentially unpopular development plan will opt for circumventing the local planning authority?
Evidence given in another place stresses the point that local communities will become increasingly reluctant to accept new developments if their voices are not to be heard. The tasks which the Secretary of State will delegate to the local planning authority may include site notices and neighbour notification, but there is no mention of a wider consultation—the very detailed points that the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, has just reviewed. Site notices on a lamp post are no substitute for a proper consultation—the interaction with local communities which frequently leads to changes in applications for the better, both for the community and for the developer, and helps drive quality decisions.
Written representations are not the preferred means of communication for everyone. Who does the Minister consider should be treated as “key parties” in this process? Will this always include the local planning authority? Given that the process and the scope of any consultation will be largely delegated to the Planning Inspectorate, what will the Secretary of State do to satisfy himself in the interests of good planning that the consultation with the local community is at least adequate?
Amendment 16 requires that any decision on an application falling to the Secretary of State because of designation must take full account of local and neighbourhood plans of relevant local authorities. One might have added the NPPF. We acknowledge that planning law requires that applications for planning permission are determined in accordance with the development plan, unless, of course, material considerations indicate otherwise. To that extent, the amendment might be seen as superfluous, but it gives me the chance to ask the Minister what will happen where updated plans are not yet in place, and whether the Secretary of State or the Planning Inspectorate will look to the NPPF, presumably as the local planning authority would.
There are issues around determining material considerations in any given situation. Might these be different when we are talking about a Secretary of State’s perspective and that of the local planning authority? There is doubtless a range of other considerations as well, but the amendment is probing whether the designation might not only involve a different speed of decision-making but could also mean that the criteria which in practice might be brought to bear could be different around the different perspective on material considerations and, if there is no local plan in place, around the perception and requirements of the NPPF.
Lord Deben
This is an important series of amendments because they bear on the very issue that we have all raised with the Minister as to the difficulties which arise because of the procedure initiated by this clause. There is a real issue here, and it is one for her to consider deeply. I heard what she said about this not being contrary to the localism agenda; I cannot say that I was entirely convinced, but she obviously is concerned that it should be consonant with the localism agenda. Surely, the one important thing in the localism agenda is that the public locally feel themselves involved. The nature of the kinds of applications which are likely to be referred to the Minister rather than to the local authority is that they will be controversial and particularly controversial locally.
I say to the Minister that, in my experience of being a Member of Parliament for nearly 40 years, the one thing people will not put up with is not being able to be heard. I would commend to her my experience of the campaign about how we should build Sizewell B. This was very successful; we got every local parish council—50 or so—to support that planning permission. We did it because we went round to every single one of them and discussed it. We put the case for and against. We listened and made sure that none of the discussions were dominated by incoming protesters from either side and were just done by the locality, so that by the time they finished hardly anybody could say—nobody could say truthfully—that they had not been involved.
The Earl of Lytton
I added my name to this amendment not least because it was originally drafted by the National Association of Local Councils, in relation to which I have already declared an interest.
I apprehend that Clause 1 is not intended to create a new type of planning application or that such applications should follow a fundamentally different evidential or representative process. It needs to be stressed that neighbourhood plans, as well as local plans, will continue to be relevant to that process. I am glad to see the Minister nodding her head. It is right that the amendment seeks to clarify this. In writing to me in the context of Clause 1, the Minister helpfully said:
“Local people will be able to comment on an application in the usual way if it’s being decided by the Planning Inspectorate instead of the local authority”.
That seems to be an incredibly helpful overarching consideration.
There is one bit of detail that needs to be addressed. Parts of the online version of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990—I am referring to Schedule 1(8)(i)—have been altered by subsequent legislation. I appreciate that the Minister may be unable to answer right now but it is not clear to me precisely what has been appealed and whether the amendment fulfils that purpose. I would like to clarify that because, under the original 1990 legislation, the parish council had to notify the planning authority that it wanted to be notified in relation to appeals. I do not see how that process will operate with the Planning Inspectorate. I am sure that there must be a way, but I would appreciate having some clarification as to how it will work in practice. The effect of Clause 1 is to move this one stage further away from the parish and neighbourhood in an application going direct to the Planning Inspectorate. In other words, it has not been dealt with by the principal authority with which it may already have existing arrangements. If the Minister could give us some clarification I would be enormously grateful.
Baroness Hanham
I have been trying to make it clear all the way through this afternoon and evening that, when the application is taken to the inspectorate, the same consultation processes will have to take place as would have taken place if the local authority had conducted the application itself. The consultation document makes it clear that there will be no dilution in the ability of communities to become aware of applications through notifications or discussions, or in their ability to comment on them in very much the same way.
I appreciate what my noble friend Lord Deben says about people being consulted. I draw his attention to the Localism Act, in which there is a requirement for planning developers to undertake pre-application planning discussions. One would expect that to happen in the first instance. The size of the applications being discussed by my noble friend would be beyond the purpose of the clause; they would be major infrastructure applications. However, some applications that will not go quite so far will still be big enough to arouse local feeling. We intend that all the current statutory requirements on local authorities should be transferred to the inspectorate. There will be the same standards of publicity and consultation, and the same opportunities and periods to make representations; and all the relevant documents will have to be available at the offices of the relevant planning authority and on the Planning Inspectorate’s website, so one will be able either to look them up on the internet or check them out locally.
Lord McKenzie of Luton
Will the Minister confirm that the current standard arrangements for consultation involve the presumption that applications are examined principally by means of written representations, with the option of a short hearing to allow the key parties briefly to put their point of view? Is that a characterisation of how the system works at the moment?
Baroness Hanham
Every local authority has its own methods, which must fall within the statutory consultation process. It would not be out of order for a planning inspector to hold a direct hearing to hear from local people; I do not see why he should not be able to do that. That would happen now anyway if the local authority thought that it was required. The process would be exactly the same as that available now. We do not think that this requires anything other than secondary legislation. It will be in secondary legislation. I am prepared to keep that under review for a little while to make sure that that is correct.
In answer to the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, planning inspectors will need to take into account all material considerations, which will include any local or neighbourhood plans. I am sure that any statutory obligation to undertake consultation with parish councils will remain. With those reassurances, I hope that the noble Lord will withdraw his amendment.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, I am grateful to a number of speakers who took part in this debate. I am grateful to the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, for his support on the issue of parish councils. I think that I have an up-to-date version of the 1990 Act, but one can never be totally sure about these things. I think that my amendment stands up, but I will look at it again, and perhaps the Minister will clarify the issue.
What the Minister said on parish councils did not quite meet the case. She said that the present statutory position would still apply. However, the statutory provision is in relation to planning applications made to the local planning authority. The question is: will it automatically transfer as a statutory provision to the Planning Inspectorate? If not, should paragraph 8 of Schedule 1 to the 1990 Act be amended to make it absolutely clear that it does apply to the Planning Inspectorate, and that parish councils will have a right to notification—which I think now is an automatic right, but I will check this—rather than having to ask for it?
I was particularly grateful for the splendid speech of the noble Lord, Lord Deben, who said some things that I would like to have said in your Lordships’ House but stepped back from saying because noble Lords might have thought that I was threatening to organise all the Swampys of the world to go and make a nuisance of themselves—which of course I would never do, but might have done in my youth. However, I will march hand in hand with the noble Lord, Lord Deben, leading a band of people behind us.
I will be serious, because this is a very serious matter. The Minister said that people like to be consulted. They do—that is absolutely true—but nowadays they demand to be consulted, and are very unhappy if they feel that they have not been consulted and, whatever the final decision is, that their representations and views have not been taken seriously. That is the important thing that we must get right, and I am not sure that the Bill does that.
The Minister said that all the same processes would take place, but the question is: given that they are different in different planning authorities, can the Planning Inspectorate cope with doing different things in different areas? The basics of what it does will have to be the same. There will have to be site notices, appropriate notices in the newspapers and so on. However, because some planning authorities go much further than they have to under the legislation, will it be local custom and practice—local policy—that applies, or will the Planning Inspectorate try to apply the same thing everywhere? That is the fundamental question that needs more thought.
Lord McKenzie of Luton
In relation to the consultation, the response was frankly a bit thin. This is an issue that we need to consider further. I will revert briefly to the point about material considerations, the Planning Inspectorate and the NPPF. I accept that it may be an entirely irrelevant point, or at least a technical one. Will there be any difference in the weight given to material consideration issues or to issues in the NPPF that balance a range of things between the perspective of a planning inspector and that of a local planning authority? This is quite apart from any difference in process. We might align them as much as we can, but is there something inherent in the process that could give a different result? I do not assert that there is, but I would be interested in a response on that point.
Baroness Hanham
I will give the noble Lord a response, but I may have to change it. My instinct is to say that the Planning Inspectorate already deals with innumerable applications from different local authorities. I do not see why the processes that it will follow when taking an application initially will be any different from those that it follows when it considers an appeal. That seems to be the sensible answer. If there is another answer that does not come under the heading of “sensible”, I will let the noble Lord know.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, that was a very interesting dialogue. Most of the things that the Planning Inspectorate deals with now are appeals, for which there can be a standard system everywhere. Dealing with initial applications is different everywhere. These are things about which we need to think further, not least to avoid revolution in the land, particularly in rural areas. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Freedom of Religion and Conscience
(11 years, 3 months ago)
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The Lord Bishop of Guildford
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is their strategy for promoting freedom of religion and conscience internationally as a fundamental human right and as a source of stability for all countries.
The Lord Bishop of Guildford
My Lords, I am very grateful for the opportunity to address this important Question to Her Majesty’s Government. First, I will say how delighted I am that the Minister will be responding, as I am aware that today she presided over a major conference at Lancaster House with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office on precisely this topic, which has only just concluded.
At the outset I stress that my Question is what it says on the label: it is about freedom of religion and conscience. It is not about creating an opportunity to make a partisan appeal for Christians alone, nor even for religious believers alone. The word “conscience” is intentional. Noble Lords may recall Cardinal Newman’s remarks to the Duke of Norfolk at the time of the debate on papal infallibility. He said, “I shall drink to the Pope if you please—still, to conscience first”.
