Localism in Planning

Nick Boles Excerpts

Wednesday 17th July 2013 Westminster Hall

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

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship once again, Mr Hollobone.

I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) on securing this important debate. He, as everyone here would attest, is one of the most effective campaigners in modern politics. There is probably no one to whom we owe more gratitude for the fact that we still have sterling rather than the euro, and no one who has more responsibility for the introduction of directly elected and locally accountable police commissioners. Furthermore, the passage of the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill through Parliament just last night owes as much to him as to any other Member.

You can probably understand, Mr Hollobone, why it makes me a little nervous, therefore, that my right hon. Friend is now turning his sights on me and my portfolio, which is planning. If I were asked to rate my chances against him, I am not sure whether I would fancy my odds, but I will try to persuade him that he need not turn his sights on me or on our planning reforms, because although the reforms are clearly a work in progress and it is only a short time since the Localism Act 2011 was enacted and the national planning policy framework was brought into force, early signs are positive and it is worth being a little patient before rushing to conclusions.

I want to engage with all the points raised as best I can in the time available, but I will start with what I think is the big argument: what does localism mean? I want briefly to take everyone away from the question of meeting housing need, which seems to be the particularly vexed issue that taxes us today, to the other needs that we all recognise human beings and families have, and which in many cases local authorities have a responsibility to provide. There is the need for schooling. There is the need for environmental management for waste collection. There is the need for care for vulnerable children and adults. We all accept, respect and welcome the fact that local authorities have responsibility for deciding how to meet those needs, and in none of those cases do we think they should have the ability not to meet them. Localism means control over how the fundamental needs of the people who elect the authorities and reside in their communities are met; it is not about deciding whether the needs will be met.

We all must be clear about our corporate, collective failure, as a society, over not five or 15 years, or over the lifetime of the previous Government, but over several decades. We have failed to meet the legitimate housing needs of our population.

[Mr Andrew Turner]

Does the Minister believe that homes for local people are more important than homes for people from afar?

[Nick Boles]

I certainly think that in every local community we want, first and foremost, to provide housing for local people. However, in response to my hon. Friend’s question and to the points he raised in his previous interventions, it is not the case that our housing need chiefly derives from the levels of immigration over the past decade, of which I am as critical as he. Immigration explains only about 40% of the formation of new households; the remainder is explained by the fact that we are all getting older and not dying as quickly as we used to. I come from a family that has four generations in it, as do many right hon. and hon. Members, but that was not common 30 years ago. Now, people in their 80s and 90s are much more common to all of us than they were when we were growing up, and they all need houses.

We have failed as a society and as a country to meet the need, and the Localism Act and the national planning policy framework make it clear that every local authority has a duty, first and foremost, to meet objectively assessed housing need. We do not allow local authorities to determine whether they will provide primary and secondary school places, or social care for vulnerable adults and children. We expect them, as branches of Government, to meet the responsibilities passed to them, and meeting housing need is among those responsibilities.

[Martin Horwood]

Does the Minister accept that in some areas it is difficult to meet endless need and demand? Certainly in a constrained urban borough such as Cheltenham, almost all the unprotected green space has already been built on or is right now under attack from developers. The problem is that in the end we will lose other things for which people have a need. Green space is good for local food production, physical and mental health, and for people’s access to recreation, including free access to recreation for poor communities, which reduces health inequalities. Those are needs as well, and we cannot be totally single-minded and blinkered.

[Nick Boles]

I certainly hope I am not being single-minded and blinkered; perhaps the hon. Gentleman thinks I am. I of course accept that almost every urban area finds it very difficult to meet its needs within its boundaries, and that is entirely accepted within all our policies. The regional strategies of the previous Government effectively completely removed any flexibility from local authorities, and that is why in the national planning policy framework we have the duty to co-operate.

I am happy to say that I have met with an authority that is a neighbour to the hon. Gentleman’s constituency, and that authority is engaged in co-operation with his local authority to see how it can meet needs, not least those of the hon. Gentleman’s town. As he says, his town cannot meet the needs within its own borders without threatening its precious green spaces. Such spaces are, if anything, even more valuable in relatively built-up towns than in the countryside, and there needs to be co-operation within broader areas to meet the needs of all our citizens.

