It is a pleasure to follow that characteristically sensible speech from the hon. Member for Waveney (Peter Aldous). I put on record our thanks for their lordships’ continued engagement on the Bill and all the work they have done on it over many months. After considering an extensive number of Lords amendments to the Bill last week, just two issues remain for us to debate again. The first is remote local government meetings.
Labour remains firmly of the view that while in-person council meetings should continue to predominate, there are circumstances in which virtual or hybrid local government meetings might be either useful or necessary. We also maintain that permitting their use in certain instances would have a number of additional benefits, not least in helping to reduce barriers to public engagement in the planning process, which is a goal shared across the House. As has been previously noted, an extremely broad range of organisations support change in this area, including the Local Government Association, Lawyers in Local Government, the Association of Democratic Services Officers, the Society of Local Council Clerks and the National Association of Local Councils. Indeed, as the hon. Member for Buckingham (Greg Smith) pointed out during last week’s debate, evidence from NALC suggests that support for it among local councils is overwhelming, with 90% of town and parish councils wanting the ability to hold virtual meetings in some form to widen participation.
As we just heard, it is not just those organisations and authorities and those on the Labour Benches who support greater local discretion in this area. In last weeks’ debate, the right hon. Members for Chipping Barnet (Theresa Villiers) and for North Somerset (Dr Fox) and the hon. Members for Buckingham, for Waveney and for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley) all expressed support for a degree of flexibility so that councils could enable remote participation in meetings in certain circumstances. No one is arguing that we should require every local government meeting to be virtual or hybrid. Doing so would clearly undermine the principle that members of the public should have suitable opportunities to interact in-person with their local representatives.
Instead, the case is being made for a degree of local discretion so that such meetings would be permitted in certain circumstances.
Lords amendment 22B addresses the Government’s understandable concern that permitting councils to hold wholly virtual meetings might have unintended and adverse consequences for local democracy. The amendment would allow Ministers to determine by regulations the range of circumstances in which hybrid meetings could take place. For example, they might choose to enable parish councillors in more remote parts of a given authority area to attend meetings virtually while ensuring that most are still required to be present in person. To take another example, they might choose to allow members of the public—say, people with mobility issues or those with children—to participate actively in planning committees, while councillors would still be required to attend in person. We believe that this is a reasonable and proportionate amendment, and we will support it.
The second issue concerns the planning system’s role in mitigating and adapting to global heating. The Government’s amendment in lieu is noticeably weaker than Lords amendment 45 as it applies only to national development management policies rather than all national policy, planning policy or advice relating to the development or use of land. It also excludes precise statutory definitions of what constitutes mitigation and adaptation. Nevertheless, we welcome that the Government have made a concession on this issue by tabling their amendment.
However, while we welcome the fact that the Government’s amendment in lieu would ensure consideration of climate mitigation and adaptation in the preparation or modification of NDMPs, it would not achieve what Lords amendment 45 would: namely, to establish genuine coherence between the planning system and our country’s climate commitments, not least by requiring local planning authorities to have regard to climate when making decisions on individual planning applications. The planning system in its current form is manifestly failing to play its full part in addressing the climate emergency. Indeed, one might go so far as to argue that it is actively hindering our ability to mitigate and adapt to climate change in myriad different ways.
The Bill is a missed opportunity to fully align the planning system with our climate mitigation and adaptation goals and ensure that new development produces resilient and climate-proofed places. The provisions in the Bill that require local plans to be designed in such a way as to contribute to the mitigation of, and adaptation to, climate change are welcome, but they are transposed from existing legislation introduced 15 years ago, and, alone, they are not sufficient. The promised related update to the national planning policy framework to ensure that it contributes to climate change mitigation and adaptation as fully as possible is vital, but it will not take place until well after the Bill has received Royal Assent if it materialises at all during what remains of this Parliament.
As we have argued consistently throughout the passage of the Bill, there is a pressing need for clear and unambiguous national policy guidance on climate change, a purposeful statutory framework to align every aspect of the planning system with net zero, and an overarching duty on the Secretary of State, local planning authorities and those involved in neighbourhood plan making to
achieve climate change mitigation and adaptation when preparing plans and policies or exercising their planning decision-making functions.
The Climate Change Committee recommended in its 2022 progress report that
“Net zero and climate resilience should be embedded within the planning reforms”
contained in the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill.
As things stand, they have not been. In this week—of all weeks—when we have seen once again the impact on communities across the country of the more frequent extreme weather events that climate change is driving, we should look to improve how the planning system responds to the climate emergency. The Government amendment in lieu is welcome, but it does not go far enough. For that reason, we will support Lords amendment 45.