Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee
Oral evidence: Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill, HC 309
Monday 20 June 2022
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 20 June 2022.
Members present: Mr Clive Betts (Chair); Bob Blackman; Ian Byrne; Florence Eshalomi; Darren Henry; Andrew Lewer; Mary Robinson.
Questions 112 - 165
Witnesses
I: Victoria Hills, Chief Executive at Royal Town Planning Institute; Christopher Young QC; and Dr Hugh Ellis, Director of Policy at Town and Country Planning Association.
Witnesses: Victoria Hills, Christopher Young QC and Dr Hugh Ellis.
Q112 Chair: Welcome, everyone, to this afternoon session of the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Select Committee. This afternoon we are having an evidence session relating to the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill and we are going to look particularly at the planning measures in that Bill.
Before we go on to our witnesses I would ask members of the Committee who are here to put on record any particular interests they may have that may be relevant to this particular inquiry. I am a vice president of the Local Government Association.
Ian Byrne: I employ a councillor in my office, Chair.
Mary Robinson: I employ a councillor on my staff too.
Chair: Those are our particular interests. Now over to the witnesses and first I take the witnesses who in the room with us today.
Victoria Hills: I am the chief executive of the Royal Town Planning Institute.
Chair: Thank you very much, Victoria, for joining us.
Christopher Young: Good afternoon. I am a Queen's Counsel from No5 Chambers and I specialise in town and country planning. Just over my shoulder here I am assisted by James Corbet Burcher and Odette Chalaby who will be assisting with the answers.
Chair: Barristers always travel with advice behind them on these occasions this case as well as in court. Thank you very much. Finally, online we have Hugh Ellis.
Dr Ellis: I am director of policy at the Town and Country Planning Association.
Q113 Chair: Thank you. We will ask questions, some of them we may direct specifically to one witness, other times we will ask everyone who wants to make a contribution. If you do agree with what others have said you only have to say you agree to make sure we can get all the important questions we need to ask you this afternoon covered in the time available.
First to Victoria Hills. It is quite a long Bill. We have the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill. In the Second Reading debate I described it as a planning Bill with a levelling up wraparound. Is that a fair comment, do you think?
Victoria Hills: I think it is a fair comment. I recognise that the world has moved on considerably since we had the Planning for the Future White Paper. At the Royal Town Planning Institute, we have considered the Bill with great interest and consider that the intentions of levelling up are very much harnessing the potential power of planning to deliver on those intentions and particularly regeneration now included as part of it. The Bill does represent some fundamental changes to our planning system, there is no doubt about that and we will get on to some of those shortly. What we recognise has moved since the last time we spoke at this Committee is that there has been a broad recognition in this Bill of the importance of a well-resourced, well-positioned planning system to enable the ambitions, the priorities of levelling up. We are delighted that it is being positioned as not just a planning Bill but a planning and regeneration Bill. There is an opportunity here, if it is done in the correct way and resourced properly, that planning is absolutely going to be the lead domino in delivering on levelling up.
Dr Ellis: We do see it as a planning Bill but the wrapping of levelling up is pretty thin in terms of those opening clauses and the meaningfulness of what levelling up means. However, the Levelling Up White Paper contained issues like health inequalities, which are desperately important.
The difficulty is that this Bill does not consolidate planning legislation so it ends up giving us a very complex system and our concern is that if we are not careful it will not address the fundamental challenges, particularly cost of living, health and the climate crisis. We are keen for aspects of the Bill but there is a very great deal more to be done. The difficulty I think is that there some advice to Government over the last two years about these challenges and how to respond to them and much of that is not in this. Particularly not practical measures that planning can support for communities.
Chair: We will come on to some of those in due course, I am sure. Christopher Young.
Christopher Young: I would agree entirely with the description. I think it is absolutely spot on. There are many clauses in the Bill that amend existing planning legislation and collectively they are substantial.
The second point is that in its name and in its structure it avoids some of the controversy and fanfare around the Housing White Paper, which was not popular, focusing very much on issues like zoning.
Thirdly, it is entirely appropriate to have the legislation and to focus on planning because, as Victoria said, planning is probably the number one mechanism by which a lot of the levelling up can be achieved through regional support, regional planning, focusing on those type of issues. There is also an urgent need to address the significant problems in local plan making at the moment. I am sure the Committee is familiar with those but we are seeing—I would not say a collapse but certainly a significant challenge to local plan making in certain parts of the country where local plans are not being made at the very local district level.
Q114 Chair: I am sure we will come back to that issue as it is a particularly important one. I have a number of further question and I will come to one witness each but if you want to add in other comments, that is absolutely fine.
Hugh Ellis, do the planning provisions in the Bill address the priorities of levelling up and achieving net zero?
Dr Ellis: I think in reverse order it was disappointing to us that there is no legal link that welds together the Climate Act and the Planning Act. This is a story that we have been arguing for, as many other organisations have, for years. To be very specific, what this Bill needed to do was to make clear in law that the planning system has to deliver on the budget regime and the Climate Act. All that has happened is that we have the policy legal neutral where they have not removed the climate obligations that exist in planning but neither have they strengthened them.
There is a very important issue about how that could have driven action on climate change, and planning is so important on that. Other aspects are there, particularly the health crisis and cost of living crisis. There were a whole series of quite creative options being kicked around, which go to the heart of the local aspect of planning. Planning is there to enable local communities to find solutions to these crises. I will pick one example, which is food and local food growing. All sorts of suggestions were made into this process about how the planning in local government could encourage that. There is nothing there. There is no detailed practical measure on the one hand and then at the bigger picture level the Bill does not contain anything we needed in terms of a national programme or effective regional planning. We are disappointed with that regarding its outcomes.
I think a quick summary would be that this is absolutely not fit for purpose for delivering on the climate crisis just as one issue.
Q115 Chair: Victoria, you have been making representations for changes in policy. Does the Bill do what you asked for, or does it do things you did not ask for and miss out on things you did ask for?
Victoria Hills: It does quite a bit of what we asked for. I am going to focus on bits where I think it doesn’t quite hit the mark. As you rightly note, we have been publicly stating the areas where we think it doesn’t quite hit the mark. If we just take the national development management policies, we are not against the principle of nationalising effectively some of the policies because we do recognise local plans are very lengthy, they are very time-consuming, they are very costly. Any opportunity to streamline some of that is, of course, to be welcomed.
One of the aspects here is there is a lack of detail, as I sit before you today I could not tell you if 20%, 50% or 80% of local plans are due to be nationalised. With that does come a notion of trust as to—without having seen that detail we just generally do not know. Putting that to one side, some of the initial kickback of the earlier proposals for planning reform related to that lack of democracy downstream. If things are to be zoned and tied up upstream then there is a lack of engagement downstream. While that has now been addressed what we think we are seeing here is a lack of engagement upstream. It has flipped to the other side of the equation. The proposal on the table today does not seem to have any engagement with the community and these national policies. We have given it back in one area and taken out in another. That does concern us, if there is going to be a lack of engagement with the public on national policies then that is an area of concern for us. I can go into a bit more detail on that but I want to move the other areas of concern.
Chair: We will pick that particular issue up.
Victoria Hills: Thank you. The improving environmental outcomes assessment report, we think there are a number of areas there that are not quite—
Chair: We will come back to that.
Victoria Hills: Okay, I am just putting placeholders in. The infrastructure levy, what we need to avoid is something getting slightly more complicated than we have in place already, which is already quite a complicated system but in the round does work in places. We think there are some areas of tweaks there that you will come back to in detail in questions, of course.
Strengthening the development management strategies, there has to be an incentivisation there for devolved areas to take them on board. At the moment there does not seem to be those level of incentives to require people to go along this particular tack, which we think is an important one. If you were looking to give more flexibility, for example, on the national policies then tying it into devo deals surely could be a place to do it with directly elected leaders.
Two final other things, which are omissions. At the institute we thought that the advent of virtual planning committees were helpful in some respects, that having a hybrid element could be a helpful thing. Obviously, as you know, those powers fell by the wayside when the Bill ended. We were told you would need some primary legislation to make them a real thing. Here we have some primary legislation and yet they are nowhere to be seen in the Bill.
My final point, if I may, as an institute we were quite excited from the original Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission all the way through to the White Paper that the recognition of the importance of place makers and having a chief planning officer at the top table of local government to put all this together and deliver this levelling up, working across the piece, is very important. We were dismayed that the chief place maker seemed to have vanished from this Bill.
Q116 Chair: I think we are going to pick those issues as well as we go through.
Christopher Young, we have a Bill; we also have one or two clauses, which are apparently placeholder clauses and are not what will be there at the end. That was flagged up at the beginning, and there is a lot of secondary legislation to come where the details will be. This is surely a lot more work for planning lawyers and more expensive cruises for planning QCs to—
Christopher Young: I think it was Tuscan villas. I don’t have a Tuscan villa, just so we are clear. The position is that planning is described by the courts as a creature of statute and it stems from statute. A lot of the real detail is in the policy, the NPPF, but as to this concern about secondary legislation, I do not think the Committee should be concerned. That is a perfectly normal part of the procedure for planning. A great deal of the detail is found in the secondary legislation just because of the complexity of the system and, to give an example, there is a lot of provisions in part 3, chapter 1 about planning data. I think that type of detail you would expect to see in regulations and certainly the system operates on that basis.
I did, as you invited us to do, watch the whole of Michael Gove’s appearance before this Committee and I heard the assurances from him that secondary legislation would be considered by Parliament. That concern, which I know is a separate concern, is a matter for yourselves but it is not unusual to have a lot of secondary legislation.
Q117 Chair: One of the concerns is “considered by Parliament” and “properly scrutinised” are not always the same thing. Many delegated legislation provisions, SIs, go through with minimal scrutiny and certainly without the witness scrutiny that we can get on the Select Committee or indeed in the full Bill before it goes into Committee.
Christopher Young: I understand that entirely. I also, to be frank, don’t blame Ministers for leaving some of the detail to secondary legislation because the White Paper, Planning for the Future proposals—which had a lot to recommend them—hit an incredibly difficult journey, partly because they were very badly timed to coincide with changes to the standard method or, as this House would consider, the mutant algorithm as it was labelled. There is some intelligent thinking here, not attempting to avoid parliamentary scrutiny but just recognising some of the detail early on, as in the White Paper, can cause concern, unnecessary concern, and so the scrutiny is for the House, and I am not as familiar as you are with how that goes through. Certainly there is a lot here that is to be determined later.
Chair: Do either Victoria or Hugh want to pick up any further points in those questions, just briefly, before we go on?
Dr Ellis: I accept that planning is considerably through secondary legislation but the balance is wrong in this piece of law. The placeholder, of course, is on street votes—I know we will come back to it—but even on the national infrastructure levy, the problem with that is that it is not clear that the system has been worked out. The system has to be taken as a whole with a lot of moving parts. What you are asking to do is to sign up to the provision of some measures without being able to see the secondary legislation to see whether the whole will operate effectively because planning is so complicated. It is important. Particularly the failure to consolidate legislation makes a normal person’s approach to understanding this law where you require a QC. That is not good law making. It has been over 30 years since we consolidated planning legislation, that is not good law making because the system is already legally complicated enough and amendments on amendment on amendment is not helpful creating a clean system people can understand.
Victoria Hills: I do not disagree with what I have just heard and to add to it. The number of placeholder clauses that are in this Bill, and there are quite a few of them, just mean there is an opportunity for the piecemeal consultations to perhaps end up with some unintended consequences without that read across. I am re-emphasising the point that we have just heard.
Chair: We will move on now to public participation in the planning system, which I think we all agree is extremely important. If the planning system is going to take people with them for the end results they have to be seen to have their voice in it. Ian Byrne.
Q118 Ian Byrne: Hugh, I will ask this one to you to begin with. The Government claims that the proposals in the Bill will enable communities to have a major say in local plans, giving them more opportunity to shape what happens in their areas. Will the proposals really lead to a greater say and influence by the public?
Dr Ellis: The short answer to that question is no. There is a major gap between the rhetoric about public involvement and participation and the direct provisions of this legislation. I do not see the clause that solves the public trust problem. It is not simply that the current system is being sustained in this legislation, we all know that you cannot build in this country without consent and that generating consent is one of the prime functions of the planning system. It is hard work but there is no alternative to that in a democracy. The problem here is that they have created a more complex level plan and split it into three elements: the supplementary plan, what is called the local plan and the strategic level plan. Only in one of those is there the right to be heard at the examination. The right to be heard is the only civil right—but you do not have it in planning applications, that is discretionary—that the citizen has to a voice in the planning process, which is not discretionary on somebody else.
