Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Chris Heaton-Harris and Clive Betts(2 years, 4 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mr Clive Betts (Sheffield South East) (Lab)
Happy Christmas from the Opposition Benches to you and all your staff, Mr Speaker.
Along with my hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) and the hon. Member for North East Derbyshire (Lee Rowley), I am supporting the opening of the Barrow Hill line, which goes from Sheffield to Chesterfield through my constituency, hopefully with new stations at Beighton and Waverley. The real advantage will be if we can get people out of their cars on to the new line so that we avoid the congestion in Crystal Peaks and Handsworth in my constituency, and on the Sheffield Parkway. We have more chance of doing that if, rather than a heavy rail service going into Victoria that puts people in the middle of nowhere, we get a tram-train on the line going into the centre of Sheffield, which would have a much better chance of encouraging people out of their cars. Will the Minister seriously look at that option?
Chris Heaton-Harris
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his question. I actually know the project very well—I have participated in a deep dive on it—and I think he is completely right. There are now many more light rail and very light rail products out there, which would be very suitable for this scheme. The whole point of the restoring your railway scheme is to help people find the right product to deliver the right scheme for them in their locality. If he would like a meeting on this, I would happily meet him.
National Planning Policy Framework
Debate between Chris Heaton-Harris and Clive Betts
Mr Betts
Well, we have seen a lot of letters to newspapers saying, “Please stop all these wind turbines being put up”—[Hon. Members: “Hear, hear!”] I got an immediate response to that one. How, in the end, does a planning system relate all the individual local decisions and wishes of local communities to the Government’s national targets to deal with climate change and house the people of this country?
Chris Heaton-Harris
As a former Member of the European Parliament I can remember the directive that we passed, but it does not tell a country how to achieve its renewable energy targets by specifying which sectors it should promote; it simply sets a target, and there is an implication that it should be hit. Allowing local people to choose which types of renewable energy they would like to see in their local community would bring on more renewable energy projects, not fewer.
Mr Betts
In the end, I am a committed localist. I believe in consultation and taking account of the wishes of local communities. All localists—not just Ministers—face a challenge: if the sum total of local decisions does not add up to the national requirements on issues such as climate change or the number of homes, what should the Government do about it?
Mr Betts
I am sympathetic to the hon. Gentleman’s point. He has a long history of arguing for more of the right sort of housing for his community; I would not accuse him of nimbyism at all. There is, however, an issue for the Government to think about.
It is helpful that the Minister has kept in place the technical guidance about the assessment of housing need, so that there is a consistency up and down the country. It would also be helpful if he could write to hon. Members, and place his response in the Library, to explain exactly what technical guidance has been left in place to date, what his plans are to review it, in conjunction with various professional bodies and the Local Government Association, and what the time scale for the process will be. It was an important decision, as I say, to leave the technical guidance in place, and it would be helpful to know more about what is going on with respect to it.
Although the Government have not gone quite as far as the Select Committee wanted, I welcome the fact that local authorities will have to come forward yearly to show in their monitoring reports what they are doing about the important duty to co-operate. There will be challenges for authorities that cannot meet their housing need because of land constraints, as they will need neighbouring authorities to take house building on to meet housing needs. Without proper co-operation between those authorities and in the absence of the top-down targets from the regional spatial strategies, whose removal I know Government Members welcome, some areas are going to have real problems meeting housing needs in a constructive and co-ordinated way.
Ministers and Government Members need to accept that, however much they welcome the changes they have brought in, any change in the planning system will almost certainly lead to uncertainty and cause an initial slowdown in decision making. That is almost inevitable, so we should not be surprised if things do not go smoothly at first. Almost certainly, too, there will be unintended consequences from what they are putting forward. There will be misreading of the wording; inspectors will come to decisions on appeal that do not conform with the Minister’s aspirations; judicial reviews will reach different conclusions from those Ministers, local MPs or local councils might want. At some point, the Minister will have to put in place a review system and perhaps bring in some changes, simply to take account in practice of those sorts of issues. This is a technical issue, but it could be crucial to how the system works. In the end, how it works in practice rather than what it says on a piece of paper is what will count.
I welcome the idea of having transitional arrangements, and it is good that the Minister agreed them with the Local Government Association. That is very positive. Let us look at some of these transitional arrangements. For example:
“For 12 months from the day of publication, decision-takers may continue to give full weight to relevant policies adopted since 2004 even if there is a limited degree of conflict with this Framework.”
What does a “limited degree of conflict” mean? There is an awful lot of room for an awful lot of lawyers to argue about that and make quite a bit of money. In the next paragraph, it states that
“after this 12-month period, due weight should be given to relevant policies and existing plans according to their degree of consistency with this framework”.
What does “degree of consistency” with the framework mean? Ministers may think they know what it means, but lawyers may have a different view and two lawyers may have two different views, and that can lead to an awful lot of expense, delay and, perhaps, the wrong decisions.
Chris Heaton-Harris
I think the hon. Gentleman will find that two lawyers will have a number of different views.
Mr Betts
I stand corrected on that point.
The fact that some of the wording is open to interpretation may cause real problems. It may mean that, ultimately, that the wishes of local communities are not adhered to.
Most of the complaints made in evidence to the Select Committee about the planning system were not about guidance and policy, but about process relating to individual applications. I do, however, have a lot of sympathy with the Government in regard to the slow pace at which local plans have been put in place. The Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 resulted from the fact that local authorities were not adopting unitary development plans quickly enough. We now know that local plans are not in place in about half the authorities concerned.
How can we change that for the future? The Minister has gone some way towards accepting our proposal. We have talked about the “light touch review”. If local plans are to be at the heart of the process, it is ridiculous that we should be dealing with plans many of which are 20 years old. That is not acceptable. We must find a way of bringing those plans up to date more rapidly. I do not know whether the system of local development frameworks, strategies and site allocation plans is too complicated to provide the necessary flexibility, but the Select Committee may wish to return to the issue, and the Government may wish to work along with us in exploring the technical issues further.
Everyone is in favour of neighbourhood plans, but I am worried about the resource implications. Such plans will not feature in poorer areas with fewer resources. It also worries me slightly that people see them as a way of stopping development. Apparently they must be consistent and
“conform to the strategic priorities within the Local Plan.”
What exactly does that mean? I think that it provides more room for legal argument.
In the end, what is important is not what the NPPF actually says, but how that is interpreted and what happens on the ground. At some point the Government will have to explain, in their terms, what a successful planning system will achieve, and how they will monitor it in order to display that success in the future.