Planning Reform

David Heath Excerpts

Wednesday 8th January 2014 Westminster Hall

[Mr David Heath (Somerton and Frome) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gray.

I am delighted to have secured the debate today. I ought to start with two disclaimers. First, although I served for 12 years on a county council, a strategic planning authority, I have never served on a district council and am ignorant of some of the niceties of local planning procedure. Secondly, despite some small differences in government with the Minister—I have rather an affection for productive agricultural land, which he affects not to share—I believe in principle in the reforms introduced by the Government. It is absolutely right that we turn around the principles of planning to make it more responsive to local people and base it on local priorities rather than on a Whitehall-knows-best approach.

The reason for calling today’s debate, however, is simply that the reality in many local authorities at the moment—certainly for those in my constituency in Somerset—is the precise reverse of that. In the absence of agreed local plans and agreed five-year supply, far from empowering local communities, we are disfranchising them from decisions that will have the most profound impact on their local areas. That is what I want to impress on the Minister today.

I could give a number of examples from my constituency, such as the villages of Evercreech, Rode or Beckington, all in Mendip, or Huish Episcopi, where a recent planning inspector’s decision has gone in completely the opposite direction to that wished by the district council, and by local people, as evidenced through the parish council. As an illustration, however, I will use the village of Norton St Philip, which I have raised with the Minister before in the Chamber. It is an example of what is actually happening on the ground.

Norton St Philip is a beautiful village: it is an historic settlement and a conservation area; it has, arguably, one of the oldest pubs in the country; and it was the scene of a battle during Monmouth’s rebellion. It has everything going for it, including one of the most spectacular views from the said pub’s car park across the village cricket pitch to the church—a view that one might wish to see anywhere in the country. The village also has the fortune, or misfortune, of being only a few miles away from Bath, with its inflated Georgian infrastructure. Those few miles are green belt, and Norton St Philip is therefore in reasonably high demand as a dormitory village for the cities of Bath and, to a lesser extent, Bristol.

The problem that Norton St Philip faces at the moment is that it is under siege from developers, with five applications already before planners and a further two in the pipeline. That could have a disastrous effect on the fabric and nature of the village.

[Guy Opperman (Hexham) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate. I am enjoying the reverie across the car park, the pub and the village green. Does he agree that, although we all want development on brownfield land first, the most important idea to take to the Minister is that housing projections by local authorities must be realistic and ascertainable rather than unrealistic?

[Mr Heath]

I will be touching on five-year supply in a moment, because it is critical to what is happening.

Let me say a little more about Norton St Philip. Under the new Mendip plan, it has been classified as a “primary village”, and along with that goes a requirement for 70 new homes. That is predicated on the newly reopened shop and post office. Without that shop and post office, Norton St Philip would revert to being a secondary village, with a requirement for 40 new houses. Setting that aside, what has happened already is 73 new houses. The applications before the planning authority provide for a further 223 houses in that small village. In other words, were those applications to be approved, the size of the village would be doubled, without any improvement to the infrastructure, and, needless to say, the character of the village would be hugely changed in the process.

I am particularly exercised by one of the applications, although I know that Members of Parliament should always be cautious about getting involved with local planning decisions. Nevertheless, to build on what is called Great Orchard, which is the site of the battle of Philip’s Norton, the skirmish during the rebellion, seems to me to be an extraordinary proposition. It is deep within the heart of the conservation area of the village and would put at risk some 200 metres of the finest dry stone wall to be seen in Britain. I apologise to hon. Members if I am exercising my Baedeker view of my constituency, but it is vital to understand that the village is an important and historic settlement. I cannot see the circumstances in which such a proposition would be approved, and of course it was not—it was not approved in the local plan and was not part of what was reserved for development.

People in the village are perfectly happy to ensure that the building that is already taking place and that which is projected in sensible places go ahead. They are not averse to development in the village. However, they do not want their village destroyed. That is a perfectly proper proposition.

[David Simpson (Upper Bann) (DUP)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on obtaining this important debate. Does he agree that one of the major problems with planning—it has been for many years—is inconsistency? One council area will approve one thing; the neighbouring council area will not approve it. There needs to be flexibility, especially with town centre developments. If we are to regenerate our town centres, we need that flexibility, but inconsistency in planning has been a problem for many years.

[Mr Heath]

I agree that we need flexibility, and that is better determined by local people understanding local needs, rather than by an inspector in a planning department—in Bristol in our case—determining a case on the basis of rules derived from Whitehall. Local people should determine what is best for their area.

[Andrew Bingham (High Peak) (Con)]

Perhaps my hon. Friend’s constituents are like mine. It is not nimbyism and they are not against development per se. Does he agree that it is all about a sense of proportion? Things seem to be out of all proportion, which is what is causing concern.

