Localism Bill

My Lords, I, too, support the thrust of the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Best. I am concerned that the change-over to the new system will simply result in more delay and more expense for local planning authorities that have struggled to produce their local development frameworks—or local plans, as we may now have to call them. My Amendment 147H is slightly different. It seeks to tackle part of the same problem, but it looks at the issue from the point of view of the local planning authority rather than from that of the regional strategy. My amendment reads: "““The provisions of this section do not affect the validity of any local development documents or of any policies contained in any local development document whether or not any such policy was adopted in order to be in conformity with a regional strategy or structure plan””—" the old structure plans were incorporated pro tem into the regional strategies, although I do not know how much of them survive. The crucial thing is that, if a local planning authority is taking its core strategy, for example, to an inquiry for examination, the strategy should not be torn apart just because those aspects of it that have been adopted in order to be in conformity with the regional strategy—or regional spatial strategy—would no longer need to be so if the local authority was starting again from scratch. Although the local authority might be able to argue that a policy is good for this reason or that reason, the true reason that a policy has been included might be in order to achieve conformity with the regional strategy. The issue is as simple as that. Under the old system, the local authority’s approach to the examination could be to say, ““It is there because it has to be there,”” and that would have been the end of the argument. However, the inspector might now say, ““Yes, but we have a new system now, so are you sure that this applies to your area?””. As we know, the imposition of regional policies has not always been in accord with what was desirable in a particular area, such as was the case with the old housing targets. As the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, will remember, in East Lancashire we fought for a long time with the Government to be allowed planning permission for new housing. Because the housing targets were so low and had all been achieved, we were not allowed to give housing permission for housing that we wanted. That was a total nonsense as a result of the planning system being too prescriptive and too top-down. We were in the opposite position to that of authorities in the south-east, which were arguing against being forced to build too many houses. However, that has all gone now. I do not know how much the noble Baroness had to do with this, but when I asked a Question in your Lordships’ House, the Answer that I got from her colleague the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, started a process. It then took a year before what Ministers were saying here and in the Commons filtered down to grass roots, but it actually changed what was happening, and I was very grateful for that. That is very good example of how the old system did not work very well.