Planning Bill

It is a pleasure to have caught your eye, Mr. Deputy Speaker, having had an opportunity to listen to the points raised in the debate. I hope that the right hon. Member for Streatham (Keith Hill) will forgive me if I do not follow him in covering the detail of his constituency interest. I am conscious that we are exceedingly short of time and that a number of Members wish to contribute, so I shall be as brief as I can. I start by thanking the Minister for taking on board a number of the points that were made in Committee and in subsequent lobbying. I am glad, too, that my right hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon (Mr. Curry) has persuaded the Minister that things can be done about permitted development rights for the agricultural industry. I suspect that her colleagues in the Lords may well see the issue covered by new clause 2 re-emerging there, so that we can get further clarification. I say to the hon. Member for North Cornwall (Dan Rogerson), with whom I shared many happy hours in Committee, that his new clause 4 on mobile phone masts comes close to a position on which we fought the last election. We believe that mobile phone masts should be brought into the mainstream planning system. That is part of the reason why we have supported single consent regimes throughout the passage of the Bill. It was also why I tabled amendments to try to bring all the remaining bits of the electricity, pipelines and gas Acts under one planning regime in the Department for Communities and Local Government. I will focus on the amendments that my hon. Friends and I have tabled, starting with amendment No. 300 and the consequential amendments that would be necessary to allow their lordships to consider a logical Bill. The Minister made a fair fist of explaining why the proposals were incorporated into the Bill late in the Committee stage. However, we do not like in any way, shape or form the policy of the remote regional assemblies passing their responsibility for planning to regional development agencies in due course. The Housing and Regeneration Bill, which is nearly an Act, hands over responsibility for housing to the RDAs, and we object to that, too. We do not think that the proposals in this Bill are appropriate because they begin the handover. The ethos of the Bill is one of the Government taking away accountability from the planning system as far as they possibly can. Removing accountability from even the remote regional assemblies by handing responsibility to unelected and unaccountable regional development agencies is entirely wrong. It occurs to me that I should have declared an interest. As I have said many times, my husband is the deputy chairman of the South East England Development Agency. However, he is there as an elected member. That does not mean that I resile from our position that RDAs should not have responsibility for housing and planning. They are entirely the wrong bodies for those functions. Housing and planning affect our constituents directly and they are already disaffected by the planning system—[Interruption.] I welcome hearing a contribution from the Minister for Local Government, whom we have missed. He has been overruled by his lady seniors. Would he like to repeat that comment? I thought that I heard a sotto voce intervention that applied to my husband, but if he does not wish to repeat it, I shall await it on a different occasion. It is lovely to see him back and I hope that he will be able to make a contribution at some point, given that he has worked so hard on the Bill. A regional development agency is not the place in which housing and planning powers should be placed, given that they affect our constituents directly. RDAs are unelected and unaccountable. The regional Ministers are next to invisible. As the hon. Member for Falmouth and Camborne (Julia Goldsworthy) pointed out, RDAs are not expert and do not have the staff. I recognise that they could hire staff, but that would entirely change their ethos. Their memberships have no expertise in housing and planning, but are focused entirely on economic regeneration. It would be completely inappropriate to hand any planning powers to such a body, so we are opposed to the Government's proposals in principle. The organisations that should have the powers are local authorities, which is why we have tabled amendments to that effect. In amendment No. 290, which relates to local member review bodies, we are very generously trying to help the Government out of a hole of their own making. We believe that it is appropriate for local authorities with planning responsibilities to be able to review the decisions of their planning ministers on issues that are devolved to officers. Anyone with experience on a planning committee in a local authority will know that they are more than capable of sending officers back to review a decision, and to challenge it if they believe that that would be in the interests of their constituents. I have here a letter from the Minister for Housing, who has come to the House today to talk about the Bill for the first time. The letter is addressed to representatives of the Royal Institute of British Architects, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors and the Royal Town Planning Institute, and it says that the planning decisions made by the local member review bodies would involve only"““the most straightforward applications, such as small householder developments, changes of use, advertisements and shop fronts””." My copy of the letter is not quite clear, but I think that it was sent in April. The Minister said that she had had further discussions with the various organisations to try to persuade them of the rightness of this proposal. However, a briefing that I have received from the Royal Town Planning Institute, dated 30 May, states:"““Proposals for Local Member Review Bodies to hear planning appeals need to be scrapped. These plans will sweep away the right of residents to appeal to an independent and impartial body””." Clearly, the Minister's persuasive powers have not worked, or at least they had not worked on 30 May with the RTPI. Perhaps things have changed since then, but I do not think so, given the briefings that I have received. However, because we believe that it is for local members to make these decisions, we have come up with amendment No. 290, in order to get the Government out of this hole that they have dug for themselves. It proposes that councillors from surrounding local authorities could be invited to sit on the review bodies. As with any of our amendments that the Government are prepared to accept, I am more than happy to offer to amend this one to ensure that it is appropriate. The Minister thought that its wording meant that potentially every member of the review body could come from outside the local authority in question. If she wishes us to amend our amendment, I will be happy to offer to do so. None the less, I would be grateful if consideration could be given to the proposal, because it would deal with the concern that has been expressed by the various bodies involved. Working on the basis that we would like to see the changes that I have outlined, I want to ensure that other Members have an opportunity to express their views. We will consider whether to press our amendments to a vote in due course.