The fact that the strategic level plan prohibits the right to be heard in any form of examination and the fact that the supplementary plan only makes it discretionary, means that civil right has been watered down. Current local plans can do all three of those things, they can be strategic, they can write a design code and they can lots of other things if they care to. That is very worrying.
That is a setback for us and then the Government relies on digitisation to be the great hope of increasing participation. It might be in terms of the process, but being able to access information and know about it is not the same as being able to access the decision-making arena and talk to the decision maker. That is absolutely critical. That is why the right to be heard is just so important in the plan making process.
I would say, just finally, that this Bill will not solve the public trust problem. You have to have a settlement between communities, local authorities, developers and Government. You have to have a balance there about what control people have.
My question remains, as it has been for 30 years, what power are we giving local people over those decisions? There are a combination of rights to be heard being removed or watered down and national management development policies, which are set centrally means that local communities will have less control over what happens and that will result in more protest and more challenge in system that does not command public trust.
Ian Byrne: Thank you. Comprehensive. Do you have anything to add, Victoria?
Victoria Hills: I would add that because we do not have the level of detail and, as I mentioned, any sense of proportion as to what proportion of local plans are going to be effectively nationalised there is a big question mark there. We are not against streamlining duplicate policies to make local plans simpler, quicker and, quite frankly, cheaper and more likely to get adopted, because that is the big problem here is there are far too many local authorities who do not have an adopted local plan.
There is a risk in not knowing that data as this Bill progresses through that there could be rather a lot of this, in which case you could have a situation where locally elected councillors and the community are left scratching their head saying, “Hang on a moment, that is not what we thought was intended”. There is a level of uncertainty at the moment and I think if there is a hell bent desire to nationalise as much as possible then to get a better outcome you have to incentivise better spatial plan making within that so why not tie it into devolution deals and provide some flexibility that way for areas who perhaps want to go above and beyond, and that is my second point on this.
Of course we would want to see any nationalisation of policies as a base minimum and the opportunity for areas to go above and beyond should be within their local democratic mandate to do so if they want to. That is not what is currently on the table.
Q119 Ian Byrne: Touching on that point, are you worried about the mechanism that is in this Bill that allows the Secretary of State to grant planning permission for controversial developments and bypass the planning system completely?
Victoria Hills: We recognise the importance of community consultation and engagement and where you get great place making is where you have involved the community from the outset. That is a recurring message and a recurring theme you will continue to hear us say.
We are not against streamlining where it is appropriate to do it but the importance of place making is too important on local communities for all the broad objectives we have heard of that, you have to provide that opportunity for the community to get involved in the right way at the right time. It is not clear from what we in front of us at the moment if that is going to be the case.
Christopher Young: I would just add I have a slightly different view, which I don’t think this is a radical change in the consultation as it stands. When Simon Gallagher appeared before you, the director of the Department, he explained his intention is still to have two rounds of consultation for local plans as we currently have so that remains the same. That is for the joint spatial development strategies, the supplementary plans are akin to supplementary planning guidance. There is a move towards neighbourhood plans, or the format of neighbourhood plans, where there is an expectation there will not be an examination of those. They may be concerned with design codes. It depends very much on the content of the supplementary plan.
I don’t think it is a radical change, there is a bigger problem—if I could just spend 30 seconds on that—which is that there is plenty of engagement in the planning system, I see that with applications and examinations in public. There is plenty of consultation but it tends to be from a particular demographic in a particular group of people. They are often opposed to development, nothing motivates people more than their opposition to development, as any Member of Parliament will know. What you do not hear from is the silent majority who are not necessarily directly affected. That is a major problem so the provisions relating to the digitisation, which is inevitably going to appeal to more younger people, to be able to access information online, those are undoubtedly appropriate provisions.
There is no real shortage, I would suggest, of participation in the system but it is not a balanced participation.
Q120 Ian Byrne: From your perspective, from a legal perspective, are you worried about the rates of digitisation with exclusion threatening elements of society from participating?
Christopher Young: That is a good point, there are people who are excluded from digitisation and my mother-in-law at 89 years-old would be one of them. There is always a need for that participation through a paper-based process, but it is reaching people, that is the difficulty. If you are sat in your house at 50 Concord Avenue, Chatham, how does this get to you? The digitisation will help the majority of people who are online, including my 80 year-old mother, but there is a section of society that there needs to be special effort to reach. If that answers your question.
Dr Ellis: I would only say that I think this is such a fundamental point. The new supplementary plans are very different because they are development plan documents and so is the strategic level plan. They are development plans documents with legal status in planning. Wherever there is a development plan document, particularly if you take the other provisions of the Bill to strengthen the legal status of the development plan, there must be a right to be heard.
On the wider point, I think it is difficult. I recognise people are frustrated with particular attitudes they encounter in planning. All I can say is that my experience as a pro housing strategic planner—that leaves me with some interesting conversations with communities—is the networks we work with like the flood forum and many other communities are utterly locked out of the planning system. The right to be heard is the only chance they ever get to be able to speak to the decision maker.
Our concern is about rebuilding public trust and that is a settlement where we create certainty in the system. Whether there might be quite a lot of noise around planning, what we want to do is move that noise into meaningful participative outcomes that shape places.
I would say this about it, if those rights to be heard are not reserved in development plan documents then it means that a strategic plan, voluntary one, can change greenbelt allocations and no one has a right to be heard in that process. That cannot stand because it will just cause total chaos on the ground. This is a fundamental point for us.
Q121 Florence Eshalomi: Christopher, thank you for your comments. I agree with some of your comments where you are saying, in essence, you think it is a balance and there is enough engagement and consultation with local residents. I represent a South London constituency, across the bridge, quite a number of big developments and when you look at the fact that some of the developments will have—not just across London but across the country—a major impact on the people that live there that is why they get involved and you may not hear from people who are not directly impacted.
In terms of the language around planning notifications, the way that the letters come in, it is planning jargon. Do you not feel that some of that needs to change to get the communities who are not currently engaged, by moving everything online, yes, you will capture another group if everything is legal, we know that councillors are following due process as set out in the current legislation but some of that process is missing and bypassing such a large cohort of residents?
Christopher Young: I couldn’t agree with you more. Three points on that. First of all, you are absolutely right, some of the language in the letters they receive could definitely be improved. That is easily achieved. That is a good point.
Secondly, this observation about participation varies enormously depending on where you are in the country and I think it would be an almost completely linear curve to pitch that against social economic status. So those in affluent areas are very aware of their rights and their ability to participate and object. Many other people do not and that is almost a truism in the planning system. How do you reach those people? How do you engage them? I have been in Barking this morning looking at huge, large scale regeneration in relation to a compulsory purchase case and the level of participation there is much lower than you would see in Essex, just 20 or 30 miles away. There is a real need to get people engaged in that. They have other priorities sometimes. They are not thinking about the protection and the value of their house, they are thinking about—
Florence Eshalomi: Paying their bills.
Christopher Young: Absolutely right, and yet the housing is fundamental, and the price of housing absolutely fundamental to the crisis we are now talking about, which is a bigger issue. I hope we come on to that as well. I completely agree with you, if I may.
Ian Byrne: Did you want to come in there, Victoria?
Victoria Hills: Very briefly. This comes back to resourcing, I do not know if we will get on to planning fees. You can have great community engagement if you have well-resourced local planning teams who have that, what I call, holding the ring. They also have the golden thread of the conversation with the community because they do not helicopter in and out and they are there.
It will all come back to resourcing and local authority chief officers I talk to who are well-resourced are able to put that capacity in to do that genuine authentic community engagement. The ones who are stripped back to the bone can’t. I think it is an important part of this entire conversation that we do not forget the important part of resourcing and how we are going to pay for all of this. All of this that we are talking about is a lot more work than local authorities are currently doing. Local authorities are currently on their knees in most planning department just trying to keep going with what they are doing and potentially what is coming down the line is a lot more work so we have to resource it.
Chair: I will bring Mary in now on strategic planning as she has to go back to the Chamber to present a Bill shortly.
Q122 Mary Robinson: The Bill allows for spatial development strategies across local planning authority borders. There are already a number of joint local plans in preparation or approved. Plans for unitary authorities and plans for areas such as London and Greater Manchester, which has nine of the 10 local authorities taking part in a strategic plan. Is this mix of wider than local plan sufficient to support the levelling up agenda? Should the Bill have gone further in suggesting subregional and regional planning frameworks?
Victoria Hills: I am happy to go first, because this is up our street. It is a great question. I mentioned earlier about the incentives, because the duty to co-operate has been replaced by these new joint spatial development strategies. You are quite right, in making them voluntary we can see in areas where perhaps they were not quite as voluntary and they have not quite worked. What is going to be special about these to make these voluntary ones work? What we will be pushing for is a slight amendment on that front that we have to incentivise the areas to take these on in the first place, hence I mentioned tied up with devo deals.
Should you be handing out a devo deal unless you are requiring a spatial strategy? We think probably not. This business of place making and planning is so important it should be tied in with any of those devo deals, so we definitely want to see the incentivisation there. Also this new mechanism that replaces the duty to co-operate, it should be strengthened to include county councils and these combined authorities as well. The incentive there in addition to the deals may be looking at ways of working with metro mayors, for example, things that they can do and things that perhaps are left to them. One of the things you might leave to them might be housing numbers, for example, but requiring them to do other things.
There is absolutely room for improvement. It is one of our top six amendments we will be pushing for.
Q123 Mary Robinson: Dr Hugh Ellis, what is your view? Should we push for larger regional areas?
Dr Ellis: If you wanted a logical system that reflects England’s diverse geography you need a national strategy at the highest level and you also need some good regional and subregional planning, with the caveat that it has to be democratic and it has to be participatory. We do need it and we need it because that is how economies and environments work. They work on bigger than local authority boundaries. There is a practical need for that.
At the moment my concern is that the legal status of the plan in Liverpool is different from the plan in Manchester and both of them have different legal status to the plan in London. We need to bring some logic to the system. It is charitably a mosaic, uncharitably chaotic. A lot of this hangs on Government playing a stronger role in where we need these strategic plans. I will give you an example of one that is not on the table, which is looking at the east coast of England from the Humber to the Thames, 33 authorities there, district councils, having to deal with 1.5 metre of sea level rise in the next 80 years. Government knows that because those are Government figures.
In that sense Government should at least play a guiding hand behind working out where we need strategic arrangements in England. It is vital that we have it and the abolition of regional plans, which was driven by a lack of public trust because there wasn’t significant accountability of them, that took away—it was a disaster for England as regional plans did good work. They just needed to be accountable to people but the fact that we had them made our planning much more strategic, much more effective.
Q124 Mary Robinson: What about the abolition of the duty to co-operate to be replaced by a requirement on specific bodies to assist in the plan making process? It was not much-loved. Will the new provision in the Bill lead to more co-operation do you think?
Dr Ellis: I can give a very quick answer to that, which is no it won’t. The duty to co-operate was not—[Inaudible]—it was trying to solve a problem created by a non-strategic planning framework but to make it just a policy requirement worries me. The duty to co-operate at least provided a minimum standard. It may well speed up development plans, and that is a great ambition, but it does not solve the cross border issue, I am afraid. We do genuine strategic planning in this country and look at the effort that has gone into the west of England plan that is going nowhere now because there is not a framework for delivery it. There has to be some statutory basis to regional planning in this country.
Christopher Young: To be absolutely blunt, the decision to remove regional planning was the greatest catastrophe to visit the planning system certainly since I have been practising from the late 1990s. It was an unbelievable mistake. It was an election promise of the Conservative Party in 2010. I am not making any political statement here but it was an election promise because they were said to be unaccountable. It has been a disaster and the duty to co-operate was to replace it. The ex-chief planning inspector, after he left post, described the duty to co-operate as the most dismal of inventions. It has been completely ineffective in the majority of areas where issues have been difficult. There have been some shining beacons of it being successful, Hull and East Riding work together very well to produce a joint plan but in many parts of the country it has just been an excuse not to deliver the housing and development that is required.