Precisely because conscience and truth go together, it must be right that there is more concern about freedom of religion than there has been for some time. This debate is topical because of a considerable increase in the encroachments upon religious freedom all over the world. Many sources could be cited. Objectively, I draw particular attention to the United States State Department’s annual report of 2011 from its Office of International Religious Freedom. This records a rising tide of anti-Semitism in many parts of the world and pressures on many religious groups: the Baha’i and Sufi Muslims in Iran, Coptic Christians in Egypt, Ahmadis in Indonesia and Pakistan, and Muslims in a range of countries, including Europe. I emphasise that that is not an exhaustive list.
My diocese of Guildford is linked with a number of dioceses in Nigeria, where we have seen a tragic increase in sectarian violence, triggered initially by questions of political power after the presidential election, but now unequivocally having a definite religious complexion with the militant group Boko Haram attacking government offices, bombing churches and threatening to kill Christians in the north and any Muslims who oppose it. On Saturday, the Emir of Kano was attacked: his driver and two armed guards were killed, though the Emir survived.
There has also been a recent and well-documented study on increasing pressure on Christians throughout the world entitled, interestingly enough, Christianophobia, by Rupert Shortt. My point, however, is not to indulge in a tit-for-tat debate about who is persecuted most but to emphasise that no one should be discriminated against on grounds of religion or conscience, for the sake of the stability of societies and their common good in a multicultural and multifaith world. Towards this goal, it is essential that religious communities speak out on behalf of others and not only their own adherents. Also, faith communities should not be slow in condemning behaviour within their own communities which is discriminatory to others.
I sadly recognise that no religious communities have a perfect track record in this regard. Even this House, with another place and the Church of England no less, does not have a clear historical conscience as regards religious toleration. Look back beyond the 19th century, for example, to the Act of Uniformity. Although it returned the Book of Common Prayer to the Church of England and the nation in 1662, it was also the instrument of the expulsion of many ministers and people who could not accept it. Nor was Catholic emancipation so strongly supported from these very Episcopal Benches in the beginning of the 19th century; nor were Methodists much welcomed as partners in the Gospel. I am aware of religious glass houses—the Crusades, the wars of religion, the martyrs of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation.
At the same time, there have been very sharp and terrible secular attacks on religious freedom from time to time, and not only as long ago as the French Revolution or the French anti-clerical laws at the beginning of the 20th century. Think of anti-clerical Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s; Nazi Germany and the Confessing Church; the Stalinist Soviet Union and eastern Europe in relation to the Orthodox Church; the Roman Catholic Church, and other churches too. Think also of Marxist China and Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. These regimes, of extreme Left or Right, with their materialistic, political and economic ideologies, had no room for either political conscientious objection or faith communities, or for churches as alternative loyalties to the authority of a monolithic and deified state. Millions of people died under these regimes.
The question is: how do we make more effective the excellent work done by a number of individuals and NGOs already researching and publicising breaches of religious freedom, so that all—and not only one faith or conscientious group—might enjoy this acknowledged right?
The European Union is developing guidelines on freedom of religion or belief but, like many things in relation to the EU, greater transparency would be welcome. The Minister may be able to tell your Lordships’ House of any developments since the recent statement of the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton, on promoting human rights. The Organisation on Security and Co-operation in Europe is currently reconstituting its council of advisers on freedom of religion or belief. As reconstituted, it will need to address the problem holistically rather than through episodic interventions for particular campaigns which would relapse into the apparent partisanship of which I have already spoken.
On the European Court of Human Rights, Members of your Lordships’ House will, of course, have been pondering on the recent judgments from Strasbourg. I discern two things. Religious belief is not simply a “residual” or even marginalised human right only to be considered when no other rights come into play. It can, on the contrary, have precedence over another right, such as the corporate image of a company. I am thinking here of the Coptic Christian, Ms Nadia Eweida, her modest cross and British Airways. In the other three cases the balance was held to be different—health and safety, for example, in the case of the hospital ward or surgical theatre. My point here is that a balance of rights and recognition of context is indicative of religious freedom as a real and not only a nominal human right. Nor is religious freedom ultimately in opposition to other rights, such as freedom of expression, non-discrimination, women’s rights and gay rights.
At the global level, does the Minister agree that there is a need to continue to support the United Nations rapporteur in moving beyond the issues of defamation or incitement, important as those issues are? For 45 years the aspiration of drafting a convention on the freedom of religion or belief has been on ice. Surely now its time has come.
Before concluding I wish to welcome and encourage further what I know is already going on in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s human rights and democracy programme. Clearly, Her Majesty’s Government now take religious freedom seriously. Developments at Wilton Park, leading to the establishment of a human rights advisory panel, and the discussion group at the Woolf Institute in Cambridge are to be welcomed, as are practical advances such as the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s tool-kit on religious freedom. I am also aware that the Minister is in the process of looking again at religious freedom issues in United Kingdom foreign policy.
In a Written Answer to a Question I raised, the Minister helpfully spoke of using the excellent expertise and experience of the United Kingdom in interfaith dialogue and co-operation. The Church of England is in the middle of all that and I strongly encourage such partnership. The Foreign Secretary has an important advisory group on human rights, but should there not also be some group, under the Minister, on religious freedom to work with the Foreign Secretary’s group— not, I hasten to add, a group of disparate partisan representatives but a group which could work, as I have suggested, holistically? I hope that this short debate tonight will stimulate such questions and encourage their exploration and development.
In conclusion, I ought very briefly to address the question that some will ask—not many, perhaps, in your Lordships’ House, but outside. How can a bishop of the established church address freedom when the church has not always been its champion? This is not the time or place for a theological exposition of how freedom is a genuinely basic ingredient of the three monotheistic faiths and others and so I simply offer two brief testimonies. The noble Lord, Lord Sacks, the outgoing Chief Rabbi, has described religion as,
“part of the ecology of freedom”.
He backed that contention up with a powerful argument about what happens when religion as a key contributor to civil society is absent.
Secondly, the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Williams of Oystermouth, until recently my archbishop, has more than once drawn attention to Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. The Grand Inquisitor speaks to Jesus, who has returned to Seville during the Inquisition after the burning of heretics. The inquisitor has imprisoned Jesus and castigates him for the freedom he brings to the earth—so unsuited, says the Grand Inquisitor, to the masses. Jesus says nothing, but in the end kisses the inquisitor’s aged lips and goes away. Dostoevsky’s parable gets the relation between true faith and freedom right.
Lord Parekh
My Lords, I thank the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Guildford for securing this debate and introducing it with such wisdom and eloquence. As the subject of the debate rightly points out, freedom of religion and conscience is both a human right and a source of stability; in other words, it is desirable in principle as well as for its consequences. I have two small but critical footnotes to add to the proposition.
First, when we talk about religion and conscience, there is a danger—I do not think that the Bishop made this mistake—of equating conscience with religion as if a non-religious conscience does not have the same rights as a religious conscience. I would like to insist that atheist and secularly minded people can feel just as strongly, hold certain beliefs just as strongly and be committed to a certain way of life just as strongly as religious people, and they need to be protected. Secondly, I am slightly uneasy about calling freedom of religion a fundamental human right. If something is important enough to be a human right, by calling it fundamental one is either guilty of tautology and thus not adding anything or one creates confusion by saying that there can be human rights which are not fundamental. To call something a human right is by definition to say that it is absolutely fundamental and non-negotiable. As an academic I wanted to get those small linguistic and conceptual quibbles out of the way and get down to the politics of the proposition.
We have an obligation to promote freedom of religion internationally. How can we do that? I think that there are two ways, although there is a tendency to concentrate on one and neglect the other. We promote freedom of religion positively as well as negatively. We do it positively by persuasion, through moral and political pressure and by setting an ideal example. However, I do not think that we have always been a good example in terms of promoting freedom of religion in our own society and therefore sometimes we have spoken to the world in inconsistent voices.
I want to concentrate on how we can promote freedom of religion negatively, and on how we have failed to do so. We can easily undermine the conditions in which freedom of religion can grow and flourish in other societies. We do that by following certain kinds of economic and foreign policies that create the conditions in which religion becomes an object of suspicion, conflict is created between religious groups, and religion becomes the site where deep political and economic group conflicts are played out. By and large, in every society people know that they have to live together and they work out a kind of modus vivendi whereby those of different religions somehow rub along and learn to live together. Things begin to go wrong when the normal rhythm of that human relationship is disturbed, and that is where the outsider comes in. The outsider can disturb the rhythm of human relationships by creating conflict, wittingly or unwittingly. Situations can be created in which people feel threatened, frightened and besieged, so they turn on each other as objects of hatred. Consciously or unconsciously, I think that we did that in Iraq by invading the country and in how we ran it afterwards, creating conflict between the Shias and the Sunnis. That is what we did in uncritically supporting Saudi Arabia and the Wahhabis where religion is hardly respected; or at least only a particular kind of religion is respected.
It is also what we have done by supporting aggressive secularism, as we did in the case of Algeria several years ago when the army took over. We are so frightened of religion that we encouraged secular forces which came down heavily on religious people, who then felt threatened and became terrorists. That gave rise to a vicious cycle whereby religious and secular fundamentalism have played each other out. If we are really concerned about freedom of religion, we have to make sure that our foreign and economic policies do not create the conditions, wittingly or unwittingly, in which religious groups are at each other’s throats and, as a result, freedom of religion becomes the first casualty.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, we are very short of time so I would remind noble Lords that when the clock registers four minutes, the speaker needs to bring their remarks to a close quickly.
Baroness Cox
My Lords, I thank and congratulate the right reverend Prelate on initiating this timely debate. Today, diverse faith communities suffer persecution in many countries, including the Baha’is in Iran and Egypt, Ahmadyyia Muslims in Pakistan, the Falun Gong and Uighur Muslims in China, Rohingya Muslims in Burma and multi-faith communities of Muslim, Christian and African traditional believers in the states of Blue Nile and Southern Kordofan in Sudan. All deserve the support of the international community for protection of their fundamental human right to practise their faith freely.
