Contribution
My Lords, I speak today as someone who has led a council for 20 years. I have sat on more planning committees than I care to remember. I have been accountable for three local plans, and I sat on the CIL review for the Minister in 2016-17—I have even built a few homes on my own account. I chaired a district council for four years, and established a public sector environmental credits company. I am well qualified to participate in this Bill.
The Bill is defective because it does not remind us that the purpose of planning is to arbitrate between the private and the public interest. Our work is important here. We need to optimise housing and economic growth within the context of optimising the burden of well-meaning regulations. We need to get the public-private balance right.
Let us not be churlish: there are several welcome moves in this Bill. It should not take 10 years to produce a local plan, which is how long the last local plan I was involved with took. However, superficial headlines fail to finger the felons who hold up progress and, most perversely, potentially reward the biggest blockers. This Bill perpetrates the myth that councils and councillors are a block on progress. That is wrong. Local councillors should not be the scapegoats for wider failures in the rest of the regulatory public sector—those who the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, mentioned. It is a pity that he is not in his place because I agreed with every word that he said about silos. Training councillors and emasculating planning committees alone will not deliver millions of homes; that is just wishful thinking.
The Bill has a touching faith that officials can clear away the debris—as if they do not have any prejudices of their own—and get Britain building all by themselves. In my experience, too often officialdom, in its widest sense, is inflexible. It interprets the local plan grounded in data which might be several years old and stuck in the past, rather than addressing the needs of tomorrow. I have sat on enough planning committees to know that, too often, officials and other parts of the state put the black spot on proper proposals.
Too often statutory bodies claim a veto to advance their own narrow interest, and on their own timescales. The Minister will remember when we both worked together to get the Planning Inspectorate to do its job in Stevenage, when it thought that 1,000 days to start an inspection was an appropriate lead time.
If you give someone a veto, do not be surprised if they use it—Natural England, the Environment Agency, the MMO, the Highways Agency and whatever National Rail calls itself nowadays. I want to be charitable here, but often they use overly precious objections, advancing specious science or contested legal opinion, to make their “wait” points. That is before we deal with a whole new set of other regulators—for example, the building fire safety regulator, which acts as if, Canute-like, it can somehow abolish fire. This Bill does nothing to address all those other blockers.
Councillors are not the problem here. In fact, we need elected officials at all levels to arbitrate positively in the public interest, to get through these vetoes and to ensure that those bodies do not use them capriciously.
Turning to Part 3, there has been a lot of NGO shroud-waving, telling us how a cottage industry of well-meaning ecologists has turned into a drag anchor on our economy. We should not ignore them, but we must roll back their veto on environmental protections, because their demands have become disproportionate and detached from reality.
Only this afternoon, I received an email as part of my casework as a councillor. A development in Norfolk has been told, on the basis of Natural England’s calculation, that the cost of installing a loo in a proposed single dwelling in a village not far from where I live will be £32,450. We have to stop this. It is on different continents with regard to value from what is reasonable or achievable.
I am concerned that proposals to give Natural England judge-and-jury powers will effectively nationalise nature. To set mitigation measures at state-run prices is dangerous. To set the price too low would kill the incentive to innovate in an area where the UK has developed some world-leading market leadership. I am anxious that we will undermine innovative local schemes where nutrient neutrality, biodiversity net gain, GIRAMS and SANGS, whatever they are, have been contracted and executed with 80-year tail liabilities. That is completely inconsistent with the 10-year life of an EDP.
On a much more positive note, I broadly welcome the proposals for development corporations in Part 4. But I have concerns over the financial models for the organisations, and it will be important to clarify the relationship between compulsory purchase and the cat’s cradle of responsibilities between the mayor, development corporation boards, planning authorities and the interactions with the money and finance that deliver the infrastructure.
There is much more that I want to say and will later on in the process. For the moment, I welcome the Bill and will do much to improve it, as there is more polishing to be done.