National Planning Policy Framework

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown Excerpts

Thursday 20th October 2011 Commons Chamber

[Greg Clark]

My hon. Friend is right, and that is now a shared view. As I have said, the right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne has said that. Indeed, in our conversations about the Localism Bill, the hon. Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey), whom I congratulate on his promotion, also recognised that the regional approach would go and not come back. It has not worked for the reasons that I have mentioned: it sets people against the planning system.

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)]

rose—

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[Greg Clark]

I want to make some progress, because lots of Members want to speak and I do not want to take up too much time. However, I will take some interventions a little later.

The first objective is to make the local plan central to what happens and to transfer power to local communities. That has to be crucial. However, if we are to put local councils and people in neighbourhoods in charge, it is essential that the policy context in which they operate is accessible. They have to be able to understand it. When I first started to review the planning policy statements and planning policy guidance notes over a year ago, I asked for them to be brought into my office. They had to be carried in—in boxes. It is not possible to put local councils and members in charge if they have to wade through more than 1,000 pages of national policy. The policy has accreted over time. It was not the intention of the previous Government or Governments before them to accumulate such a mountain of policy; it has grown up piecemeal over time. That is why—to respond to the hon. Member for Huddersfield, who has now left the Chamber—it was important to take the issue seriously and review the policy from first principles. That is what we have done to make it accessible. The proposals that we have received to boil it down and distil it reflect a consensus in the House and beyond. In the submissions that have come in from the groups outside the House, I have seen many detailed “track changes” comments, and none of the proposals departs significantly from the type and length of document that we are aiming for.

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

I congratulate my right hon. Friend on having elevated the debate on planning policy, which is vital for the economic future of the country. May I also tell him, however, that all those who work in the planning system now need certainty? Will he move on as quickly as possible from the consultation to provide a definitive national planning policy framework, to give us that certainty?

[Greg Clark]

I will, and I will have more to say about that shortly.

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[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)]

I am delighted to follow the hon. Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts), the Chairman of the Communities and Local Government Committee, because he is one of the more knowledgeable Opposition Members on these matters, and he made some very pertinent points.

We may trade figures, as the right hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Mr Raynsford) started to do, but his Government inherited a golden legacy, and although the planning system can bring forward permissions, it cannot ensure that houses are built. His Government inherited a golden legacy, but they managed to ruin it, and we are now are in a very difficult situation in which we need to build more houses. The planning system has a part, but only a part, to play in that; the market has a big part to play, too.

I welcome the actions of my right hon. Friend the Minister in getting rid of regional spatial strategies, which the previous Government introduced. I have opposed them very strongly, simply because they have not worked. They have not produced the number of local plans required, and they have alienated many local people from the planning system, so my right hon. Friend has done the right thing in bringing forward this new national planning framework. I wish him every possible success.

I declare an interest, which is in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, as I have property that could benefit from these planning changes, and I, like the right hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich declared, have a non-pecuniary interest, too, because I am a fellow of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors and used to practise in the planning field.

One issue that is not in the NPPF is the costs in the planning appeal process. In my experience, small local authorities often have to weigh up the correct planning decision while bearing in mind the cost of appeal. My local authority has a development budget of about £2 million, and, if it has to take on board four appeals in any one year at £50,000 each, that is 10% of its entire development budget.

I have a proposal to deal with that. The default setting should be that the developer, who after all gets the benefit, will be expected to pay the local authority’s reasonable costs on an appeal. The issue of costs could then be varied by either the planning inspector or the Secretary of State in a particular place where the local planning authority has acted blatantly and without good reason against its own local plan or has ignored relevant national guidance.

Turning now to the issues that are governed by the draft NPPF, my first concern is about the guidance relating to the increased supply of housing. I am particularly concerned about the requirement in paragraph 109 for local authorities to provide an additional 20% of the existing five-year land bank. The five-year land bank is a rolling programme. Every time one permission is built on, it has to be replaced with a new permission. In my area, that is bringing about a substantial amount of new building land. If we impose this extra land on top of the existing five-year land bank, it will become unsustainable, it will sterilise more land through planning permission than is necessary, and it will give rise to the wrong assumptions on infrastructure planning. I hope that the Government will think very carefully about introducing this additional 20%; otherwise, many people in our areas will become very disillusioned with the planning system.

[Duncan Hames]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

I will give way once.

[Duncan Hames]

In response to my earlier question, the Minister said that he did not want to require local authorities to build for more than the five-year housing supply. That being the case, does the hon. Gentleman agree that it is important that the housing that is derived from windfall developments should be taken into consideration against the need that the local authority needs to meet?

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman. He must have my notes, so I shall continue.

The Government should reconsider what counts towards housing numbers in a local authority area. First, they should allow for windfall sites; after all, these are real gains, and they should be encouraged.

[Mr Steve Brine (Winchester) (Con)]

We are a team now.

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[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

Well, we are in coalition together.

Secondly, exceptions and additional neighbourhood sites should be included. Thirdly, new agricultural and forestry dwellings should be included. Fourthly, sheltered or high-dependency housing accompanying a nursing home application should be included. That is particularly relevant to my constituency, where we have three large such applications on areas that perhaps would not usually be given permission, but they would gain greater currency in the local community if people felt that they were contributing towards the five-year plan.

