Planning Bill

A number of Members throughout the House have already commented on the challenge posed by the planning process. There is an increasing polarisation between engaging the community, maintaining sustainable communities and tackling major challenges such as climate change on the one hand, and the promotion of enterprise, employment and wealth on the other. I believe that the Bill gets the balance substantially wrong. I appreciate, and would not seek to minimise, the difficult balancing act that Ministers must perform in the face of lobbying from business and the one-sided findings of the Barker review of land use planning. Like many Members, I am closely involved in supporting the communities in my constituency in expressing their view on local planning applications and their impact on the quality of their lives, and trying to ensure that developments are sustainable and address issues of climate change. My main starting point is the extent to which the Bill deals with community participation. When my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State was performing her piece at the Dispatch Box, I was taken back a few years to a similar debate on public involvement relating to the abolition of community health councils and their replacement with patients forums, which are themselves to be superseded. In the context of public involvement, I recognise that the Bill will have no great impact on the overwhelming proportion of local planning applications decided under the Town and Country Planning Act 1990. If I have any criticism in that respect, it is that the Bill provides no means of promoting and enhancing community participation in respect of local planning applications. In the past, like my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Mr. Drew), I have advocated a qualified third-party right of appeal to give communities an opportunity to challenge significant local planning decisions made by councils on applications requiring an environmental impact statement. The Bill relates principally to major infrastructure proposals, or MIPs. I have therefore tried to view it from the perspective of how it might operate in respect of MIPs with a potential impact on the communities that I represent. For example, Conservative and Liberal Democrat-controlled Leeds city council is considering options for major waste disposal facilities that may include the building of a huge incinerator. We also have on our doorstep Leeds Bradford airport, recently privatised by the Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition. Those were the very people who condemned the passenger projections in the aviation White Paper, but then sold it off—and with it, absolute control over its future development—so that they could, in their own words, secure private investment to promote its growth. Only time will tell whether that particular development will lead to a planning application that will amount to a MIP, but it is a possibility. I ask myself how, if planning applications for an incinerator or airport are submitted, the process proposed in the Bill will enable local people and communities, environmental groups and elected representatives such as councillors and Members of Parliament to express their views. That includes their ability to make representations on national policy statements that would set the framework for individual decisions, as well as individual inquiries on specific applications. I have great sympathy with those who regard the Bill's proposals as an unnecessary dilution of existing procedures for engaging the public. We are told that the present inquiry process is unfairly protracted, but little empirical evidence appears to have been provided by Ministers to demonstrate the extent to which the present opportunities for public involvement and engagement are responsible for that. In some cases that are cited as examples of the protracted process, the way in which applicants have presented their case and the delay between the end of an inquiry and the announcement of a decision by Ministers have been the main culprits. I dare say that, if he manages to catch your eye, Mr. Deputy Speaker, my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) may even cite the oft-quoted example of Heathrow's terminal 5. In that instance, the process was prolonged by the applicant's lack of preparation and subsequent changes in the application, and by the time that it took for a decision to be made once the inquiry was over. We have been told that the present inquiry process is a barrister's beanfeast. Barristers are always good whipping boys in any discussion of this type. It is asserted that many citizens lack the confidence to contribute to a process in which they may be cross-examined by those intimidating successors to Torquemada. I find that argument somewhat tendentious, if not patriarchal and patronising. In any case, whatever the process, many people—irrespective of their background—lack the confidence to contribute at any public meeting. It is not unusual for them to defer to others to provide representation, whether those people are members of their own community or organised pressure groups—““green”” groups, for example. There is also a mindset, which I consider particularly unhealthy—I do not accuse my hon. Friend the Minister of holding this view—that sees objectors to planning applications as nimbys, and the present procedures as a nimby's charter. As Churchill once observed, the trouble with democracy is that it is the worst form of government apart from all the rest. The Government's wish to truncate the process in the way that the Bill suggests is another aspect of the desire to remove some essential, but sometimes slightly awkward, democratic elements. It seems that Ministers are exaggerating the murkiness of the bathwater to justify throwing out the baby. Perhaps I am guilty of a touching naivety, but I do not think it beyond the wit of Ministers or their civil servants, particularly in the context of the proposed national policy statements, to analyse the lessons of previous protracted processes and to inject a greater discipline that does not require removal of the right to appear and to cross-examine. I believe that the Bill transmits the wrong message: support for business at the expense of the community. Councils such as Leeds are constantly spinning the political line that over-intensive development on brownfield sites, including gardens, is being forced on them by the Government. Of course, they do not reveal that the guidance on brownfield development of gardens was introduced by the last Government. They do not reveal that they have powers under the 2004 Act to draw up plans to provide action plans and a local framework to address local issues of over-development. Nor do they admit that PPS3 on housing allows them to examine planning applications in the light of local housing needs, particularly for families. Far from helping to explode some of these political myths, the Bill simply helps to reinforce them. NPSs are key documents in determining applications and obviously can be site-specific. Yet despite their power and influence over people's lives, there does not appear—I may be wrong—to be any clearly specified right to be heard in the preparation process. Paradoxically, this right does exist for local planning documents under the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004, but it is essential that NPSs are likewise subject to robust and guaranteed public consultation. The consultation provisions contained in the Bill seem a little vague and subject to a very broad exercise of discretion by the Secretary of State. The Bill needs to be strengthened to ensure that a clear and unambiguous commitment to publicity and consultation exists in respect of NPSs and, for the process to be effective, it should include policy options so that people can look at what has been considered. If the Bill is not to represent a retrograde step in terms of public involvement, it should build on the 2005 rules for major infrastructure project inquiries and contain an effective right to be heard in person at all stages of the inquiry process with qualified rights to cross-examine and to test evidence. It is essential that the Secretary of State and the IPC issue specific guidance on community involvement and, as we have heard, it is essential that we have adequate resourcing of groups such as Planning Aid to allow people to participate effectively in the process. Most, if not all, of us will have had experience of pre-application consultations conducted by developers. Often they are merely a lip-service exercise. Often they make little or no difference to the eventual application that is submitted. I believe that applicants must be guided in much greater detail as to their responsibilities in consulting local people. If the process is to mean anything, the applicant must be required to consider the reasonable mitigation of the proposals that they submit, perhaps in the form of a statement of the impact of the development that is considered by the IPC.