My Lords, at last we arrive at perhaps the remaining flashpoint in the Bill. I rise to move Amendment 102CL and speak to my other amendments in the group. There are two other very useful amendments from noble Lords in the group.
Clause 145 is a major, very controversial innovation. It may be the first step towards the privatisation of development management and yet it was dumped on the Commons on Report. There was a very short explanation by the Minister, one speech by Clive Betts MP at 1 am and the Minister refused to answer his questions—there was no reply from the Minister.
Here we are in the Lords at the very end of the Bill, at the end of the afternoon on day nine of nine, and we must try at least to give it some intelligent consideration. I have no doubt that the issue will come back on Report anyhow. The Government are saying that this is intended to be a pilot, but the Bill appears to give the Secretary of State untrammelled powers to introduce this provision to any extent he or she wishes at any time in the future, so the question of how it can be limited is an issue that the Committee ought to look at.
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I have referred previously in Committee to the Technical Consultation on Implementation of Planning Changes, which is an extremely useful document for helping to understand what is in Part 6 of the Bill. I say again that it is a pity that it was not sent to us as well. The technical consultation is very interesting on this matter and raises more questions than answers in my view. The first paragraph of the chapter headed, “Testing competition in the processing of planning applications”, reads:
“One form of innovation that we are keen to explore is competition in the processing of planning applications”.
The second paragraph says, referring to local authorities generally:
“The majority of research studies suggest cost savings of up to 20 per cent for competitively tendered or shared services”,
Cost savings are right at the beginning of the reasons for doing this, and the first reference to it is about local authorities collecting refuse 30 years ago. Other references suggest that the savings might be less than 20%, but all of them are old, including a reference to a study from 2008. What collecting refuse 30 years ago has to do with processing planning applications is a mystery to me, particularly after the huge reductions in spending that have been forced on local authorities, which have already produced what are either a lot of efficiency savings or a lot of inefficiency savings due to not having enough staff to do the work.
The Royal Town Planning Institute funded some useful research in the north-west of England which found that staffing in planning departments in the north-west had reduced by one-third since 2010: there are 37% fewer staff in planning policy departments and 27% fewer in development management. If local authorities are doing the same amount they did six years ago, they have already achieved that amount of efficiency savings. One would have imagined that was enough, but perhaps not.
The technical consultation goes on to say:
“These benefits could include giving the applicant choice, enabling innovation in service provision”—
which is usually management-speak rubbish, but never mind—
“bringing new resources into the planning system, driving down costs”—
on the basis of refuse collection 30 years ago—“and improving performance”. I am being a bit cynical reading this out but as somebody who was involved in reducing costs in one local authority in particular, and peripherally in the county council as well, I know how much of this is going on now and how much innovation is taking place to achieve it.
I turn to choice. Development management is a local authority function and part of democratic local government—or local governance, if your Lordships prefer. It is part of the local planning system, closely integrated with plan-making and other functions, such as enforcement—often a poor relation—tree preservation orders, environmental management issues generally and the council’s involvement in promoting economic development in their areas, which, over the 45 years that I have been a councillor, has become more and more important. It hardly existed 45 years ago and is now a fundamental function, closely integrated with the planning system. But as well as all those things, it is a regulatory function. It is quasi-judicial at the point of determination and requires exercise of judgment. It is not a matter of ticking boxes, as building regulation control tends to be and some of the local authority functions may be. It requires the exercise of judgment at almost every stage of the operation—judgment in the light of policies at all levels, but it is required. It is not an appropriate service to be privatised, whether on pilot schemes or more widely, at any time.
One can think of other similar services provided by the public sector. Will we be able to choose which firm of tax inspectors we have to determine how much tax we pay, or will we have competing firms of parking wardens, some of whom might charge more, or be friendlier and let you off? Will we be able to choose the bailiffs who come to our door if we do not pay our council tax? I should say that I have paid mine for next year already. If we run cafés or fish shops, will we be able to have competing food standards officers from different firms, and to choose the ones we think might be more lenient to us? Will schools have an alternative private provider to Ofsted—that might be a good idea, actually—whereby they can choose which inspectors they want? The whole concept of privatising public regulatory services is flawed.
Will the new system undermine the viability of planning departments, which are already struggling under the cost-cutting being enforced by their finance departments and the local authority budget? Could it increase the costs to the local planning authority if it has to employ underemployed staff, since they will not know what the workload will be from one month or year to the next? Will we have competition by outcomes? Competition on the basis of efficiency may be fine, but will we have competition by fees, as some people charge lower fees than others? The consultation says that,
“benefits could include giving the applicant choice”.
Will people game the system and discover that planning applications for extensions are more easily passed if they choose one lot and not the other? On the basis of experience, that is the kind of view that will be taken locally before very long.
What will the relationship with elected councillors be? At the moment, elected councillors tend to be involved at an informal level right through the process, if it is in their ward or they are chairman of the planning committee, or whatever it is. In my part of the world, who knows where the designated person—that is, the firm that will do it—will be? Will they be in Manchester or London? Will they be local? Who knows? Will we have two different sets of people doing the same things in the same area? What about contacts for residents and other people who will not know what is going on because there will be a different system according to who is carrying out the process?
What about cost recovery? Full cost recovery of processing and determining planning applications does not happen now. It is subsidised by local authorities. So how will it work with private providers? Will the provision in the Bill that the Secretary of State can make payments to private providers result in their being subsidised when in competition with the local planning authority? How will it work?
It is all very well arguing for efficiency from the private sector, but before it starts being more efficient—and I am not sure what it will be doing if all providers are based in Manchester or London—it has to make a profit on top of its costs before it can gain in efficiency, assuming that that is possible. Will there be a level playing field? Will the charges be the same? Will the private sector be able to undercut? Will it charge more and provide a better service—in other words, provide more recommendations for approval?
What about the work by the local planning authority that will have to take place even if a different provider is doing it? What about pre-application work? It may be that somebody has all the pre-application discussions with the local planning authority and then, at the point of putting it in, goes to the alternative provider. The local planning authority would be doing a lot of the work and getting none of the fee. How will that work?
What about information? Will it all be on the local authority’s website and will the local authority have to maintain that? How will that work? Or will people have to go to different places according to who is dealing with the planning application? How will people cope with that? How will the pre-decision review of reports, information and recommendations work? Who is going to advise a planning or department control committee when it is making a decision? Will the private provider come to sit at the committee and act as an officer?
Will a council planning officer going to be there to provide help and advice to the committee? Try going to the planning committee of a local authority and not having a planning officer there because they are all down with flu. I ended up suggesting all the reasons why we should turn something down. I cannot remember whether we won that appeal. You need officers there to provide technical legal advice. What happens if
the planning officer’s recommendation is different from that of the alternative provider? Which prevails? Does the committee get two reports? How does that work?
I do not think that this has been thought out properly. There are lots of amendments in this group and I shall not go through them now. The Minister will have answers to them all; I will listen to the answers carefully and I may bring up later any with which I am not satisfied when I reply to the debate on this group. This seems to us to be a scheme which has been dreamed up on the back of the traditional fag packet, or whatever people use nowadays, and dumped on the Commons at the last minute. The best thing this House could do is send it back to the Government and say, “You might have a case, you might not have a case, but go away and bring it back when you have thought it out properly”. I beg to move.