However, without indulging in tit for tat, the reality is that the faith tradition now suffering the most widespread and systematic violations of religious freedom is Christianity. It is estimated that there are at least 250 million Christians suffering persecution today, from harassment, intimidation and imprisonment to torture and execution. Major ideological contexts include residual Marxism-Leninism in China and Cuba, the totalitarian repression of any religion in North Korea, and extremist Hinduism erupting into episodic attacks on other faiths in India. But the most widespread and escalating violations of freedom of religion for Christians are associated with militant Islamism. The so-called Arab spring has left a legacy of increased pressure on Christian communities in countries such as Egypt. President Mubarak’s rule posed many challenges for the Coptic Christian community, but since his downfall there have been even more attacks on Christian communities and the exodus of many Copts from Egypt.
Time only allows me to give two further detailed examples based on my firsthand experience of visiting communities suffering from militant Islamism in Nigeria and Sudan. Last June, I and HART colleagues visited the states of Plateau, Bauchi and Kano in Nigeria. The Islamist Boko Haram group, to which the right reverend Prelate referred, had already attacked many churches with the express intention of eliminating all Christians from northern Nigeria. Suicide bombers had driven into church services, detonating their bombs and causing multiple deaths and injuries. But the Boko Haram assaults are just the latest in many attacks against Christian communities in Nigeria over the past 20 years. Thousands of Christians have died and hundreds of churches have been destroyed.
Just last week I was in Sudan in the Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile where civilians are suffering from the ICC-indicted President Al-Bashir’s commitment to turn the Republic of Sudan into a “unified Arabic Islamic State”. Constant aerial bombardment is forcing civilians to hide in caves or by rivers, and many have died from starvation. Some 200,000 have fled to refugee camps in South Sudan. Those suffering include Christians, Muslims and African traditional believers who resist the Khartoum Government’s intention to impose Sharia law. The people of the Nuba Mountains are committed to their tradition of religious tolerance and as a consequence they are the victims of Al-Bashir’s agenda to impose hard-line Islamist policies.
The security implications are grave. In Nigeria there is a fear that the Islamist agenda pursued by Boko Haram and other militant groups may destabilise the nation, with serious repercussions for the whole of West Africa. In Sudan, the Khartoum-based Islamist guru Hassan Al-Turabi has reportedly declared that he sees South Sudan as the equivalent of an “Iron Curtain”, claiming that if he could only break South Sudan, he could spread his militant Islamism “all the way to Cape Town”.
I conclude by asking the Minister whether Her Majesty’s Government will follow the good example of the United States and Canada with initiatives such as appointing a religious liberty commission or special adviser on religious liberty; publish an annual FCO report on international religious freedom; consider a linkage between aid and respect for religious freedom, and consider imposing targeted sanctions on key individuals or Governments who are responsible for serious, widespread and systematic violations of religious freedoms. The need for action is urgent. Those suffering oppression look to those of us who have the privilege of living in freedom to use that freedom to promote and protect theirs. I hope that tonight’s debate and the Minister’s response will give them the encouragement they need and deserve.
Lord Patten
My Lords, the entirely virtuous pursuit of freedom of religion and freedom of conscience, whether by Governments or by churches, should be underpinned by two fundamental principles. The first is that everything should be all right at home, which is the launching pad for these suggestions in the United Kingdom. The second is that the Government and the churches should be even-handed in their approaches to these issues abroad.
On the first issue, as to whether everything is all right in the United Kingdom as far as freedom of religion and conscience is concerned, there are some who would say that it is not. How so? We have a head of state who is also head of the established church and we have three gorgeously enrobed bishops here in their places to show that they are part of the body religious. However, if you go a little further than that you see that we live in a very secular society. Religion is a minority sport—I happen to play it myself but it is not played by the majority of people in this country.
Some people say that we have aggressive secularism. I see no problem at all with secularism, atheism or agnosticism—I see a splendid example, in the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald of Tradeston, of the best sort of atheist, agnostic or secular person—but as we look around the United Kingdom, we see recent examples, such as the wearing of the cross by that Coptic Christian. That was judged by UK courts, to their shame, to be not right, although it was put right by Europe. Just imagine if someone in a place of work had said to Mr Sikh, “Take that turban off” or had said to Mrs Muslim adherent, “Take that scarf off”. I suspect there would have been outrage that these things were suggested in the first place.
Christianity and other religions are under various forms of attack. The Plymouth Brethren, for example, feel that they are facing prejudice in some parts of the United Kingdom. Some people find the Plymouth Brethren a bit odd and a bit strange. People used to think that Roman Catholics were a bit odd and strange, but we have to protect those people who are different in their religious beliefs. We must be convinced that all is well on the home front.
Abroad, we have to be equally convinced by the second fundamental principle, that the churches and Her Majesty’s Government must under all circumstances be even-handed in the way in which they approach the promotion of religious rights and freedom of conscience. I will mention three countries where some people have suggested that we have not been even-handed. Turkey is a fellow NATO member and one-time cadet member of the European Union. It is a terrific place to do business in but not very free as far as religion is concerned. Sometimes people have said that UK Governments—in the past, I am not just speaking about since 2010—have been pretty muted in what they have said about the terrible conditions of the Alevi Muslim minority sect. It is also pretty rough to be a Greek Orthodox in Istanbul today. An Anglican vicar—I hope I have the term right—came to see me not long ago in your Lordships’ House. He tries to minister to holidaymakers—it is a very good job that they go to church in a couple of the peninsulas in Turkey—but he says that he is not given the freedom to have a public service anywhere. He has to have the mass or celebration, as in the old days, in a house church. He asked why the Turkish Government cannot be nicer to Anglicans. I said that I did not know. I am nice to Anglicans and try to be nice to them all the time, and I think that the Turks should be nice to Anglicans.
In Egypt, we have the so-called Arab spring, which is an Arab winter for the Copts, on which I do not have to elaborate a moment longer. Then there is Bahrain, which is a great strategic partner of ours and an old ally. We value the close relationship. However, those of lesser standing among Muslims in Bahrain do not get the right level of attention compared to the minority who actually run Bahrain.
I look to Her Majesty’s Government and the churches to adopt these two fundamental principles.
The Lord Bishop of Ripon and Leeds
My Lords, I, too, am very grateful to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Guildford for raising this profound issue for our world, of freedom of conscience, as a human right involving the ability for human beings to make their own choices as to which, if any, faith system they wish to follow. That means that individuals must have the opportunity to change their adherence as a matter of personal conviction and call.
I want to concentrate on two areas. The first is the increasing abuse of blasphemy laws across the world. The Church of Pakistan has actively challenged the misuse of blasphemy laws in that country, which has led to the persecution of both Hindus and Christians and which, in particular, appears to be used to prevent Muslims from converting to another religion or to no religion. Although it is perfectly appropriate to deprecate the insulting of any religion, it is a denial of human rights to prevent anyone from changing or abandoning their faith stance. In principle, Pakistan continues to uphold the rights of religious minorities but, in practice, the existence of the blasphemy laws encourages illegal persecution and rejection.
The same sort of danger exists, for example, in Sri Lanka, where Muslim and Christian minorities fear the effect of blasphemy laws in a predominantly Buddhist society. Will the Government make it clear that countries which pass discriminatory legislation such as repressive blasphemy laws, or Pakistan’s anti-Ahmadi laws, risk their reputation in the international community?
My second point of emphasis is on the way in which our Government could, and I believe should, make it clearer that this country rejects all forms of religious bullying, by providing proper protection for those who flee here having suffered from it. In the discussions last night about North Korea, I was very pleased to hear the Minister say how wrong it would be to return any people to North Korea.
I am aware time and again of those who have fled to this country from Iran, Pakistan and elsewhere having suffered abuse and being terrified of being returned to their countries of origin because of it. My experience is that freedom of religion, conscience and non-religion is not taken as seriously as a human right in this country as is political persecution. Those who change their religion in particular are regarded with suspicion by tribunals and find that their faith is not taken seriously.
I recently met a taxi driver accused of blasphemy by Muslim leaders in Lahore, who fled here with his wife and children after hiding in the hills in their homeland. They faced deportation back to Pakistan. Among the reasons for the negativity of their tribunal seems to be that they found a home in a different Christian tradition here from that from which they came. Roman Catholics in Lahore, they attended an Anglican church in Leeds. This was taken to be evidence that they did not take their faith seriously. I do not ask for comment on a particular case; what I ask for is for it to be stressed by the Government that those who flee persecution in their country must and will receive an equivocal welcome here.
We have in the past couple of days recognised the need for faith groups to work together. The Minister knows that West Yorkshire in particular needs to be a welcoming society for those of all religions who come here. I look forward to hearing a firm assertion of the Government’s commitment to defending religious freedoms in this country as elsewhere.
Lord Sheikh
My Lords, we are extremely fortunate to live in a country where freedom of religion is not just accepted but respected and acknowledged as a key pillar of a free and healthy society. People from a whole range of faiths live alongside each other, as well as with those who do not consider themselves religious. I think it is fair to say that, in general, this has worked very well.
Since arriving here many years ago, I have always appreciated the freedom afforded to me to practise my own religion of Islam. In religious matters, I think that we have the right balance in our country. While the Church of England is our official state religion, others are able to flourish without fear of persecution. We should all be proud of what we have achieved. We are indeed a role model, although, of course, we are not a perfect society.
The main commonality between people of all religions is that they cherish the sense of unity provided to them by their faith, a sense of belonging and endearment that often carries over into a sense of comfort and stability on a regional or national level. I have always maintained that there are more similarities between people than differences and nowhere is this truer than in faith. Unfortunately, in some parts of the world, certain religious communities are undermined and persecuted for their beliefs. The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights provides for freedom of religious expression, yet too often a growing number of individuals are denied this fundamental right. I am not naive to the fact that evil is sometimes conducted in the name of religion, but these minorities are merely using their manipulative interpretations of faith for their own gain. The message that we are calling for to be promoted here today will help to tackle this destructive behaviour, which is detrimental not just to religious communities but to their relationships with others who live alongside them.
In a number of countries, religious bodies undertake voluntary work in a range of sectors, helping to relieve pressure that would otherwise be placed on the state. Perhaps most notably, they provide high-quality educational institutions for children and healthcare facilities which have helped change the lives of many people in different parts of the world.
