I draw the attention of the House to my interests as declared in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, and to my non-pecuniary interests as a trustee of the Town and Country Planning Association. I was pleased to listen to the speech by the hon. Member for Wealden (Charles Hendry). He made a number of very important points. I hope he will forgive me for not following on directly from what he has said, but I will refer to him later in my speech.
This is a very diverse Bill that covers a very wide range of issues, but I want to focus on specific issues in part 4. It is not just a disparate Bill with a huge range of clauses; it will also have different impacts in different parts of the United Kingdom. We have been debating devolution quite a lot recently and a number of Members have advocated the case for MPs not being able to vote on measures that are devolved for local decision in the areas they represent. That is an issue we need to think about in relation to the provisions in the Bill. The explanatory notes give a pretty good feel on this matter:
“The provisions in Part 1 extend to England and Wales only, save that clauses 14 and 16 to 18 extend to the United Kingdom…In Part 2, clause 19(1) extends to England and Wales only and clause 19(2) extends to England, Wales and Scotland…The provisions in Part 3 extend to England and Wales only. The provisions in
Part 4 relating to nationally significant infrastructure projects under the Planning Act 2008 extend to England and Wales and (in relation to certain oil and gas cross-border pipelines) Scotland.”
And so on. However, if we look at the Bill in detail, we can see that in clause 27 the provisions relating to the Homes and Communities Agency apply to England outside London, and that there are separate provisions relating to the Greater London authority in the London area. I therefore have to put it to Members who advocate voting rights being restricted to Members who do not represent an area with a separate devolved authority taking decisions, that I would like to hear how they propose the House should consider the provisions in the Bill and which particular sections would be open to voting by Members from different parts of the country, whether they come from Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, London or the rest of England, because parts of the Bill relate only to each of the areas I describe.
I intend to restrict my comments to part 4, which itself contains diverse provisions, not because the other parts are not important but because there is simply not time to do justice to them all. Clauses 23 to 25 relate to the planning regime for nationally significant infrastructure projects. There are some modest amendments to improve procedures. I personally have no objection to them, as I believe they are helpful. I merely reflect that when the Planning Act 2008, which introduced the nationally significant infrastructure planning regime, was debated in the House, the present Government were extremely critical of it. I am glad that they have now decided that this initiative, introduced by the previous Government, is worthwhile, and that they are supporting it and taking it forward.
Clause 26, however, raises an altogether more problematic issue to which I have already alluded. It allows the Secretary of State to pass regulations by statutory instrument that would allow specific planning conditions to be deemed to be discharged if a period of time elapsed without the planning authority having reached a decision. I accept entirely that delays in discharging conditions can prove highly problematic and burdensome for developers, and I am not arguing against sensible measures to accelerate the discharge of planning conditions. However, the clause is a blunt instrument and could well result in measures being arbitrarily prevented from mitigating the serious adverse impacts of developments on local communities. In its briefing, the Town and Country Planning Association says that the Department for Communities and Local Government technical consultation on planning
“reflects this dilemma by recognising classes of condition whose function is too important to be subject of any deemed discharged. The question must be whether any NPPF compliant condition can be regarded as so trivial as to have no impact on the wider community.”
I put that question to the Minister earlier, and I was pleased he agreed to reflect on it.
The TCPA continues:
“Paragraph 206 of the NPPF states that ‘planning conditions should only be imposed where they are necessary, relevant to planning and to the development to be permitted, enforceable, precise and reasonable in all other respects’. The tests of necessary, relevant and reasonable provide a strong framework and logically imply that there should not be a body of conditions which are in some way frivolous or unimportant.”
That is a telling point on which I look forward to hearing the Minister’s view when he has had a chance to reflect on it, because it concerns a very significant issue. Ministers used to be vocal in their support for the principle of localism—of allowing local communities the power to promote their interests and reject proposals that damage the amenity or well-being of the area or its residents. I hope, therefore, that when they have had a chance to reflect, they will assure us that no planning condition relating to the material amenity of residents or the wider community will be subject to the deemed discharge provision.
One planning issue that surprisingly is absent from the Bill is an updating and clarification of the remit and role of the new town development corporations, which were established in the 1940s and played a key role in developing the substantial number of new settlements subsequently created in our country. Now that the Government have given their approval to the creation of a new generation of garden cities and have agreed that a development corporation is the appropriate vehicle to promote the projected new settlement at Ebbsfleet, it is time for a new statement of the purposes of new town development corporations.
Simply seeking to apply the urban development corporation model, which was devised for different circumstances and with no clear statement of its social and environmental objectives, is not adequate. In the other place, the concept of a new definition of the role and purposes of a new town development corporation was considered, and I hope that if the Bill is examined in detail in Committee, an appropriate new clause can be introduced to achieve this. The TCPA has undertaken substantial work in drafting an appropriate statement of the purposes and objectives of the new town development corporations, and I hope this can provide the basis for an improvement to the Bill.
The third weakness in part 4 that I would like to highlight relates to the low and zero-carbon agenda—another area in which the last Government made important advances. The ratcheting up of the energy requirements in part L of the building regulations, the creation of the route map to zero-carbon housing through the code for sustainable homes, the establishment of the zero-carbon hub and the setting of a target for reaching zero carbon in new homes by 2016 were all significant initiatives that have had a very positive impact. Our new homes now achieve much higher standards of energy performances than they did a decade or two ago.
I have first-hand experience of that. I live in a new home built in Greenwich millennium village, which was designed to be an exemplary development. It was pioneered by the last Government and set high energy efficiency standards. My flat is now eight years old, so it is not at the cutting edge of new energy performance, but last winter I did not need to have the heating on at all, so good is its energy performance. The hon. Member for Wealden referred to the previous winter, focusing rightly on the issue of energy supply, and said it was a very cold winter. In that very cold winter, I needed just 42 hours of heating.
My argument is this: just as important as energy supply —I entirely accept the emphasis of the hon. Member for Wealden on it—is energy efficiency to ensure that we are not wasting energy unnecessarily and that people have the benefits of warm sustainable homes in which they
can afford to keep warm through winter. That is the great benefit of the whole low and zero-carbon programme. It is not just about helping to achieve our carbon reduction targets, but about improving people’s quality of life so that they live in better, warmer and more economically maintained homes.
That is why I find it very disappointing to see yet further evidence in the Bill of the Government backtracking from their previous position and indeed their predecessor’s ambitions—first by resiling from the previous ambition to meet code level 6 by 2016; then by watering down the standards to be met on site, even before offsite allowable solutions are invoked; and now by exempting small sites entirely from the obligations.
The UK Green Building Council had some fairly pithy comments to make:
“We see no reason why a development of 10 units should be treated differently from one of 11. Creating a disparity between the treatment of different sites opens up the possibility of unforeseen and undesirable outcomes, and possibly exploitation, where larger sites are broken down to qualify for the exemption.”
I wholeheartedly agree. It is very much the case that we should put the emphasis on helping small builders to meet the more demanding standards of high-energy performance homes rather than on providing exemptions not to meet those standards.