My Lords, I am grateful for the care and detail that the Minister has put into her reply. In most cases, when I read it in Hansard it will turn out to be satisfactory.
One issue that the Minister might respond to now, or perhaps afterwards, is that of designation. For which kinds of areas will there not be automatic designation? I understand that in most cases, particularly parishes—most cases are parishes at the moment—the application is for the whole parish, and that is very clear. What will the position be if the application is for only part of the parish, and not the rest of it? What will the position be if more than one parish applies together for designation as a neighbourhood area? What will the position be if—the obvious further complication—one whole parish is part of the neighbourhood area together with part of another parish? I should say that that is exactly the position in the area where I live. Anyway, that is a straightforward question and I will move on from it.
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I thank the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, for his comments. I will pick up on one thing that he said: that development control decisions and other planning decisions, presumably by the local planning authority, will be informed by neighbourhood plans. They will, in exactly the same way as they are informed by the local plan because the neighbourhood plans form a full part of the local development plan. I am fairly sure that that is correct, until or unless somebody says that I am wrong. The neighbourhood plan is therefore a fully fledged planning document alongside the core strategy, the allocations and the other things in the principal authority’s local development plan.
The noble Earl said that neighbourhood plans are often seen as a defensive strategy. In my experience of looking at quite a few around the country, my observation is that in many cases that is how they start—by people saying, “We don’t like this planning application”, or, “We don’t like the decision on all this new housing. What can we do to stop it? Let’s have a neighbourhood plan”. As the process of putting together a local plan develops, and as discussions among the local people who put it together take place, it seems that there is often a change of emphasis. People come to understand that they cannot change the overriding policies in the National Planning Policy Framework and the local development plan, but that they can change the impact of those policies to a degree on their community. They can have new housing in one place instead of another, for example, or perhaps a different sort of new housing or different access altogether.
Whatever it may be, while the people could then go back and say, “We’d rather not have it at all”, the process of getting involved in putting it together nevertheless results in a much higher local understanding of the problems, and of the situation that they are in. This appears the case from the fact that, so far anyhow, almost all these plans have been passed in a referendum, so that they have a local buy-in to what is there. In an ideal world, they might prefer to be on Mars or the moon or somewhere, but they are not. It forces people to accept the reality of what they are doing and where they are.
Listening to the noble Lord, Lord True, who is not here at the moment, I was thinking that I heard the same speech from him several times during debate on the then Localism Bill. I say to the Government that he is putting forward a very good case in relation to a small minority of local authorities. I think the Minister said that the Government do not want a lot of exceptions in the legislation that would stop people going through the neighbourhood planning process in the future. They could just block it because they do not like the concept of neighbourhood planning. The position in Richmond, and perhaps in some other authorities, is that what they do differently they have already done. There ought to be a way of exempting them from going through the whole system again, with all the expense and everybody having the same discussions with the same people and all the rest of it, when they already have a system which has local support and local acceptability. In other words, although the system may not fit the detailed rules and regulations of neighbourhood planning as set out, nevertheless the process and the involvement of the people has been similar, and the outcome is the same, so there ought to be a process by which authorities can apply to say, “We accept that in the future all new authorities will have to go through the neighbourhood system. But look at us as we are now and tell us, ‘Yes, there is a way for you not to have to go through that alternative system all over again’”. That is a common-sense way of dealing with it which will stop the noble Lord, Lord True, having to make the same speech on the next planning Bill in three or four years’ time. Apart from that, if the Minister can answer my questions, I will then withdraw the amendment.