I am pleased that our Government continue to maintain a strong commitment to the promotion of freedom of religion, as outlined in Human Rights and Democracy: The 2011 Foreign & Commonwealth Office Report. Using our embassies and high commissions to engage with Governments around the world is undoubtedly the most effective way of making an impact on the ground. The United Kingdom has trade and historic ties with a number of countries overseas, particularly countries in the Commonwealth, and we can use our influence in a gentle and appropriate manner. Going through such channels will help us reach the leaders who can make a difference.
I was very pleased to see the Foreign Office join the Canadian High Commission in London last month to hold a conference on this very subject. A number of potential measures were discussed. There was a general consensus that we shall have to play a greater part in promoting harmony between people both within our own communities and across the world. I agree with this sentiment. Governments and political leaders will have to work alongside religious leaders, civil society groups and, in some cases, the media to help promote good relationships between people of different religions.
Lord Macdonald of Tradeston
My Lords, I, too, thank the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Guildford for initiating this important debate and for his inclusive definition of “conscience” to include non-believers. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states:
“Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion”.
A small but significant advance was made with the subsequent United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and of Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief.
The significance of that for a humanist such as me was in the interpretation of “belief” to include non-religious beliefs, for the reasons eloquently outlined by the noble Lord, Lord Parekh. Those of us with no religious belief are as diverse as our fellow citizens in churches, temples, mosques and synagogues. In Britain, we are second in number only to the Christians, according to the recently published 2011 census results, which show that 25% of respondents ticked the box for no religion. That is a remarkable increase, up from 15% in 2001 to 25%—or 14 million British citizens—in just 10 years. I speculate, but the fact that so many millions of our fellow citizens now refuse any religious affiliation may well be linked to the increase in violence by religious extremists. As we have heard tonight, noble Lords who are religious will be even more appalled than non-believers by the atrocities that result when their faiths are twisted to legitimise hatred and killing.
Reacting presciently to that increase in violence, the United States under President Clinton introduced a Freedom from Religious Persecution Act, and the State Department now publishes an annual international religious freedom report, which warns of the growing use and abuse of blasphemy and apostasy laws, which constrain the rights of religious minorities and limit the freedom of expression of non-believers, or even threaten them with death. Inevitably, that continual, low-profile oppression has been overshadowed by the sheer scale of sectarian killing in recent years, which countries such as the United States and Canada seem to monitor more closely and denounce more vigorously than we do.
Here in Britain, in defence of our freedom of religion and conscience, secular organisations such as the British Humanist Association are potential allies of those faith groups active in opposing oppression. After all, the 25% who declare that they have no religion are in almost every other regard identical to the 75% who tick the census box declaring their religion. Whether humanists or religious believers, we in Britain share common values—many of them anathema to the sectarians, who refuse dialogue. Our tolerant balance of the sacred and secular contributes to the stability that Britain has enjoyed for so long, a stability which, in recent decades, has also been enjoyed by a growing number of newly democratic countries.
I join other noble Lords in asking the Minister: what action taken by the Government has proved most effective in advancing freedom of religion, conscience and belief for those oppressed? I hope that she can dispel the concern expressed tonight that Britain is not yet doing enough.
Baroness Berridge
My Lords, I, too, thank the right reverend Prelate for securing today’s debate on a topic that has not received the attention that I believe that it deserves. I am fully aware of some of the poor history of the Christian Church in this arena and the legacy that this nation has left in some Commonwealth countries by the insensitive application of our then laws on blasphemy. However, the title of the Pew Research report in this area, the Rising Tide of Restrictions on Religion, says it all. The current global trajectory is not promising, so we must act now.
Article 18 of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights is a human right, but it is best framed as a freedom. It is not about compulsion or coercion; it is a freedom. That is why it is so interrelated with the freedom of expression. If you are not exposed to any other views, how can you really be said to have exercised freedom or choice? It is perhaps the most fundamental human right, but it is hard to understand sometimes in our secular society. The fact that individuals in the UK can choose to be secular is an indication that that freedom is in operation. It is the freedom to choose no God at all. Human beings’ innate right to choose was first exemplified by the tree in the garden of Eden; we have a choice in this ultimate matter.
That issue is affecting all religious communities, as described by many noble Lords. Late last year, there was one compelling story reported by the BBC of an Ahmadi Muslim, Ummad Farooq, who was shot in the head in Pakistan. I am proud to say that he is claiming asylum here in the UK. Is this the shape of asylum applications to come, and are the UK Government ready for that?
As chair of the All-Party Group on International Religious Freedom, I am so pleased that representatives of religious groups in the United Kingdom, such as the Baha’is, Sikhs, Hindus, the Coptic Church—so ably represented in the UK by Bishop Angaelos—as well as groups such as Christian Solidarity Worldwide and Aid to the Church in Need, are working together on the issue. The group’s first report will be entitled, “Article 18: An Orphaned Human Right”, and submissions are currently being sought. The title of the report reflects the fact that this human right has not become the basis of an international convention, such as those on the rights of the child or women. In the wake of the Arab spring, is this not to be the human rights issue for decades to come and the lens through which many world issues need to be seen?
There are encouraging changes at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, which has hosted two Wilton Park conferences of the issue. Sue Breeze and her assistant are now dedicated FCO staff within the human rights team. Can my noble friend please outline what further steps or mechanisms the Foreign and Commonwealth Office is looking at to raise the profile of this issue at the EU and the UN? Also, what is Her Majesty’s Government’s approach to the emphasis within international institutions on defamation of religion and incitement to religious hatred laws, which I believe has left the rump of Article 18—namely, life, limb and employment—obscured from view?
While it is true, as Archbishop Temple said, that when religion goes wrong it goes very wrong, we cannot turn a blind eye. As Dr Martin Luther King so rightly said,
“freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed”.
However, we must all do what we can to help those demanding their freedom. It is not only the least we can do; it is our duty.
Lord Roberts of Llandudno
My Lords, I appreciate the opportunity of saying a word in the gap to draw our attention to just two events. These events prompt me to regard them as milestones in the move for greater liberty and conscience, and understanding between religions.
One was the inauguration once again yesterday of President Obama, whose breakthrough four years ago as the American president was hailed as a great move forward among people who wanted to dispel all discrimination. Even yesterday, he reminded us of the great march on Washington led 50 years ago by Martin Luther King. Things have moved and changed, often for the better.
As a Liberal I also acknowledge the birth, 150 years ago, of David Lloyd George. He was elected as the Member of Parliament for Carmarthen Burrows in 1890, at a time when Wales was open to new ventures in education and in looking at the vulnerable with compassion and understanding. Again, that was a move in the right direction. Education holds the key to so much as we can stretch the minds and have people who, because they are thinking and free to think, can resist all tyranny. While acknowledging that there are unfavourable situations today, we should say that we are grateful for what has happened over the years.
Lord Collins of Highbury
My Lords, I, too, thank the right reverend Prelate for initiating this debate. Freedom of religion and belief is a human right which applies to everyone. Inadequate religious freedom is a threat to freedom of association, to freedom of speech and to social, economic and cultural rights. Respect and tolerance are the key ingredients in building a safer and more peaceful world.
The relationship between oppression of religious belief and armed conflict is clear. In the Government’s Building Stability Overseas Strategy it was recognised that,
“religious freedom is often crucial to ensuring conflict prevention and post-conflict peacebuilding”.
The report continued:
“Violence against a religious group can be a forewarning of wider conflict”.
As we have heard in today’s debate, hundreds of millions of people of all religions and none find themselves facing daily threats of violence simply for exercising this basic human right to practise their faith. Even those who look to defend the rights of others regularly face similar intimidation, threats and violence.
Too often when we discuss issues of religion and human rights, it is to consider the ways in which sets of rights conflict—or seem to be in conflict—with each other. I was particularly pleased to hear the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Guildford note that religious freedom is not ultimately in opposition to other rights such as freedom of expression, non-discrimination, women’s rights and gay rights. As a humanist, I would certainly not suggest that freedom of religion and belief be elevated over other human rights, nor that they can go unchallenged where the safety or rights of others are threatened. Yet neither can religious belief simply be seen as a right at the margins, to be considered only when no other rights come into play. In that context, the point made by the right reverend Prelate about the right to manifest religion taking precedence over other rights, such as the corporate image of a company, was an important one. Above all, a balance of rights and a recognition of context are indicative of religious freedom as a real, not just a nominal, human right.
As with other fundamental freedoms, religious freedom is something that benefits everyone because it creates conditions for peace, democratisation, development and human rights. To that end, I ask the Minister whether the Government have considered following the example of such countries as Canada and the US in prioritising the issue of protecting religious freedoms. Our country’s links of tradition and trade to many of the most troubled areas make it well placed to use that influence to best effect. And act we must, for the human rights abuses of which we have heard this evening must not be allowed to continue unchallenged.
The Senior Minister of State, Department for Communities and Local Government & Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Baroness Warsi)
My Lords, I congratulate the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Guildford on securing this very important debate and thank all noble Lords who have made such valuable contributions to today’s discussion.
This is such an important and relevant time to be having this debate; as I was saying earlier to the right reverend Prelate, we have had a conference today at Lancaster House specifically focusing on this very issue. The Foreign Office and indeed the Government take the promotion of the protection of the right to freedom of religion or belief as a key human rights priority, so I am pleased to have the opportunity to tell the House of the work that we have been doing.
This is an issue that I know is followed closely by Members of this House, and I receive much correspondence about it from both parliamentarians and the general public. It is an issue that can quickly bring the abstract into our living rooms via media stories that have such a human element.
Freedom of religion or belief is, I believe, one of the fundamental human rights, and one that underpins many of the others. It is a valuable litmus test of other basic freedoms. I say that because, where freedom of religion or belief is under attack, we often find that other freedoms are under attack too.
This is an issue that also matters to me personally as an individual, as a practising Muslim in a Christian country and as a Minister in the FCO with responsibility for human rights, of which a priority area is freedom of religion and belief. Indeed, earlier today, as I mentioned, we had a historic meeting, trying to form a core group of government Ministers, senior advisers and ambassadors from across the world.
The Secretary-General of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, the Foreign Minister from Canada and Ministers from Pakistan and Morocco were there, along with ambassadors and senior officials from a wide spread of other countries, including many countries that have been mentioned here today. I hope and believe that our discussions today will make a real contribution to solidifying the international consensus around the need to do more to combat religious intolerance and promote the right to freedom of religion and belief, using Resolution 1618 as a framework. It is important diplomacy but of course it is risky; I have had numerous conversations with my officials about what we can achieve but what may be lost when we have these honest conversations. However, we must be brave, for exactly the reasons mentioned by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds.
