Oral evidence - Built Environment

Members present

Baroness O'Cathain (Chairman)

Baroness Andrews

Lord Clement-Jones

Baroness Finlay of Llandaff

Lord Inglewood

Earl of Lytton

Baroness Parminter

Baroness Rawlings

Baroness Whitaker

Lord Woolmer of Leeds

Baroness Young of Old Scone

_______________________

Examination of Witnesses

Councillor Sue Derbyshire, leader of Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council and planning and housing lead for the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, and Councillor Gillian Brown, leader of Arun District Council and planning lead for the District Councils’ Network

Q208 The Chairman: Welcome, Councillor Brown and Councillor Derbyshire, to this evidence session of the Select Committee on National Policy for the Built Environment. It is very kind of you to come. I am sure you have both had long distances to travel, so I hope it is okay. In front of you, you have a list of the interests that have been declared by members of the Committee. There are additional interests, incidentally. Baroness Young of Old Scone has just been appointed chairman of the Woodland Trust. That has relevance to what we are doing, and we congratulate her on it. A transcript of the meeting will be taken and published on the Committee website. You will have the opportunity to make corrections to that transcript where necessary.

I shall begin, Councillor Brown, by mentioning that I am a resident of the Arun district. You probably did not know that. I will also highlight that you were invited via the District Councils’ Network and are very much here in your role as planning lead for the network. The Committee’s questions will focus on national issues and issues that affect local authorities across the country, rather than focusing too much on any particular local area. This has happened throughout our evidence‑taking, not that we have had the sort of clash that there is today. Could I please begin the session by asking each of you to briefly introduce yourselves to the Committee for the purposes of the record? You will get a transcript at the end and we want to make sure we allocate the correct names to the people who spoke. You can look at that transcript and, if you think there has been a mistake, please let us know.

Councillor Brown: My name is Gillian Brown. I am the leader of Arun District Council in West Sussex. I am also a member of the District Councils’ Network.

Councillor Derbyshire: I am Sue Derbyshire. I am leader of Stockport Council and I am vice‑chair of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority. In that role, I hold the portfolio for planning, housing and low carbon.

The Chairman: That must be a massive job, and a very interesting one too, not that Councillor Brown is not interesting.

Councillor Derbyshire: It keeps me busy.

The Chairman: I have to watch my mouth. The first question is: what have the main impacts been on local authorities of recent government planning policy reforms? This is prior to yesterday—obviously things have appeared in the Statement. I have had a quick glance at them, but I really have not digested them. Have you seen them? That is only as an aside, but, if you have any observations, you can certainly make them here. How has the role of local authorities in the built environment changed in the light of recent government planning policy reforms?

Councillor Brown: Just having the NPPF was a huge change. Strategic planning coming to district councils through clusters and duty to co‑operate made a huge difference, because we went from the regional system down to duty to co‑operate. The rise of neighbourhood plans has made a huge difference in my own district. I think we have the largest number in the whole of the country; we have 14 made neighbourhood plans and three more in the pipeline. That is a very big difference. There is a huge tension between strategic planning and localism, particularly local residents’ perception of localism, in the neighbourhood plan preparation.

Then there is a big difference with the objectively assessed needs, setting our own housing targets, looking for that evidence, finding that the targets were much higher than the regional targets ever were. Many local authorities lost their five‑year land supply when these new figures came out in March with these massive housing numbers. Local people find it very difficult to believe that we need that amount of housing, but they are the figures that we have to work to. In my own district, we had just finished our local plan, as we call it, and on the inspector’s desk when the new figures suddenly arrived within a couple of weeks. Now our plan has been suspended and we are looking at having to produce at least 200 houses more per year for the next 20 years. That has a massive impact on us.

The Chairman: What was the quantum? How many would you have produced per year for the next 20 years? You have to produce 200 more. Was it 400 you would have had to produce?

Councillor Brown: Unfortunately not. That is what the local population would have liked. We eventually agreed to 580, so we are now talking about 750 to 900. We have to look between those two figures. That is what we are doing now. The plan has been suspended for 12 to 18 months.

Q209 The Chairman: Can I ask about the process? Were you able to consult before these figures were imposed?

Councillor Brown: We consulted extensively on the 580. In fact, two separate consultants came to verify that we actually needed 580, because the local population were not happy with that, but we were not able to consult again. That will be part of the process that we are going through now.

The Chairman: Councillor Derbyshire, do you have the same problem?

Councillor Derbyshire: Yes, I would agree with that. A lot of the changes look fine, but on an objective needs assessment for housing, for instance, there is no right answer. It is about forecasting and projections. There can be quite a lot of difference in that. It can take a very long time and it is very expensive to get those projections. Current guidance says that we should start with the DCLG forecasts, but they are changed every two years, so you can be part of the way through the process and a very different set of figures comes up. It provides places where the plan can be challenged at various stages and creates tension between what local communities think and what should be done.

Currently, in Greater Manchester, we are consulting on a plan covering all 10 authorities. It is on the evidence base for the numbers, and the difference between the objective needs assessment, what the developers have put forward and the steady state is very, very significant. Calling it an “objective needs assessment” possibly gives a spurious idea that it is scientifically arrived at. It is forecasting; it is crystal ball gazing, in the end.

The Chairman: I see. Councillor Brown mentioned that she had to employ consultants to help you with this. Is this the same with you?

Councillor Derbyshire: Yes.

The Chairman: Who takes the burden of that expense?

Councillor Derbyshire: That is borne by the local authorities. In Greater Manchester, we are doing it collectively. I assume Councillor Brown has had to pay for that through her own council.

Councillor Brown: We spent more than £1 million—I should think around £1.2 million—in getting to the stage where we had our plan on the inspector’s desk, but immediately when those new figures came out we did not have a five‑year land supply. We have now lost two appeals, with developers just coming in and putting in bids for houses, because we do not have that five‑year land supply.

The Chairman: I should not and will not make an observation on that, but the fact remains that you go through all this work, you have it ready, and then suddenly it is scuppered, in effect. Is no allowance taken of what is done, or is there an easy way to build on your 580, or whatever it is, without too much more expense and without having to have another consultant?

Councillor Brown: Not really. We were grateful that our plan was not thrown out altogether and was only suspended.

