My Lords, I oppose Clause 12 standing part of the Bill. We have just heard how controversial this clause is. It is nothing to do with neighbourhood planning; it is all about the Secretary of State and the Government taking additional powers at the centre and issuing instructions to local authorities. Nothing I heard in the previous debate changed my mind on that. What lies at the heart of all this? It is a misguided notion that planning departments and planning committees—local authorities—are holding up development, not approving applications and generally being the root of the problem. That is nonsense. As I said before, I have served on a planning committee for many years and our planning department is certainly not sitting there deliberately not approving developments. The Committee has still not been given the evidence of all these problems; we await the letter.
No noble Lord present would dispute that we have a glut of planning permissions already approved in certain parts of the country. This is certainly the case in London and the south-east. I can walk around Lewisham, where I live, and see many applications that I have approved as a member of the committee and very little has happened. Once, in my own ward, nothing happened except a sign going up saying, “Permission to build x houses”.
We do have a problem with land-banking—people holding on to land, looking at its value but not moving forward. Again, I have never known a developer come forward to any committee I have sat on, either in Lewisham or when I was a member of Southwark Council, to suggest that the conditions the council was seeking to impose were somehow going to hold up its development. It was never suggested, in either authority, that we were a hindrance to development. I just do not see that that is the problem that the Government suggest it is. I contend further that some conditions can be positive in enabling things to get under way and agreed quickly, with the local authority and the developer or builder concerned moving forward in a collaborative way.
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In Committee and at Second Reading, we have talked about learning the lessons of history. If we do not learn those lessons and make sure we put in place provisions to ensure that what we build is sustainable, we are being irresponsible and reckless. Surely the Government will want to work on the basis that we learn from what we did wrong, particularly in the 1960s. For me, building homes that are poorly designed and constructed, that fail to take account of modern development techniques, that are not energy efficient, cannot reduce our carbon footprint and are not sustainable, especially in terms of drainage, is plain daft. I can see no justification for the Minister, on behalf of the Government, to put forward this clause as it stands. I beg to move that Clause 12 do not stand part of the Bill.