Localism Bill

My Lords, I have three amendments in this group. Amendment 151 is quite simple. I am interested in the Government's views on how strong a neighbourhood plan will be. If someone has been left out of a neighbourhood plan and still wants to develop their property, will they have the same scope to go for a departure as they do at the moment, or will there be a strong presumption that the neighbourhood plan prevails? Amendment 152ZB deals with the way in which neighbourhood plans intersect with development orders. A lot of planning permission goes through under development orders which, quite rightly, a district, a county or a borough will not have a particular interest in, but which a neighbourhood will have an interest in. Neighbourhoods are very interested in the way in which their local shopping streets develop, for example. Many things that can happen to a shopping street can happen under the general permissions given under a development order. I am interested in the way in which those two intersect. Amendment 152 is a little more complicated than that. Rural and semi-rural parishes, where there is a lot of scope for development, will become wealthy—that is the wrong word; they will have a lot of money at their disposal as a result of this Bill. A typical parish will go round its residents and ask what they want and will also go round all the neighbouring landlords and say, ““If we give you the sort of permissions you are looking for, what will you do for the community?””. That is the only way it can work, because if that did not happen, any landlord who had a deal to offer could upset the referendum by saying to people voting in it, ““Why are you voting for this and giving Farmer Jones £1 million as a result of the development? If you had asked me, I would have said that you could have had £0.5 million towards the village hall, a new village shop or to subsidise the bus service and that I would require only £0.5 million if you put those houses on my land””. Inevitably, there has to be that kind of negotiation with all the local landlords. The neighbourhood plan, when it emerges, will be a document which results in a very substantial flow of funds from landlords to the community. In what way they will provide those funds, whether by permissions or by being prepared to build things for the community or subsidise things for the community, will be a total re-establishment of relationships between landlords and the community and a much more equal appreciation of sharing benefits and burdens of development. I reckon that you would probably get the planning game settling down at about 50:50 between the landlord and the community. Incidentally, this will render entirely unnecessary the argument that we had a few days ago about the community right to bid. Most of my noble friends were worrying about relatively rural communities. They will be in a position to buy. They will have funds potentially sitting around to buy the cricket pitch. They will not be hanging around waiting to see whether they can raise money. They will be well off and have a great deal of flexibility where such things are concerned and anyone wanting to sell local property will start to think of the local community as being a place to find a purchaser. Under those circumstances, inevitably one gets into a position where there is scope for corruption. We have to be careful that that does not occur. In a small community, people by and large know each other's business: but everything ought to be open. It is essential that when one deals with these sums of money—hundreds of thousands of pounds—everything ought to be open for inspection, so that everybody can see what deals have been proposed by landlords, what the basis is for choosing particular deals that have gone into a neighbourhood plan and what deals have been cast aside. Nothing should be hidden, everything should be open. That way, at a neighbourhood level, we will have pretty good insurance against corruption.