Contribution
My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 98 and 99, tabled in my name, which would enhance the existing statutory power under Section 303ZA of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 to charge fees for planning appeals to the Planning Inspectorate. That existing statutory power has never been used. There is currently no charge to submit an appeal to the Planning Inspectorate against the refusal or non-determination of a planning application. That contrasts with the position in relation to planning applications, where applicants for major developments pay application fees of tens of thousands of pounds, and sometimes more.
A huge amount has rightly been said in the context of this Bill and planning reform generally about the importance of ensuring local authorities are fully resourced to improve the speed and quality of planning decision-making at local level. That is of course right, but the same applies to the Planning Inspectorate, which performs a critical role in scrutinising local authority decision-making and plan-making. The inspectorate is already overworked and underresourced. This has consequences for its ability to deal as effectively as it would like with its existing case work, and for its ability to attract the widest possible range of candidates to become planning inspectors, including from the private sector. A couple of years ago, many inspectors went on strike due to what they said was unacceptable pay, which in most cases is significantly less than that of a First-tier Tribunal judge, which is, broadly speaking, the equivalent of a planning inspector in other aspects of the justice system.
With the expected uptick in planning appeals and local plan examinations resulting from the new National Planning Policy Framework, as well as the Government’s promised 150 development consent orders and a raft of new spatial development strategies which inspectors will need to examine, the demands on the inspectorate’s resources are bound to increase. Given the constraints on the public purse, an obvious solution is to introduce appeal fees for some or all types of appeal. I have advocated this publicly and privately for a long time—indeed, longer than I have been in this House. I have been reliably told that a key blocker to introducing this has been that, under the existing power to charge fees, any money charged by the inspectorate could not be retained by it but would go to the Treasury.
Amendment 98 is designed to address this by providing that, if the power to charge appeal fees is implemented in future, the fees received will be ring-fenced for the inspectorate. That mirrors the existing provision in Clause 48 for local authority planning application fees to be ring-fenced for planning. I must stress that this is only an enabling provision. The effect of Amendment 98 would not be to introduce appeal fees; it would simply ensure that, if the existing power to introduce such fees were to be implemented in future, the inspectorate could keep the fees. I find it very hard to see what policy objection there can be to that, particularly given the Bill’s existing provision for fee ring-fencing at local level.
Amendment 99 goes further and would make provision—again, this is only an enabling power—for an optional fee that appellants could pay for a fast-track, bespoke appeal process, a bit like one can pay extra for a fast-track passport or a fast-track visa. Ask any developer or land promoter what their biggest concerns about the planning appeal system are at the moment and they will tell you four things. The first is unpredictable delays in the process, particularly the time taken between when a planning appeal is submitted by the appellant and when the Planning Inspectorate validates it and issues a start letter.
The second is the lack of a right to a public inquiry, where the local authority’s refusal or non-determination of their planning application can be subjected to detailed scrutiny through cross-examination. The appeal statistics persistently show that inquiry appeals have the greatest success rate—they are the form of appeal that delivers more homes and more growth—yet there is no right to the inquiry. The Planning Inspectorate chooses the process and, given the constraints on its resources, there are only so many cases it can allocate to the inquiry procedure. More and more often, I personally have seen cases for substantial schemes involving issues of real complexity being allocated against the appellant’s will to the hearing process, or even written representations, which are much lighter-touch processes and, in my view, in the light of that have a markedly lower success rate.
Thirdly, there is the inability of the inspectorate to recruit from the widest possible range of backgrounds in the planning profession due to the pay constraints. There are, I must stress, many really brilliant planning inspectors, but there could be many more. Fourthly, once a planning appeal is started by the inspectorate, often after weeks of delay since the appeal was submitted by the appellant, inquiry or hearing dates are then imposed on the parties at relatively short notice, which can have the effect of depriving them of expert witnesses or legal representatives who have been on the project for years and are integral to its conception and formulation.