I am grateful that the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Guildford said that he did not want the debate to be a fight about who around the world is victimised more. This is a universal right and we must therefore protect all minority religions, wherever they are and whenever that abuse occurs. I think that I speak for people of faith when I say that evil in the name of faith can be found in the distortion of any faith, and we must therefore all speak out when we see that evil. The strongest arguments that I have heard are from those people who speak out not for a religion that they themselves belong to but for a religion that someone else belongs to and suffers abuse as a result.
The noble Baroness, Lady Cox, and my noble friend Lord Patten both raised specific examples. Those examples are important but it is more important and powerful for us in Britain to be seen not just to be speaking out for Christian minorities but to be speaking for minorities wherever they may be abused.
The noble Lord, Lord Macdonald, asked what has worked. I can give a very personal example from my involvement in Pakistan: tough conversations, a consistency of approach, leading by example, being able to talk about how we have been through our history with regard to religious minorities—we may not always have got it right but we have learnt from those mistakes—and making the issue universal in a globalised world. I have often said that maybe it is not Christians in the West and Muslims in the East but Muslims in the West and Christians in the East who could probably foster this dialogue and come forward with some real solutions.
The right to freedom of religion or belief is set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but the issue is not about abstract discussions or a debate on philosophy or human rights law but about people’s lives—the right to be individuals and to be free. The right to be free, as far as your religion or belief is concerned, is very broad. It is not about the freedom just to hold a belief, but also to manifest that belief, for example through worship, dress and the wearing of religious symbols. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Guildford mentioned the European court case. Noble Lords will, I am sure, join me in acknowledging that the court came to the right decision last week when it ruled in favour of Nadia Eweida.
We believe the right to freedom of religion or belief also includes the right to share your faith and to teach others about it and, importantly, it includes the right not to hold a religious faith. All these approaches deserve space in society, and it is the responsibility of government to ensure that this is the case. We are tireless in our efforts to defend these rights worldwide but, sadly, according to recent research by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 75% of the world’s population now live in countries where Governments, social groups or individuals restrict their ability to practise their faith freely. Restrictions on religion are increasing in each of the five major regions of the world, including in the Americas and sub-Saharan Africa, the two regions where overall restrictions had previously been in decline, and the share of countries with high or very high restrictions on religious beliefs and practices rose from 31% in the year ending in mid-2009 to 37% in the year ending in mid-2010.
In many countries, following the wrong religion can lead to torture, violence or even death, so we need to make sure we do our utmost, both to raise individual cases where freedom of religion or belief is under attack and to tackle it through organisations such as the UN. This Government are absolutely committed to getting it right because, quite simply, lives are at stake if we do not. It is because defending this right is so important to us that we have developed a comprehensive strategy to guide our work in this area. The strategy draws on valuable expertise from members of my right honourable friend the Foreign Secretary’s human rights advisory group, which is composed of leading British experts in the field of human rights. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Guildford asked about a religion or belief advisory group. I know that such a group existed under the previous Government, but I understand that it became unwieldy with each religion and each brand of each religion demanding a seat at the table. What we have done instead is to ensure that some of the members of the Foreign Secretary’s human rights advisory group—Malcolm Evans and Joel Edwards—bring a faith perspective and an awareness of international human rights law in the area of freedom of religion or belief to the group. We are currently looking at broadening that brace to bring in experts in relation to other religions.
How is this strategy implemented? It is implemented by having a very ambitious action plan, which works at all levels. I hope that I can give my noble friend Lady Berridge some comfort when I say that it includes: working in multilateral organisations, chiefly the UN, the EU and the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe; bilateral negotiations, where we raise individual cases, practices or laws that discriminate against people on the basis of their religion or belief; and project work in a range of countries, many of which were mentioned today, working with NGOs on issues such as promoting better understanding between faiths, bridging sectarian divides, promoting dialogue between faith groups and government, and offering technical advice on laws that need amendment—issues that were raised by my noble friend Lord Sheikh.
Britain has a good story to tell, although we have made mistakes in the past. In many ways, in interfaith dialogue we are very much at the cutting edge of work that is being done around the world and it is important that we share that. It is also important that our policy is informed so that we do not knowingly walk into the consequences that were spoken of by the noble Lord, Lord Parekh. We are training FCO officials better to understand the role of faith in society and foreign policy. A series of lectures and some specific training is being given to understand the nuances between religions and within religions.
My joint ministerial role, spanning the Department for Communities and Local Government and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, is also proving extremely valuable. Ministerial oversight in both departments allows the Government to join up our domestic and international work on this crucial issue more effectively. As I have said on many occasions, what happens in Benghazi has an effect on the streets of Bradford.
We should also be mindful that, while Governments play a key role in creating the conditions for all to practise their religion or belief freely, or for individuals to live free from discrimination on the grounds of religion or belief, Governments alone cannot change the landscape. They need the co-operation of civil society to promote messages of understanding and tolerance for the followers of other religions or those without a faith. A climate of intolerance curtails freedom to practise and manifest a religion as individuals would wish to practise it.
Noble Lords will be aware that in some cases the issues are much more complex than they may first appear. Some cases are not actually about religion but about deprivation and other issues. Dr Paul Bhatti, Pakistan’s Minister of National Harmony and Minority Affairs, rightly told me that some issues are more to do with social justice than religion. Too often it is the poor, the exploited and the marginalised who are affected. Religion becomes an extra issue on top of that.
I can tell the noble Baroness, Lady Cox, that the Government report on violations of the right to freedom of religion or belief in our annual rights report. The next one will be published in April and will look back at events over 2012. I am sure that it will prove a source of much debate in your Lordships’ House.
The noble Lord, Lord Collins, I think, asked about the appointment of an envoy for international religious freedom; or maybe he did not. Somebody did. We continue to keep this option under review. However, for the moment, we believe that the best course of action is to continue to make each of the FCO Ministers responsible for defending freedom of religion or belief in the areas of the world that they cover. Each Minister is aware of issues affecting religious communities on their patch, so to speak.
Much more needs to be done, but I assure the House that this Minister is personally committed to tackling this issue. It is a matter that I have dealt with domestically and take extremely seriously. Internationally, it is a matter into which I and my office put a huge amount of energy. I know that your Lordships also share my passion for ensuring that we make a real difference, so that we can say that, because of our actions, the world is becoming a safer place for people to practise their religion or belief freely. I hope that we can continue to work together to bring about that real change.
Growth and Infrastructure Bill
Lord McKenzie of Luton
“(5A) Any performance standards that apply to local planning authorities in the consideration of planning applications shall also apply to the Secretary of State in the performance of his functions under this section.”
Lord McKenzie of Luton
My Lords, Amendment 19 is a probing amendment, which I hope will not detain us for long. So far as the planning guarantee is concerned, the consultation document proposes that a 26-week limit will apply to the Planning Inspectorate where it is determining applications. That is fine because, clearly, given the lack of a right to appeal, a limit of no more than a year is not appropriate.
However, paragraph 64 of the consultation document proposes that the performance standard for the inspectorate would initially be to determine 80% of cases within 13 weeks, or 16 weeks where proposals are subject to an environmental impact assessment. On what basis has this target been set? For how long is it envisaged that the initial phase will endure? What will the Government do if it emerges that the inspectorate is not meeting its targets—a point that the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, also touched on earlier? I beg to move.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Communities and Local Government (Baroness Hanham)
My Lords, I want to make absolutely clear the level of service that an applicant can expect from the Secretary of State in those very few cases where the applicant applies directly to him, and to explain why this amendment is unnecessary. As I have said several times today, the ability to apply directly to the Secretary of State would be limited to a very small number of situations where there is clear evidence that a local planning authority is not delivering an effective service. For example, in relation to the speed with which applications are dealt with, we have proposed in our consultation that the measure should apply only to authorities that have decided 30% or fewer of their major applications within the statutory period.
We will ensure through amendments to the secondary legislation that exactly the same statutory period for determining applications applies to the Secretary of State. We have proposed in our consultation to set a performance standard for the Planning Inspectorate of dealing with 80% of those applications within the statutory period unless an extended time has been agreed in writing with the applicant. That compares to the current average performance among planning authorities of deciding 57% of applications for major developments within 13 weeks.
The inspectorate will publish quarterly data on its performance so that it is clear what is being achieved. We are clear in our commitment to offering applicants the choice of a genuinely better service in those few cases where this clause has to be used in the future. The secondary legislation and performance standards set for the Planning Inspectorate are the appropriate places to set this out. I do not think that there is any need to add a specific provision in the Bill.
The noble Lord also asked about what would happen if the Planning Inspectorate did not achieve that. The fact that the inspectorate will have to make its own reports if it does not do 80% probably will be quite a serious obstacle for it to overcome if it is not achieving that.
Lord McKenzie of Luton
I am grateful to the Minister for her response. I may have missed it, but I do not think she said on what basis that 80% target has been met. If she did, will she kindly repeat it? If not, will she cover that point?
Baroness Hanham
May I write to the noble Lord on that? I am not sure about the 80% but I will write to him.
Lord McKenzie of Luton
That is fine. I am grateful for that and beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord McKenzie of Luton
“( ) This section shall cease to have effect two years after it comes into force.”
Lord McKenzie of Luton
My Lords, this amendment is grouped with Clause 1 stand part and we are happy to take it on that basis. I am conscious that we had somewhat of a stand part debate earlier. Nevertheless, I wish to get something on the record as to our overall position.
We wish to see Clause 1 removed from the Bill; it is wrong on so many levels. Fundamentally, it is a denial of localism, representing as it does a shifting of powers from local planning authorities to central government. It is not, of course, the only clause in the Bill to do this. We will debate Clause 24 in due course and there are other consultations in hand relating to permitted development rights and call-in powers which demonstrate the same direction of travel.
Such consultation as there has been is being undertaken now in parallel with consideration of the Bill. It is a truncated eight-week consultation and it is not planned that we will see the Government’s response until we have completed our deliberations. The powers in the Bill, especially around designation, go way beyond the stated intent of the clause, as the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee points out.
