My Lords, Amendment 227A in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, seeks to impose a requirement on the Secretary of State to bring forward regulations under Clause 128 that will enable statutory consultees to charge applicants for their advice on planning applications and consents under the planning Acts. I appreciate that our Amendments 229 and 230 do not go as far as the noble Baroness, Lady Young, might like. However, given the complexity of statutory consultee charging—it is a complex field—in our view it would be unwise to rush into a radically different set of arrangements. The changes that she proposes have the potential to
impose financial impacts on applicants, in particular home owners and SMEs, and they could severely affect local planning authority capacity and its ability to make timely decisions. We need to ensure that an appropriate balance is reached with any charging model.
To put that into context, there are around 28 statutory consultees prescribed nationally and around 50,000 applications a year that the big six national statutory consultees comment on. That does not include local statutory consultees, such as highways authorities. Therefore, we will need a system that works for everyone, not just a select few, and this will need to be worked through carefully and collaboratively with the sector. Against that background, I hope that the noble Baroness will see why we are reluctant to rush into the model that she proposes and that she will in fact decide not to move her Amendment 227A on that account.
Amendment 235, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, would enable local authorities to set their own planning application fees. I understand how important it is for local planning authorities to have the resources that they need to deliver an effective planning service. On 20 July, we laid regulations, as she mentioned, that will increase planning fees by 35% for the major applications and 25% for all other applications. This is a national fee increase that will benefit all local planning authorities in England. In addition to the 35% increase, local planning authorities may charge fees for providing pre-application advice or using pre-planning agreements for major schemes. Fee levels for those services are set by individual local planning authorities. It is important to factor that point into noble Lords’ consideration of this issue.
The Government do not believe that enabling local planning authorities to vary fees and charges is the way to answer resourcing issues, for several reasons. First, it does not provide any incentive to tackle inefficiencies—indeed, the opposite is true. I am not sure that I heard that point addressed either by my noble friend or by the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock. Secondly, I have to come back to the point that the Government argued in Committee. Having different fees between local authorities would be bound to create uncertainty and, perhaps more importantly, unfairness for applicants. We have to be cognisant of the need for fairness. It is all very well for my noble friend to say that applicants will not notice if fees vary between areas. It is a question of doing what is right for all parties and not just feeding the wishes of local authorities in this area, understandable as those are, as I said. Also, at an extreme, if fees are set too high, they could risk doing what I am sure the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, does not want, which is to discourage development coming forward in the first place. For those reasons, I am afraid that I must resist the amendment and I hope that, on reflection, the noble Baroness will be persuaded not to move it when we reach it.