The answer is exactly as Hugh has been saying. First of all you need a national strategy. Steve Quartermain the immediate past chief planning inspector at the Department was a huge fan of this. You need a national strategy to set out the 300,000, which in answer to your questions Mr Gove said was still very much the Government’s commitment to the country. I personally think you can go higher than that but that raises issues of capacity.
You need regional plans that tier down from that national strategy to identify where they are at. On a simple level, linked to some of the questions you asked Mr Gove, Sussex is covered in designations such as national parks, AONB, where they struggle to deliver housing. Coastal flooding, difficulties with road infrastructure and so on. In a wider south-east plan that would inevitably lead to the focus on the Oxford to Cambridge arc, Milton Keynes, and that should have been in place and we should have been planning on that basis for the last two decades. Yet we have not done that as a consequence of which there has been a real difficulty in making long-term strategic plans.
These new plans are a step in the right direction but we need regional plans. I have not met a professional planner, somebody in the developments industry or local authority people who do not think that is absolutely the answer we are looking for.
Q125 Mary Robinson: The new spatial development strategy is voluntary. Would you agree with the link to the devolution?
Christopher Young: Yes, it is often beyond the remit of us to talk about devolution. I am certainly someone who is focused on planning but there is a link there and there is definitely an importance to having more devolved power so that this democracy deficit at the regional level is more accountable. I have been involved significantly in the west of England plan that fell apart on behalf of a consortium of 10 developers and house builders, and it has completely disintegrated. There was not the political leadership.
In contrast, in Manchester, despite Stockport dropping there has been a real concerted and successful effort, backed by Andy Burnham, to deliver the houses and that is going to examination in October. That is the future for large urban areas. If Manchester can get it over the line then they will have achieved where many other areas have failed. Crucially what Manchester is doing is grappling with the difficulty of greenbelt and delivering—I, with Mr Corbet Burcher, appear on behalf of Peel who have a lot of land holdings there. There are significant releases from the greenbelt to deliver the houses that Manchester need.
Here in London—I participated in that local plan—the issue of greenbelt did not even get a mention. It was a half day session and no recommendations were made for it, yet rolling out the greenbelt, even a few hundred yards, would deliver millions of new homes.
Q126 Mary Robinson: I should declare an interest as a Stockport MP so I do know the details of this. Obviously there is a Stockport plan in process now so it will be interesting to see how any interactions occur as that is being drawn up.
Dr Ellis, do you have anything to add to that?
Dr Ellis: No, I don’t.
Victoria Hills: I would add if we are going to have the voluntary spatial plans then where is the incentive to have them unless you tie them into some sort of fiscal or infrastructure goodie? They can work incredibly well but there is nothing like a carrot to bring people to the table is my experience of having been involved in such documents previously.
Chair: Ian, back to you on public participation.
Q127 Ian Byrne: This one is for you, Chris. We have seen a legal opinion from Landmark Chambers, which concludes, “Overall in our view the Bill radically incentivises planning decision-making and substantially erodes public participation in the planning system”. What is your reaction to that assessment?
Christopher Young: I have read the advice provided. I do not agree with it. That is one QC disagreeing with another; happens quite a bit. I have an enormous amount of respect for Paul Brown who was the chair of the Planning Bar Association but I do not recognise, in many ways, what is being described because it is being suggested that a lot of participation will be removed because there will be a national policy and the national policy will have the equal status to the development plan.
In reality what happens is exactly that already. We have the NPPF, I am sure you are all familiar with the NPPF, and that has a particularly important status as a material consideration. Interestingly in the Supreme Court case involving Richborough Estates and Hopkins Homes the Supreme Court issued a letter, notes, to all the barristers just before the case—I was involved in the case—saying, “Can you just direct us to where the NPPF is set out in legislation?” I can tell you, nothing causes a fluster among a collection of barristers more than that from Lord Carnwarth because it is not provided in there. The Supreme Court took the view it was implied by various provisions but there is no statutory provision for national policy, which is the driving force of nearly everything associated with the delivery of houses and employment.
To add to your question directly, the NPPF, the decision-making, whether it is at application level or appeal is omnipresent through the whole process. There are provisions in the NPPF that ensure the decision makers consider the NPPF alongside the development plan already. For example, paragraph 2.18 in the annex to the NPPF requires applications to be considered and that you should take into account national policy when determining applications. Paragraph 35 is when plans are examined they have to be seen to be consistent with national policy and the presumption in favour of sustainable development expressly requires consideration of whether the development plan policies are up to date and they will be judged up to date, not by the age of them but how consistent they are with the NPPF, which is paragraph 2.18.
That advice is suggesting that somehow something is being removed from participation and that the national policy will now replace the development plan. I don’t think what is being proposed—
Q128 Ian Byrne: You do not think it substantially erodes public participation in the planning system?
Christopher Young: No, not at all.
Dr Ellis: I think this again a very important point and I am going to muster what is left of my professional credibility and not argue with a very fine legal opinion, but it is policy not law, not required by statute, and its status in planning is very influential but there is wriggle room. It is policy. Where there are good reasons to set that NPPF policy aside that can be done quite lawfully.
What is proposed here I think is wholly different. It is saying that the policy will be translated into a document with legal status and not only equality but trumping the local development where there are areas of dispute. That is what the Bill says. Where there is an area in dispute it will be resolved in favour of the policy described in the national development management policy. That sets the national development management policy up as a national development plan document with that kind of legal status. That is significantly different to the NPPF. Then the mistake that has been made is to not wrap around it the safeguards about parliamentary scrutiny or public consultation, the point that Victoria has always made. We had the primacy of the development plan. Now we have a new kind of development plan described at a national level that outranks, where there is a dispute, the local development plan. That is a significant change for me as a planner.
Victoria Hills: We sit perhaps somewhere in the middle of the two views you have heard. We do walk a fine line, with a foot in both camps for our membership. We are not against nationalising some of these policies, however, it is our opinion, and I am not going to argue with legal opinion, of those bits that are going to be nationalised there will not be the level of local engagement in some of those DM policies that there is currently. I am not a lawyer, a barrister or a QC but that is our interpretation. I was going to use the Top Trump analogy, but Hugh already has, but in a game of Top Trumps there is only one winner, and it is not the local plan for policy. That is why the extent is very important. That is why I have written to the Secretary of State asking for some clarity as to what we are talking about. If we are just talking about a few plain vanilla policies that everybody has anyway, we can live with that, but we do not know, and that is the point.
Q129 Florence Eshalomi: That is the point, Chair, because when we asked the Secretary of State at Committee last week about these policies the Secretary of State responded to us, just in comment to all three of you that, “it is the case already that national policy supersedes local discretion in a number of areas.” So if we are looking at the NPPF or NDMP and for us as a Committee reading the current legislation it indicates that neither legislation nor policy currently establishes primacy for a national policy. Do you believe that the Secretary of State is correct or is there still some confusion around this?
Christopher Young: I think the Secretary of State is right. The system that is being introduced where the national policy and the development plan have a level status already exists in the way that decision-making is carried out. Hugh is right that it is not on a statutory footing at the moment, nor is it that this equilibrium or indeed national policy if there is inconsistency, will prevail. I think that is already the system that we have in NPPF.
Before everybody says, "Well, that is a bad thing. Everything should be decided locally" that is fine if local communities and local politicians at a councillor level are prepared to address the burdens of the amount of development that is needed in this country—the new homes, the jobs, the warehouses—but often with local plans or many local plans that I see, which I would say are more typically in rural areas than urban areas, when there are points in which barristers become involved and there is controversy, there is a lot of local opposition to development, which is not in the national interests and which is fuelling the housing crisis. The constant reference to "local is best", “localism is best”, I am afraid does not always translate unless communities step up and take the development that they are meant to achieve.
Q130 Ian Byrne: Isn’t that a power grab?
Christopher Young: No, I do not think the system that is operating now is particularly different from the system that is already there. I do not go to a planning inquiry and fail to talk about the NPPF or mention it anything less than about 100 times a day. We call it the "framework", the NPPF—it is constantly referred to in everything from consistency of the development plan to policies in national policy, and the objectives of the NPPF to significantly boost the supply of housing. I was in central Bedfordshire last week and in central Bedfordshire they introduced a new plan that delivers 1,600 houses a year less than the 2,200 a year that they are doing now, and that apparently was consistent with boosting the supply of housing. No, it was not.
It is different in different areas, but I do not think it is a power grab. I think it is probably a statutory footing for the reality of what already happens.
Q131 Ian Byrne: I will to touch on two questions. Clause 96, which is causing quite a lot of interest, is street votes. One of the proposals is for residents in the street to propose developments in the street and then have a vote to see if they should get planning permission. Keeping this brief, is this a gimmick or does this enhance public participation in the planning process?
Victoria Hills: The RTPI supports a range of mechanisms for local residents to get more involved in planning in their local areas, such as neighbourhood plans, neighbourhood development orders and potentially street votes, provided there are safeguards against the hijacking of these procedures by small and vocal minorities. We welcome trials. Our mantra and mine personally is "no idea too crazy". If the current way of getting the community on board is not working, let us look at other ways. Let's try new things. We do not know if it will work but we are not against trying it at the neighbourhood level.
I would be interested to see, if it is voluntary, just how many local leaders are up for going for this sort of thing. That will be an interesting experiment. Let us have a look at it; we cannot rule it out until we have tried it and we have never tried it. It sounds very radical, but if it is set up in the right way, and I am sorry if I sound like a broken record, it will come back to resourcing. The cost for example of the burden of delivering neighbourhood plans currently, what is paid, the local authorities get about £20,000 per neighbourhood plan just to run a decent-sized street ballot. To run a ballot for a neighbourhood plan can cost £40,000 or £50,000 by the time you have hired the hall, the staff and run all the bits and pieces. You have already doubled your budget. They sound like a good idea in principle, let us try it out, but where exactly is the funding going to come from to pay for these at a time when we cannot keep the handle turning on what we are trying to deal with currently?
Q132 Ian Byrne: Very good points. Does either of the other witnesses want to comment on street votes? I can feel the Chair glaring at me.
Christopher Young: Are they a gimmick? I think they probably are, to be perfectly blunt. I think talking about participation may possibly be something designed to make other parts of this Bill more palatable. I have already expressed that I do not have some of the concerns that others do about the lack of participation. I do not know what the objective is. Is this going to deliver more houses? Is this going to help people get more involved in planning? It looks very much like something that could be divisive and could cause a lot of friction. People have raised concerns about how to persuade their neighbours to allow certain development and there are concerns around that. I cannot think of a good reason for introducing this. I am sure there is one, but I certainly have not heard it yet.
To be frank, one of the difficulties in the planning system is the more localised you make them, neighbourhood plans have not been a great success, they have been used as something of a NIMBY charter, and not everybody likes that phrase, but that is how many of them have been used. I took that view as soon as I saw the Localism Act in 2011 and shared that view with others. I think others have come to that view. Street votes is the same thing. I do not think this is a positive move and I think it is a bit of a gimmick.
Dr Ellis: As a point of principle, one sentence. It is not just the people on the street who count. It is the people who walk down it and live in the whole community, so you should not restrict democracy just to a street. There are a lot of flaws in it, but if I am honest, I do not understand what is being proposed.
Chair: Back to Florence. We have already been talking a bit about the national development management policies and perhaps you would like to explore it a bit further.
Q133 Florence Eshalomi: We have covered some of this already, so I am just looking at the national development management policies. The Government have indicated that they are going to consult on any new changes and the revised National Planning Policy Framework. The Bill proposes the new changes to that, and it states that if to any extent the development plan conflicts with the national development management policy the conflicts must be resolved in favour of the national development management policy. Again, we have touched on some of this already. Do you feel that this proposal as set out is a useful one and will it apply to all local authorities and allow them to focus on what matters at a local level?
Christopher Young: I do not think there is any harm with this provision. I think it is a good provision and I know that lots of others involved in the planning system also think it is a good provision and the reason is that there are over 300 local authorities in this country, and they are often producing policies that you can find in national policy anyway. A classic one would be greenbelt and they introduce their own greenbelt policy and add some different nuances and different criteria and all that does is prove when you have an application or an appeal that the applicant can point to the inconsistency with national policy. Nothing is served by having lots of different policies in lots of different areas that replicate national policy. I have seen this at the sharp end doing the South Worcestershire local plan; Inspector Roger Clews removed lots of policies that he felt were a replication of national policy.