Of course, the clause is predicated on the proposition that delays in the planning system are holding back growth, but scant evidence has been provided for this. There is obviously clear evidence on the time being taken by local planning authorities to handle applications, but any linking of this to growth—or the lack of it—is, frankly, anecdotal. In any event this seems to ignore the existing powers of the Secretary of State in relation to call-in and the right of applicants to appeal to the Secretary of State against non-determination. We should bear in mind that an appeal against non-determination can be made up to six months after the expiry of the period that the local planning authority had for dealing with the application. This is 13 weeks for major cases and 16 weeks if the application is accompanied by an environmental statement, or whatever extended period has been agreed between the local planning authority and the applicant.
Why are these powers insufficient? As the TCPA points out, planning is not a process. It refers to the complexity of planning decisions, which often hang on fine judgments of local and national policy, and the deliberate anchoring of the system to democratically elected local authorities—the basis of our planning system since 1947. Appeal rights for non-determination, or call-in powers, still retain a role for the local planning authority.
Clause 1 means that the substantive right to have a planning decision taken by a democratically elected local authority is removed, negating one of the founding principles of the 1947 English planning system. There is no doubt that the Government are focusing on the speed of decision-making to the exclusion of quality. Paragraph 47 of the consultation document states:
“We also propose raising the bar for the speed of decisions after the first year”.
Any assertions by the Government that the clause will be used in extremis sound a little hollow. The Government cite the decline from 65% to 57%, in the year ending June 2012, in the number of applications for major developments dealt with within 13 weeks, but there is no substantive analysis of why this might be or, indeed, what might be done to improve the position.
Baroness Hanham
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for tabling this stand part debate as it gives me an opportunity to read into the record what I should like to say in reply. That is fair because it lays out for both of us the starting or finishing points— I am not sure which it is.
We have debated the merits of this clause at length. While some have argued that it breaches fundamental principles of local decision-making and somehow marks a retreat from localism, I reassure noble Lords that that is simply not the case. On the contrary, as I have sought to make very clear, this clause is necessary and appropriate, and it will be used only in exceptional circumstances.
This Government believe that planning plays a key role in facilitating investment and growth, which is why we announced an inflation-related increase in fees last year and have put locally produced plans at the heart of the system for identifying and addressing development needs. Most planning authorities are rising to the challenge of delivering an effective and positive service in what are, we acknowledge, difficult times. However, it would be wrong not to act in those few cases where planning was not being delivered effectively. Equally, though, this is a measure of last resort, and we will ensure that it is deployed in a way that is fair and proportionate.
Decisions that are unnecessarily slow, or which result in development being refused without good reason, can have a real impact by delaying or discouraging investment. That is bad for the economy and bad for communities, and we should not stand by and delay taking action in those very few cases where this is a significant problem. This clause represents an appropriate response to such situations.
Far from being an unprecedented move to centralise power, Clause 1 will ensure that action can be taken in the rare cases where planning services are failing, just as previous Administrations have sought to ensure in relation to schools, hospitals and other services that are vital for the well-being of the community. Nor should we forget that applicants for planning permission can already go to the Secretary of State for a decision where the local planning authority fails to decide within the statutory period. What we are proposing in Clause 1 merely extends that principle by saying that in those very few cases where authorities have a track record of genuinely poor performance, applicants should be able to exercise that choice from day one rather than wait for the statutory period to elapse.
I have already made it clear that, where it is obvious that more time than the statutory period is genuinely needed to decide an application, and agreements between developer and local authority are in place to extend the determination period, these applications will be excluded from the performance figures provided that there is an agreed timetable for reaching a decision, as we should not let these cases drag on unnecessarily. This will ensure that there is no risk of quality being sacrificed for speed and that there is a transparent process and timetable when applications need more time than usual. This does not by any means require a full-blown planning performance agreement in all such cases, but there should at least be a record of what has been agreed on the way forward.
We consider that sector-led support will play a key role in identifying and addressing any weaknesses in designated authorities. We will work with the Local Government Association and the Planning Advisory Service, which the Government fund, to ensure that struggling authorities get the support they need in order to improve. This is something which should, in future, also help to avoid the need for any designations altogether.
Our aim in introducing this clause is simple. It is to give applicants the choice of a better service where this is genuinely justified, while encouraging sound and timely decisions on the part of all planning authorities. As I hope the consultation shows, we have thought carefully about an approach that does this while minimising any risk of the sort of perverse outcomes that have characterised some previous performance measures.
So let us be clear. Based on the criteria that we have suggested in our consultation paper, this measure would affect only those authorities that show a wholly unacceptable level of performance—on speed, for example, those authorities that do not meet the statutory target on 30%, or fewer, of their major applications.
In addition, we are not removing powers from local authorities. We are saying that, where applicants are unhappy with the level of performance, they will now at least have an alternative. They will have the choice of applying directly to the Secretary of State.
We all understand why the Government cannot support the proposal to switch off this clause after two years—that it would be provide insufficient time for it to work and it would also remove the continuing incentive for planning authorities to deliver a good level of performance. I therefore must reject the proposal for, effectively, a sunset clause and hope the noble Lord will understand that and withdraw his amendment.
Lord McKenzie of Luton
My Lords, I thank the Minister for her reply, though I am bound to say that it did not come as a surprise. There are a range of points in relation to the clause-stand-part proposal that I do not accept, but given the hour and given that we have many more Committee days and some more on Report, I am sure we will return to each of these points. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
“Greater London: option to make planning application directly to Mayor of London
In the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, after the new section 62A insert—“62B When application may be made directly to Mayor of London
(1) In Greater London, a relevant application that would otherwise have to be made to the local planning authority may (if the applicant so chooses) be made instead to the Mayor of London if the following conditions are met at the time it is made—
(a) the local planning authority concerned is designated by the Secretary of State for the purposes of section 62A; and(b) the development to which the application relates (where the application is within subsection (2)(a)), or the development for which outline planning permission has been granted (where the application is within subsection (2)(b)), is of a description described in subsection (2)(c), (d), (e) or (f).(2) In this section “relevant application” means—
(a) an application for planning permission for the development of land in Greater London, other than an application of the kind described in section 73(1); or(b) an application for approval of a matter that, as defined by section 92, is a reserved matter in the case of an outline planning permission for the development of land in Greater London,in either case where the development is development—(c) for the purposes of provision of a school that is or will be the subject of an academy arrangement made under section 1 of the Academies Act 2010;(d) by an electricity undertaker which is not permitted development for the purposes of a development order made under section 57(1);(e) prescribed by the Secretary of State as an application of potentially strategic importance in an order made under section 2A(4); or(f) otherwise prescribed by the Secretary of State.(3) Where a relevant application is made to the Mayor of London under this section, the Mayor may direct that he is to be regarded as the local planning authority for the purposes of determining the application, and the Mayor may determine it accordingly.
(4) Where a relevant application is made to the Mayor of London under this section, an application under the Planning Acts referred to in section 62A(3) (“the connected application”) may (if the person making such an application so chooses) be made instead to the Mayor of London.
(5) If the connnected application is made to the Mayor of London under subsection (4) but the Mayor considers that it is not connected with the relevant application concerned, the Mayor may—
(a) refer the connected application to the local planning authority, or hazardous substances authority, to whom it would otherwise have been made, and(b) direct that the connected application—(i) is to be treated as having been made to that authority (and not to the Mayor under this section), and(ii) is to be determined by that authority accordingly. (6) Section 38(1) (delegation of functions by the Mayor) shall apply to the Mayor of London’s functions under this section.
(7) Section 2E (section 2A and planning obligations under section 106) shall apply to any direction given under subsection (3).
(8) Section 2F (representation hearings) shall apply to any application in relation to which a direction has been given under subsection (3).””
Lord Tope
My Lords, in moving Amendment 39, I shall speak also to Amendment 80, both of which stand in my name and are supported by the noble Baroness, Lady Valentine. Though on the Marshalled List her name is only attached to Amendment 39, she has assured me that she supports Amendment 80 as well.
I begin with two apologies. I should earlier have declared my interest as a councillor in a London borough. Given the subject of these amendments, I must particularly declare my interest as a London borough councillor. Secondly, I apologise on behalf of the noble Baroness, Lady Valentine, who has an important engagement this evening and was unsure whether we would get to this amendment or, if we did, at what time. I agreed that she should go and keep her important engagement rather than wait here, and promised to do my best—not to represent her views; I cannot do that—at least to put this debate on record. I should perhaps also declare on behalf of the noble Baroness, Lady Valentine, since I am speaking for her as well, that she is chief executive of London First and a board member of the Peabody housing trust.
These two amendments are the first to refer to the unique position of Greater London in these considerations. At Second Reading, the noble Lord, Lord Smith of Leigh, reminded me of the combined authority in Greater Manchester; it is not exactly the same as in Greater London, but if he wishes to bring forward proposals of a similar nature, I would certainly consider them with great sympathy. In view of the time of night, I do not want to go into great detail on this; I am not sure that, at this stage, it is necessary to do so because I am sure we will return to it on Report. However, the situation and position in London is that the Mayor of London—and here I refer to the office, not necessarily the office holder at any particular time, in which I have not so far had any interest to declare—already has the responsibilities for strategic planning in London. I am unclear whether the Government have given any consideration—and if so, what—to the position of London in relation to the provisions of this Bill.
It seems to me that if any London planning authority has the misfortune to be designated—we all hope that this does not happen, and I have made my views clear about that—it would be sensible in all respects for it to be referred to the Mayor of London and to the Greater London Authority, rather than to the planning inspectorate, which just happens to be in Bristol. I say that on a number of grounds. The first is the important democratic principle that the Mayor of London is elected by Londoners; he is accountable to Londoners and he is accountable particularly directly to the elected London assembly. Therefore, the actions he takes and the decisions he makes are directly accountable to an elected body, which is not the case with the planning inspectorate.
Secondly, the planning department in the Greater London Authority has on the whole a good relationship —certainly a relationship—with all the planning authorities in London, some more than others, as necessary. It knows the situation in London and the individuals concerned in many cases. It is by definition more local than somebody based in Bristol could possibly be. It is better placed to consider particular local circumstances, and indeed, people are able to make their representations directly to that elected and accountable body.