Q210 Earl of Lytton: I am also Sussex‑based, but not in your bailiwick. As you will probably know, I am a chartered surveyor. I am very interested in the numbers, because, not mentioning any names, I can think of one district in West Sussex in particular where, under the old regional spatial strategy, there was one figure, which was actually brokered between the counties and the districts. Then, when they got into the new phase of the local plan, they were going for housing numbers that were about a 35% to 38% discount on those figures. Of course, the plan was then declared unsound because it did not meet the criteria, so they have to go back and have other things.

Councillor Derbyshire, you said that the figures were crystal-ball gazing. We seem to be on phase 3 of crystal-ball gazing, in fact. Could you explain the origin and sequence of these numbers and whether the numbers you are now talking about are the same as, more than or less than the ones that would have come out under a regional spatial strategy process?

Councillor Derbyshire: The numbers we started with under the regional spatial strategy, as you described, were probably brokered figures based on local authorities’ assumptions and what they thought they could deliver. We are going up from those. Clearly, there is a stated aim to create a lot more housing and we need to find ways to do that, but we have had several plans either suspended or rejected at the inspection stage within Greater Manchester, because the inspector has been unhappy that insufficient housing numbers have been presented.

When we went out with our first set of figures across the conurbation, which were based on an uplift from the regional spatial strategy to recognise our growth ambitions, that was severely challenged by developers and landowners. An organisation called Housing the Powerhouse has submitted its figures, which are significantly higher and based on us being successful on every single thing that we did, to the nth degree, and every new job creating the need for a new home. That is not what we believe will happen in Greater Manchester, but of course we have had to have consultants come in.

A lot of work has had to be done, in our area certainly, on the question of net immigration into the area, because if Greater Manchester’s plans for growth are successful, that will pull more people into the area than have lived there previously, and obviously we have a lot of travel to work across our boundaries anyway. There is an upward pressure on the figures, and because of the way the system is set up at the moment, if you are a landowner or a developer and you are in an area where land values are great, it gives you a lot of opportunity to challenge at the inspection stage. In my experience, the first thing inspectors look at is the housing numbers. If they are not happy that you are there with it, the plan does not usually get past day one.

The Chairman: At least you do not get involved in an awful lot of unnecessary expenditure.

Councillor Derbyshire: We have spent a lot of money to get to the inspection.

Earl of Lytton: Can I ask about Councillor Brown’s experience of these numbers?

Councillor Brown: It is very much the same. This is why we went back twice and spent money on other consultants: to really look at these figures and see if we could bring them down. There is this sort of policy‑on, policy‑off process, whereby you look at these figures without any constraints, and this is where you get to the final figure. I live in a very constrained district: I have the sea on one side and the national park on the other, and 50% is AONB, so we are very constrained. When you look at this policy‑on and policy‑off, they do not take any notice of the constraints that you have; that is the number of houses that you need. We need some, because we need jobs. We need housing, but I do not believe we need that amount. That is the problem.

Q211 Baroness Whitaker: I would like to go more widely than housing. As you know, this inquiry is about the whole of the built environment and how the elements interact. Councillor Brown mentioned tension between strategic planning and localism. I would like, if I may, to ask about one particular area of tension. I know that the only way some local authorities can get to their housing targets is to destroy worksites, particularly small firms. How do both of you view that tension? How do you balance the local economy’s need and the sense of local identity’s need for particular workplaces and housing?

Councillor Brown: In my particular area, the Government said, “If you do not develop commercial and business premises within a certain time, they can revert to residential”. In fact, we hung on to our commercial land from our last local plan. In fact, it has taken 12 years: we have a very large commercial area and it has just come to fruition now. The second Rolls‑Royce motor car manufacturer has come to Bognor Regis, believe it or not. The first one was in Goodwood at Chichester. That will probably produce 2,000-plus jobs, plus a lot of apprenticeships.

It was the right thing to do, to hang on to that land, and I am very much opposed to changing commercial and business land to residential. It is one thing building houses, but people need jobs. We already have more than 16,000 people out commuting every day in my district, because we did not have the jobs. Although it took 12 years, which is a long time, we managed it in the end and it is absolutely brilliant. That is a catalyst for a lot more companies that want to come into the area.

Councillor Derbyshire: I have a slightly different experience, coming from a northern area, where the employment land is not necessarily all the right land. We are looking very closely at what the employment needs are, which tend to be not quite such large units as historically the factories would have taken up. But there is a real need to preserve the employment land, and the pressure to release for housing can disrupt a strategic overview of what is needed, because once it has gone for housing it is lost and has all the impacts on the infrastructure of the roads if it creates commuting. We feel it is very important that they are looked at together and that we do not lose sight of the fact that we need employment sites. They may be of a slightly different nature than historically in some areas, but we still need them.

Q212 Baroness Andrews: I am going to go back to housing. There are quite different housing situations in Sussex and Manchester. Both of you have said, essentially, that you have had to lift the figures from where the regional spatial strategies were. It sounds as if you were quite comfortable with the regional spatial strategy, because those were negotiated numbers. This is my first question: there are no national housing targets any more, so where are you getting your instructions about numbers from?

Secondly, in West Sussex, as you say Councillor Brown, you are constrained geographically. To what extent can you build your expectations of housing numbers into, for example, the regeneration work that you are doing around the coast, which is clearly an important strategy, because it is quite depressed? In relation to Manchester, Councillor Derbyshire, given the housing market renewal programmes that were started and faltered after about 2010, to what extent are you reviving those sorts of plans in relation to your housing need? Is it a completely different strategy now?

Councillor Brown: The housing figures come from this wonderful thing called the SHMA, the strategic housing market assessment, which everybody has to have. I am not quite sure how they devise these figures, but this is what we all work from. They evaluate how many houses they believe we need and that is our starting point. I do not believe they are realistic figures, but when you get a whole sheet of figures, it is extremely difficult to dispute them.

Baroness Andrews: Do they come from CLG?

Councillor Derbyshire: No. We are required to employ people to do this assessment, to say, “Based on economics, trends and projections, this is what you will need”, and then we cannot really argue with it. Previously, the plans were based on local authorities setting what they thought was realistic within their plans and then meeting objections so that the plans were defensible and to some extent agreed with communities.

Now we have to pay for these assessments, which our communities may not agree with and we can be quite unhappy with, potentially, because, as Councillor Brown says, they do not necessarily take into account the ability of the area to deliver those plans. I have three river valleys running through my authority, for instance, which limits you considerably. It is meant to be objective. While the legislation sounds very good—it has to be based on sound evidence and be objective—it is not looking at local criteria and is creating a lot of legalistic points at which landowners, developers or sometimes objectors can challenge to the inspector or to the High Court. The planning system generates an enormous amount of judicial reviews for the courts.