We will come on to this, but plans are much better to focus on not rewriting or trying to slightly amend greenbelt policy or heritage policies but to focus on the business end of what plans should be doing, which is allocations, allocating land and identifying perhaps local designation special landscape areas, which need to be protected in addition to the national range of policies.
Q134 Florence Eshalomi: How do you feel that the NDMPs compare to the National Policy Statements and should they be subject to the same standard of consultation and scrutiny? Do you feel that there is a crossover?
Victoria Hills: The point I would like to make is about the checks and balances. I have talked about broader engagement with the community, but having checks and balances for any England-wide policy through these national DM policies, to be able to have the right checks and balances and by that I mean scrutiny in both Houses of Parliament and minimum standards of consultation, that is not currently part of the plan and that is what we will be asking for.
Also, when it comes to areas that are doing above and beyond, the example that is quoted, and I have spoken to them directly on this, is London, but there are other devolved areas as well that have above and beyond the national policies and want to be able to do that, and that provision is not there currently and that is an area of concern for us.
Dr Ellis: I think we have a counter view. We are worried about this because it does allow the Secretary of State to decide whatever is national development management policy at the moment is in scope, and development management policy is hugely positive. That is the way you get things done. That is how you control what happens in your area, that is how you enforce standards on design and all that stuff. The development management policy has this reputation of something that is simple and can be abstracted out to national level, but because the Government have not set out what scope there is for national development management policy, it is difficult to understand it. We do not want to see the undermining of the primacy of the development plan. If the NPPF is already this powerful document, why do you need even more power? The only way I think we can see it happening is if Government are clear that it only relates to existing legal requirements for example that need to be translated into planning on equality or climate. Maybe there is a case for it in those areas but there must be a test. There must be a legal test for what is nationally significant development management policy, because otherwise it allows the Secretary of State, who just to be clear already has huge reserve powers to call in planning applications and call in plans, to change overnight without proper scrutiny whatever local development management policy might be. If this is a policy designed to rebuild trust, I do not know what to say. There needs to be a much greater thought process and care around how this policy develops.
Ultimately this gets back to the issue, which is difficult, of how much power the communities have over their future. The only thing I would say in the field we work on, with climate change, is all the innovation has come from the local level; all the great work on climate change has not come centrally. It has all come from local authorities and communities doing it for themselves, and I am quite terrified that the Secretary of State can stifle a lot of that, because innovation is not coming from the centre as a result of these policies.
Q135 Florence Eshalomi: In broad terms, the changes being proposed are likely to begin from 2024, which is quite soon and once the Bill receives the Royal Assent the associated regulations and changes will be in place. Do you think that circa two-year period would allow for preparation for how these changes would work? Going back to what we mentioned about the pressures that local planning authorities are facing, and the backlog of planning applications, the fact that in some councils they are choosing between a planning officer or a social worker, equally we know that planning officers are quite important, do you feel that is enough time for this to work?
Victoria Hills: One of our asks all the way along is for clarity at the earliest opportunity. Our worry, and I am sure it is shared by others listening, is that the longer uncertainty goes on it allows authorities or leaders opportunities to say, "There is no point in investing in this local plan in the way that we are currently because some of that work will be abortive." The worst-case scenario is, "We will just park it completely or we will go slow" or something else. Why does that matter? Because some important things must be addressed locally. Our ask all the way along is we must have the clarity sooner rather than later. Things are moving very quickly now. We should note that. The Bill is moving apace, but that clarity is important. If we look at local plans in particular, they are expensive to produce locally, and that cost is directly met by the local community. If you are a local leader or elected politician, you have to explain to that local community why you are spending lots of money on something that will have to be changed immediately. You can see that is a difficult conversation.
Our ask in all this is for clarity, simplicity and not to overcomplicate things. We could see with other broader factors a complete slowdown, and we are already seeing that for example in housebuilding numbers anyway.
Q136 Florence Eshalomi: My last question is looking at some of the different clauses. Under what circumstance do you envisage Clause 97 on Crown development being used?
Christopher Young: I think this probably may find its origin in the response to Covid. The urgency of certain developments like the Nightingale Hospitals was something that this is probably inspired by. That would be an immediate and obvious example of it, but of course it is open-ended and therefore it would be capable of being used for other things.
I do not think there could be the introduction of a nuclear power station for a provision like this. There are too many checks and balances in the system, too much scrutiny in our democratic system. I think it is probably where there is a pressing need, but at the moment we do not have the detail. There is not an open or a closed list of what might be envisaged or the sorts of things that might be included by that.
Dr Ellis: There must be safeguards for Crown development. There are emergency situations, which we all understand, but of course Departments like the Home Office, in relation to detention facilities, might make the case that that is an emergency power, reducing the amount of local consultation perhaps on that, and there must be a safeguard there, so that it does not allow Departments to fail to meet minimum requirements to gain some form of consent from the local community, because they have not thought about their policies. In most cases, there is no reason why consultation cannot happen. There is always time for consultation on some of these issues unless we are in a dire, wartime situation.
Chair: Moving on now to an issue we have touched on to some extent, local and neighbourhood plans. Ian Byrne.
Q137 Ian Byrne: If you have touched on these, just tell us to move on because we have explored them. To touch on one thing Victoria spoke of before, about the cost of local plans, the Government have said that provision in this Bill will simplify and standardise the process for local plans to drive down the cost, so they are produced more quickly. Do you think that the Bill will enable that and also a speedy production of plans?
Victoria Hills: Someone has to say it—the devil is in the detail and we just do not know how much is coming out and being nationalised. To some extent we have covered it. Anything that reduces the bureaucratic burden locally, and I can include within that the provisions for the environmental assessment, anything that can streamline and pull things together in a clearer way must be welcome, but not at the expense of democracy. I do not think I have very much more to add than can it achieve it as it currently is? Absolutely, it can achieve that. The question is whether that balance is right and that is the discussion that we have had this afternoon.
Christopher Young: It will. Having these national development management policies that will undoubtedly speed up the process, but let us be clear, the professional planning and the wording of these documents are not what causes the delay. The delay is inordinate in some cases or the almost non-existence of plans, for example in the Wirral, is down to the political process. Politicians at local level are choosing not to progress plans. They choose not to progress plans because they see that housing development is controversial. Several Essex and Hertfordshire authorities, certainly in Essex, have abandoned plan-making. They have gone all through the stages of it, and then Basildon had a plan that has been found sound and then they have just abandoned it.
Q138 Ian Byrne: That is one angle that we are looking at. Another angle is the expense and obviously local authorities are absolutely cash strapped. You are talking about the Wirral. They are closing down golf courses, libraries and everything else. Do you think they prioritised it and maybe thought, “We will do a couple of social workers instead of a plan”?
Christopher Young: I think that the issue of the financial side of it is it is very expensive. The process is not being streamlined to shorten these two stages of consultation. Ministers have said they want it done in 30 months. The Planning Inspectorate has raised concern about that. If an inspector is concerned about a plan, the plans are usually suspended for a period so that the local authority can identify a more realistic, larger housing number. In short, there is a massive problem with planning, which the RTPI is aware of. Everybody is aware of it. The answer is to significantly introduce the fees associated with planning applications. Nobody I know opposes that, certainly not in the development industry. The fees are a tiny part of the amount of work that goes into applications.
Mr Gove has said, when speaking in this House before, that he is not keen on the idea of ring-fencing the additional fees. The fees should absolutely be ring-fenced for planning. The planning departments are on their knees in some places unable to progress the amount of work they have done, with constant reductions in staff and the fees should double and all that money should go to planning departments because they deliver the houses that we do not have enough, which is the cause of the housing crisis. They do not deliver in the north-west, the warehouses that we needed. That all went through very expensive appeals. If the plans are not produced the appeals, which are even more expensive, are produced, and local authorities sometimes find it difficult to grant planning applications at a local level, cost applications to the hundreds of thousands. The system needs proper funding, and that funding is not there at the moment.
Q139 Ian Byrne: I will let you come in on this point, but I also wanted to make another point you can come back on. Is a statutory timetable needed regarding the 30-month expectation by the Government? Does that need to be a statutory timetable, and are these timescales feasible?
Dr Ellis: I think the statutory timescale for plan-making would help the process, guide the process and provide some accountability. Everybody wants plans in place, and they should be put in place in a timely fashion.
Having listened to the comments, many of which I agree with, in hindsight of watching 30 years of planning reform, the reality is that if you want an effective planning system you would abandon this Bill and focus the Department's effort on supporting policy change and delivery on the ground. If you change the system when it is broken, and the current system is creaking because of resources, on a scale that is in this Bill and expect it to deliver, that is delusional. It would be much better to focus on the crisis confronting planning around climate, health and much better to focus on redirecting policy, to do one thing that I think we have not talked about, which is to fundamentally understand that planning is a solution and that what we want is for Ministers to say that, to get behind the system and to be clear about the direction of travel so that people come back into it and see it as a positive driving force.
Q140 Ian Byrne: This Bill also allows parish and neighbourhood forums to produce a simple neighbourhood priorities statement. Is this a strengthening of localism or a watering down of neighbourhood planning?
Dr Ellis: I understand why it is happening because many of the parish councils and town councils I work with are struggling with resources, particularly in places where they do not have access to social capital when some places do. I can understand why they might default to a wider statement. I am worried about this because there has been some research to suggest that neighbourhood planning allocates more housing than traditional local plan processes. I am slightly dubious about that, but that is where the Government have drawn some research from.
I think this measure is a watering down and the critical issue is that the Government need to direct resources into neighbourhood planning in a way that it is delivering for those communities who are struggling the most. That is why neighbourhood planning is not happening in complex urban environments. That is why it needs a lot more focus in those areas so that it can be a positive tool.
It is fine for parish councils to make a statement, but I have an awful feeling that it is a meaningless statement and that we should focus on preparing good neighbourhood plans.
Ian Byrne: A strong message coming through loud and clear. Victoria or Chris?
Victoria Hills: I want to come back on the earlier point that you were talking about, fees, but also it is very difficult for areas such as Wirral to prioritise funding of the local plan because they must fund other things. I want to take a step back to remember the “why”. Why are we bothering to produce these local plans in the first place? Why invest in them? It is because they provide a powerful framework for interventions in placemaking. If you have a strong local plan that can direct where you want to put the investment in housing, health, education, employment, delivering on net zero, and all the above by levelling up, the idea behind that is not just so that we as planners can sit back and say, "Aren't we wonderful? We produced this fantastic local plan." The idea behind it is that it drives outcomes locally in a systems approach to a better life, which means you spend less money on social services. That is why we say that planning funding should absolutely be ring-fenced, not because it is not important to support child or adult social care, we all get that, but we are never going to get that Bill done unless we create healthy, prosperous local places. The only way we can do that is through a strong planning framework. It absolutely must be ring-fenced. We have been told it cannot be, but I do not think it is beyond the wit of men or women in the Treasury to find a way to ring-fence it. The business of placemaking is so incredibly important to deliver healthy outcomes that gets those Bills now, downstream. We absolutely need it.
Chris mentioned doubling. I think we must be a bit cuter than that and tie it into inflation, because we have run the figures on what is on the table currently by 2024, and it is wiped out on inflation with what they are proposing. It is meaningless. We must be a little bit cuter on how we do it. We cannot just come up with an android percentage. We must come up with a fiscal mechanism that works in these current unsettled times.
Ian Byrne: An excellent answer. Thank you.
Q141 Chair: I am still trying to get my head around whether the Secretary of State said it, and I hope it is true, that these proposals in the Bill make a simpler and quicker local plan process. I remember the Select Committee went to the Planning Inspectorate some years ago and we saw two trestle tables full of boxes of documents, just for a small district local plan. Nobody is going to engage in that, apart from, with respect, QCs, and developers and the council officers. The rest of the community is excluded. Can we not make it simpler and still achieve a proper local plan with local engagement?
Victoria Hills: Yes, we can. We are not against nationalising some of the policies. We must just be careful about the ones that we nationalise, and we have not seen the detail. Certain things are important for local communities, and they want their say and engagement, and certain things can come out. The problem is we do not have that detail and that is the point we have made this afternoon.
Christopher Young: It is a perception that it is only the professionals who engage in this documentation. From my own experience, the Redditch and Bromsgrove plans would be a good example of where the community was heavily involved and scrutinised the sustainability appraisals surrounding the plans. Some communities get very heavily involved and then participate extensively through the local plan process, but it is not, as the lady here was saying earlier, uniform participation. There are huge differences between areas and that is the issue with neighbourhood plans, there are some good examples of neighbourhood plans but a lot of them have been generated to resist individual proposals for housing or development in their area. You do not find that in urban areas because there are not the parcels of land, the greenfield land particularly, to be developed within a metropolitan area and so the motivation to produce one is not there.
