Neighbourhood Planning Bill

Viscount Ridley Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 17th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Ridley (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a landowner in Northumberland with experience of converting farm buildings into houses and offices, who has benefited from the development of land for housing. I probably benefit from the present system because it drives up development premiums, but I think that it needs further reform. The Bill, with its welcome emphasis on plans that come up from communities rather than down from bureaucrats, will not in itself solve our housing problem. However, we should see it alongside the forthcoming White Paper designed to speed up land-use planning decisions—it will be interesting to see what it says. We badly need to address the effective rationing of housing, which has hampered our economy, worsened inequality and benefited people like me. Notwithstanding some of the improvements in the planning system mentioned by my noble friend the Minister at the start of the debate, there is still quite a long way to go. I urge the Government to be as bold as possible in the White Paper and the amendments that they bring forward.

Land-use planning in Britain is not a joke; it is a disgrace, in many ways. The present system is biased, not so much in favour of opponents or proponents of development but in favour of delay and cost. Most of those involved actually benefit from the delay: the statutory consultees maximising their budgets, the councils pleading overwork, the archaeologists getting paid by the developer, the bat surveyors, the great-crested newt industry, the objectors with nothing better to do and, above all, the armies of consultants and lawyers working for both sides.

People think that the planning system is a system of environmental regulation. It is worth remembering that it is not. It is a system of economic planning, left over from the days of the 1940s, when people thought Stalin had the answers. Any environmental protections it produces are, in a way, accidental, capricious, clumsy and actually rather precarious. The existence of the planning system has sterilised and stymied the development of environmental regulations about zoning, similar to those they have in other countries. No common law has been allowed to develop on this principle and so we have to rely, rather embarrassingly, on EU directives such as the habitat directive.

The worst aspect of the current system is that it is so slow. Things take years that could take months. How can it possibly take twice as long to decide, let alone build, a single runway as it took to wage the Second World War? Why do we assume that these delays are natural? We need to speed things up. I welcome the clauses restricting the abuse of pre-commencement planning conditions because I have had first-hand experience of how they slow things down.

I would like to make two more suggestions. First, we need to slim down the list of statutory consultees and incentivise them to take decisions more quickly. At the moment a gravy train is being ridden. The planning system is awash with ex-planners selling their services as heritage consultants, environmental consultants, archaeological consultants and so on. It is a revolving door. Setting time limits makes the problem worse. At the moment, if a conservation officer has to take a decision within, say, three months, then, lo and behold, you get your answer one day before the deadline. Let us set up a sliding scale of fees or fines so that the longer a consultee or a planner takes, the more it costs them.

Next, let us cut out the waste. If the Government want to build a new trunk road bridge over a river—this is a real case that is happening on my land at the moment and I welcome it—the following happens. Over about a year, they hire five separate teams of consultants to survey birds, bats, newts, otters and badgers. The teams get hefty fees and write hefty reports, which nobody reads, and the bridge gets built anyway. Here is a better idea. As soon as the bridge is decided on, the planner tells the developer—in this case the Government—that as birds, bats, newts, otters and badgers may all live in the vicinity, they must spend a bit of money creating suitable habitat for such species somewhere else. Buy a field, dig a pond and plant some trees in it. It would be simple, quick and much better for the wildlife.

As a final point, can we stop pretending that the development of housing is a bad thing for nature? It is not always. When an arable or a silage field gets developed for houses, the biodiversity almost certainly increases massively. Gardens are teeming with wildlife that farmland is not—bats, newts, birds and bees.