Baroness Andrews: What about the other questions, which are about place, really? The regional spatial plans identified the growth points, so you had a steer about whether you were going to do an urban extension or whatever it was. Are those the same sort of criteria?

Councillor Brown: I think they are, yes. In my area, economic regeneration is our main objective, because we do not have the right jobs or skills. We have a very low skill base, so we are trying to upskill our workforce and have better jobs. So, yes, we are trying to do that. Rolls‑Royce in particular has helped with that. But, through the local plan, we are doing much the same as we would have done through the regional strategy, so that is a whole‑place plan.

Councillor Derbyshire: In terms of Greater Manchester, we are doing at least the overall plan on a Greater Manchester footprint, although there will still need to be local plans, because that is a coherent economic structure. We need to look at place. Planning is very important, but it is only an aspect of regeneration and of place-building. The Greater Manchester spatial strategy will have to fit in with our transport strategy. No planning document has ever built a house or a factory. You need your residential growth strategy; you need a whole raft of strategies that fit together. It is an element in a jigsaw or a patchwork rather than being the answer in itself, however you do it.

Q213 Baroness Young of Old Scone: In normal walks of life, where there is that degree of uncertainty about numbers, planners would be encouraged to think on a much longer timescale and then speed up or slow down depending on how things were panning out. Is there a case for having a much longer horizon for plans and housing targets, so that plans can emerge on a rolling basis rather than constantly being knocked back in the way that you have described?

Councillor Brown: That was our plan at the beginning. We decided when we had to have 580 houses that we would have 400 built in the first 10 years and then we would have 600—whatever the figures were—later on, but we were not allowed to do that, because you have to have this five-year land supply, and that meant we would not have one. There is this pressure all the time to build. Now our housing numbers have gone up. We had a land supply of 5.3 years and we were thrilled, because then you can hold back on planning on appeal. If you do not have a five-year land supply, it just goes on appeal and you are left with piecemeal developments all over the place instead of your local plan. This is what happens. We now have to get a five-year land supply, and we can only do that by building.

In my district alone, we have 3,000 planning permissions already granted, but not one of them has started. When you are trying to get a five-year land supply, this is the problem. We need developers to build out on the sites that they have.

The Chairman: It is similar in your area.

Councillor Derbyshire: Yes. We do not have quite the demand to build. For instance, the five-year supply is difficult to demonstrate, but the housebuilders are not building anything like that number, so we are being caught in both directions. Across Greater Manchester, I am not sure how many applications there are, but 47,000 units have planning permission but are not being developed because of viability issues. They affect the five-year land supply. It is a straitjacket that is not helping to create houses. It has been a little counterproductive.

Baroness Andrews: By “viability issues”, do you mean it is not profitable for developers to build them?

Councillor Derbyshire: Yes.

Baroness Andrews: That is the bottom line, essentially.

Councillor Derbyshire: Yes. There are different viabilities across Greater Manchester, but in an area like Greater Manchester land values are significantly lower than in London and the south-east. There is quite a lot of contamination, potentially, and infrastructure issues—the costs that you might load on—to deal with, and developers are not that keen on a lot of the sites that we would want to see developed, because the profit is not in it for them. For many years, until recently, the only real houses that were being built in Greater Manchester were being built by the social landlord sector. The volume housebuilders—I sometimes think that is an oxymoron—were not particularly interested. Parts of the conurbation they are now getting interested in, but it is very limited. Issues of viability and infrastructure costs, which I think is one of your questions, are big ones for us.

The Chairman: We need to crack on a bit. Baroness Rawlings, then Lord Inglewood.

Baroness Rawlings: You said that 47,000 units have planning permission. Do the permissions not elapse after a certain amount of years? They are not ongoing, so those would not be there for ever.

Councillor Derbyshire: They can come back for renewal at the end of each period.

Baroness Rawlings: Every three years?

Councillor Derbyshire: Every three years, yes, but I know of one that came back for 12 years until they forgot to come back at the end of the 15th year, as it were.

Baroness Rawlings: But they had lost the permissions then.

Councillor Derbyshire: They lost it because they did not put their paperwork in on time. It was never going to be developed. Even I could tell that it was never going to be viable.

Q214 Lord Inglewood: The responses you have given have taken you in the direction that I wanted to inquire about. Until the end of the discussion that we have been having, you talked a lot about allocations and plans and not all that much about demand. I do not know much about the south of England, but my understanding is that in places like the Arun district you could more or less build from the north end of the district to the sea if you just let it rip. What is the relationship between the real demand for housing and the allocations that you are being given?

Following on from that, to take up Councillor Derbyshire’s point, you illustrated something that people have said to me privately, which is that on occasions affordable local housing, for example, means that on certain sites the combination of the price of the product and the margins is such that it is not worth doing. Is one of the answers as far as housing is concerned, therefore, contrary to what appears to have happened yesterday, to ease the burden of tax on housing rather than to increase it?

Councillor Derbyshire: I would not like to go into tax policy at this point.

Lord Inglewood: It is quite important, is it not?

Councillor Derbyshire: The viability is important. Houses are not just blocks that people live in; they are homes and they are parts of communities. We like to talk about community and place-building. The infrastructure implications of housebuilding are enormous—for example, the road networks and schools. Even if you take out the requirement for affordable housing, very often the costs of developing a site, if the developer cannot meet them either through CIL or Section 106 and you do not produce an enormous amount in a lot of the country, make it unviable.

Lord Inglewood: Can I just stop you there? Forget about precisely why. If you are the developer, if there is no margin, no profit, in it, you are not going to do it, yet the allocations you are given are such that this should be done. Is there not somehow a misfit?

Councillor Derbyshire: Potentially, yes, but I am not sure what the answer to that is, because the investment to make those houses viable within the communities in which they are built has to be made by somebody.

Lord Inglewood: Somebody has to pay for it.

Councillor Derbyshire: If the road network is already at 100%—and certainly there are parts of my borough and I am sure Councillor Brown’s borough that are at that—and if the schools are already well oversubscribed, even without taking into account other things such as play and social housing, there are costs to housing being produced over and above the cost of the bricks and mortar and the land. One thing we would like to capture in Greater Manchester is the uplift in land value of some of the land that is released for housing and is immediately worth a great deal more, which tends to reduce the developer’s margin, because they put that cost into their balance sheet.