There are examples where people are trying to deal with design issues but that is where these new statements might be more beneficial than a whole neighbourhood plan. Neighbourhood plans should do what they say on the tin—they should plan for development—and a lot of neighbourhood plans do not do that in a meaningful way.
Chair: Another important measure potentially is the creation of an infrastructure levy. Andrew Lewer.
Q142 Andrew Lewer: Good afternoon. The first question is to Victoria substantially and then if Hugh and Christopher want to chip in that is fine. Fundamentally the Bill as you all know includes a framework for the infrastructure levy where there are several rates and thresholds that could apply within a single local planning area. The RTPI suggested that could create a possibility of thousands of different levy rates across the country increasing already immense complexity. Could you unpack that a little bit and tell me your thinking?
Victoria Hills: Our thinking was initially that one flat rate does not work for the whole of England. We were very happy to see that this is going to be locally devolved, but again the devil is in the detail. We need assurances that it is not so devolved that you have mini-rates going on at a site level or at a multi-site level that makes the system so incredibly complex it becomes unworkable and unfundable. We will be seeking a clause to ensure that the complexity is not enhanced, but if anything becomes slightly simpler.
On that point, we want to see that there could be a way that local authorities would be able to reach agreement directly with a department, rather than taking every individual CIL through an examination in public at PINS. That is going to be very costly and time-consuming and has to date been part of the prohibition of why some areas just do not go down that route, because it is far too complicated and expensive. The difference here is you must have one, so everyone has to do it; it is mandatory now, so we have to find a way to make it palatable and fundable. We will seek a clause that is a sensible approach that does not see multiple rates happening in areas. Anything that overcomplicates the system that we already have, which some say is quite complicated, is perhaps not where we want to be.
Q143 Andrew Lewer: Is that one planning area, one IL? Is that what you are suggesting would be better?
Victoria Hills: I do not think we want to be too prescriptive. What we want to see is some detail on what is on the table now and what is on the table in the Bill gives us some concern that it could result in multiple CILs within areas, and we need some assurance that will not be the case. We will be seeking that clarification via an amendment, to ask that multiple rates will not make the system too complex, but we will not be saying we want one per local authority area. We do not feel it is for us to state that level of detail. We are just stating the potential for unintended consequences of what is currently laid out and the burden associated with that, part of which means taking it through an examination to PINS currently, which we do not think is going to work locally. We do not think PINS can cope if every single local authority now must take a levy through. It would be interesting if the Committee can ask PINS their view on this as to whether they could even cope to get everybody through the system quickly.
Christopher Young: I do not think there is any difficulty with variable standards. The thousands are probably just a product of the fact that there are 320 authorities, so you only need three or four different zones across the country. Having differences in different areas is a very good idea, because viability varies enormously in local authority areas, as you will all know from your own constituencies and therefore what drives the ability to fund all this—and let us be clear, the development industry funds enormous amounts of new infrastructure, roads, schools and so on— all depends in the case of houses, which is the majority of new development, on the sales value of the houses in that area. They vary enormously. It is sensible to have a variable system in different locations. There is a lot more that is very positive about this infrastructure levy, but I do not think the variation should be a concern.
Dr Ellis: Our overarching concern about it, and obviously this is a very different proposal to the one in the White Paper, is whether you can fairly describe it as a national infrastructure levy now given it is locally set and locally collected and essentially we are just talking about a nationally agreed metric. There are positive aspects to it, but there is one issue that has not been resolved and that is that between CIL and section 106 yielded around £7 billion in 2018-19 in contributions predominantly for affordable housing and other infrastructure, but that accumulates in high-value areas. The question about this is that this measure may well be the right one in being able to do that, but it is not dealing with the spatial inequalities that scar this nation. Homes England is certainly not going to do that job with the resources they have. The question at the heart of this was how you got some form of redistribution mechanism, because the amount you can yield in terms of land values and viability in for example some parts of the north-east, versus Kensington and Chelsea, are pretty stark. That leads to a problem, which is that you reinforce growth-on-growth. Given the Secretary of State's stated objectives around levelling up, there must be a fundamental change. Treasury is also reaping significant funds through Stamp Duty Land Tax on the transfers of land. That should be part of this review because that is also related to planning permission whenever land is transferred. Values are being generated for Treasury and the opportunities for redistribution are there. Without that redistribution, I feel that you are just going to repeat the spatial inequality that this country has, where high-demand areas will receive more development with higher-quality infrastructure and low-demand areas receive nothing, which is why some of those areas do not have CIL charging schemes.
Q144 Andrew Lewer: Hugh's point there leads into the next question. Hugh, you have already answered that, but given that this is now the Select Committee for Levelling Up and the Department is called the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, how can that objective be achieved when revenues from infrastructure levies are likely to be from London, the south-east and so on?
Christopher Young: There are valuable areas throughout the country. In the north-east, places like Hexham, around Manchester and in Manchester there are plenty of higher-value areas. Hugh makes a very good point about reinforcing that, but it is very difficult to envisage how you get around it when the sales values that generate the £7 billion are much higher in the south-east of England. It would be for central Government to address that through regional policy. You cannot make bigger payments in the north-east when the houses are not selling for much more than they cost to build; you cannot solve that problem. There are other things that can be done. There can be a greater focus on greenfield sites. I have done a lot of work in Stoke. All the values in central Stoke were unsustainable. They could not build houses for the price that they could sell them. That is an area that should have explored greenfield development because that is where you can deliver affordable housing. There needs to be a sophisticated approach to this, and that is not always to revert to brownfield and think that is the answer to everything, because when you get involved in CIL and viability that often is not the answer.
There is a huge pathfinder project for central Stoke, but there was so much time spent consulting on that, I know this through direct involvement, so much time spent consulting and involving people and participating that the scheme was ended by the time any significant development was underway.
Q145 Andrew Lewer: So the levy in a sense could disincentivise brownfield development because it is more expensive to do than greenfield, and therefore you get less of a yield for the infrastructure levy you have been charged?
Christopher Young: There is always a problem with brownfield sites. The Government say they will invest through Homes England and do gap funding and so on. The real answer is to welcome regeneration but have development on greenfield land as well. The scale of the housing crisis means that that is completely necessary and justified. You must recognise that you are not going to generate a lot of affordable housing from these developments. Some of the detail provisions, and I will not go into them now, do relate to allowing more flexibility around the provision of affordable housing, making choices about the level of CIL, and that is positive. One of the consequences of the current system, the CIL system, community infrastructure levy, has been that affordable housing has been a casualty in some of these areas.
Victoria Hills: One of the provisions that we welcome here is the opportunity to borrow against future CIL income. That could be a positive mechanism to create some of the value, so that if you have a test and learn or checks as you go along, or reviews, while I accept some of the value may not have been there at the outset on some of these more sustainably located brownfield sites, by putting some up front infrastructure in you might raise the values. It has been shown to happen before. Look at King’s Cross, for example. Having a fiscal mechanism to help you borrow up front to deliver infrastructure to make a place attractive for investment is something that we welcome. Our concern is that if you draw a pie, the pie is being sliced so thinly now in all the additionality. What is going to be left? We were talking about Top Trumps earlier, but if you look at the statutory obligations for biodiversity net gain, our interpretation of that is that is number one. Forget anything else; fund BNG first.
After BNG has been funded, if there is any money left, where does affordable housing come alongside school places, doctor places, play parks, bus stops, roads? That must be looked at because our concern is there has just been so much layered at the top that there is not a lot left in the middle. You asked for the solution. We need to find ways of funding some of that infrastructure off grid, meaning it does not go via the CIL in the first place but is funded elsewhere in areas that need it. I cannot see any other solution to bringing forward those sustainably located low-value areas where if you cut open the pie there is nothing there, let alone giving back for BNG, other than levering in funding by the borrowing, which we welcome but also by some form of direct grant. We need to have an open and honest conversation about where those priorities are and where those areas that will need extra help are, because the infrastructure levy on the face of it is not going to be able to magically lever in that extra help from other areas, because it is a locally set levy for the local area.
We must look imaginatively at how to fund that regeneration via broader agencies, Homes England has been mentioned, and devolution deals were mentioned earlier but also working with other delivery partners, infrastructure providers, to bring forward those low-value areas. The levy is not going to be able to deliver everything that is required in that pie after you have dealt with the statutory obligations, of which BNG comes first.
Q146 Andrew Lewer: Those statutory obligations become more challenging for larger and complex sites, given the impact on the area that they arrive in or derive from. There is a proposal therefore to keep section 106 for large and complex sites. Do you think that is the right decision?
Victoria Hills: I will share with you one anecdote from a major London developer who walks around the site, not too far away from here, and the chief planner there for that site never leaves site or home without his bible. His bible is the section 106. That is the intricately negotiated document that tells everybody, the community, the council, the developer, the funders, everybody, what is coming when, how much it is and what is going to be delivered. We welcome the retention of section 106 for complex sites. They work, they provide that certainty, not just for the developers or the lawyers but they provide the certainty for the community. It does not matter if you flick the site. The feet are going to be held to the fire for that site. Absolutely they have an important place to be made. The threshold is important within that, and we are pleased to see that they did not get axed.
Christopher Young: It is 100% the right thing to do and previous proposals that looked to get rid of them would have been disastrous, frankly. Large schemes often involve a huge amount of complexity surrounding the delivery of infrastructure. Local councillors often want to see the delivery of certain infrastructure, certain road works. They will insist on a school at a certain time, and the only way you can sensibly do that is through a bespoke section 106 package. To keep it short, absolutely. I have not met a lawyer who did not think that was the right way. That is not just the vested interest in continuing to negotiate these section 106s. It is the reality that they would probably stall without this.
Dr Ellis: I agree with my colleagues.
Q147 Andrew Lewer: Do you think the levy is going to increase incentives to build out planning permissions more rapidly?
Dr Ellis: I do not see why it should. The other measures might but the incentive to build out for volume house builders is based on absorption rates, and there has always been a tension in the system between the needs of volume house builders and the needs for local authorities to meet housing targets. I do not see any of those measures in this Bill that particularly address that issue, partly because to do that you need to think about de-risking development. It is fair to say that the considerations right at the back of all these provisions are that development corporations are the best way to drive delivery. We often have conversations about housing delivery and delivery rates. We have an immensely rich history of learning and some big mistakes, but a lot of learning about how to do this through the development corporation model and the delivery rates were impressive, but that needs a public sector body acting as master developer. So far as there are provisions, they relate to the slightly curious reference in this Bill to the use of development corporations without there being any national policy about where or how they might be used.
Christopher Young: I do not think they will have any incentive on delivering houses or have any effect on that. I do not think it is even a relevant factor contributing to it. If we may momentarily talk about the elephant in the room, the elephant in the room is that we have a system that tells local authorities in the NPPF paragraph 11 a) to meet the development needs of their area and then in paragraph 11 b) says, well, there might be strong reasons why you do not want to do that, for example greenbelt, AONB, lots of heritage issues, and that is the problem. If you want to build more houses, which is what is behind the question about CIL, then what you need is development plans that address the needs of the area and when an area like Sussex claims that it cannot deliver it for its area, then you need a regional strategy that allows that to happen and be redistributed. That is how you address and deliver more houses. Tinkering or changing the infrastructure levy will not do anything.
Victoria Hills: I will add a slightly more positive spin. My takeaway is that if you do enable local authorities to be able to afford and fund infrastructure, through enabling borrowing against future receipts, which they currently cannot do—it has been a frustration of mine in a previous life—that we could see the financial model coming down the line, we could see all that money coming down the line, we could not put a bridge over a canal because we had no money, but we could not borrow against that money, which seemed strange because for national infrastructure you can. For the Northern Line, you can hypothecate against business rates. For the Elizabeth Line, you can hypothecate against Mayoral CIL. The local area, you have not been able to. Why is that important to your question? Because if you can forward fund the infrastructure ahead of when a developer would do it, that will get delivery away quicker.
Q148 Andrew Lewer: Why could you not borrow from the Public Works Loan Board and just pay it off when the returns came in?
