Localism Bill

My Lords, I was quite tempted to address many different aspects of this Bill which have a curious familiarity, but I will concentrate on the planning sections. I am wearing two hats: first, as chair of English Heritage, I thank the Minister for what has already been done to improve the Bill in another place, and I shall come back to that at the end of my speech; secondly, I want to record my dismay both at the regressive nature of some of the proposed changes to planning and—in this rather curious combination of legislation—at the untested and confused nature of some of the more radical elements around neighbourhood planning. My fears are shared by many of the professionals and people outside this House who will have to make the Bill work. Like many Members of this House, I can welcome some of the proposals, such as the specific proposals for a community right to buy and a community right to challenge, but the key question, which has been raised already by many noble Lords, is how we can guarantee that the Bill will work. The job of this House, in addition to guarding constitutional proprieties, relates to the workability test. At the moment, sadly, I am not convinced how the Bill, with its many good aspects, will achieve the ambitions for growth in planning and housing given the inherent contradictions in it. The first contradiction is over what the Government want and expect from the planning system and these reforms. Planning is essentially about the best use of land and resources. It is about achieving a balance between all the things we need, whether that is about more jobs and affordable housing, energy security and green space or agriculture and high-speed trains. They all have to be accommodated, and the challenge for a modern planning system is to balance potentially infinite demands with finite resources. That is why the system must have the capacity to be strategic and it must be informed by a wider view of how things can fit together—a spatial view. That is precisely what we have lost in this Bill. With the loss of regional spatial strategies, we have lost the strategic content for planning and any means of mediating tensions between national, or even global, imperatives and local perspectives. Floods, minerals and housing have to be planned for across boundaries; they play out on wide spatial scales and they are contentious issues. The Minister has already spoken about the duty to co-operate, but she will know from her extensive briefing that there is grave concern about the efficacy of a voluntary duty to consider co-operation which does not require local authorities to co-operate. We do not even know yet which areas of policy or which geographical areas will be covered. What is likely to happen when it comes to issues which divide local authorities and which have to be planned for beyond boundaries, such as waste incinerators or flood risk? There are few more contentious issues than housing supply. Whatever the complaints about the regional spatial strategies, they had some merits: they were evidence based, independent and offered a coherent way of looking at where housing was needed and could be provided according to land resource. The regional spatial strategy also provided a mediating process for local authorities; now local authorities are on their own and face unforgiving housing pressures. The Minister said that only 110,000 homes were built last year, but now that the national housing and planning advice unit has been abolished can she tell me how the housing needs for the nation as a whole will be assessed? How many houses does she think the country will need this year, next year or the year after? Perhaps she will refer me to the new homes bonus. I accept that that may act as a spur to housing in growth areas, but it will not help poorer communities where the need is for regeneration and renewal—take the case of Liverpool, for example. Indeed, the TCPA and the Joseph Rowntree Trust suggest that it will reinforce structural inequalities between regions. I am afraid that, on the analysis, the outcome is all too predictable. How would the Minister interpret that dichotomy? My noble friend has already referred to Clause 124, on financial incentives. I and many others have grave concerns about the clause, because we have for the first time in planning legislation an explicit priority given to financial incentives in the planning system. This is a major distortion of what planning is there to do. It has set many alarm bells ringing, because it could lead to grave consequences. Where is the wider planning interest in this? Where is the interest which compensates for sustainability or affordability? Much wider issues should be taken into account. I turn from the regressive to the untested elements of the Bill. We are told that the key planning document will now be the local development frameworks. Barely a third of them have been completed, but the neighbourhood development orders, these radical new powers, are required to conform with them. What will happen where there is no LDF in place? How many neighbourhood forums does the Minister anticipate? I have seen a figure of 25,000. Can she confirm what has already been put about, that some of them could cost as much as £200,000? But the crucial question is what exactly they will be free to plan for. If they do not cover housing allocations, waste or minerals, what are they left to do? The lack of reference to sustainability opens up a second major contradiction. Whereas the Budget statement seemed to take a very simplistic view of planning in which growth and sustainability were at odds with each other, we now seem to have a default position in which economic growth is to be the principal determinant of planning. The Minister in the other place was insistent that this and many other aspects of policy would be made clear in the national policy planning framework, which will be the key to getting the planning system right. Its purpose is to streamline all existing planning guidance, but we do not yet have the final version. We have only a draft version, apparently commissioned by CLG and produced by a group of ““practitioners””, which has been described by the TCPA, for example, as falling short of the kind of guidance necessary to create an effective planning framework for England. So we are in a rather strange position. Will the Minister say why the draft was commissioned when work is already under way in her department on the official CLG version? Who will own the final draft and when we will have it? Without the authorised version—and this is very important—we simply cannot tell whether the degree of detail available will be clear or sufficient to guide local authorities towards making the right local decisions. I would refer noble Lords to the issue of sustainability, which is interpreted in the draft text in a way that suggests that economic factors are given more weight than social ones. I come back, finally, to heritage protections. What concerns us in the heritage community is that the protections around the historic environment in this draft document are in fact weaker than existing protections in the recent, modernised planning document on heritage protection—PPS5—which was praised as valued and successful, only two weeks ago, by the Minister for Tourism and Heritage. Indeed, he expressed his concern that it must not be thrown out with the bathwater in order to make the NPPF an all-new document, because it is such a useful and clear document. I am sure that the Minister will want to talk to him. The problem is that this document, for example, fails to recognise the spectrum of heritage assets, which extends from undesignated to nationally designated assets, or how to find new viable uses for useable heritage assets. If these elements were to find their way into the final draft, we would be left with a weaker set of protections around heritage. We do not want to do that. I will let the Minister have a full list of areas of concern, which will also include the problems raised by undesignated archaeology, which again is in a rather unfortunate position in relation to the NDOs. I know that is something she will want to know about. I know the Minister is going to respond to me in the very positive way that she has already done when we raised issues with her at an earlier stage of the Bill. Indeed, without her interventions, we might now be faced with a clause that explicitly removed protections around conservation areas and listed building settings in relation to neighbourhood development orders. I am extremely grateful that the Government have now corrected this and I am very grateful to her personally. In conclusion, I hope that the Minister is able to respond to some of my concerns this evening. I have raised them in the wider spectrum: the increased uncertainty, reduced confidence in the objectivity of planning and abolition of the necessary ability to plan strategically—not least because we are at a time when we have never needed greater foresight, intelligence and objectivity in the planning system. The Minister began by saying she was willing to listen. I would expect nothing less from her and I am sure that, across the House, we can improve this Bill in the way we need to.