[Robert Neill]

I agree entirely with my hon. Friend’s analysis. He makes a powerful and sophisticated case. Does he agree that the duty to co-operate is significant not only because it is the first time we have sought to have such a duty on a voluntary and localist basis—by agreement rather than imposition—but because of its link to incentives such as the new homes bonus and the reforms to local government finance with business rate retention, so that we can persuade communities that growth in the right place—I stress “right place”—is not a threat but potentially an opportunity that we can realise if we collaborate, sometimes across local authority boundaries?

[Nick Boles]

My hon. Friend is exactly right, and puts the argument much better than I could. The Localism Act and the national planning policy framework attempt to achieve just that, replacing the previous approach of entirely denying local flexibility in how and where housing need was met.

It is right, briefly, Mr Hollobone, to give appropriately short shrift to the rank hypocrisy displayed by the hon. Member for City of Durham (Roberta Blackman-Woods). She was a Member and a supporter of a Government who introduced regional strategies that tried to impose eco-towns on constituencies such as that of my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke), and who introduced the Infrastructure Planning Commission, which had no democratic accountability at all. For her suddenly to pretend that she is now a localist rings pretty hollow.

I will move on to trying to persuade my right hon. and hon. Friends—I seek not to persuade the hon. Lady—that localism is not dead but in gestation. At the heart of the Localism Act is the idea that control is gained from having a plan. A plan that fulfils the criteria of the national planning policy framework puts those with the plan in charge, and their decisions will not be overturned. Decisions might be challenged, but no challenge will be supported by the Planning Inspectorate. It all rests on having a plan, and the difficulty faced by many hon. Members and their communities is where no plan is in place. That is why so much of the discussion has focused on the question of what weight can be attached to emerging plans.

I want to share with my right hon. and hon. Friends the difficulty of the position that some of them want the Government to take, which is the suggestion that an emerging plan should immediately be given substantial weight in any decision on a planning application. That could simply create the problem that every community in the country that wanted to oppose a development might start the process of working up a neighbourhood or local plan and then take their own sweet time about it. That would immediately create an opportunity for communities to block all development by simply saying that they were engaged in a plan-making process.

That is why there must be a sense that a plan has reached a relatively advanced stage before it can be given substantial weight. Such a position has not been established by policy or Government, but over many years in the courts, as has been pointed out. I know that many people here think that an easy solution would be simply to abolish the inspectorate, but I say to them that all such decisions would then be taken by judges in courts. Developers will not stop challenging local decisions that they think do not accord with local or national policies. They will simply challenge them in the courts, at much greater cost to the taxpayer and, I suspect, to the not much greater contentment of residents.

The critical thing is to engage in plan making. The reason why I urge my right hon. and hon. Friends not to give up on the process is the good news that plan making is happening at a speed and intensity that has never happened before: three quarters of all local authorities in the country have now published a plan, and half of them have submitted a local plan to the Secretary of State. Some 800 communities in this country are now engaged in some stage of neighbourhood planning, and several hundred of them have already had their plan areas registered. The first three neighbourhood plans submitted to an examiner and passed as sound have passed their referendums, which is the first time that a Government have said to local people, “You get a vote on whether and how you develop in your local area.”

The referendums passed not just by resounding margins, but on a greater turnout than for the county council elections taking place on the same day. In Thame in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Henley (John Howell), people turned out to the polls to vote on the neighbourhood plan and did not vote for a county councillor. Why? Because the plan matters to people. As has been pointed out, the plan contained proposals to build 775 new houses in one of the most beautiful market towns in one of the most high-pressured areas in the country.

[Nicholas Soames]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful case, and nobody doubts his commitment to seeing this right, but does he not understand that it is precisely the backing and energy that he expresses that renders it so deeply unsatisfying for councils that go to all this great effort when their plans are overturned by spiv developers trying to take advantage of a very difficult position?