[Mr Heath]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. Let me come on to where I think things are going wrong. We have a free-for-all at the moment, an avalanche of applications that are opportunistic in nature, because the local plans have not been agreed.

The Minister has said on a number of occasions, “Well, it is up to local authorities to have their plans approved.” He is right—of course it is up to them, and everyone understands that, but he underestimates the difficulties and the extent of the changes in the process. The early adopters of local plans had an easy time. Some of the local plans, which the Minister can look at in his office, are paper thin and would never get through the process now, but because they were done right at the start, they went through. The smaller rural district planning authorities in particular are now struggling with an extraordinarily cumbersome and complex process.

Let me deal with some of the issues that are bedevilling that process. The key is the five-year supply, which I have mentioned. There is a lack of definitive guidance on how it is to be calculated. There was a clear promise from the Department for Communities and Local Government that definitive guidance would be produced in August last year, but it has not appeared. Two things are happening as a result. First, planning authorities are struggling to understand exactly what is required. Secondly, plans are being picked apart at planning inquiries by clever QCs, who are going back to the first principles in the planning framework and using those to override any sensible local decision making.

There are tensions within the system. Historically, census figures have been used, but it now seems as though economic aspiration is a key factor. Economic aspiration is fine, except that if it does not come to fruition, an area is left with the houses but not the jobs, which does not make sense.

There is also the fundamental problem that housing supply is effectively determined by the house builders themselves and what they say they will be bringing forward in a particular year. Let us not kid ourselves: there are a limited number of national house builders that effectively have an oligopoly of supply. They are coming forward with figures that might look all right on paper, but the house builders will build only when the margin meets their requirements, and the profit margin on those developments is relatively high. The Government might wish to see more houses built—I certainly do, as we desperately need them across the country—but developers are interested in banking development land rather than building when their marginal profit is not at its greatest.

As a result, we have perverse incentives for developers to acquire permissions but not develop the projects. We have what are called technical starts, where developers will put in a road and say, “We have started that project, but we are not actually going to build any houses yet—we will leave that for the moment. Meanwhile, let’s get on with our next application for the next bit of land that we see.” That can distort the entire local plan and what emerges from it.

The second key factor is the weight that the emerging local plan has in planning inspectorate decisions, as it is developed, consulted upon and submitted to the Department. The Minister said to me in the House a few months ago that the plan has weight, but that is not evidenced by the decisions taken by planning inspectors, who are not working on the basis of ministerial aspiration but of regulations—quite rightly, as that is the only basis they can work on—which require them to look at different criteria. We are therefore seeing inspectorate decisions that do not match the desires of local communities for local planning.

I have to say to the Minister that, when we are talking about large conurbations, sometimes it really does not matter which bit of land is developed—there is capacity for spread, so if one development comes on, it is possible to deselect another bit of land to bring everything back into kilter—but when we are talking about small market towns and rural areas, the topography does not allow for that. If the wrong bit of that sort of community is developed, it does not help to deselect what would have been the right bit for development. Deselection does not work.

There is another aspect concerning the inspectorate that I shall mention in passing: the perverse decision, which has been evidenced more than once now, that because a particular design of building is right in one place, it will necessarily be right anywhere. As a result of that, we have lost the sense of the vernacular, which is key to good planning. We should be able to ensure that the buildings in a particular area suit how buildings in that area have been built historically and fit with the urban or rural community landscape. Instead, the same model of house is relabelled in different parts of the country: in Somerset, they would probably call it a thatched cottage, despite the fact that it is an executive four-bed home, whereas in the north it would be called the Ullswater model or something like that. It is nonsense. Such decisions show whatever the visual equivalent is of having cloth ears.

I have a number of modest requests for the Minister. First, I want emerging local plans that are on the point of publication to have real weight in the planning process—to have what is called materiality. That is simply not the case at the moment. If he wants that to happen, he has to make it happen by regulation—to instruct planning inspectors that they have to give the plans real weight and back local councils in doing the right thing. That is the whole principle of localism.

Secondly, the Minister needs to provide definitive guidance on the five-year supply, to show exactly what is to be taken into account and how it is to be calculated. He must not leave it to clever QCs representing house builders to determine what is right for a particular local area. That is not localism, but an absolute divorce from it. Until we have that clear guidance, I do not believe the situation will improve.

Thirdly, we need to give real weight to the views of parish councils. That is a gap in the new legislation. At the moment, they are virtually non-people, and do not have the locus they should have in planning decisions. I recently read a speech by the Minister about the importance of neighbourhood plans. We went down that road with the previous Government and their village plans.