Lord Inglewood: Yes, but it does not matter to the developer whether his disbursement is tax or infrastructure contribution, does it? The problem is—question mark—that in a number of cases the costs of doing it exceed what the project will bear. Then there is a really big public question: if you need the housing and you have a land-use planning system, how do you deal with that?

Councillor Derbyshire: That is not in itself a planning policy issue, in that no plan can overcome that, which is why the residential growth and the other economic plans in areas are part of how we try to deal with it.

Lord Inglewood: I appreciate that. That must be right, but if stuff is not happening, the whole thing is a complete waste of time.

Councillor Derbyshire: Yes, and it is expensive to produce the plan. As I say, no plan in itself produced any houses.

Lord Inglewood: Councillor Brown, do you have any comments on that?

Councillor Brown: We have much the same problem. Yes, we need family housing. We have quite an elderly population too, but we need low-cost housing; we have a lot of young families. What happens on some of the building that takes place is that developers come back and say, “It is not viable any more”, so the bit you need, the affordable bit, is reduced. Instead of 30% affordable, you are lucky if you get 15%. On some, it is taken away altogether, or some of the infrastructure that was going to be part of that development is taken away. This is where the problems start.

Lord Inglewood: It is the conundrum that it may be affordable for the potential purchaser but it may not be affordable for the developer.

Councillor Brown: That is right. It is a huge problem.

Q215 Lord Clement-Jones: I would like to come on to some of the cross-boundary issues that we have touched on, and in particular issues such as the duty to co‑operate, devolution, and so on and so forth. We have heard criticism of the duty to co‑operate. I wondered where you both stood on whether that is working well in practice. Does it need change? It is fairly recent in terms of the 2011 Act. Coming on to devolution, virtually every major northern conurbation apart from Leeds now seems to have a combined authority or a city region—whatever you call it. Do you think that is going to be an effective way? Is it really effectively a substitute for the regional spatial planning framework that was there in the past in those particular areas? That of course begs the question about what you do where there is nothing.

Councillor Brown: Yes, absolutely. The duty to co‑operate has been extremely difficult in some areas. You are bringing together local authorities that were in different places producing their plans, and with different political make-ups. The whole thing was quite new. In my particular area, we have done extremely well. I have to boast that we got an award for best practice. We have quite a large area in our duty to co‑operate. It includes Brighton and Hove. There is one county council, we have the South Downs National Park, and there are seven districts and boroughs. We cross into East Sussex, West Sussex and Brighton and Hove.

Lord Clement-Jones: Why did you get the award? What was good about what you did?

Councillor Brown: We actually collaborated and worked together on a plan.

Lord Clement-Jones: I see—just by collaborating, in a sense, as you are meant to do.

Councillor Brown: Yes. That is right. We spoke to each other—members and officers. We had a good working relationship. We came together as a strategic planning board and we achieved something. We put forward our proposals and, yes, it worked very well. But we were taking into account a functional economic area rather than county boundaries. This is the way it works. You get a cluster of districts in an area that works, where people want to live somewhere, they shop somewhere else and they work somewhere else. That is the economic boundary, and it does not necessarily—I know the county councils do not like this—end at the county boundary, nor at the LEP boundary. That is why ours was successful: because we were an actual economic area.

The Chairman: And you spoke to each other.

Councillor Brown: And we spoke to each other, and we are still quite friendly. Even though there are quite large political differences between some of the authorities, we worked together for that.

Lord Clement-Jones: Going forward, that is going to be an effective framework.

Councillor Brown: Yes.

Councillor Derbyshire: Similarly in Greater Manchester, we are an economic area. We are working together as the 10, but the duty to co‑operate involves the boundaries. It sounds blindingly obvious that you should co‑operate. In practice, it has produced real difficulties as to what is meant by “duty to co‑operate”. In some cases, you get a letter saying, “This is our plan. This is what we are planning to do”, and informing is seen as co‑operation. A neighbouring authority to my own nearly foundered on its first day of the inquiry, because we were asked, “Did they co‑operate with you?” We said, “Yes, they did. We do not agree with some of their conclusions”, and the inspector started a long debate as to whether duty to co‑operate was the same as duty to agree. We said that we were happy that they had co‑operated and that we had the information and we were clear between the two authorities where we disagreed on analysis. It was suspended for other reasons, and it has come back. It is one of those phrases that, again, can be used as a way of trying to stop or derail plans, because even objectors or developers, if they can see a way in, will go, “We do not think there was sufficient co‑operation between the authorities”.

Lord Clement-Jones: Is that superseded, though, by the combined-authority structure? Is that structure going to be more effective?

Councillor Derbyshire: Our combined authority involves the 10 working together, but we have neighbours all around our boundaries, so we will be co‑operating on the GM strategic framework with all of them. That will be Lancashire, Merseyside, Cheshire, Derbyshire and probably a couple of others I have forgotten.

Lord Clement-Jones: That takes you wider. My supplementary was going to be: in terms of major infrastructure, you need to have co‑operation of a higher order, in a sense, between city regions and combined authorities as well.

Councillor Derbyshire: Potentially, but, as I say, there is no real definition of what it means to co-operate. In the end, with Cheshire East, they accepted that we were aware of their plans, we understood their plans and we had made comments, but then our reservations stood. It does not necessarily mean that the issues have been dealt with; it is more about awareness, which obviously should happen. It has caused difficulties in areas where it was not meant to do so.

The Chairman: Would it be an idea if, instead of calling it a duty co-operate, they called it “duty to show common sense”? It seems to be just crazy.

Councillor Derbyshire: I am not sure that that would overcome some of the difficulties that we have had, which require investment in further highway engineers to look at the traffic impacts of the proposals. The soundness requirement—again, it sounds blindingly obvious that the plans should be sound—can require years of evidence and consultation. Did you say that it cost about £1 million to get yours ready?

Councillor Brown: Yes.

Councillor Derbyshire: It leaves it open to being questioned. In any planning where you are looking ahead, whether you are projecting five years or 20 years into the future, there is an element of uncertainty that people can challenge on.