Paragraph 109 requires local authorities to

“identify and bring back into use empty housing and buildings”.

This has been a problem for many decades. There are about 740,000 empty houses in England. When I had a housing brief in opposition, I surveyed most of our major institutions that had a presence on the high street to discover why so many of the flats about their shops were empty. Most said that they did not find occupants for those flats because it was too administratively burdensome. The NPPF needs to have stronger guidance to bring back into use these empty properties, which are a shocking waste of our built environment.

The vitality and viability of town centres is dealt with in paragraph 78. Town centres, particularly in smaller rural market towns such as those that I represent, are undergoing significant change. The increased trend towards shopping online is causing many retail businesses to reduce their presence on the high street or to leave it altogether. Many town centres are therefore coming under pressure as demand for retail space drops. Nothing is worse for a town than the sight of a large number of derelict shops. The NPPF needs to be straightforward so that local authorities can consider ways of strengthening the vitality and viability of town centres and are able to resist applications where they are threatened, first, by out-of-town centre schemes, and then, by edge-of-town centre schemes.

[Jason McCartney]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

I said that I would give way only once, if my hon. Friend does not mind.

Special consideration needs to be given to small market towns, because they are particularly vulnerable to such large developments.

Design is a very important issue for those in special vernacular design areas such as the Cotswolds. On the whole, post-war planning has been successful in keeping the distinctive Cotswold stone wall and roof construction. However, guidance such as that in paragraphs 21 and 118 seems to run totally counter to what has been achieved in the Cotswolds over so many decades. The way around this would be to allow particular vernacular styles to predominate only in those areas where it can be proved that it has done so in the past, as must be clearly demonstrated in the adopted local plans.

Finally, as the Member of Parliament for a constituency of which more than 80% is comprised of areas of outstanding natural beauty, I warmly welcome Ministers having said that national parks, green belts and areas of outstanding natural beauty will be protected. However, I think that the guidance in paragraph 167 needs to be strengthened in that respect. I suggest to my right hon. Friend the Minister that it follow the wording of policy ENV3 of the south-west regional spatial strategy on protected landscapes:

“Particular care will be taken to ensure that no development is permitted outside the National Park or Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty which would damage their natural beauty, character and special qualities or otherwise prejudice the achievement of National Park or Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty purposes.”

These are some of the most special landscapes in the country. As has been said, we live in a densely populated country, particularly when the hilly areas of England, Wales and Scotland are taken out of the equation. It is therefore particularly important that we get the planning system right and, in particular, the NPPF.

I urge my right hon. Friend to resist too much more additional consultation. Planning practitioners now need to get on with the system, which I am sure will be improved and will be more friendly to local people. I warmly welcome the idea of local decision making and neighbourhood plans. I can tell my right hon. Friend that many of my parish and town councils are lining up to draw up neighbourhood plans, because they have become so fed up with a regional planning system that is based many hundreds of miles away. They want to feel that they have ownership of the planning system and that they will benefit from applications in their area.

I only have a couple of seconds left, but I just want to say that pre-planning application is really important. I have gone through it successfully with a big house builder in my constituency and we have got an application that is much more acceptable to the local communities. I urge Members to encourage that. Good luck to my right hon. Friend.

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[Andrew Stunell]

My hon. Friend is right. I shall deal with some of the specific points that have been raised in a moment, although several of them are quite detailed, and I shall not have time to respond to all 35 Members who have spoken. We will make a serious effort to write to those whom I do not manage to respond to today.

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

I wonder whether the Minister can answer one point that was raised by a number of Members. Do the Government intend to introduce transitional arrangements, so that local authorities such as mine that were not encouraged to draw up local plans under the old regional spatial strategy system will have time to do so?

[Andrew Stunell]

The hon. Gentleman is a page ahead of me, but I will get there very shortly.

Of all the thousands of comments that have been made about the NPPF so far, very few have challenged the importance of both the simplification and the localisation that we have set out. I would have said that none had done so, but, funnily enough, a former planning Minister, the right hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Mr Raynsford), said that he was one of those who considered this to be the best of all possible planning systems. His view was somewhat contradicted by my right hon. Friend the Minister of State’s quotation from Lord Rooker, which demonstrated that that simply was not so.

Quite properly, today’s debate has largely concerned the precise shape, the exact wording and the detailed nuances of what we have proposed in the NPPF and the Localism Bill. Let me now deal with some of the key points made by Members. I will begin by tackling what seem to me to be some of the principal issues. One is our use, or rather non-use, of the word “brownfield” . We have referred instead to land of the “least environmental” quality.

There is a clear reason for that. We think that land of the least environmental quality should be taken first, and we recognise that some brownfield land is of high quality. It may be the quarry that has been left for 40 years and is now the next best thing to a self-managed wildlife sanctuary, or it may be back gardens. There are a number of circumstances in which brownfield land may have become recreational. Indeed, there is an example in my constituency that is sufficiently contentious to be prayed in aid. Using brownfield land as a planning category and turning it into the first priority for development will prove to be a mistake in some instances. At the beginning of the debate, my right hon. Friend said in his emollient way that we were taking careful account of all the representations we have received, and we certainly are in that respect.