My Lords, I have added my name to Amendment 235, which I proposed in Committee and to which the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, has just spoken. Since Committee, the need for it has become more urgent, as reflected in the report of the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Select Committee in July, which concluded:
“The Government’s reforms to national planning policy will fail if local authorities lack sufficient resources to implement them. The package of support which the Government has outlined does not go far enough to address the significant resourcing challenges which local authorities currently face”.
I support the amendment for two reasons. First, I do not believe that the Government should be controlling the fees charged by planning departments, as a matter of principle. They do not control other local authority fees—building regulations, parking fees, library charges, school meals, swimming pool charges—so why planning? A national cap does not reflect the different circumstances of local authorities.
The case for relinquishing control is made stronger by the aspirations in the levelling up White Paper, with its commitment to
“usher in a revolution in local democracy”.
The revolution is stopped in its tracks by the notion that local authorities should not be free to recover the costs of their planning departments.
In reply to my amendment in Committee, my noble friend the Minister said that
“having different fees creates inconsistency, more complexity and unfairness for applicants, who could be required to pay different fee levels for the same type of development. Planning fees provide clarity and consistency for local authorities, developers and home owners”.—[Official Report, 24/4/23; col. 1003.]
Let me briefly dissect that. As far as local authorities are concerned, they are the ones who sponsored my original amendment. They have since confirmed their continuing support with this statement:
“We support this amendment. Planning fees do not cover the true cost of processing planning applications. In 2020/21, 305 out of 343 local authority planning departments operated in a deficit, which totalled £245.4 million”.
As far as developers are concerned, they already have to cope with myriad different local plans and can well manage different fees. What the developers want are well-resourced planning departments that can effectively process their applications quickly. One of the reasons for the disappointing housebuilding performance is planning delays. The amendment addresses that. As for home owners, I do not think that they know that planning fees are set centrally and they are used to local authorities having different charges for libraries, parking, allotments and the rest. I do not think that they would mind if fees were set locally, as long as they got a good service.
Secondly, I do not think it right that council tax payers should have to subsidise the planning system—the hidden subsidy referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Young. There are more important calls on those resources, underlined by the financial problems facing Birmingham City Council. The Minister told us that the Government were consulting on increasing the fees, but in the words of the Local Government Association:
“We welcome the Government’s commitment to increase planning application fees. However, our modelling has shown that even if all application fees were uplifted by 35 per cent, the overall national shortfall for 2020/21 would have remained above £80 million”.
In his opening speech, my noble friend referred on several occasions to full-cost recovery for provision of services. That is exactly what this amendment does.
I conclude by quoting the Times, which recently, on 7 July, summed up the position:
“Britain’s planning system is grinding to a halt, with four out of five big applications now being delayed by up to two years.
Official figures show that more than half a million new developments have been delayed during the past five years as threadbare planning departments struggle to cope with even routine cases.
Industry experts said the delays were exacerbating the housing crisis, with developments now taking up to three years to get started. Councils are supposed to give developers a decision on big projects within 13 weeks, but the latest official data shows that only 19% of applications were processed in this time over the past year, down from 57% 10 years ago … Developers say that performance is damaging efforts to tackle the housing crisis and other government priorities such as installing wind and solar farms. They warn that unless the government insists on proper funding for planning departments, the housing crisis will worsen as councils will always choose refuse collections over planning when allocating scarce resources.”
The noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, has made a powerful case and I hope that the Government will reflect in their reply on the further measures that are now needed.