Councillor Brown: The duty to co-operate, I believe, needs some review. The District Councils’ Network has put forward some suggestions. You can get to the end of the local plan process with your thing on the inspector’s desk and he can then rule that out by saying that he does not believe you co‑operated. This happened to Mid Sussex. One of our suggestions would be that we have a staged local plan. Ours has taken nearly five years. After two or three years, you have done the main bulk of the work you need to do. At that point, you could go before the inspector and he could tell you whether or not you were on the right road to co-operating and put you right there, rather than waiting until you get right to the end of the process and him then saying, “Sorry, I do not believe you have met that requirement”.

The Chairman: You have done this; you have a template for co-operating. Is there any chance that we could have a copy of that?

Councillor Brown: I can send that to you, yes.

The Chairman: If you could. Somebody used a jigsaw analogy recently, and that is what it seems to be.

Q216 Baroness Andrews: I should declare an interest because I live in East Sussex. I know the ecology of West Sussex and East Sussex is rather different. If you have a strategic planning board that covers the entire plan, what you effectively have is a sub-regional plan, which is to put a new narrative on it, frankly. You also have this Coast to Capital initiative. I would just like to ask a bit about that. Councillor Derbyshire, one thing that has worried me about the creation of sub‑regions that are city regions is how you ensure that those smaller towns, not least like Stockport, really get a fair share of airtime, resources and influence. They sometimes get lost, do they not, in the great magnetic pull of the city itself?

Councillor Derbyshire: Greater Manchester’s geography suits us in that the city of Manchester is not enormously larger than the other nine authorities, and it literally sits in the middle; it is our regional centre. Our geography works very well for us. We have had this long history of working together after the metropolitan county councils were abolished in the mid-1980s. We have a mayor model, and will have a mayor model, where the 10 leaders of the local authorities are the cabinet. I have responsibility; each of the 10 leaders has responsibility. That is a model—it is more of a joint committee, in all honesty, but “combined authority” and “mayor” are the chosen phases that we have to use—that works for us. I appreciate that it would work differently in other areas—in areas such as Birmingham, where the city council is so large compared to the others, or rural areas where you do not have that large conurbation. The thing is functional economic areas where there is a common advantage. We have a joint growth and reform strategy that we can all sign up to. That is probably the basis that you need for any kind of combined authority or devolution agreement.

The Chairman: I am being pressured from my left about time.

Councillor Brown: I will be very brief. Building on our good working relationship on our duty to co‑operate, we are putting in a devolution bid from East Sussex, West Sussex and Surrey. Next week, I think, we are going to see Government. We have put in our initial bid. We are quite excited about that.

Baroness Andrews: Where does the national park sit on that? The national park is a very complicated element in all this.

Councillor Brown: They will be part of it.

Baroness Andrews: They are part of it. They complain because they have 17, or whatever, local authorities represented, all fighting for their space.

Councillor Brown: I know they do, yes. I have heard them.

Baroness Andrews: It is a very complicated national park.

Councillor Brown: There are 26 local authorities involved from East Sussex, West Sussex and Surrey, but we are very confident that we may be one of the first areas to get it.

The Chairman: Well done. Best of luck. That is terrific.

Q217 Baroness Rawlings: From all that you have explained very clearly, I wonder what powers and resources local authorities need to ensure planning departments can carry out their functions effectively. In the case of reforming planning fees, have you had time to evaluate a little the effect of the Autumn Statement?

Councillor Derbyshire: It is very clear that planning authorities have been running at a significant loss, given some of the expertise that you need. A lot of planning officers have been lost and a lot of authorities do not have some of the more specialist staff available to them, at least directly, because of costs. The ability to put fees up will probably help with that, but there is a question about whether it will allow us to fund to the level that we are at. Some of the changes—for instance, being able to change from office or shop to residential without planning permission—create work for planning authorities but without any fees. The potential in the Bill for the brownfield designation will also do that and take away some of the strategic view that we can have.

There is a tension there. To run a proper planning authority, you need some specialist staff, and the planning fees do not cover that. I think developers would prefer to pay a decent amount and get a good service, in all honesty. A lot of us do pre-planning for free, which saves quite a lot of money. Sometimes you can put a lot of time into pre-planning discussions and a planning application does not come forward at all—possibly for very good reasons, such as that you have advised that it would not meet policy or it would be too difficult—but the cost is falling on the local authorities at a time when the ability of local authorities to meet it is limited. That, again, is one of the reasons for working together, as we are doing and as it sounds is happening in the Sussex area.

Councillor Brown: Through the District Councils’ Network, we have put forward a very robust case for at least two years to have full cost recovery on planning fees—to set our own local planning fees. The announcement yesterday is just another uplift. We want to be cost-neutral, but I do not think the Treasury trusts us to do that. It is very counterproductive not to be able to recruit and retain good planning officers. This is the problem. We are eight short at the moment. We have to pay consultants. It is a huge cost.

The Chairman: I was going to ask that question. Other witnesses we have had have said that there has been a reduction in the number of those who are training to be planners, that planners are moving on and that there is a real serious situation. In both your areas—particularly Councillor Brown, with your national hat on—is that valid? If it is valid, how important is it to get working on it now? Should it be a major recommendation of ours, or, indeed, is it just being bigged up?

Councillor Brown: I believe it is a major problem that we need to sort out. No, we do not have enough planners, but the ones we have are all going to the private sector. You cannot really blame them. In my own case, I am looking at having one set of planning officers between maybe two, if not three, authorities, but still keeping the local planning determination, because it is very important that you have the local input. But in order to get specialist and well-trained officers, we cannot afford now, with our loss of income, to have a separate planning department.

The Chairman: I take it that it is the same in your area.

Councillor Derbyshire: Yes, I would agree with that.

Q218 Lord Inglewood: I would just like to pursue this a bit further. A generation and a half ago, the planning service was a municipal phenomenon; it was all paid for by the rate-payers. We have now moved to a world where you say you cannot afford it, which I am sure that is right, but at the same time we are therefore privatising, in one sense, the planning system. If you end up getting full cost recovery, first, is it desirable in constitutional or institutional terms that this public service is all being paid for by individual people in the private sector? Forget about where you raise the money from for a moment; it is a comment in principle. Secondly, if those who are applying for planning permission are paying for the whole thing, what, if any, redress do they get when the planning system is incompetent?

Councillor Derbyshire: If they do not get their decision within a certain amount of time, they can go directly to the inspectorate.

Lord Inglewood: Yes, but it is not very satisfactory.

Councillor Derbyshire: That is not very satisfactory, no.

Lord Inglewood: I am just questioning you.