From the point of view of the Mayor of London with his responsibility for strategic planning in London, if a planning authority is performing so badly as to be designated, that must have implications for him and his strategic role, so again, in all respects the mayor has a particular interest in planning. For me the important principle is that if there is to be designation, at least in London it can go to an elected and accountable body rather than to an appointed body some distance from London. I have made my position clear several times, but if it is to happen, that is a far preferable situation and far more in accordance with our belief in localism.
Briefly, Amendment 80, which is much further on in the Bill, would ensure that planning applications for developments relating to school and energy infrastructure must be referred to the mayor as being of potential strategic importance. This would allow him to call in applications that are deemed to have strategic significance for the capital’s future and expedite the decision-making process, getting key projects off the ground. That would also allow the mayor to delegate his call-in powers in cases where he does not have the time personally to hold the representation hearing or he has a conflict of interest in which case the power is currently automatically lost. We need to consider the position of London in the context of a Greater London Authority and an elected mayor. Should it be deemed in the future that Greater Manchester is in that position, that will be fine. It is the principle that I am concerned with here. In England, that principle applies only to London, and I do not see that the Government have yet given any consideration to the position of London in relation to their proposals. I beg to move.
Lord Jenkin of Roding
My Lords, due to procrastination, I did not ask for my name to be added to those of the noble Lord, Lord Tope, and the noble Baroness, Lady Valentine, until the weekend, by which time the first Marshalled List was already with the printers. However, I warmly support what has been said by the noble Lord, Lord Tope, and I do not need to add very much to it.
The point I would make is that the Mayor of London—I am talking about the office and not the individual—already has very substantial strategic planning functions in London. As to the question of designation and the right of an applicant to apply under the rest of the Bill to the Secretary of State, it seems obvious that in London the application should be referred to the mayor because, by definition, we are talking about major applications. As I think my noble friend said, the mayor has extraordinarily good planning relationships not only with the boroughs but with a range of other interests, such as developers, other stakeholders and so on, who are very much concerned with planning. That has been developed to a considerable degree of expertise and skill. That is the right body to exercise the function if, as has been said, any London borough suffers the misfortune of being designated. I very much support this.
I hope that by the time we come to debate Amendment 80, my name will have been added to it. It is a very useful and important addition. The Mayor of London, with his overall economic functions, has a very considerable interest in ensuring that there is sufficient energy to supply London, particularly when one is dealing with decentralised energy—what might be local wind-power turbines and things of that sort. It would be entirely appropriate in those circumstances that he should have the right to call in applications that refer to such functions. Like my noble friend Lord Tope, I warmly support the amendment and hope that the Government may see their way to accepting it. Amendments 39 and 80 were drafted to follow the pattern of the earlier part—Clause 1—of the Bill, so I hope that the Government may feel able to accept them. It would be very much welcomed in London, and also by the London boroughs. I have already declared my interest as a joint president of London Councils. I look forward to hearing what my noble friend says from the Front Bench.
Lord McKenzie of Luton
My Lords, I listened carefully to the noble Lord, Lord Tope, who moved the amendment, and to the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, who set out his support for it. A very good case was made. I am attracted in particular to the democratic principles underpinning this. One does not necessarily always like how the democratic process works, but we should always see the principle as sacrosanct.
I was unclear about whether, if an authority is designated, it is only in respect of strategic issues that the mayor will step in, or whether he could do so in respect of all major applications. Clearly the two are not necessarily the same. However, the proposition is worthy of very serious thought.
I was a little confused about Amendment 80. On the one hand, the proposition is that the mayor should have more powers and things to do; on the other, that he will have the right to delegate because he will not have the time to deal with some of the representative meetings involved. However, I will not dwell on that point. A decent case has been made this evening and I will be very interested to hear the Minister’s reply.
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
My Lords, I will explain the Government’s position on this amendment. I was amused when my noble friends referred to the distinction between the office and the person. When one thinks of the present incumbent of the Mayor of London’s office, or indeed his predecessor, it is very hard not to talk about the person in the office. One can make that claim about both the current incumbent and his predecessor.
I listened to the arguments in favour of Amendment 39. First, I will say that I concur completely with the point that the Mayor of London should play an important role in strategic decisions affecting the capital. My noble friend Lord Tope made that point very well. As a former councillor in a neighbouring borough to his, I dealt with issues in collaboration with the Mayor of London’s office. As my noble friend Lord Jenkin said, the mayor already has powers to put in place a strategic framework for planning in London, and to call in for his own decision any applications that are of potential strategic importance. Clause 1 was drafted to ensure that his power to call in such applications would remain where proposals were made directly to the Secretary of State. The question was raised about discussions with the mayor’s office. The Government have had positive discussions with the mayor’s office about how this would best be implemented. We gave the reassurance that applications of potential strategic importance would be notified to the mayor very quickly once they had been received by the Planning Inspectorate, so that he will be able to act immediately should he wish to intervene. This presents a more practical and workable approach than the one proposed in the amendments.
It is also important that we do not overcomplicate the process for applicants. As it stands, the amendment would introduce a three-way choice for those proposing major development in the capital should the borough be designated on the basis of poor performance. They could, for example, choose to apply to the borough as normal, or to the Secretary of State, or to the mayor. In the Government’s view this would complicate matters further. In other words, what constitutes the application’s potential strategic importance or falls into one of the other proposed categories could end up being extremely complicated and confusing and risk further delay should an applicant misjudge the criteria. The mayor would then have to return an application because he could not decide upon it. It is much simpler for the applicant to have a two-way choice, as we propose, and for the planning inspectorate to decide whether an application it has received is one in which the mayor could have an interest. This approach is entirely consistent with the existing situation where the authorities, not the applicant, decide whether an application is of potential strategic importance.
We would also need to make sure that the categories are generally strategic in nature and consider the views of the London boroughs and other interests. We are happy to have that debate but currently feel that the Bill is not the place to make these changes.
Reference was made to Amendment 80. While there may be a case for the changes proposed, this again can be achieved at the appropriate time by amending secondary legislation. Amendment 80 would allow the mayor to delegate decisions relating to planning applications in the capital. As I have already said, we are sympathetic to this proposal but believe that the Bill is not the best place to address it. In this regard, we propose that we look at the mayor’s planning powers as a whole package and then, in discussion with all interested parties, consider the opportunities for making any appropriate changes.
With those assurances and reassurances I hope that the noble Lord will be willing to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Beecham
Can the Minister indicate whether it is the Government’s intention to consult the Mayor of London, or indeed any body, about proposals to permit the conversion of office premises to residential premises, which I understand has not gone down too well in parts of London?
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
It is the standard procedure. We continue to consult the Mayor of London’s office on a raft of issues and discuss them. I am sure that the noble Lord is well aware of such practices.
Lord Tope
My Lords, mention was made of the reference which I and my noble friend Lord Jenkin made to the office and not the office holder. We did so partly out of sensitivity to Members of the opposition Benches, who may have some sensitivity towards both office holders thus far. I thought that we should be clear in our heads, as far as that is ever possible, about distinguishing the office from the office holder. Given that they are such personalities, that is what we should try to do.
I am not sure that I am greatly reassured by the Minister’s reply. The suggestion that an applicant in a major project would be confused because he might have three choices rather than two is rather demeaning to such applicants. I am sure that they could understand the difference between the local authority, the Planning Inspectorate and the Mayor of London. What choice they might make is up to them but I do not think that it is beyond their intellectual capacity to cope with that. I do not speak for the Mayor of London—perish the thought. In my view, they should still have two choices—the local planning authority or the Mayor of London. Given the role of the mayor as the strategic planning authority, I do not see a role for the Planning Inspectorate. However, that is my view. I do not know what the mayor’s view is; I am sure that he will let us know.
Clearly I am not going to push this to a vote. I urge the Minister to continue discussions—I hope that there are discussions already—with the GLA to try to reach some agreement on what should be in the Bill when we come to its later stages. I do not feel that we can go through the Bill, proposing the designation of authorities and passing responsibility to the Planning Inspectorate and the various other provisions, without recognising the role in Greater London of the Greater London Authority and, in particular, the Mayor of London. It may well be a good idea in some future legislation, primary or secondary, to give further consideration overall to the planning powers of the mayor and indeed to how planning works in the capital city. However, I think that Amendment 39 applies particularly to the provisions of this Bill. I am sure that we will return to this subject on Report, but in the mean time, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord McKenzie of Luton
Lord McKenzie of Luton
My Lords, this amendment concerns the arrangements when an application has been made to the Secretary of State in circumstances where another person is to be appointed to deal with the application. The provisions of Schedule 1 enable the Secretary of State, for so long as the application has not been determined, to revoke that appointment and to appoint another person to determine the application instead. On the face of it, this is a very wide power.
It is accepted, of course, that for these purposes the Secretary of State has to appoint an individual and it is further accepted that there may be circumstances where the individual may be unable to complete the task for a number of reasons and has to be replaced. However, the revocation of the appointment can be for any reason or, indeed, for none. Our amendment seeks to constrain the power by making it subject to the agreement of the local planning authority and the applicant. This is not the only constraint that might be adopted, but it is the one that is being proposed. Perhaps the Minister will put on the record the policy involved in the application of this power. Concerns obviously arise around the Secretary of State intervening to pre-empt a decision that is on the point of being made. What criteria does the Minister consider it appropriate to attach to this power? I beg to move.
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
My Lords, this provision in Schedule 1 allows a new inspector to be appointed in cases where, for example, illness or probity would prevent the original inspector considering a particular case. It is a safeguard and a check, and nothing more. The applicant would be informed of the change of inspector as a matter of course, but there should not be a requirement to do so, only with their agreement. The Secretary of State must be able to choose the most appropriate person to determine an application, just as happens currently with any planning appeal. Equally, there should not be any need to agree this with the designated authority, especially as it would not be the determining body for the application. With those assurances and clarification, I hope that the noble Lord is willing to withdraw the amendment.