Victoria Hills: In that particular situation, I do not know. I would have to get back to you in writing, Andrew, because I do not think you can. I think in the provisions of CIL you could not borrow against it and you cannot borrow against a Public Works Act for infrastructure that is going to be funded by a developer in the future, but we will get back to you, to clarify that point. You cannot forward fund infrastructure through any mechanism at local authority currently unless it is for Mayoral CIL or a nationally backed scheme like the Northern Line extension.
Q149 Andrew Lewer: I was just thinking aloud there. Finally, your view on the thing overall, snappily. We will start with Hugh. To what extent would you describe the infrastructure levy as effectively a land value tax?
Dr Ellis: I do not think it is strictly speaking a land value tax, because it is focused on general development value towards the end, but the relationship between general development value and land values is an intimate one in terms of what developers are paying for land. This has been difficult. There have been three times since the war where Government have attempted to have a comprehensive land value tax. All of them have failed for various reasons. It is worth reflecting that the value created on the ground to planning permission and the rise in value for land is a value created by a public authority through state regulation. Tapping those values has always been important. The mistake we have made now, to support Victoria's point, is that that is not just a money tree. There are limits to those values and therefore we must be sensible about how they are deployed. The difficulty is that landowners have become accustomed to super development values, which essentially have not been because of their action but through—[Inaudible]—and we now have to fundamentally change that. The reason we must change is not through any ideological reason. If you want to create great places you must find the values to generate and so I am not sure that this is unfortunately for us the end of the story. We started with high hopes about a new system and we have ended up keeping section 106, a heavily tweaked national infrastructure levy and again it makes you wonder whether all of that was worth it.
Christopher Young: Briefly, I think section 106, CIL and its new infrastructure levy are all land development taxes. I do not think anybody doubts that. That is how they operate. They extract enormous amounts of value. You often find the house builders are not in opposition to them. They just want to know what the amount of money is, they can put it into their viability appraisals, and it is the landowners who are more resistant. They often question why so much is being extracted. In some cases as Hugh said they are making super profits anyway so there is not a great deal of sympathy for the landowners if they are making £2 million per acre.
Victoria Hills: Nothing to add, other than our overarching point on the infrastructure levy is to not make anything more complicated than we already have for CIL. There have been countless reviews for CIL over the years. We now have an infrastructure levy. Some may argue you can set CIL locally anyway, so what is the difference? Let us not overcomplicate it any further. Let us keep it as simple as we can, but we have broader concerns that we are overburdening the system anyway and there is not going to be much left in the cupboard even for the high-value areas after you have met biodiversity net gain, a bit of affordable housing and let us face it, that is why communities resist development because they want to see some infrastructure, particularly the existing communities who live in the area want to know how it is going to impact their daily lives. That is important and that is why we need to have a broader conversation about how we fund some of that stuff in areas where the value is not there in the land in the first place.
Andrew Lewer: Yes, and your desire for these proposals not to complexify the issue seems optimistic. Thank you.
Q150 Chair: To pick up on that last point, the need to develop the land where the value is not there, there is a challenge about how the Treasury Green Book values investment in housing, which we raised with the Secretary of State. Is that not a major challenge? Communities do want to see this land developed. My constituency has a lot of old industrial land, some for new industry coming back, which is great, but some of it for housing. Trying to stack up those amounts of money of public subsidy to make the housing viable is a massive challenge. Would an idea be to top-slice this levy nationally and take some of it from the areas where there is massive value in the land and put extra subsidy into brownfield sites elsewhere where regeneration is a priority?
Christopher Young: Absolutely. There is undoubtedly a need for a lot of gap funding and brownfield sites, sites that I am sure you are familiar with in your constituencies, that need redevelopment, a huge amount of development potential around Wirral Waters and something needs to be done to provide more money. I have been around Barking and the scale of Barking Riverside is enormous. It is very positive. A lot of regeneration but it takes a lot of public money when the values are not there, and that is in London. In places in the north-west and north-east it is much more challenging.
Victoria Hills: Yes, you may get massive values in high-value areas but let us not forget those massive values also have massive costs for delivering affordable housing. It is not always as straightforward as one may think.
If any of this was simple it would have been done some time ago, which is why we are still talking about it 10 years after the last CIL Committee review on how to do it. I think the clue lies in working in a multi-pronged approach, so no stone unturned, some working with national agencies to help forward fund infrastructure and help lever investment. It all starts with a very strong local plan and in some of those areas perhaps that have lower values if you have that strong vision and framework, and you can build upon some of those golden nuggets that you have locally, you can create value where it was not before. If you look at some of the deprived seaside towns of the north-west, for example, who are now looking at reinventing, what is their story and how they can generate that income. We cannot overemphasise the importance of starting with a very strong and clear vision and that local leadership through the local plan.
Dr Ellis: If levelling up is to succeed you must push hard to redistribute. That is the challenge. Spatial redistribution is challenging, but that is what we must do. Economies do not drop from the sky naturally. They are made. The fact that the south-east became a dominant research, investment and tech hub was for reasons that were partly based on public investment in all sorts of research and development. That means that the whole of this, and this is where planning can help through a national strategy, requires confidence and certainty that there is a vision for lower demand areas, and then based on that vision an urban policy to go with that, based on redistribution, and then top-slicing some measure of taxation to begin to kickstart those economies. This is not difficult to see how this can be done, and planning can help with it.
At the moment, the challenge with the Bill is that I cannot see where that measure is. I cannot see the urban policy and I cannot see the redistribution behind it, and if that is not going to happen then many of these places are simply stuck and they just cannot afford to be stuck in my view any longer. There are huge opportunities in our northern cities for sustainable growth, but they are not going to do that without some measure of investment incentive.
Q151 Chair: Moving on to another issue that is in the Bill, environmental outcome reports, and the change of approach that the Government are bringing in, the Government are saying that this will improve outcomes for our natural environment. Is that the case, in your view? Hugh?
Dr Ellis: This is challenging because I am old enough to remember what planning was like before EIA and SEA came into force, and it was a disaster for the environment. There was no golden age, so these assessment regulations are important.
I am going to make one very brief comment, though, because again we have not seen the detail so how do we make an assessment? That is very difficult for the Committee. It is fine to want to bring some simplicity to the system, but it is not the regulations that drive the volumes of environmental impact assessments. That is how people respond to the regulation and that is an important point. There was nothing wrong with them. What worries me is this simple point. Our understanding is that these regulations will return assessment to what I would describe as a 30 year-old definition of the environment, so the Government's idea is let's make it simpler and let's just return the definition to understanding the development impacts on the environment. The problem is that our understanding has changed. Impacts on the environment are now crucially important for people. I had hoped that these regulations would wrap up other assessments critical to our future, such as health impact assessments, because we now have a much better understanding of the environment's crucial impact on people's health and wellbeing. I am concerned that these regulations are going to try to simplify what we mean by environment and then the consequences for human beings will be downplayed. If that is the case—and because I have not seen the regulations I do not know if it is, but that is my understanding—that will be a terrible because we know from the enormous impact that development has on people’s physical and mental health that it needs to be wrapped up in the regulations as well.
Chair: Victoria, I think you made some similar points before as well.
Victoria Hills: Yes, that is correct. Our starting point is when I go out to speak with members and local councils and planning committees and I say, “What is your biggest bugbear at the moment? What is the thing that is challenging you, apart from the lack of resourcing?” Most of them say the environmental assessment industry has become so overcomplicated and so overburdened that there is an opportunity here to welcome a streamlining of the old assessments into a new environmental outcomes assessment.
Anything that reduces the bureaucracy. For example, we have 30-odd environment documents going into a local plan and you can streamline it through an environmental outcomes assessment mechanism. That is something that we would welcome. We do feel, though, that there is a need to retain the EU requirements to consult with the public and consider alternatives because at the moment that seems to have been stripped out. It seems that the public will be informed of these assessments but the public will not be engaged on the assessments.
This comes back to a little theme here that we have been on for most of the afternoon, but we will be pushing for an amendment to ensure that those previous EU provisions that we have had do stay so that you will consult the public and you will consider alternative options.
I agree with Hugh’s points here on people. I should say that, in the way that the EU version did not have reference to “humans” just “rare species”, there is an opportunity here to put humans into the equation so that we can consider the social health and economic impacts. Therefore, we do think there is an opportunity there so that we do not just consider the impact on species. That we actually consider the impact on the health of humans as well, which may sound a bit apple pie but it is not very specifically in there at the moment.
We welcome the opportunity to streamline and have a much more meaningful one stop shop. We perhaps think it should have gone a little bit further in having it focused into a single environmental assessment. However, we have two things that we are not happy with, which are the lack of consultation and the lack of consideration of alternatives.
Christopher Young: I will try to keep this to a minute. I will say you are much more polite and courteous than many judges I have appeared in front of because you allow us to speak without cutting us off.
Chair: I could always start.
Christopher Young: You are extremely courteous about that, so to respect the process and the time—just to keep it short—this is undoubtedly a very positive measure to just talk about the outcomes and focus on the outcomes.
Victoria talked about the EIA industry. I see that industry. I think huge volumes of material are produced that are completely unnecessary. You do not need to write 10,000 words to point out there is a biodiversity net gain. You do not need 20,000 words to assess the landscape impacts of a housing scheme. You just don’t. That alienates people. Even if they do read it, it feels like they are excluded from that process. It needs to be massively simplified.
One of the leading planning solicitors, Stephen Ashworth—now sadly departed—was brave enough to say, despite spending an enormous amount of time in his firm doing this work, these environmental impact assessments are written and very rarely read and I think that is the case. There are exceptions to that but they don’t help the process. The complicate the process and, as Florence was saying, people are feeling alienated from the planning system. These documents do not help. Everything in planning could be massively reduced in terms of the volume and the content.
Q152 Chair: Certainly, when I talk to local groups they are suspicious of these assessments because the developer pays for them and they think the developer gets what the developer pays for. Would it be better if the assessments, or whatever will replace them, were commissioned by the local authority with money coming out of the planning fee that the developer pays?
Christopher Young: You could do it that way. I think, in defence of them, the local authority officers—including specialists like ecologists, landscape officers—investigate and interrogate these documents and if they disagree with them they will point it out. I think the burden on them is the volume of it. Just too much is written.
The local authorities often have expertise or if they don’t have it at local authority level they have it at the county level, for example, archaeology but, to be honest, the amount of resource and effort make a good advert for moving to a county system—which is of course part of what this Bill is trying to do—and to have larger authorities better able to cope with more resources to deal with this.
Dr Ellis: I think independent commissioning would be transformational. It happens a lot in Europe because it would be able to control standards and the brevity of the documents. Certainly, in working with communities on environmental impact assessment, there is some terribly bad data being put into them. Amazingly enough, local communities often know a great deal about their local patch but then trying to access the process is very difficult.
Independent commissioning is another measure that would substantially rebuild trust and streamline the process. Otherwise, these documents just become just sales documents when they should be appropriate, proportionate, independent assessment of impacts and alternatives.
Victoria Hills: We do think that there is an opportunity to improve on the EU standards by building in additional consideration of people but also other aspects and being able to do so in a more streamlined process, so we welcome it.
Chair: Independent?
Victoria Hills: Independent? I am just thinking, “Who are all these people who will be commissioning it in a local authority?” Chris has very generously painted a picture of all these ecologists and specialists out there. It may be that you deal with lots of authorities who have them. I speak to many who cannot find them and, even if they do, sometimes they cannot even afford to keep them. There is a shortage. I don’t disagree with your point about trying to do things at a subregional level and lots of authorities are able to do that but they are specialists. I am not sure how introducing independent commissioners in a local authority will help streamline them.
Q153 Chair: If you do not have people who can commission a survey, you have no one who can actually assess the surveys the developers are doing, have you?
Victoria Hills: You do. They are called chartered town planners and it is their role to—
Chair: They can commission them, can they?
Victoria Hills: It is their role to assess these new single environmental outcomes assessments and make recommendations to the committee. What this does is simplify it. Rather than having 30 documents that they have to interpret and say, “The bat survey says this. The biodiversity says that and here is the nutrient neutrality aspect”, what we would like to see is that it comes to a comprehensive recommendation that, “In the round, this is the balance of the recommendation”.
The qualified chartered professional would do that. Should they have a role in commissioning that? Why would we not trust it to equally qualified applicants on the other side of the fence, our members who are putting that documentation together? Why do we need another level of bureaucracy?
