My Lords, this has been a very interesting debate and I thank everybody who has taken part in it. Most of the debate was about issues that I was not personally raising, but I want to thank the noble Lord, Lord True, who made a speech similar to one I thought of making. It is clear that the noble Lord is less intimidated by the Government Chief Whip on these matters than I am and feels able to make such a speech at length, putting forward the localist view which he has done so well so many times in this Committee.
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The noble Lord, Lord True, said that what was being proposed was not soft arbitration but hard statute. This is yet another example of this Government, like previous Governments, not trusting local authorities or local people. I particularly noted the noble Lord’s description of this measure as possibly a new inspectorate. The Government are very good at setting up policing mechanisms to police everybody else in the world. I do not know when they are going to stop: we thought it was coming to a halt with the Localism Act, but it seems that that Act did not do that at all, or only in small measure.
The Minister said that she wanted to agree planning obligations “earlier in the process”. I am not quite sure which process she is talking about or what stage of it. Affordable housing obligations are often the central part of the application from the very beginning, when the application is put in; certainly for larger sites, the question of how much and what kind of affordable housing is there from the very beginning and is part of the pre-application negotiations and discussions that take place between the applicants and local planners, and that is as it should be. A lot of the smaller Section 106 obligations that end up with an application, however, actually emerge during the process that people think is necessary and reasonable for the development to go ahead. They might even emerge at the decision-making time: if the application goes to a committee, there will
be discussions and small Section 106 additions might take place at that late stage. If the Minister is saying that the problem then is that it takes time for the negotiations to take place between the applicants and the planning authority after a decision has been made that an obligation is required, that is true; but if there are bureaucratic, legalistic or just administrative reasons why that process is slowing down, it is not always necessarily the fault of the local planning authority. It can often be the fault of the applicants who delegate to somebody working on their behalf; it can take months and months for them to deal with it.
The whole tenor and ethos of this Bill seems to be about making things easier for developers. I am in favour of the whole planning system being made easier, more efficient and simpler, as the Minister knows. At the moment, it is too complicated; there is no doubt about that. It is too bureaucratic and too difficult for people to understand. However, there has to be a balance, and the danger of making things easier for developers, which lies behind a lot of the discussion that has taken place in this Committee, is that, if we are not careful, development could become more harmful and less good than it otherwise would be. Often, it is the things that are beneficial to the local community and that make for a much better development—better designed and laid out, with better provisions—that the developers complain about. They will go to the Government and say, “These planning authorities are making us do all these things”. But if you build a housing estate it is there for 100 or 200 years, or however long, and taking a bit longer is not necessarily always a bad thing.
Most of the debate on this group was about rural housing, small developments and affordable housing. Again, I was bowled over by the level of expertise on these issues around the Chamber. The noble Lord, Lord True, was right again: this is the tension that runs right through the Bill and it is a fundamental issue throughout it. My observation is that the Government have to come up with some fairly important improvements to the Bill in these areas—perhaps one would call them concessions—if they are not to get into serious trouble on Report. Having said that, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.