I have 135-odd villages in my constituency, and many of them spent months and years of really hard work on developing their village plans, thinking that what they were doing would affect future planning decisions and ensure that what was built matched needs and locality. The reality was, of course, that those plans were completely ignored. I am worried that neighbourhood planning will go down exactly the same road. Indeed, people are now so cynical that they might not engage with neighbourhood planning in the first place, because they do not believe it will have an effect. Unless we can show that it will bring a real improvement to local planning decisions, people will not engage.

[Chris White (Warwick and Leamington) (Con)]

My hon. Friend has mentioned backing local councils and parish councils as well; that is an important part of this discussion. There is a problem, however, when those two organisations come into conflict. On my website there is a petition, with nearly 2,000 signatures, objecting to our current plan. How does he think district councils and parish councils could work together better to create greater consensus among local residents?

[Mr Heath]

That is important, and I believe there is a duty of co-operation within the local planning process that involves that sort of consideration. As I said, I have never sat on a district council in my life, but I know from my experience as leader of a county council, where we were dealing with matters such as mineral planning, that getting consensus is a long and iterative process. I do not believe that it is impossible for local people to achieve that consensus when they work together with shared objectives, but it is difficult when a plan is overridden by an inspector at appeal, or, worse still, when a district council feels so powerless to resist planning appeals that it rolls over in advance of them. We have seen that time and time again with local councils.

[Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con)]

My hon. Friend has made a powerful case outlining the mess that we are in. Just to be clear, is he content that the system should, ultimately, leave decision-making powers with the unelected planning inspector, or does he agree that those powers ought to be much closer to the property owner, the householder and the community?

[Mr Heath]

Ultimately, I would like the planning inspectorate to be redundant and local plans to be sufficiently robust to provide for the planning environment and, if necessary, local planning courts to determine whether there is a clear breach, but we are a little way away from that. In fact, the situation is quite the reverse: Her Majesty’s planning inspectors—I am not criticising them because they are only doing their job within the rules they have been given—are the planning authority for many of our rural areas. That cannot be right.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Heath]

I am trying to conclude to give as many hon. Members as possible a chance to speak, but I will give way.

[Jim Shannon]

The hon. Gentleman has talked a good deal about the impact of housing development on rural communities and so on. Does he have the same concern about the drive for green energy, wind turbines and the targets set by Europe? Does he believe that the same consideration should be given to the impact on householders, as the hon. Member for Wycombe (Steve Baker) mentioned in his intervention, so that they may object and a balance can be struck in the countryside between the drive for green energy and the impact on people and the quality of their lives?

[Mr Heath]

With the greatest respect to the hon. Gentleman, I do not want to divert this debate to energy, which is a completely different issue. I have always suggested that energy generation should be subject to the same sort of planning considerations as other industrial development. Although I am strongly supportive of renewable energy, I do not believe that it overrides all other considerations and I believe that such matters are best decided at local level. However, I do not want to derail this debate, which is about more routine planning policy.

[Jason McCartney (Colne Valley) (Con)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Mr Heath]

This is the last time I will give way because I want to give other hon. Members a chance to speak.

[Jason McCartney]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate, the importance of which is evident from the turnout this morning. It is interesting to hear that he has 135 villages in his constituency. I will name just five communities in mine: Lindley, Linthwaite, Upperthong, Netherthong and Golcar. They are facing the prospect of open land being pounced on by developers because my Labour-run Kirklees council’s local development framework is up in the air and it is refusing to use the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics. The nub of the matter is that when local councillors on the planning sub-committee listen to local concerns and are minded to refuse an application, its planning officers run roughshod over them, so there is no local democracy and no local accountability.

[Mr Heath]

The nomenclature of the villages in my hon. Friend’s constituency is as euphonious as those in mine. I could trade some wonderful village names with him. I am grateful for his intervention.

I have said that I want four things to be considered: the materiality of emerging local plans, a definition of “five-year supply”, the position of parish councils, and the vernacular, which is really important. I urge the Minister to look at that. It may seem to be a minor matter, but simply allowing uniformity of design throughout the country is contrary to the organic way in which architecture has developed in this country and is a hugely retrograde step.

I want to make one more suggestion. Central Government often put huge pressure on local councils to do things within time scales and castigate them if they do not. Could the same discipline be applied to the Government in terms of non-determination? It seems to me that local authorities are desperate to get local plans certified. Why do we not have a period following completion of the local plan process—perhaps six weeks from the plan being lodged with the Department—when it will be certified or will be deemed to have been certified irrespective of the planning Minister’s decision? It is no good the Government saying that they do not have the resources to deal with the issue—they do not accept that argument from planning authorities. The suggestion is a modest but good one, and I am sure that the Minister, being a radical Minister, will want to adopt it.