Chair: I do not think that communities would necessarily trust that but, never mind, okay, that is a difference of opinion.
Victoria Hills: Well, with a chartered professional they should trust them.
Christopher Young: It is a good point about the independence and if the officers are not in place that is a very legitimate point, but the answer to that is proper funding for planning as opposed to having another tier of independent consultants to look at things.
The officers in local authorities do an amazing job, they really do, but you need there to be an ecologist and a heritage expert and a landscape expert within the authority. If they do not have them, which is your point, which is a very fair point, they then have to export that to outside consultants and that can end up costing more money than having somebody in post who actually knows the local area.
Chair: We will move on now to the NPPF. Bob Blackman.
Q154 Bob Blackman: Apologies to our witnesses. I have had to flit between different meetings, so if I ask you questions you have already answered from other colleagues I apologise for asking.
Turning to the NPPF, the Government have committed to a further consultation on the new NPPF. Do you think a new vision is needed and, if so, why? Can I start with Hugh, possibly?
Dr Ellis: I think a new vision is needed and I will try to be as specific as I can about why. People have lost faith in planning over the last 12 years, partly because I think it has lost in outcomes to people across a broad range of issues. The specifics are that the document does not contain some key aspects of sustainable development. I know sustainable development is sort of disregarded now as an idea but I will put on the table that this nation only has one development idea and it is sustainable development. Inside that concept, the idea of environmental limits and the idea of future generations is critical.
While the NPPF has good policy in it, it has a prioritisation problem, particularly on climate change. That is why local authorities are not responding as we would hope to that challenge because the policy is not clear enough in relation to carbon and it does not set out that overall development goal. We are a nation that needs development goal. It is an interesting issue. We don’t have one as a nation and that is curious.
One other thing I will say just at the far end, planning is a solution to the problem. It isn’t a problem of itself. I do wish the NPPF would speak more directly to communities about solutions. I am conscious in my own patch, looking out at the River Derwent, that communities are being blighted by flood risk and yet there is nothing in the NPPF about the extraordinary work being done all over the country by communities on natural flood defence. There is nothing in it that allows space for local food growing, which in times of austerity and a cost of living crisis is very important. In other words, it is not dealing with either end of the debate very effectively. There is good material in it.
I also think that if you can agree an effective NPPF for the future you actually get a sense of what planning is for. Although we have not spoken about it, it is a bitter disappointment to us that the Bill does not set out a statutory purpose for planning around sustainable development. That would be a measure that could build confidence. So, I hope the NPPF will be there. I have a fear that for some issues it is just taking too long, particularly on climate change.
Victoria Hills: Our number one ask for that new vision, a new NPPF is: could we have some certainty on the timetable? It is a very important document. If we all have to engage with it properly having some certainty on when it is coming and what will be expected is important for us on the professional side of things as it is for civic society, the civic community wants to engage. Number two—
Q155 Bob Blackman: Could I just interrupt you on that point? I have heard at the moment the proposal is that the consultation will be two stages: one on revision and then secondly on the policies, which suggests to me that this will take a very long time indeed, just doing consultation and response. Do you have a view as to whether that is the right approach or should they be looking at the entirety of the proposals?
Victoria Hills: A point I made when you were not in the room was about the continued uncertainty. The longer things take is not a good idea when we are in the business of trying to deal with urgent matters, homes, climate change and so on. We have to move quite quickly. It is not for us to tell the Government how to do their consultations. That said, if it is going to be a long, drawn out piece of engagement that would be something of concern because we need to move quite quickly; not just certainty for the community and all of us but certainty for investors, developers, people who will actually deliver.
Q156 Bob Blackman: What do you mean? One of the problems here is that the Government can consult for a very long time. As a Committee, we know that when we put proposals to the Government their responses can take rather a long time to come and they are not always what we would like to see. From your perspective, this could be a long drawn out process, do you have a view on how long it should be?
Victoria Hills: Yes, we would like it to be—I was trying to bring stats to mind on just how many consultations there have been and how many responses we have had, so your point is well made, the ratio isn’t where we would like it to be—as soon as practically possible because certainty is required to deliver on levelling up and all the investment that needs to go with it.
I was going to make an equally important point. We are just not clear at the moment—and perhaps my learned friend here can tell us—on where the national policies fit into this? We have a National Planning Policy Framework and will have a whole separate suite of national policies, which we don’t know. You missed that session earlier: what proportion and how will it all fit together? If I as a qualified professional am struggling to understand, how will a local resident or local business person, who wants to make an investment in an area, be able understand it? That is causing us—certainly me—a slight bit of a headache.
My third or fourth point, which Hugh made very eloquently, the biggest hope in the NPPF is that somehow that legal statutory requirement to deliver on net zero is mandated in the NPPF. Because the local leaders—I speak to local chief planning officers—have a lack of incentive to go over and above what is exactly required in there currently. If it will not be required in a statutory way to deliver on net zero, why would you go over and above? Some local authorities do but not all do, so we would like that. We see that is the biggest hope for change. Thank you.
Christopher Young: In terms of the question: do you feel a new vision is needed? I think that the NPPF has probably been the most positive development in planning in the last decade. It came in 10 years ago. Greg Clark introduced the presumption in favour of sustainable development. I think it has been extremely positive. It has been a carrot and a stick, to use some of the language the committee used before with Mr Gove, in terms of incentivising local authorities to have plans in place and, more importantly, it is a very concise statement of Government policy, making it much easier and much more digestible for people to understand what planning policy in this country is. So, it is a very positive document.
It has always been very positive in terms of housing to significantly boost the supply of housing. What it does not do is look at other areas. You hear people complaining about housing numbers. Then you speak to those involved in employment development and they say, “I dream of having numbers for employment because we do not even have that”, so the NPPF needs to broaden to other areas of development and to listen to the development industry and others about what it should be covering.
For example, specialist accommodation for elderly people gets a brief mention. Extra care for elderly people with housing with care. Warehouses, the warehousing sector is desperate to have some focus. Some of this is best going through regional planning and a national strategy but the NPPF needs to go beyond the positive work it has done with housing.
What I would say about housing, though, in terms of whether we need a new vision, is that nowhere in that document is there reference to the housing crisis. In 2013, in a backbench parliamentary debate, Nick Boles admitted there was a housing crisis and reminded the House about the scale and hardship that the housing crisis was inflicting on our fellow citizens, as he put it. Yet, we don’t see that in national policy.
I asked Chris Pincher when he was housing Minister, when he came on Have We Got Planning News For You, which some of you know about, a regular weekly webinar, “Why don’t you include that in the national policy?” He gave Mr Gove’s answer to this Committee on 8 June, which was to sort of run away from the housing crisis, try not to mention that. Why do we not do that? Everybody knows there is a crisis. Affordability is out of control. Average house prices and lower quartile house prices are sometimes 10/15 times. Why can we not recognise the crisis? That is what the NPPF should do.
Mr Gove said he did not want to use the C word. Well, I think we should recognise that there is a crisis and if that was written into policy it would help decisionmakers at all levels recognise how important the development is. If there is one thing contributing to the cost of living crisis right now it is the extraordinary price of housing, whether you rent it, whether you buy it. It is inflicting misery on millions.
Q157 Bob Blackman: Coming back to the two stage process that we are looking at here, both on the vision and the policies, it appears from what I am seeing once again an elongated process to when all this will change. From your perspective, as somebody that represents people particularly at planning appeals and beyond, do you see this as being a real problem? Because you will be looking possibly at local plans, the NPPF, the replacement NPPF, the replacement local plan. Basically, every authority will almost be in crisis.
Christopher Young: Yes. I think delays in the planning system are unwelcome. I think repeated changes in policy are problematic. It is a constantly evolving system. I think that is why the Government want to move to having national policy on the same status as development plans, so that it is always up to date. What I would say is I do not think there is any harm in the consultation. Mr Gove qualified his answer to you, didn’t he, about the fact that he said the NPPF will be out in July and his civil servants reminded him that it was just a brochure document, a prospectus, about that.
I can tell you, even that comment in this Committee sent shockwaves through the industry and shockwaves about the timing of applications and things like that. It helps if politicians get it right but it also helps to recognise that consultation on major changes to the NPPF is appropriate. It does not have to take forever. I have seen how long this Committee has to wait for some of the responses to your reports, all of which, if I may say so, do get to the nub of these issues. You often see the industry quoting your reports at planning applications and in appeals because you are listening to people who are telling you what is working and what is not working but, most of all, you do need consultation on major changes to the NPPF.
I might say that I have taken the Government to court over a failure to consult, a legitimate expectation on changes to the housing policy is something, well, in my view, evolved over a number of years. There was always consultation on changes to housing policy in PPG3.
Q158 Bob Blackman: Thank you. Moving on to the White Paper in August 2020, Planning for the Future, the Government stated in that White Paper that the National Planning Policy Framework targets those areas where a reformed planning system can most effectively address climate change, which is what you were talking about earlier, Victoria. We are nearly two years on from the release of that and we are already awaiting the changes. Is there any justification for the delay?
Victoria Hills: I am happy to comment first. We feel it is incredibly important that we get the climate change requirements or Climate Act requirements into the NPPF as soon as possible. Why? Because local authorities, unless they have an extremely visionary leader in a high value area who can afford to go over and above the usual requirements, for example—that is just one scenario—will do what they are required to do within the existing framework, but we all know on climate change there is no time to waste. I cannot comment on—
Q159 Bob Blackman: Sorry, to interrupt. Does that mean loading extra cost onto development, which then leads to—taking Chris’s point—extra cost to the end customer who will buy this property?
Victoria Hills: No, I don’t think it does. I think it means loading extra certainty onto the development, which is, “We will come back and change things in a few years’ time. We are asking you to get on with the important business of delivering on net zero now”. I think the industry is—well, I know. I speak with the construction industry regularly. They are crying out for that certainty because they want to make the investment in R&D. They are trying to come up with the innovations, for example, on cavity wall so that they can get on and do what they know is coming down the line but isn’t quite mandated yet. However, they will not invest in R&D without the certainty. So, I don’t think it is adding cost. It will drive innovation and we need that innovation to deliver green economies in the UK. We need that certainty so that business can get on and start coming up with the solutions for it.
As we approach that two-year anniversary, I don’t disagree that two years on I would not have thought that we would still be talking about it in this way. That said, that is just the way of the world. One observation I would have, though, is the time from launching the White Paper on the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill to laying the first Bill and its second reading, I think there is an element of making up lost ground, which we welcome. Because of all the urgency, as I have said, and the lost ground that we have had in the last two years, we need to get going on it now.
This is not a criticism but, rather, noting that now the incumbent Secretary of State has got going with this at a rate of speed, there are certain elements we would like to continue going forward quickly. However, what we are worried about is the one you have identified that we might now be on a bit of a go slow, which isn’t good for the business of delivering on net zero.
Q160 Bob Blackman: There is a great deal left to regulation as well within the Bill, which is—let’s wait and see. Hugh, sorry, you have not had a chance to comment.
Dr Ellis: I think this is a critically important issue. The delay is unforgiveable because we were 30 years in to the response to climate change through planning. I did my first meeting about why the planning system needed to respond to climate change 30 years ago. We have lost a lot of time. We have certainly lost a decade.
It is interesting to me to give a practical example of that. Well over 1 million homes have been consented that could have been consented post-2016 to zero carbon standards had we not decided to duck that target at that time. The influence of planning on this and its relationship with building regulations is critical and time is running out. I think that is why there is an important relationship not just with the pleading—and it has become pleading I think—with the Secretary of State to issue an urgent ministerial statement simply saying that climate change is a priority for planning, which I think would help confidence in the wider sector a great deal.
The thing that shocks me is this—and I think it is important to place on the record—that since the Bank of England started to ask financial institutions, lenders and insurers whether they are proofed against climate challenge—it has been asking questions about whether it should lend in high flood risk areas and whether it can insure. Bearing in mind that the reinsure scheme, Flood Re, of course only applies to homes built pre 2009 and does not apply to properties built after 2009, on the assumption that everything we have built since 2009 is in an intrinsically flood secure location, which is plainly not the case. The bank is starting to talk about differential rates for insurance and massively reducing mortgage lending in flood risk areas. It is a critical issue for levelling up to get this right.
