My Lords, it is a pleasure as usual to follow the noble Lord, Lord Morris of Handsworth. It is becoming a habit that I get put down to follow him and, as usual, I agree with what he has just said, which fits in, as far as Clause 27 is concerned, very neatly with what has been said by a number of noble Lords around the House speaking from different perspectives—the noble Lord, Lord Monks, my noble friends Lady Brinton and Lady Wheatcroft. I am grateful to my noble friend Lady Wheatcroft for the thought that only in the House of Lords could someone quote Tom Lehrer and expect everyone present to understand the reference and remember the song.
This is a very unsatisfactory Bill. It is interesting that, apart from the Minister’s introduction, it has not had a huge amount of enthusiastic support around the House. I call it an “odds and sods” Bill. Perhaps that is too rude for the House of Lords. In the old days, before Governments labelled Bills with soundbites and slogans such as “growth”, and actually said what they were, it would have been called the Planning (Miscellaneous Provisions and One or Two Other Things) Bill, which is exactly what it is.
I get very frustrated by it. Following the noble Baroness introducing Tom Lehrer, I wondered what I should do to remove my frustrations and thought that perhaps going shooting pigeons in the park might at least take some of them away. However, there are lots of enthusiasts for nature conservation, and even pigeons, around here who might chase me if I tried to do that so I will forget that thought.
I should like to apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Rooker—I am sorry he has just gone—for heckling him when he was speaking, which is a most un-Lordly thing to do but just shows the frustrations over this Bill. He was adamant that ward councillors cannot deal with planning applications in their own wards.
I must live in a different universe from him because in December I was at a planning committee—a development control committee—at which not only was there a big planning application for housing in my ward but I moved the resolution that the committee then passed unanimously. So the world is not as the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, thinks.
Thinking of local government, I declare my interests in full—a habit I have as a local councillor, where the rules seem to be stricter than in your Lordships’ House. I am a vice-president of the LGA. As I have already said, I am an active member of Pendle Borough Council; I am “portfolio holder for planning policy”, whatever that may mean. I am an active member of committees on and a patron of the British Mountaineering Council. I am a member and patron of the Friends of the Lake District, and a member and vice-president of the Open Spaces Society. At least I know have those on record for the rest of the Bill.
I am concerned about Bills such as this, which seem to be the result of a circular that goes around to different departments saying, “We are putting this general Bill about growth and infrastructure forward. Have you anything lying around that you might like to put into it?”. There are two or three Bills of this nature going around at the moment. They can lead to unintended consequences and unexpected outcomes. The departments put forward what I might call one-off wheezes which have not been properly thought through in the context of the legislation of which they are part. There is no underlying structure or philosophy about it; they are just put forward and can have unintended consequences. The outcomes of the Bill might be like that.
They can also, if we are not careful, undermine the basic principles and structures that lie behind legislation, areas of government and government policy. We see that in this Bill. We see it in the planning system. We spent a huge amount of time discussing the passage of the Localism Act 2011; many noble Lords in the Chamber today were involved in it. Whatever many of us thought about the outcomes—some very good, some perhaps not so good—they were nevertheless based on the philosophy of how the planning system should work. Now we are putting it into practice to see if it will work.
However, what we have here is ad hoc, hotchpotch messing about with bits of the planning system, some of which seems to completely contradict the philosophy behind the Localism Act. We have changes to planning rules and regulations proposed for national parks, removing requirements on the Secretary of State to have special regard to conservation and the environment in national parks, done on an ad hoc basis. If the Government want to change the way national parks work to make them more growth-based, perhaps they should change the philosophy and the ideas behind it and let us have a national parks Bill under which we can discuss that properly across the board. Some of us would be very unhappy about it but we could nevertheless discuss it. Bringing one-off measures such as this forward, which may then be cited as a precedent—“We did that for that and it was not too disastrous, so we can do it for that and a bit more”—is not the way to get coherent legislation.
The proposals for town and village greens suffer from the same problem. There are clearly problems in some places. It is ludicrous that somebody can apply to register a town or village green on a piece of land which already has housing built on it. The whole procedure for registering town and village greens is, in my view, too legalistic and overbureaucratic. However, just bringing forward a one-off proposal which seems to solve a small-scale problem is not how to make quite significant changes to the whole regime set out in the Commons Act 2006. It is not the way to do legislation.
Noble Lords have referred to Clause 1 and the way in which naughty or inefficient councils might be designated so that people then have the option to make planning applications direct. Quite apart from the principle behind this, with which many of us are obviously not happy, all sorts of practical problems will arise which we have to look into very carefully in Committee. The local authority will need to keep a planning department because some planning applications will go to it, so presumably that department will get less cost-effective and efficient. We have not been given any proper figures on the cost to government of boosting the Planning Inspectorate. There is the question, for example, of pre-application discussions with applicants. Who will do those? Will it be the local planning authority? Will it be the Planning Inspectorate? Who will be responsible for that? Will it be the local planning authority up to some stage, and then, when people say, “Oh, we are not getting very far with that lot”, will it move to the Planning Inspectorate? Perhaps everything will have to start again.
Where the local planning authority has to do work, on behalf of the Planning Inspectorate or otherwise because the application has gone there in the first place, will it be reimbursed for that? Where will the planning applications fee go? It all seems to be a very messy sledgehammer to crack a nut, with lots of unintended compromises. If nothing else, we in the House of Lords have to probe properly the workability of it all, in the way that the House is very often so good at.
On Clause 8, on electronic communications, I am concerned about why these large cabinets are required and why the electronics industry, which is miniaturising everything at such a huge rate, still needs these cabinets which are the size of a big wardrobe. That kind of practical thing, in addition to all the other important points that have been made, must be sorted out.
On town and villages, under Clauses 13 and 14, there is a perfectly acceptable way of doing exactly what the Government want without driving a coach and horses though the very principle of the Commons Act and the registration of greens. There is a lot of misunderstanding about greens. They are not a planning designation. It is not a matter of deciding whether it is a good idea or not, it is a matter of fact. It originally came from prescriptive common-law rights acquired over time, which were first codified in the Commons Registration Act of 1965, and then most recently in the Commons Act 2006, of which some have a blessed memory. If we are to disrupt that whole system, we should do it very carefully. On the other hand, the Government said that they wanted to align the
commons registration system with the planning system where there were planning proposals. That is absolutely sensible. It can be done, and a consequence may be that the town and village greens registration system can be made more efficient. However, the way in which it is being done in the Bill abolishes people’s rights, rather than aligning them with the planning system.
I will certainly be making proposals in Committee that I hope the Government will at least consider and discuss sensibly. I look forward to the Committee, along with everybody else.
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