Contribution
My Lords, Amendment 61 in this group is in my name. I will talk to that in a moment, but first I want to say one or two things about the helpful amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill. I think it points in the right direction, but we need to understand where we would end up if we were to go in that direction.
Some noble Lords will have participated in the debate that we had toward the latter stages of the last Parliament about the new regulations relating to planning fees. One thing that came through quite forcibly from that was that householders—for example, making applications in relation to their own houses—were paying significantly less than the cost of dealing with their application. I completely take the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, that there is, and has been subsequently in the Government’s changes to the planning charges, some balancing of that, and that householders are paying more.
If I understand correctly, it is the noble Baroness’s intention that the fees charged should be proportionate to the number of households or the scale of a development—although that is not actually what her amendment says. The amendment simply says that it should be proportionate; it does not say proportionate to what. Basing it on the size of a development could mean basing it in a positive correlation or a negative correlation. I am afraid that when you write legislation, you have to write specifically what you want. Otherwise, the noble Lord, Lord Banner, and his colleagues will take it apart. We do not want that; we want to be very clear about what we are setting out to achieve.
I am sure it is not the noble Baroness’s intention to press the amendment, but it raises an important issue. When Ministers bring forward regulations to set out how the planning fees should be set and the criteria by which they should be set, it is at that point that I hope they will take full account of what the noble Baroness said and the purposes she was describing.
My amendment is derived from our debate in Committee. I did not have an amendment then, but we had an exchange about Clause 49, which relates to the surcharge that can be charged for the purpose of meeting the costs of statutory consultees and other bodies that support the planning process. When we reach Clause 49, we see that new Section 303ZZB(6) states that the level of the surcharge must be set so as to
“secure that, taking one financial year with another, the income from the surcharge does not exceed the relevant costs of the listed persons”.
I noticed, in listening to the debate, that new Section 303ZZB(8) says that:
“Regulations …may set the surcharge at a level that exceeds the costs of listed persons”.
We therefore have the curious situation where, in the same section, it says that it should not exceed the costs and also that regulations have the specific power to exceed the costs. I have not had a conversation with the Minister, but I have been thinking about this quite carefully. The purpose of tabling this amendment is to ask whether my understanding is correct. If it is, I think it would be very helpful for that to be said explicitly.
New subsection (8), which says that the surcharge could exceed the costs of the listed persons, relates to a specific application, so the charge does not have to be set so as not to exceed the costs of the work done in relation to any individual application. New subsection (6) tells us that, in effect, it is not just taking one year with another or looking at the costs, but looking at costs across all of these activities and applications, and that, overall, the listed persons should not receive more by way of income from the surcharge than meets their costs. I hope that the explanation of the Bill is precisely that: subsection (8) should only be referenced in relation to an individual application and could not be used to set surcharges so as to provide greater income to statutory consultees or others than the costs they incur dealing with planning applications.