On top of that, we know we will have to do major relocations of property off the east coast and much sooner than we thought we would have to. All I can say about all of those issues is that I cannot for the life of me understand why as a nation we are not grasping that challenge because it is having a desperate impact on people in terms of flood risk and the heat and temperatures will have an equal impact. Just like the housing crisis is complicated in terms of cost, it is also complicated in terms of resilience.
As far as I am concerned, the Government should act now through a ministerial statement on climate change. They should bring forward an NPPF urgently with revisions around this. The consultation process of three months is not the limiting factor. It is actually having the policy and that is the challenge that you should have read on page 1 of this Bill.
Q161 Bob Blackman: Just to cut across you, obviously making a statement is one thing but actually having regulation or something that would support that so that if Christopher, or his colleagues, take to the courts there is very clear parliamentary backing for whatever is done. Are you saying that the regulation should be in place rather than just a statement? I just want to be clear on that because it helps us for our report.
Dr Ellis: Yes. I think the statement is about culture direction and policy priority. There is no doubt there is need for legal and regulatory change as well, and there have been intense conversations with the Department from a whole group of very expert players in this field. So, we need all of those things. I think the ministerial statement is the beginning of the journey not the end of it. I think you are quite right. We would need further policy changes in the NPPF and then further policy changes in guidance.
From my position, as a planner, there is no technical barrier to the solutions we need to build zero carbon homes. That is absolutely straightforward. There is a cost issue but the industry has to modernise, desperately needs to modernise what it builds but there is no technical barrier. We know how to do it. We know how to assess carbon in a local planning context. Local authorities, a small group of them, are already doing it. We know how that could drive change and all sorts of innovation around energy. It is just that we know we are not doing it because of a political impasse. That has to change if people are going to have sustainable lives.
Q162 Bob Blackman: Christopher, do you have any comments?
Christopher Young: Very briefly to the question directly: two years later we are still awaiting changes. I think we should have seen the changes, but you are right in the sense that it is about detail and in many ways it is about what the industry does in response. There is a lot of positive news around this because some major housebuilders are now moving to creating factories that build modern methods of construction. They can build most of a house in about 90 minutes, so the complaints about lack of capacity the problem with the housing crisis is a planning problem, completely, 100% in my opinion.
The issues surrounding capacity will be addressed through these factories and these factories are there. If you want to see one, in Bardon in north-west Leicestershire there is a factory that Countryside has that produces—
Bob Blackman: I have seen these factories, yes.
Christopher Young: Well, there you go. It is fantastic, isn’t it? It is extraordinary. Hugely energy efficient, and one way to sell new homes is through the incredible energy efficiency because many older homes are incredibly energy inefficient. I think it was coming but it needed the industry to make the investment. Some have, others need to be making that investment now.
Q163 Chair: I think we need fairly concise answers now to try to get through the last couple of areas.
There are measures in the Bill to strengthen enforcement powers. Are they sufficient and will they work, Victoria?
Victoria Hills: We are getting into quite a specific area now. Our position on enforcement is that it has been the Cinderella of planning for some time, so we welcome any opportunity to strengthen the enforcement powers.
Have they gone far enough? My sense is no, but on the detail of that it would probably be better if I came back to the Committee with an exact position on it.
Chair: That would be helpful.
Victoria Hills: The key part is resourcing. From what we have seen, I think it needs to go further but we will come back in writing for you on that.
Dr Ellis: We support what we have seen so far. Enforcement is critical to public trust but we need to get that balance right. For example, increasing fees for retrospective applications is the thing that undermines confidence in the system. It needs to be a rules-based system. People need to follow the rules, so we welcome that, but resources are everything, of course.
Christopher Young: Changing the breaches of planning enforcement or planning controls so that it is 10 years, whether it is operational development, that is built development, a material change of use is absolutely right. How people were allowed to get away with unauthorised development just if they reached the fourth anniversary of when they built it was completely inappropriate, so that provision 101 is entirely appropriate.
The other provisions have very little to do with levelling up, I have to say. But in terms of strengthening enforcement, the overwhelming majority of people don’t flout the rules. It is a very small minority who do.
Q164 Bob Blackman: One possibility I have put to Ministers, which they have not said no to so far, concerns some developers who are fairly notorious at flouting rules and getting away with what they can. I have had homes in my constituency, a site at Althorp who—just basic things like not putting wheel washers in, not putting parking facilities in, encroaching on land. I get two or three contacts from constituents every week, the enforcement officer out there, and that is a shortage of resourcing authorities. Would it not be possible when that developer comes to apply for another planning permission in the future to take into account their past bad behaviour?
Christopher Young: I think you can do that. I think it is very difficult. It sounds like a sort of plea in mitigation. They will get plea in mitigation—
Chair: Could we not toughen the rules so that authorities certainly could?
Christopher Young: Yes. If there is flouting of the rules and, as I say, I think that is very much a small minority but if that happens there is no point having these enforcement provisions unless they can be effectively enforced. So, I don’t see anything wrong with taking into account, as a material consideration, the past performance of a developer.
Dr Ellis: Absolutely. There is some research that I think was presented to the Government from the University of the West of England about widespread non-enforcement of detail and a culture that I think was an echo of some of the investigations of construction elsewhere: a culture of non-compliance, what could be got away with.
So, I think toughening the rules is absolutely right if you are going to build confidence in it. It is critical I think but the question is: who is watching? Moving to a clearer rules-based system is right. Taking past record into account, yes, absolutely. I do not see why that should not contribute because there are serial offenders and most district councils and local communities know who they are but there is no sanction. There is no incentive to behave well if the rules can be breached. Particularly, I think, retrospective applications create that problem. People know, “I can get away with it. It is not a criminal offence. I can do what I like and then bang in a retrospective application and draw the process out for years”, and there is a great deal of delay created. This is harassing. There is a great deal of delay created by the private sector as a result of that. Delay is a two-way street, so I think clarity about that. Being able to put their record into the deal would be great.
Victoria Hills: It sounds like a nice idea and if it was practical I think we would support it. My concern would be that any rogue developer that I would have come across would find many ways to get round that, by changing the name of the organisation, the applicants, unless it was tied to some sort of land registry or something or other. I think you could spend a lot of time playing cat and mouse and it could be a diversion rather than just clamping down in the first place, serving them with a stop notice.
Chair: Thank you for that. Finally, Darren Henry.
Q165 Darren Henry: I will ask Victoria first: the 2020 White Paper promised a comprehensive resources and skills strategy for the planning sector. Have you been involved in the development of such a strategy? Do you think it is important? Also, if you could comment on the fact that in the White Paper it mentions that the local planning authority should have a chief officer for design and place-making but then that does not appear in the Bill. Do you think it should and should we legislate?
Victoria Hills: Thank you very much for the question because the latter is one of my hot topics but the former absolutely. I am delighted that we are now working with the Department on a capacity and capability discussion, which I hope turns into a strategy very quickly. Has that happened as soon as it should have done? Probably not, but we are there now and we are having a conversation with the Department about it.
Because it has taken quite a while—you identified 2020 as when it was first mentioned—as a professional institute we have just been getting on with stuff anyway, whether it is apprenticeships, a working partnership with public practice bursaries and trying to address the chronic lack of capacity going in but, of course, there is a chronic underfunding of the public sector planning sector that we have seen get a lot worse in recent years.
We have done a lot of research on it and total expenditure on planning by local planning authorities is now just £900 million across the whole of England. I think it equates to an average of about £5.50 per resident. Where you just think, “That is the importance of planning and place-making”. It is a very low figure. We urgently want to address the capacity and capability issues. Raising fees is part of it. To better resource it will be key but our number one additional ask is we will be making a submission to the Migration Advisory Committee, this summer I hope, to get town planning put back on the shortage occupations list. It was taken off in 2008. It was a big mistake. We waved goodbye to a lot of international planners who were holding up our planning department. We would like to welcome them back with open arms because there is a lot of need for more planners here, and internationally I should say, but we are an attractive place for many of our international colleagues. So, we would welcome any support that the Committee can give to the Migration Advisory Committee that this is an important way that we can bring some skilled professionals back to the UK.
On the business of the chief place-maker, chief planner, yes, you weren’t here for my opening statement but we were disappointed that it seems to have fallen by the wayside. It started out in the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission. It was recognising the importance of having somebody holding the ring locally. It made its way into the 2020 White Paper Planning for the Future and, sadly, it has now fallen out of the Bill.
In all of the things we have been discussing, it is hard to see without having a chief place-maker, a chartered chief planner we would like holding the ring and pulling it together and ensuring the funding resourcing is in placing, ensuring that these important policy areas are driven forward, it is hard to see in just rolling the dice and seeing what happens that that will become a reality without having that very important position in place.
We know it can be done. The Planning (Scotland) Bill introduced legislation to require each planning authority to appoint a chief planning officer. If you have a statutory chief finance officer, why would you not have a statutory chief planner whose business it is to make the important business of place-making happen in the local area? Thank you.
Christopher Young: First of all, on the chief placemaking officer, if that is something different from the chief planning officer I agree with it. You are not just going to change the name and say, “We have created something new”. Placemaking is vitally important so that is two positions you are talking about.
The second one is this issue about funding. All three people this afternoon have said there is a desperate need for funding. This is a Bill about levelling up and regeneration. There is a lot in here that is very positive. You won’t deliver it unless you have the people on the ground to deliver it through planning departments. There are 12 missions to levelling up. A lot of them go well beyond planning into health and education, but you need the resources in local government to do that and planning is an absolutely fundamental part of that.
Finally, it would be wrong not to say that there is a real recruitment problem with the planning officers in all parts of the country at the moment. One of the problems they suffer—my sister is a planning officer in Wales and she says there is an awful amount of abuse of planning officers from local people, threatening to say that if they grant planning permission for new housing that will lead to their children dying because of more cars on the road. You should look into that, in my respectful submission, into the way in which planning officers are treated through the system. These are professional people. They should be respected for their expertise. They are incredibly motivated. I work with lots of them. I cross-examine some of them. I can respect them after I have cross-examined them. I hope it is the same as how they see me.
The reality is that they do an incredible job and some of them are incredibly devoted. In Ellesmere Port I have seen officers delivering at their Cheshire Oaks village. Incredibly dedicated officers who are so devoted to the job. It is disheartening when members ignore their recommendations, and that is becoming an increasing problem even unallocated sites. That is a depressing tendency. But this issue of abusing planning officers and being abusive to them that is a real issue. My sister is a planning officer of 30 years. She has eight years to go until retirement, she reminds me. She is hardened to the system but a lot of the junior people who join them find this completely and utterly upsetting and dispiriting and something should be done about that.
The chief planning officer, Joanna Averley, has said she will look into that, but support from your Committee about how planning officers are treated would be very welcome.
Darren Henry: Thank you, and finally to Hugh.
Dr Ellis: Just quickly, there is no doubt that there is a skills and capacity crisis. Like Victoria, we are involved in a process but we have yet to see the strategy to go with that or the resources that will be needed to go with it. In some of our interactions about that—and I am building on what Christopher just said about the reputation of planners—for me this country has an amazing tradition in relation to shaping places that meet people’s needs from Letchworth Garden City onwards. Yet the level of denigration about the planning service is huge. Where does all cultural change start? At the top. Well, read the introduction to the Planning White Paper or comments that successive leaders and Secretaries of State have made about planning being the enemy of enterprise. Almost everything has been to denigrate what planning does.
Planning at heart is simply answering this question: how shall we organise ourselves to make ourselves fit for the future? How can planners enable people to find solutions for these problems? It is the answer to the question. It allocates 60,000 to 100,000 more units of housing every year that get built, so discuss where the problems lie.
If you want a successful country you need a successful planning system. That means that the Secretary of State, above all else, if they want to address recruitment needs to make that speech about why a young person could possibly want to come into planning. I am clear about that. I know Victoria is clear about that. I am absolutely not sure the wider society is. We are an answer to a problem, an answer to a question, an enabler for communities. Answers to strategic futures in this country. We are not something to be denigrated. Survival depends on the skills that we can bring to the table.
Chair: That seems to be a very positive note to finish on. Certainly, you go to the Netherlands where quite often their planning is seen as part of the solution not part of the problem. A very different approach there.
Thank you all three for coming. You have given us a lot of detailed advice and information on some very challenging subjects, but in the end they do amount to getting it right to shape our communities for the future and to make sure that we have the services and provisions there that the people we represent want to see, so thank you very much indeed, all three of you, for coming. It has been a most helpful and useful session.