Something is seriously wrong not with the principle but with the operation of planning reform. It is causing great concern throughout the country. There is concern that communities will be distorted by opportunistic developments that our local authorities are apparently powerless to stop in the present circumstances. We must look closely at that. I do not want suburban sprawl across my rural constituency, but I see a risk of that. Of course I want houses to be built—we have a desperate need for them—but I want the right houses in the right places for the right reasons determined by local people. Those are exactly the principles that the Minister has espoused in his planning reforms. What I do not want, to almost quote the immortal words of Peter Seeger, is little boxes made of ticky tacky.

[Mr James Gray (in the Chair)]

Order. A glance round the Chamber demonstrates that quite a lot of hon. Members are trying to catch my eye. I want to make two points. First, the drill is that hon. Members write to Mr Speaker indicating their intention to speak in debates. Those who have not done so will be at the bottom of the list rather than the top. Secondly, I have the authority to impose a time limit, but I do not believe in time limits. I believe that we should have self-regulation and good manners rather than rules, so if hon. Members restrict themselves to about five minutes that would be extremely helpful.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Nick Boles)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gray.

First, I absolutely echo the condolences that the hon. Member for City of Durham (Roberta Blackman-Woods) has just extended to the family of Paul Goggins. I had not understood that he had died, and it is a very sad day. He was a gentleman who commanded respect and affection across the House.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr Heath) on securing this debate, which has become something of a “Groundhog Day” experience for me. I am absolutely sure that this is not the last time that I will have this experience, although whether I will end up with Andie MacDowell at the end of the movie is open to question.

I welcomed many of the questions that my hon. Friend asked, but I must object very strongly to how he opened his speech. He seemed to imply that I was not a supporter of maintaining agricultural land for farming. I heard some bellows from up above, where my recently departed father, a sheep farmer in Devon, and my rather-longer-ago departed grandfathers, farmers in the Mendips and in Devon respectively, were outraged at the implication that I am anything other than a passionate supporter of farming.

[Mr Heath]

I am very pleased to hear that. I just seem to remember that the hon. Gentleman once called agricultural land “boring”.

[Nick Boles]

My hon. Friend is such an experienced Member that I am surprised he believes what he reads in the newspapers.

In the very short time available to me, I will try to cover some of the main issues raised this morning, chiefly by my hon. Friend but also by other hon. Members. I will not be able to answer every question. In particular, I would like to write to my hon. Friend the Member for West Worcestershire (Harriett Baldwin) about the questions that she put about the Planning Inspectorate. I will copy in everybody in Westminster Hall today with the answers, because they were very good questions but technical ones, and I would like to come back to her specifically on them.

The first issue is housing projections. What is the role of figures from the Office for National Statistics in supporting housing projections? The fundamental situation is that, just as we expect local authorities to make plans to meet their needs for schools and for social care, we expect in the national planning policy framework that local authorities will make plans to meet their housing needs. Those plans have to be evidence-based. Of course, we cannot entirely reject ONS population projections, because the ONS is our national statistics body and those projections are the best that we have, although I entirely understand why they are often wrong and flawed, as all projections necessarily are.

What I have said, however, does not mean that those ONS projections are the last word. It is absolutely open to any authority—Cornwall council will certainly have this opportunity—to look at the actual figures achieved in the past, relate them back to the projections that were in place then and then say why it thinks that projections are not the last word and that different numbers have an evidence base. It is absolutely open to authorities to do that, but their numbers must be based on evidence; they cannot be based on assertion alone. Authorities must use evidence and that evidence will be challenged in an examination by developers and others, so it needs to be pretty robust.

I will now address the subject of the five-year land supply and particularly the question put by my hon. Friend about this rather vexed question—I cannot believe that we are all getting into this business whereby we are all experts on Sedgefield and Liverpool, not as places, football teams or constituencies, but as methods of calculating land supply.

What “Sedgefield” and “Liverpool” simply refer to is a particular question. If an area has had an under-delivery of housing in the past, how quickly—in the area’s new plan—should it catch up on that under-delivery? Rather than getting into the whole question of, “Is it Liverpool and is it Sedgefield?”, which will mean precisely nothing to our constituents, I will just read out what the draft guidance, which we hope to finalise in a very few weeks, says about this issue:

“Local planning authorities should aim to deal with the under-supply within the first five years of the plan period where possible.”

Now, some things are not possible; some things will conflict with other sustainability policies that are very important in the NPPF. However, it is not unreasonable to expect that, where past performance has undershot need, if it is possible, we should try to catch it up at the beginning of the plan and not during the full 15-year life of the plan.