My Lords, this is the first time I have spoken on this Bill and I have a number of interests to declare. Unfortunately I was not able to be present at Second Reading, having been laid low by one of those 24-hour bugs which one hears so much about. I am here not to make good my Second Reading speech but to pick up on the specifics of this group of amendments. In so doing, I declare my interest as a practising chartered surveyor with an involvement with the planning system. I am also the president of the National Association of Local Councils, which is the national parent body of parish, town and neighbourhood councils.
I have been following the issue of planning and how it has unfolded from the times when we had county structure plans, and the planning system under that regime, through to the local development frameworks and regional spatial strategies, and now into this new era of local plans and the National Planning Policy Framework. As with all these situations, we are now in a transition. I fully recognise that and can understand some of the reasons why the Bill is framed in quite general terms. Picking up on the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Deben, I do think that there is a lacuna here, but it is slightly different from the one that he referred to.
There are lots of duties in the planning context but I see two particular ones in local plans. First, there is the duty to deliver on the national strategic needs, to which a local plan must have regard. We know what some of those needs are—housing, for instance, because of the statistics on household formation. The second thing, of course, is making local decisions for local people. Having not been able to deliver my Second Reading speech in person, I gave it to the Minister in writing. I have just had her reply, for which I thank her. I asked a question about what I saw as a lacuna between the National Planning Policy Framework, and what the Secretary of State is putting in place in that respect, and what has to be decided at local level in the local plan.
Picking up on the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, I would say that there is a high degree of variation between different planning authorities, be it geophysical, social or economic, and we cannot necessarily second-guess how those will bite. By virtue of localism and there being a greater say at community and neighbourhood level, the chances are that the way in which those are cast into the local plan will be different from what we have experienced hitherto.
However, the larger strategic and supra-local issues and imperatives cannot so easily be dealt with by localism in terms of the local plan if you are looking for a local voice and a local view. You require for that purpose the local view to be better informed and to look outside its own local existence in a way which I suspect is not the received wisdom of the fruits of localism being passed to communities and neighbourhoods. Some of these supra-local issues are going to be the least palatable to communities, particularly where they exceed the criteria for local organic need.
In putting in place the National Planning Policy Framework—here I echo what the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, said earlier—it was necessary to try to render down a lot of the guidance and everything else into a matter of simple arithmetic. My fear is that it has gone slightly too far in that respect and that some of the more specific guidance about growth and targets—those things that local plans needed to build into their criteria that sat above the strictly local level—is not so well informed under the National Planning Policy Framework. There is insufficient definition of those issues in the framework, as opposed to the laudable aspirations that it contains, for a local planning authority to be able to resolve them.
Housing need as an organic local construct, as against the national imperative of household formation, was a matter that I raised with the Minister. She did
not answer that question. I referred to a local authority of my acquaintance. I shall not name it and I would not be the judge of designation in such circumstances, but I have seen the numbers go up from one figure to another figure and back down again. This oscillation has taken no account of what has happened during the many years that have passed in the period starting with country structure plan targets and going on to regional spatial strategies. We are now back to a figure for that particular authority that is below the figure considered by the country structure plan and the SERPLAN decision-making process, yet we know that the numbers likely to be required, particularly in growth areas and key areas of economic growth, which is the circumstance of the authority that I had in mind, are mounting all the time—and there are aspirations. What has happened with the National Planning Policy Framework is simplicity—yes—but I am less sure that there is guidance that is of real use in informing local plans.
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In this situation, local planning authorities are obviously going to have to be judged. Where there is a lack of clarity, the risks of error, of an appeal going wrong or of a slow process as one tries to work things out on the hoof are likely to exacerbate the situation at precisely the time when we need slicker and speedier delivery of the economic fruits of growth and infrastructure development. It worries me that we do not know what the criteria are. I would therefore be in favour of something along the lines of Amendments 33 and 35, just by way of making sure that we are clear that there is not some elephant trap for a local planning authority inadvertently to step into, and to prevent it being designated as an underperforming authority for reasons that, as the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, touched on, are outside its control. We have to be very careful about that.
We have heard all sorts of things about the fact that we are in this together. We are indeed in this together: this is a community and a national momentum that has to be harnessed in order to take things forward, and we know what those things are. There are many issues relating to performance. I would be very worried about using the simple expedients of the speed of making decisions and the robustness of those decisions before an inspector is appointed by the Secretary of State. After all, it is ultimately the Secretary of State’s call whether the appeal goes one way or another. That offends against a degree of objectivity.
I therefore broadly support the amendments. I shall not make any more detailed comments than that—I have said quite enough—but that is why some of the amendments have considerable force in terms of the growth and infrastructure that we are trying to achieve under this Bill.