Planning Bill

I thank my noble friend for making that clear. This has been an important debate on the fundamental issues of the community infrastructure levy. I am very grateful to all noble Lords who have spoken. I am particularly grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Ford, who has brought forward her great experience in positive support of CIL itself. A number of very important questions have been raised in the Committee which I shall try to address, but I begin by setting the scene, as it has moved on since the summer. This is probably more in the nature of a Second Reading speech, but the Committee needs to know how we addressed the issues that arose from the questions raised at Second Reading. I will refer to the community infrastructure levy as CIL; that will shorten our debate by at least an hour. CIL is a significant change to the way in which development contributions towards community infrastructure are secured. The fundamental point—to address immediately the point raised by my noble friend Lord Woolmer—is that we seek to do that in a way that ensures that development is deliverable and sustainable; that it is framed by the local development plan; that it is related to the specific costs of infrastructure that the community needs; and that, for the first time, we will have certain, transparent and predictable levels of funding to fund the impact on infrastructure that new development generates. I am sure that noble Lords will have read the report we issued in August, which went into a great deal of detail about our thinking behind the proposal and our testing of assumptions. A great deal of work was done on those relationships in that document. The noble Baroness, Lady Ford, said that the proposal for the levy commands wide support; I can endorse that. As far as we are aware, no local government planning or developer representative body objects in principle to our proposal. I am very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Valentine, for saying just that when she opened her speech. For example, there is support in principle from the CBI, the Local Government Association, the British Property Federation, the TCPA, the Royal Town Planning Institute, the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors, the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England, and many others. I know that the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, and my noble friend Lord Woolmer do not accept some of those views. I hope that I can persuade them in our debates that there is a lot of merit in what we propose—that it is not only a better system but the right system to provide what we so badly need in future. It is worth reflecting on that consensus, because everyone is agreed that we need a fairer, more certain and more transparent way to secure developer contributions. That is crucial in the light of what many noble Lords have said about the current state of the economy and the need for long-term secure planning. We need to understand what we have to do and be as transparent and clear about managing risks ahead as possible. Developers have consistently said to us that they find the existing negotiated system of planning obligations or Section 106 agreements slow and unpredictable. They are certainly not transparent. We know from our recent research that it is the most major developments that bear the burden of contributing to local infrastructure. Only 14 per cent of residential planning permissions make some form of contribution through planning obligations. I take the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith—this is about capturing more of the development so that it can contribute to the key infrastructures that we use. We are not talking simply about roads but about hospitals, play spaces, schools and green spaces. We are talking about the green infrastructure and the physical infrastructure but also the social infrastructure. It is all contained in the definition of what the community needs to thrive—what the development plan must work out to ensure that the community has all the resources it needs to thrive. Most minor development makes no contribution. I think that the noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, referred to household development. I make absolutely clear that we intend to use our regulation-making powers to exempt household development for homeowners, so there is no question that that will be caught by CIL. We have been very clear about that. I know that we will discuss the impact of the current economic difficulties. As I said, the demographic, social and environmental trends will not change in the long term. We must ensure that, whatever are our short-term difficulties, we are planning for suitable infrastructure for long-term sustainability. That is exactly what CIL is intended to do, and why it is so important to get right in that equation the explicit relationship between the costs of infrastructure, to which the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, referred, and long-term sustainability.