Lord McKenzie of Luton
I thank the Minister for that reply. I understand the thrust of it and I understand that probity and illness are circumstances in which someone would have to be replaced, but as I said earlier, the nature of this power is quite wide and the noble Lord has not reassured me as to whether there is any constraint on its usage. Perhaps I can take this opportunity to pick up a point we touched on earlier, which is that persons who can be appointed by the Secretary of State under these provisions are not just the Planning Inspectorate; it is not limited to that body. I think that the noble Baroness is going to write to me on that point. I am sure that she has not had a chance to do so in the dinner break, so I will forgive her and return to the issue when we have the correspondence. However, it would be helpful if the Minister could say a little more about not so much where the power will be used but the constraints that could be imposed upon it. Can he have another go and help me further on this?
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
I think that my noble friend has already undertaken to write to the noble Lord on the other point, so I will ensure that this is covered in the letter.
Lord McKenzie of Luton
I thank the Minister for that and I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord McKenzie of Luton
Lord McKenzie of Luton
My Lords, in moving Amendment 41, I will speak to Amendments 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48 and 49. With this group, we seek to ensure that when the Secretary of State awards costs, he does so in keeping with the principles of good consultation and in a way that is beneficial to the planning process.
Ensuring that all parties to an appeal act reasonably is of course essential, but the clause risks overly penalising local authorities and working against localism. If the risk of being designated as failing is not a strong enough deterrent for local authorities to turn down inappropriate development, the risk that they might have to pay the costs of appeals certainly will be. There are concerns that the costs of appeals are inhibiting a true localism. Given that, how can increasing the number of instances in which a local authority would have to pay the other party’s costs be beneficial, especially given shrinking budgets and the huge resources that developers often have at their disposal to undertake appeals? When local authorities consider the risk of having appeal costs awarded against them alongside the risk that any decision overturned at appeal may contribute to their designation as failing, that makes it much more likely that developments, whether good or bad, will be nodded through by a local authority.
At present, costs are awarded in very few instances. The impact assessment sets out that, last year, costs were awarded in only 3.7% of cases but goes on to predict that, under Clause 2, the number of cases would rocket, with costs being awarded in as many as 20% or more of all appeal decisions. Worryingly, the Minister’s department has made no estimate of the amount that that would cost local authorities or any other party; hence, the need for amendments to allow for clear criteria and proper regulation of the procedure.
Amendments 41 to 47 specifically target the need for proper criteria to be used when assessing whether costs should be awarded. The impact assessment states that,
“this measure will lead to an increase in the number of costs awarded at least in the short term until longer term behaviour changes”.
However, there is no assessment of how long that might take. Published criteria, set out in regulations, would surely speed up the change in behaviour more effectively. Such criteria would allow the Secretary of State to define what would be deemed unreasonable behaviour and would therefore encourage, rightly, local authorities to avoid it. There is no benefit in giving the Secretary of State discretionary powers to award costs in the hope that it will change behaviour unless the instances in which costs are to be awarded are plainly set out. Furthermore, as the clause will allow the Secretary of State to award a portion of costs, he will need clear guidance in setting out the formula on which the portion of costs is to be awarded and perhaps, more importantly, how it is to be calculated.
Amendment 48 is key to this argument that we are making against the clause. New sub-paragraph (11) allows the Secretary of State to subsume to himself personally any power in connection with the award of an appeal. Can the Minister explain why the Secretary of State would require individual power to award costs, independent of the experts appointed to decide such an award? The amendment seeks to ensure that such power will be used only when it is to the benefit of all involved. It is difficult to conceive of a set of circumstances in which that might be the case; nevertheless it is important that some restraints are put on the Secretary of State’s powers under the sub-paragraph. We need to ensure that the Secretary of State is able to take such power unto himself only if parties to the appeal agree that it is appropriate in the circumstances.
Amendment 49 further constrains the power proposed in sub-paragraph (11). It seeks to ensure that the Secretary of State will make any decision under the sub-paragraph in accordance with published criteria, which would be extremely useful to assist in trying to determine what is in the Secretary of State’s mind. We want the Secretary of State to publish criteria that can be assessed to see whether he is making a fair and even-handed decision about the award of costs, and we want a requirement for him to publish his reasons for his decisions. Not only do we want open and transparent criteria that will inform decisions but we want them to be published. We also would wish to know, in particular circumstances, how they are being applied.
We would like the Secretary of State to publish his reasons. It should not be the role of local authorities, the other agencies involved or Parliament to try to work out what the reasons might have been in any particular set of circumstances. We want it to be clear and transparent. We would have thought that this was something that the Government also would want. I beg to move.
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
My Lords, I sought to scribble down the noble Lord’s questions as they came in. I apologise if I miss certain questions. On anything omitted, I shall write to the noble Lord.
The award-of-costs system supports the Government’s drive to improve the planning system by seeking to reduce the poor behaviour that leads to wasted expense and unnecessary delay. Clause 2 extends existing powers to enable the Secretary of State to recover his own costs in planning appeals and makes provision to improve the handling of costs awards between parties. A timely and efficient appeals service will promote economic recovery. At the start of the debate—I hope that this shows my level of attentiveness throughout the past few hours—my noble friend said that this was a magic wand of a Bill. Certainly, what it seeks to do is remove hurdles to growth and it is our view that this is one of those elements.
Clause 2 extends the existing powers of the Secretary of State to recover costs in full or in part in all appeal procedures. It already provides, at subsections (5) and (6), for rules and regulations to lay out the circumstances in which the Secretary of State may direct that costs may be recovered—about which the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, asked. Amendments 41 to 44 and 46 and 47 would duplicate provisions already made in the clause and are therefore not necessary.
On Amendment 45, the current award-of-costs system is already flexible enough to take account of mitigating circumstances when all claims for an award of costs are being considered. All parties will have the opportunity to present evidence, including detail of any mitigating circumstances, before a decision is made on an award of costs. We therefore consider, again, that no further change is necessary.
The noble Lord asked how the new powers of the Secretary of State would be laid out transparently. I assure him that established guidance is provided on what constitutes unreasonable behaviour and behaviour that may give rise to an award of costs. This guidance will continue to apply whether an award is made by the inspector or by the Secretary of State. We will of course ensure that clarity is provided on the circumstances in which the Secretary of State may recover his costs.
The noble Lord said that the Secretary of State seemed to be able to take a lot more powers to himself to recover costs. As I am sure the noble Lord is aware, the Secretary of State already has powers to recover his own costs. The clause simply makes it clear that he can do so in full or in part in relation to the different appeal procedures. It is right that these powers cover all types of appeal, and we will ensure that information is provided on what type of behaviour may give rise to the Secretary of State recovering his costs before any costs are recovered.
The noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, said that the proportion of appeals in which costs are awarded is estimated by the impact assessment to rise from 3% to 20%. The 20% figure was rather a high estimate; we also gave in that same assessment medium and low assumptions of 10% and 5% respectively. I guess that one can only make estimates until the reality kicks in, and I am sure that we will return to the subject at that time.
Clause 2 is about improving the efficiency of appeals handling and freeing up inspectors’ time to focus on planning issues. Subsection (7) enables the identification of categories of work connected with appeals which will be dealt with by the Secretary of State instead of by a planning inspector. It is unnecessary to seek the agreement of parties to do this in each case. Parties to an appeal can be assured that any matters dealt with directly by the Secretary of State will be handled fairly and justly. Award-of-costs decisions, which I have covered, will be made in line with current guidance on grounds for an award. As I have already assured the noble Lord, we will amend existing guidance to make it clear what type of cases this will apply to. Therefore, Amendments 48 and 49 are deemed unnecessary.
Ultimately, this is to make the whole process more efficient and effective. I am sure that all of us involved with the planning process would welcome such changes. I therefore hope that, with those reassurances, the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie of Luton, is willing to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Greaves
The Minister said several times that the purpose is to increase the efficiency of the appeal system or of appeal-handling in pursuit of economic growth. I am not sure what the direct correlation is between the efficiency of the appeal system and economic growth, except that decisions might be taken more quickly. Is the phrase, “increase the efficiency of appeal handling”, a euphemism for more applications being passed and therefore not going to appeal at all? Is that what is behind all this?
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
The short answer to the second question is no. This is about making things more efficient. I am sure that anyone involved with the planning process would welcome greater efficiency. If a decision is more efficient—if it is quicker—it makes the planning process more in line with requirements and, ultimately, saves costs for all involved. I commend the changes because they are simply making something more efficient. To anyone involved with the public or private sector, increased efficiency is always a welcome development.
Lord Greaves
I agree entirely with that. Whatever you are doing, doing it more efficiently is a good idea. However, I do not understand what the allocation of costs—increasing the costs on local authorities and increasing the number of cases where costs are allocated—has to do directly with efficiency. I said earlier that, in my experience, the Planning Inspectorate has not always been the most efficient organisation in the country. However, my perspective is that that is not because the Secretary of State could not get his costs back at the end of it all or that more costs might be allocated to other people in the process but that, as a bureaucracy, the Planning Inspectorate was not very efficient. Either it did not have enough people working for it or those people were not working sufficiently efficiently. The long delays that there were in planning appeals—there still are in some cases, although it has very much improved—do not suggest that the Planning Inspectorate has always been the most efficient organisation in the world.
What on earth has that got to do with the Secretary of State being able to take money off local authorities following the end of an appeal?
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
As I said, from my experience of life, whether in business or the public sector, it helps growth because things progress that much more quickly. My noble friend also raised a point about added costs for local planning authorities or developers. On the contrary, no local authority or developer will face an award of costs if they behave reasonably. It is in everyone’s interest that all parties behave reasonably at all stages of the planning process. If anything, making these changes will prevent delays, drive good behaviour and therefore reduce unnecessary expense and delay for everyone.
Lord McKenzie of Luton
My Lords, I am not sure that we can progress much further on this this evening. I fear that part of the rationale underlying this is an encouragement for local authorities not to risk appeals and to tick through, at least at the margins, those applications which they might otherwise have rejected.
The Minister told me that the amendments are unnecessary because they duplicate what is in the Bill, there is established guidance on it or the Secretary of State already has that power. That is all good stuff. Perhaps he might give us the reference to, or in due course pass a copy of documents relating to the definition of “reasonableness”. The Minister said that the established guidance was going to be updated to ensure that there is clarity on this. Perhaps we could have a draft of that updated guidance before we reach Report. Having said all that, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.