Growth and Infrastructure Bill

Earl of Lytton Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd January 2013 Lords Chamber

[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.

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Thirdly, they do not want to have those opportunities restricted in the sense of there being some sort of spokesman who will put forward what they happen to think. They want to feel that there is an opportunity to have their say. My experience is of enabling people to have their say, which I always did as a Member of Parliament. I was not one of those who said he had nothing to do with planning applications. I had a lot to do with planning applications and I made sure that the local party knew what people thought. I did not tell it what to do but I made sure that it knew what people thought. I am very worried because I do not see that people will have their voice heard at all unless there is a much tougher statement from the Government that will be included in the supplementary legislation and the guidance to ensure that the inconvenient facts, which are that the public do not always welcome a particular development and do not always have the same problems with a development as the experts would want them to have, ought to be certainly faced. If this House does not face them I am not sure who will insist that people locally should feel part of the decision. I cannot guarantee to the Minister that people will agree with the decision, but I can guarantee that if they do not feel they have been part of that decision it will be difficult to carry it through and there will be more and more direct action by people who feel that they did not have a chance to do anything other than protest.

[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.