Councillor Derbyshire: We are running a planning department, as all the authorities are, but we are all looking at ways in which we can maximise. It is probably true that a lot of developers would tell you that things have got slower because there are fewer planners, or there are fewer specialists, when certain things need to be done, so it takes longer to do it. There has been an enormous growth in the number of people working in planning agencies for the private sector, who are then trying to persuade the planning department that something is acceptable despite local policies, or whatever. In a way, it is becoming almost more confrontational.

It would be desirable if planning were seen as completely independent of the developers, but given the pressures on local authorities—a cut of, I think, 41% was announced yesterday, on top of what we have already had—planning is part of the reductions that we have faced. As I say, the calculation is that, without change, the bins and social care will take up all the available resources. That does not include planning. Somebody has to pay for it somewhere. Whether or not it is being paid for by the planning fees, applicants should have redress if they are not getting good service. That does not always mean getting the answer that they want, but getting the appropriate service is something that all applicants should expect.

Lord Inglewood: I am not saying that I subscribe to any question I put, or that I subscribe to this one, but you have made the case that we cannot afford proper planning any more.

Councillor Derbyshire: We have a system where planning is often seen as the answer to all sorts of problems. It is an aspect of the answer, but it has not been given the resources to do that, which is a very difficult position for planning authorities to be in.

Lord Inglewood: You have told us they are not there, as it were.

Councillor Derbyshire: A lot of local authorities are running like mad to try to keep the show on the road. It could be a lot better if it was better resourced. I would say that is true of many public services, of course, and it is a question of priorities, but if we want to see the growth in housing and employment, we need a properly funded planning system to do that, however that funding is produced.

The Chairman: What is the situation in other countries? Do they have this awful block on progress that is created by a lack of planners or planners who are not properly skilled? Is there any information about that?

Councillor Derbyshire: I would not really know. Strategic planning is very different in France, for instance, and in some countries there is a different culture towards local planning.

Q219 Baroness Andrews: I want to ask you about CIL and Section 106. CIL is designed to streamline the accumulation of benefit, as it were, but Section 106 lingers on, because there is a transitional arrangement. What is it doing to your ability either to deliver affordable homes or to deliver proper strategic planning for infrastructure? Is it helping or is it not?

Councillor Derbyshire: We do not have a lot of experience of CIL. We only have one authority in Greater Manchester that has gone for CIL. There are six that are not even looking at it, and three, including my own, that are looking at it. One of the things about CIL is that it looks simpler, but simpler does not always meet the complexity of life. You have a flat rate. That does not allow for negotiation on perhaps the more difficult sites, where, for strategic reasons, you might want to show flexibility. There is more flexibility in the 106 system, but there is a limit now, under the transitional arrangements, to the number of 106 agreements. As I say, the problem generally in a lot of the north‑west, certainly, is viability. Regardless of your policies with regard to CIL or to 106, if a developer is coming forward and saying that a site is not viable, you start to compromise if you really want to see the development. Very often, affordable housing is almost the first one to come under pressure; if you need the highway improvements, they tend to take priority, because they have to be in, so affordable housing gets squeezed. Many authorities have aspirations for affordable housing out of development that are very often not met, or are met only in small proportions.

Councillor Brown: We are exactly the same. We have not really entered into the world of CIL yet; we are still in Section 106.

Baroness Andrews: Are you recommending that we revisit CIL? Could something be done to make it more effective or more accessible and useful to you?

Councillor Derbyshire: The evidence from my area is that it is inflexible, because you need to look site by site. You might want to bring a site forward for strategic reasons—either as employment or perhaps major housebuilding—but it is not going to be terrifically viable if you apply CIL. There are very limited exemptions from it. It does not have that degree of flexibility for an authority to say, “We would forgo this because of the other benefits”, or, “You particularly want to go here. Can you put some more in?” It does not have the flexibility. Equally, 106 agreements can take a long time to negotiate and can be quite piecemeal.

Baroness Andrews: Also, sometimes, you simply do not get what you expect out of them at the end.

Councillor Derbyshire: Yes.

Councillor Brown: The Government are looking into an investigation into CIL. I know the District Councils’ Network has been asked to input into that review. They announced it last week, if I remember.

The Chairman: Too many things are happening, but there you are.

Q220 Baroness Young of Old Scone: Can we just stick with infrastructure? The planning system needs to look at a whole range of infrastructure issues. You have talked about transport, but they also include healthcare provision, schools, water, sewage, flood defence, energy—you name it. How effective is the system currently at being able to bring into play these issues? If it is not, what would you like to see changed in the system that would allow that to happen?

Councillor Brown: In my area, we have a huge deficit in infrastructure before we even start talking about building one more house. We have a big problem, and that affects the economy of the area and everything like that. We need a national approach to infrastructure that supports housing and economic growth. We need a little more flexibility within CIL and Section 106 to advance-funding the infrastructure maybe from your CIL, but we need to front-load it. One of the problems that we have with, say, infrastructure is the fact that we have this deficit but local communities are against any further development because they cannot see the benefits of it. I talked about my last big strategic allocation with the commercial land. It took 12 years to build 1,800 houses and we are waiting for the relief road to be opened next March. We need to have some up-front funding for infrastructure. That would make it a whole lot easier to sell the fact we need more housing and to actually move around the area.

Councillor Derbyshire: There are a lot of problems with infrastructure: strategic, financial, and sometimes the politics of local areas about what you do—communities have different views. Planning is part of it, but I do not think that planning can be the sole answer to creating the infrastructure, because the value is not there in a lot of the areas.

Baroness Young of Old Scone: I have to declare an interest from the past: I was chief executive of the Environment Agency. There are whole swathes of the south-east where, quite frankly, there is simply not enough water around to sustain development aspirations for the future. Are you able to take a broad enough view across a range of authorities? Does the duty to co‑operate mean that you can take a strategic view about things like the housing and sewage need or the transport need, or is that a really difficult proposition?

Councillor Brown: Yes, you can. In my local area in Chichester, they had to stop building for that very reason. That is definitely part of what we look at in the duty to co‑operate and the strategic planning.

Councillor Derbyshire: Yes, it is something that we take into account. Within GM, we have an open-source infrastructure map, which has a lot of the information on it that allows people to see what is there and what is not there, which hopefully will help with forward planning.

