Planning Reform

Steve Baker Excerpts

Wednesday 8th January 2014 Westminster Hall

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Evans]

I totally agree. It means frustration on the part of not only the people, but the councillors. They shrug their shoulders and say, “Well, what is the worth of being a local authority councillor if we are making these decisions on behalf of the public and then they are overturned?” Or, even worse, the local authority is told, “Listen, you’d better accept this planning application. Otherwise, it’s going to cost you a lot of money and you will lose.”

[Steve Baker]

My hon. Friend has made the point with great clarity and passion, but I cannot forbear from saying that those of us who stood for election on the Conservative manifesto stood on a platform of a radical decentralisation of power—an invitation to the people to join the Government of Britain. I think that he will agree with me that those of us who stood on that platform with enthusiasm are rather disappointed that it has come to this.

[Mr Evans]

More than disappointed. I used to use a counter-argument against those in my constituency who said, “This is a disaster. This is what is going to happen if the Localism Bill goes through.” I said, “No, localism will give power back to the local authorities.” Now, when we look at what has happened, it seems as if there has been some Orwellian double-speak. Localism sounds as if it is giving power back to the local people when in essence it has not done that at all—quite the contrary. If people want to build houses, localism is fine. If people want to go against the building of the houses, localism does not help them one jot.

I was elected as a Conservative. I am a Conservative; just as the name on the tin suggests, I want to conserve—I want to conserve what is best in our area. The position is as my hon. Friend the Member for South Antrim (Dr McCrea) said. If people in the Ribble Valley want to live in Manchester, that is fine—they can go and live there. What we do not want is Manchester coming to us. We do not want to see these towns growing at such a rate that we do not even recognise them.

The Ribble Valley is one of the nicest places to live in the whole country; it is one of the jewels. I say that it is like the Lake district without the lakes—even with the rain we have been having, we still do not have the lakes, thank goodness. People want to live there for a certain reason. I know what the Minister is talking about when he says that people deserve the right to have a roof over their heads. Everyone deserves a home; I agree with him on that, but we need to look at areas that neighbour places such as the Ribble Valley—such as Burnley, Preston, Pendle and Hyndburn—and see what we can do to regenerate some of the run-down areas there. We need to ensure that homes that are run-down are made available to people in those areas and that they do not have to flee those areas and live somewhere else.

I will finish shortly because I know that many other hon. Members want to speak, but I just want to say this. I believe that we ought to have a planning system that is based on consent—the consent of the local people. I finish by referring not just to housing but to wind turbines. When fairly well everybody in a local area is saying no to three wind turbines in a suburban area and the council turns the application down because it has listened to what the local people say, but it then goes to the inspectorate and the inspectorate passes it, there must be something wrong in the system because we are not listening to the people. Minister, listen to the people.