The first thing I want to say about the planning section of the Bill is that it is a pity that it has not had more resonance in the public realm, because it is bringing about far-reaching changes to the planning system that many local communities should be concerned about. Two issues that I will highlight are the extensive use of permission in principle on brownfield sites and the contracting out of planning services to private providers. Both risk drastically reducing the say that local communities have over what is built in their area and are a further nail in the coffin of the Government’s localist credentials.
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I will begin with those Lords amendments that the Government are opposing or seeking to amend. Introducing Lords amendment 97, which provides for a neighbourhood right of appeal against an application for planning permission, Lord Kennedy said in the other place:
“It is right that communities have a direct say in developments in their area, and the amendment provides a mechanism for a limited right of appeal in certain circumstances. The right of appeal would apply only to parish councils and neighbourhood forums whose plans progress to formal submission to the local authority.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 20 April 2016; Vol. 771, c. 661.]
We accept that the Government have come forward with an amendment that seeks to make clear how the plan will be taken into account in making a planning recommendation and identifying points of conflict, and we can see where the Minister is coming from, but we are not sure it gives the protections that hon. Members are seeking, so we will have to monitor the situation in due course.
Lords amendment 108, tabled by Lord Kennedy, Lord Young and Baroness Parminter, aims to ensure that new homes contribute to meeting our greenhouse gas targets and help to lower fuel bills by requiring that new homes built from 1 April 2018 achieve the carbon compliance standard. In opposing this amendment, the Government argued that the amendment imposed a regulatory burden, but these standards, withdrawn by the Chancellor last year, had industry-wide support. If the Government’s priority is to support small house builders, it should be noted that they themselves cite that the major constraints on their building more homes are land prices and access to finance, not building carbon-neutral homes.
That was the evidence given last October to the House of Lords Committee on National Policy for the Built Environment by representatives from both the Home Builders Federation and the Federation of Master Builders. Their evidence completely contradicts the Minister’s point. The House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee has also added its voice to the call for a reinstatement of the zero-carbon homes policy. Higher regulatory standards should be considered not as burdensome red tape but as a requirement that is essential both to reducing energy costs and to tackling the threat of climate change.
The zero-carbon homes standard is important to delivering on our climate change commitments. The cost of building to standards is reducing all the time and is now probably only about £1,500, not the £3,500 the Minister mentioned. Introducing the standard would result in homes that have lower energy bills and reduced carbon emissions. Given that Labour introduced the zero-carbon homes policy for homes built after 2016, which was disgracefully stopped by the previous Government, we will support the Lords in their amendment to bring back carbon compliance measures from 2018.
Given all the flooding we have had in this country recently, it is very strange that the Government are seeking to vote against amendment 110, which would require that 1 million new homes be built with sustainable drainage systems, helping to protect homeowners against flooding and delivering wider environmental benefits. Almost every environmental organisation and organisation concerned with flooding supports the amendment, from the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust to Water UK, the Royal Institute of British Architects, the Chartered Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management, the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management, the Angling Trust, the Rivers Trust, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds—I could go on.
New developments will put new pressure on critical infrastructure, including drainage and flood defence. New homes continue to be built in areas of flood risk without resilience measures, such as SUDS, and many conventional drainage systems are already over capacity. In many cases, capital costs for sustainable drainage will be lower than conventional connections, as recognised in the 2010 impact assessment by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. We also know that retrofitting is considerably more costly. The amendment would offer considerable protections against damage from flooding in the long term, and I do not think the Minister justified why he was voting against the amendment. I ask him to have a rethink.
We consider Lords amendment 111 to be a good one, because it seeks to limit to five years the time during which the pilot to test the privatisation of the processing of planning applications can run. We appreciate that the intent is to limit the policy, but we do not agree with the policy at all, because we believe it could lead to extremely difficult conflicts of interest at the local level and would take away much-needed resources from local planning departments.
Let me deal briefly with some of the Government amendments. Government amendments 98 and 99 would amend clause 129 to ensure that the Secretary of State, or the Mayor in the case of London, could prepare a local development scheme that sets out the development plan documents that the authority intends to produce and the timetable for their production for an authority that has failed to prepare one, and then direct the authority to bring the scheme forward. In effect, this means placing a requirement on authorities to have a local plan in place and it is what Labour proposed in the Lyons report, so it is good to see that the Government have taken our proposals on board.
Amendments 100 to 106 relate to clarifications on permission in principle, and the time limits are welcome. I must commend Baroness Andrews for all her work in the other place; it is also good that the Government accepted Lord Beecham’s amendment on developments
on brownfield sites being housing-led, but we still have huge reservations as to whether this whole policy of permission in principle will bring forward more land, more quickly.
It is particularly good to see in amendments 240 to 243 that the Government have accepted what Labour argued for both in Commons Committee and in the other place—that where they consider it expedient to do so, it would be possible in principle for local planning authorities to revoke or modify permission granted by local plans or registers. We look forward to seeing the regulations that will accompany this, but we wonder why the Minister did not agree to this in Committee—still, better late than never!
Similarly, we accept amendments 124 and 127, which simplify the process for setting up new town corporations and urban development corporations. Again, this is something we argued for in Committee, and we would like to see an updated version of new towns legislation as soon as possible to deliver the garden cities and villages our country needs.
Lastly, we accept that amendments 128 to 179 clarify changes to the compulsory purchase orders process. We will monitor these in practice to see if they do enable a speeding up and a wider use of CPOs to help local authorities to deliver the additional housing that our country desperately needs.