[Nick Boles]

I entirely understand that. I might well wish that we were in a world where we could say to everybody, “You’ve got a year. Make as much progress as you can in a year, and nothing will happen in that year.” My right hon. Friend will understand that, given the level of housing need and the appalling record of housing delivery even during the boom—when, frankly, money, developer finance and mortgages were not a problem—it is simply impossible for us to impose that kind of moratorium. However, I can tell him that in a matter of days, we will introduce the planning guidance that we have long promised and that will address the issue of the weight given to emerging plans. We will make it clear that once a plan has reached the point that, first, it has become specific and, secondly, it has gone through a fairly substantial level of public consultation, it will become something of real materiality—to use the lawyers’ phrase—as a consideration in decision making.

[Nick Herbert]

My hon. Friend and I agree about housing need and the value of plans when they are formed—it is good to hear that weight will be given to emerging plans in the new guidance—but my concern is that he seems to be giving the impression that everything is going swimmingly; it is not. The very neighbourhood plans that it is so important for people to embrace—he believes in that as much as I do—are being undermined, because people will walk away if they think that the inspectorate will overturn those plans. It is therefore a mistake entirely to dismiss the idea of giving stronger guidance. Unless people have confidence that they can take such judgments without their being overturned, they will not engage in the process. That is the damage that is being done. Commitments on giving weight to emerging plans have been given before. They were given during the passage of the Localism Bill. So far, those commitments have not counted for anything.

[Nick Boles]

Perhaps this is the core of our disagreement: my right hon. Friend argues that I am too sanguine, and I say that he is in too much of a panic. Even on neighbourhood planning, the fact is that the figures for April, June and July show that the number of communities engaged in it has gone from 650 to 710 to 750, that the number of plans designated has gone from 300 to 360 to 408, and that the number of plans published pre-submission has gone from 24 to 28 to 35, so progress is being made. I understand that people are concerned, which partly prompts them and gives them the incentive to get the move on that we all want in trying to avoid unwelcome developments.

[Sir Alan Haselhurst]

Will the Minister give way?

[Nick Boles]

I will not give way to my right hon. Friend, because I have only three and a quarter minutes, and I want to address the many points made in speeches.

The guidance that will be produced at the end of July will be in draft. It will all go on what is an explicitly beta website. In truth, what applies now is the inherited guidance on prematurity from the last Government—it still applies in all decisions made in courts and elsewhere by decision makers—but the new guidance will be in draft form later in the summer and will be available for everybody to comment on. I absolutely encourage my right hon. and hon. Friends to comment if they do not believe that the guidance goes far enough in attaching weight to the emerging plans. I reiterate, however, that the best possible thing is for them to look up from the here and now and to think about their community in 10 years’ time—

[Andrew Bingham]

Will the Minister give way?

[Nick Boles]

I am sorry, but I will not give way again as I have many points to cover.

My right hon. and hon. Friends may miss one development that their communities do not like and that they would have opposed, and which would have been backed up by the inspectorate if their plan was in place. Perhaps they will, but they will be able to control and decide 10 years-worth of developments if they put in place a plan that meets their objectively assessed needs. That has been done in Thame, which will now determine its own future. There have been developments in Thame that the town did not like: it did not just say, “Right, we’re giving up,” but, “That makes it even more important to put even more energy into the process of producing a neighbourhood and local plan.”

I therefore urge communities not to lose heart. Childbirth is a painful process and gestation is not without its pains and difficulties, but the process resulting in local communities having local plans and neighbourhoods having neighbourhood plans will—I promise—be one in which everyone feels that they are in control of development in their area in a way that was never true under Labour or previous Conservative Governments. We are involved in a revolution. Revolutions are not quick or painless, but this revolution is gathering pace and beginning to work.

I urge my right hon. and hon. Friends to continue to write to me and to invite me to their constituencies to submit me to absolutely proper pressure, but not to give up hope. Every Government Member will be able to campaign with pride on the Localism Act at the next election in 2015, because by 2015 it will have delivered.