Localism Bill

My Lords, in moving my Amendment 170A, I should like to start by quoting what the Minister, Mr Greg Clark, said in another place at the Report stage of the Bill: "““There is also a case for looking at the fact that the costs of losing appeals can sometimes hang over local authorities. Sometimes the threat of losing an appeal dissuades a local authority from turning down an application that it might want to turn down. We should look at that””.—[Official Report, Commons, 17/5/11; col. 274.]" My only quarrel with that statement is that it is not so much the threat of losing an appeal as the costs of fighting one, whatever the result, that can dissuade a local authority from turning down a planning application that it should turn down and/or might otherwise want to turn down. This is more true today than ever now that local authorities are having to make severe budget cuts. Following my having taken up that point at Second Reading, my noble friend the Minister kindly wrote to me on the 20th of last month and ended her letter by saying that she hoped to be able to update me shortly with news on, "““how we propose to do that””;" that is, deal with the concerns about appeal costs. I am hoping that she may be able to tell us today what that is. I have singled out onshore wind farm applications because it is particularly scandalous that it is the subsidies that wind farm developers are promised that place them in a position to outbid local authorities and local action groups. Without those subsidies, the planning applications would never be made in the first place. Just to remind noble Lords, the subsidy takes the form of a promise to take on to the grid for 20 years all the electricity that the wind farm can produce at a price which is currently over twice the market rate. If for some reason the grid cannot accept the electricity, as we have seen happen recently and I am sure we will again, it will still pay for it at the subsidised rate. It is of course the consumer, including the consumer who is being pushed into fuel poverty, who is then charged on his electricity bills with these costs, and who thus pays for the subsidy. This of course creates the very antithesis of a level playing field. The result is that this is an area where final planning decisions are emphatically not taken by local authorities or local communities. Localism does not rule. It is routine for developers to waste no time in appealing once the local authority has rejected, if it has had the courage to reject, their planning application. In the first place, the developers hope to intimidate the local authority with the threat of a protracted and expensive public inquiry into granting their planning applications. If, nevertheless, the local authority stands up to them, they hope to defeat the local authority at the public inquiry. As developers are invariably able to afford better legal and administrative representation than the local authority, and certainly than the local action groups, they are favourites to win. The Government are complicit in this unjust process because they maintain the subsidies. The Government also apply immense pressure on the Planning Inspectorate through statements in every conceivable piece of legislation and guidance to help deliver, through its decisions at public inquiries, the Government’s renewable energy targets. In many cases the inspector does give priority to local concerns or to landscape considerations, but it still seems to be the case that in a majority of cases he will give priority to government policy. So by means of the subsidies to renewable energy electricity generators and the pressure on the Planning Inspectorate to deliver the Government’s renewable energy targets, the Government are doing everything in their power to thwart local opponents of onshore wind farm schemes. Yet they still claim to want to devolve decision-making powers in planning matters to local communities. How do they justify that blatant contradiction? I am afraid that it invites the charge of hypocrisy. Yet it is still the case that the Government have signalled their recognition that the ability of developers to intimidate local planning authorities into granting planning permission because of the costs of going to appeal represents a problem, which is why I hope that my noble friend will say today what the Government propose to do about it. My amendment might result in developers thinking twice about taking local planning authority refusals to appeal. In doing so, it might give some encouragement to local authorities to stick to their guns with the result that more final decisions might be in accordance with the wishes of local communities. Perhaps naively I thought that that was meant to be the main purpose of the Bill. I beg to move.