Earl of Lytton: In the old days, a lot of this infrastructure was provided centrally; one thinks particularly of trunk roads, which were provided through the old Department of Transport, as it was in those days, which presumably then provided funding to the county to deal with roads that were not Department of Transport roads. First, am I right in thinking this has just been shunted down wholesale somehow for you lot to sort out?

Secondly, when you are dealing with these infrastructure things—just picking up a point that Baroness Young made, and thinking about the privatised water companies and the people who provide telephone, IT, drainage facilities and stuff like that—how do you corral all these things? I have some experience in my professional work of this. On one particular site I can think of in the past, the sewerage authority said that it would not put anything in its forward plan unless it was in the local plan. The local plan said, “We are not putting it in our local plan unless we know there is capacity in the sewage treatment works”. Do you come across all this sort of stuff as well?

Councillor Brown: We have the same problem, because we are working on a 20‑year plan and most of the other utilities seem to be working on a five-year plan. This is where the difficulty came in forward planning. On the road network, I am not quite sure where we are with it. We still have what is not the Highways Agency any more; it is called something else. Part of the devolution bid that we are making is that we take over transport—road and rail—because it is really important. It is a very big ask, and I am not quite sure whether we have not bitten off more than we can chew, but that is what we are trying to do with our bid. I think that is the only way forward.

Lord Inglewood: Might I first ask a question of Councillor Derbyshire? We are talking about infrastructure and costs and so on. I put it to you specifically because you come from Stockport. I live in Cumbria. The water you drink comes from where we are, and we do not get a penny piece from you all for it. Do you think that is right?

Councillor Derbyshire: That sounds right, although the Greater Manchester area has quite a lot of rainfall of its own and a number of reservoirs. Yes, there are all sorts of anomalies in the system. As I say, all our boundaries are very permeable in terms of travel, natural resources such as water, and the infrastructure that has been set up. That is why it is important to have these overviews, and the networks, the partnership and the communication between the organisations. It is quite difficult to legislate for that, because then it becomes a tick-box system, but you have to require that areas work together.

Q221 Lord Inglewood: If the volume of water you all drink was a volume of oil that had been extracted from Cumbria, we would be the richest part of the United Kingdom. My real concern is the inhibitions that we have talked about, particularly on housing and bringing land forward. The general question is: are there any particular new powers that might enable this to happen more smoothly? In particular, do you think that the CPO powers that you have are adequate to bring some of these things forward in the wider interests of the communities you are serving? If you have a site that has been sitting with consent and planning permission for housing for, say, 10 or 15 years and you need that, there seems to be a case for thinking that perhaps it should be progressed.

Councillor Derbyshire: It is difficult to use CPO powers locally for purely regeneration purposes directly.

Lord Inglewood: Is that because the legal inhibitions on the criteria are too tightly drawn?

Councillor Derbyshire: Yes. It is a very cumbersome process as well. You have to take a very deep breath before you get into it, so that is an inhibition. Part of the budget in the spring was a land commission for Greater Manchester. We are hoping to start meeting in January. We hope that will help us to bring together the public sector. That is part of the work that we are doing, because we believe there may well be public sector land that can be released. That is obviously a lot easier for us to get hold of than the rest. In many cases, though, it is the resources that are needed to develop the sites. A lot of our private sector sites, if we could put something into the remediation, would probably come forward. It is a whole range of things, but I am not convinced that our CPO powers are as strong as they should be, given the demand and the aspirations that we have for housing and for employment land.

Lord Inglewood: Are you saying that what you need is a CIL in reverse? There are some sites where, as a matter of course, some public money—do not let us get into where that comes from, for a moment—should go into the site to take it through the threshold of viability.

Councillor Derbyshire: Yes. I am not sure about Councillor Brown’s area, but Greater Manchester has an industrial legacy, some of which is very beautiful but much of which leads to pollution and to site contamination that needs work. If they could be productively brought back in, they could make a massive difference to local communities, but they are not viable for the private sector as they stand.

Baroness Andrews: Where does that leave the brownfield provision that is in the new planning Bill? Are you saying that is not going to work for you?

Councillor Derbyshire: A lot of the brownfield within Greater Manchester would fall within that. The deemed permission, which takes away the strategic view of how sites might play into an area—I have some concern over that—would still have the viability issues. There is also the issue that what is brown to a developer or to a planner is sometimes very valued green-looking space to communities. They are not always lacking in controversy. Just making it easier to get permission would not in itself bring those sites forward, because of the viability issues that are tied up with them.

Baroness Andrews: Presumably in greater Sussex, or whatever it is going to be, there is a lot less brownfield.

Councillor Brown: Absolutely.

Baroness Andrews: So it is not going to help you with your land supply issues.

Councillor Brown: No, it will not help.

Baroness Andrews: Yet that is where the pressure is for housing.

Councillor Brown: Yes, it is. We would like to see the CPO process made much easier for councils to exercise when it is necessary.

Baroness Andrews: Would that be the one single thing that would make the biggest difference to you—if you freed up CPO a bit?

Councillor Brown: It would not make the biggest difference, but it would be a good thing to do where it is necessary.

The Chairman: Would you put it at the top of your list of priorities?

Councillor Brown: It would not be at the top of my list, but it would certainly be on it.

Lord Inglewood: What would be at the top of your list?

Councillor Brown: Getting developers to build out the sites they already have permission for, where they are viable. That would be right at the top of my list.

Lord Inglewood: Are you then saying you would like to have access to central government money, or money from somewhere, so you could say to these people, “We will put some cash on the table here. You do the rest”? Is that how you think it should happen?

Councillor Derbyshire: Yes, that would unplug a lot of sites.

Councillor Brown: Yes, it would.

Lord Inglewood: But it is less easy to do.

Q222 Baroness Parminter: I declare an interest as a former district councillor in West Sussex and a resident of Surrey. My question follows on from Baroness Young’s and is about how you build communities that have the necessary infrastructure along with the housing. I wanted to ask particularly about low-carbon futures and the failure—or not—of the present system to ensure that those communities in the future have the resilience to deal with the impacts of climate change and the statutory requirements that you have on low carbon.

Councillor Derbyshire: That is a good question. We have a carbon implementation plan. At the moment, we try to, but there is variability in the environmental standards that local authorities ask for, and then there is that viability discussion with developers. Some developers are planning for the long term, but if you build and sell you do not necessarily worry about the running costs. We are working with some of those who are building to hold in the private rented sector and who perhaps have a different attitude. Putting in some of the low-carbon things is still seen as a bit of a luxury, an add-on, an extra cost, rather than as something that would benefit. As I say, given sites’ difficulty with viability, that is difficult. On some of the sites where they really want to go, developers will offer you higher standards.

