If the right hon. Gentleman will forgive me, I will not, as I am very short of time. I might a bit later, once I have made a bit of progress.
I also want to speak to new clause 11, on the need for the viability assessments to be transparent to the public. Labour has consistently raised this issue, and we continue to believe it is of huge importance. If the public are to accept development in their area, they have to be absolutely certain that viability arrangements for site—in particular, safety integrity level requirements and section 106 requirements—are all that they should be.
As things stand, a viability assessment lays bare to council officers the economics of a project, providing detailed financial evidence for a developer’s claim that a particular scheme would not be viable without reducing the number of affordable homes. The problem is that the assessments are not available for public scrutiny. Labour has commented that despite planning practice guidance encouraging transparency, developers may opt not to disclose their viability assessments to the public on the grounds of commercial confidentiality. It is widely accepted that that is sometimes done so that they can negotiate down their section 106 obligations without public scrutiny. As a consequence, affordable housing may be reduced and the quality of the built environment may suffer. We need a uniform approach to transparency, across the country—I am sure the Minister supports that—so that developers know that they will be open to public scrutiny wherever they decide to operate.
I move on to amendment 14. This Bill is the Government’s sixth piece of legislation on the planning system in six years. I hope that the current Minister will not continue what we saw in the past, namely the Government blaming the planning system, or various elements of it, for their failure to build enough homes. On this occasion, pre-commencement planning conditions are in the firing line. But as the Minister well knows from our time in Committee, there is a distinct lack of evidence that pre-commencement planning conditions slow up development. In fact, we heard a lot of evidence that they often make a development acceptable for a local community.
Pre-commencement conditions are also advantageous for a number of different stakeholders in the house building industry. They have certain advantages to developers, who may not be in a position to finalise details for a scheme but wish to secure planning permission as soon as possible. They have advantages for local authorities, because councils may, in practice, have limited legal ability to enforce conditions once a scheme is under way. Conditions are useful to the development industry in general, because they make it possible to permit schemes that might otherwise have to be refused.
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It makes little sense to us to make such important changes as the Minister wants to make to pre-commencement planning conditions, especially as the
evidence that we received suggested that the problem was not with the conditions but with the signing off of planning conditions in a timely manner. The evidence suggested that the problem was mostly with the resourcing of planning departments and the fact that they did not have enough officers to carry out enforcement, rather than with the pre-commencement conditions. We heard that that could slow up development or result in development being rejected because the conditions are not applied to it.
We intend to press to a vote new clause 11 and amendment 14, because we want to ensure that measures are in place not only to deliver the homes that we want in this country, but to make sure that they are in communities that have access to the services, jobs and general good-quality built environment and natural environment that people want.
I will give way to the right hon. Member for Wokingham (John Redwood) if he still wants to intervene.