My Lords, I too welcome the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, to the community of the saved. The amendments on parish councils find favour with our Front Bench. I will not go into great detail on them. I hope that, if we are quick on this group of amendments, the Government will give us a break afterwards.
On the standards proposed by Amendment 159, I say that I was a member of the Committee on Standards in Public Life when we carried out our inquiry on the state of the health of democracy in local councils. There was a quite clear gap, and our recommendations were very clear about what should be done. It is disappointing that the Government, initially at least, responded that they were not going to
take any action. I hope that they will now take some action, not least because of the high-profile cases which came to light during the pandemic lockdown.
We support Amendments 160 and 161; the review of parishes is certainly well overdue. The capacity of parishes to do things was much tested during Covid. Most parishes proved up to the task, but the government system of emergency funding was denied to them; had it been available, it would have been helpful to their communities. I would have thought that the Government might want to have this reserve power in their pocket for a future occasion, even if they are convinced that they do not need to apply it immediately.
I did not know how controversial grants by parish councils would prove to be in the debate. I just add that the Church of England is not the only religious body in England, and certainly not the only religious body which supplies and helps its community and which parishes might well want to support and enable. I am quite sure that we need to get past this particular roadblock and just make parishes able to take their own decision about whether a particular body and a particular cause does or does not justify the use of taxpayers’ and parish money to carry out duties of one sort or another. The power of general competence is of course part of capacity raising, all of which is about levelling up by making parish councils effective voices in their community and enabling them to do things; it is empowerment.
The Government have focused on things which some of us think are completely misplaced or very trivial—the subject of street names springs to my mind. However, on things which are much more important and significant, they seem to have been a little blind, so I hope that they will respond to the debate in a very positive way.
On the question of Clause 92 standing part of the Bill, I hope that I do not understand the clause properly, because it seems to say that neighbourhood plans will be fine from now on, but only as long as they reach a minimum standard set by the Government in terms of housing supply.
I said in an earlier debate that neighbourhood plans had been remarkably successful in allocating more land for housing than the local plans that they superseded, on average. Obviously, of the roughly 3,000 that have been approved, not every one has provided more housing—some have provided less—but, on average, they have provided more. They are a vehicle for overcoming the terrible tension in a planning system in which the developer develops and the community opposes. They were designed to turn it around, so that the community proposes and the developer develops. That is how you get more homes; if you try to bulldoze it through the community, at whatever level, you will slow the process down. Neighbourhood planning has shown that you can speed it up and get more homes.
9.15 pm
Now we have a wrecking clause which will say to every neighbourhood forum—I should have declared that I am a member of one, which is about to present its plan to the community—“We’d like to know what you’d like to do with your community, but you’ve got to do it this way.” That is not neighbourhood planning.
We should scrap it. I would not have got involved in a neighbourhood forum if I thought that the constraints were that I would have to come out with the answer that the Government had first thought of. That is the whole point of putting decision-making in the hands of the neighbourhood forum or parish council. The neighbourhood plan in my area is being developed not by a parish council but by a free-standing neighbourhood forum in an unparished area.
I entirely endorse what the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, said about the tension—if not outright conflict—between the different layers of planning and what takes priority over what. I have an amendment later on to say that, if this way forward is adopted, we should make an exception for those neighbourhood plans that are in the process of being signed off in referendums and endorsed by their district councils. If the Government insist that those which are 99% finished have to go back and be ripped up because Clause 92 and the national development management plans take priority, they will completely crush the neighbourhood plan movement and undo all the good work they have done so far.