It would be good if the building standards that people had to work to clearly required them to build for the future. We have the sustainable urban drainage system coming in. It would be better if that was built into the system, but it is very difficult for an individual authority to do it and it usually loads costs on to the initial building process.

Baroness Young of Old Scone: I was talking recently to people who were active at the time of the green building code and the standards that were in place then, and I was given assurances that the majority of the code standards were now in building regs. Is that not the case?

Councillor Derbyshire: The higher ones have not come in. It is a lot easier to put in a gas central heating system, and everybody understands gas central heating, but for long-term sustainability, particularly if it is a large unit, you might want to look at district heating, at heat source pumps, for which we have pilots going, or at routinely putting in solar where it is appropriate, and those things are not built in. A lot of the carbon that is produced is produced domestically and it is through the grid—either gas or electricity. Even if we go to electricity, whether or not it is a low-carbon usage depends on how the electricity is being produced. There is a presumption that every house has its own gas boiler and suchlike when things are being built.

On the whole, people are probably building houses with good insulation, because that is important if you are going to try to sell it, but they are not necessarily doing some of the things that would reduce carbon costs over a longer period of time, because it is not an immediately saleable thing. If you are a developer, you are going to sell and you are going to move on. As I say, we have seen landlords who plan to stay taking perhaps different views of biomass boilers and making the running costs of the building cheaper, which tends to make the carbon output lower as well. Low-carbon tends to be a win-win from the point of view of costs of running buildings.

The Chairman: Do you find the same thing, Councillor Brown?

Councillor Brown: Yes, I do. We were working towards every home being level 6 of the code by almost this time, but the financial viability just would not allow that to happen. We still have our own housing stock. We have made it as good as we can, and everybody has new windows and it is very high-quality stock. We were just starting on a programme of building our own council houses again, after 25 years, and they were going to be built to a very high specification. Unfortunately, the Government’s announcement that 1% has to come off all the council house rents for the next four years has cost us £4 million and we have had to stop our building programme, which is very sad.

Baroness Andrews: You have completely stopped it.

Councillor Brown: We just cannot afford to do it. It is a very long story with the HRA, but there is a cap on that, so we are not allowed to borrow. We have got to the position where unless the Government take away the cap, we cannot borrow to build—and it is a very cheap rate to borrow at the moment.

Baroness Andrews: Just to be accurate, are you saying that because of the combination of the cap and the second factor, which I have forgotten—the regulation, or whatever—you will not be building the local authority housing that you thought you would be able to build? How many houses would that have been a year?

Councillor Brown: We knew that we could build 30 a year; we were hoping to build 50. When you build your own council stock, you can keep the rent low. You do not have to do it at the housing association rates, which are—I cannot remember exactly—around £150 a week. Our council housing we can set at a social rent of about £90 a week, which makes a big difference to people who can never afford to buy.

Baroness Andrews: If you gross that up across the whole of your region, you would be talking about hundreds of houses.

Councillor Brown: I cannot remember the amount of housing that will not be built across the whole country, but it is a lot of housing.

The Chairman: This is really quite incredible. This is silos gone mad. We are not going to be able to recommend anything if we have this rubbish going on.

Councillor Derbyshire: We have not done a calculation for houses, but we know that across Greater Manchester the loss to the social housing sector over four years is over £300 million. That would have represented housebuilding as well as improvements to existing stock. It is over £300 million.

Baroness Andrews: It is a difficult equation. Do you think that the £400 million that is being made available nationally, as of yesterday, to build new homes is going to be completely discounted by the impact of the loss of homes?

Councillor Derbyshire: Yes.

Councillor Derbyshire: More than.

Baroness Andrews: In fact, more homes will now be lost than will be built.

The Chairman: I cannot believe it. Something has to be done. The two of you have certainly made an impact. This is quite remarkable.

Councillor Derbyshire: It is a situation where there are aspirations but policies are not lining up on the ground.

The Chairman: I am being reminded of the time by my clerk. You have the last question, Baroness Whitaker, but please make it very quick.

Q223 Baroness Whitaker: We need a quick word about the people who are going to live in all these places. Councillor Brown mentioned local resistance to more housing and people being against infrastructure development. What is the best way to draw in local communities to these decisions, which affect the whole of the way they live their lives? How ought people to be better informed about all their built environments so that this can play a bigger part in the decisions? What are your ideas on this?

Councillor Brown: In my area, the residents are very much involved. As I was saying, we have 14 neighbourhood plans. That is the opportunity for the communities—

Baroness Whitaker: At what stage are they asked what they want their place to be like?

Councillor Brown: They compile their neighbourhood plan. They start from scratch as a group. It is not done by the council; it is done by local residents. They say what they want in it. They have to align with our local plan, though. This is where there is the tension. In some of the village areas, because we do not have any brownfield sites we have to allocate greenfield land for housing.

Baroness Whitaker: How do you ensure that they are fully aware of all the factors that you think they need to be aware of?

Councillor Brown: They are fully aware. At our local plan meetings, we can have upwards of 200 people turning up. We can only get 100 into the council chamber because of the fire regulations, so the rest are downstairs on a monitor. They are very much aware. We have had even more than that.

Baroness Whitaker: If they are on the monitor, can they ask questions?

Councillor Brown: They can ask questions at the beginning of the meeting, yes. We have a lot of two-way communication with our residents.

Baroness Whitaker: Is it their opinion that they have enough communication?

Councillor Brown: I think they do. They do not like the decision because, at the end of the day, this is where localism clashes with strategic planning. We are bound by certain things that we have to do, and they think, with localism, that they can say they do not want that number of houses. I wish that was so, but unfortunately it is not. That is where the tension is—that localism does not actually exist in reality.

Councillor Derbyshire: I would have to agree with that. We had one area that was looking at a local plan until they realised it could not be used to stop the planning application they were concerned about. I think all local authorities try really hard to communicate when they are in the planning process. It is something that you are required to do anyway, because if you get to inspection and there are a lot of objections because you have not followed the process, that will derail you. We have local planning committees.

Baroness Whitaker: There is consultation and there is involvement right at the beginning. These are not quite the same thing.

Councillor Derbyshire: No. As Councillor Brown said, there is perhaps a belief out there that planning is locally determined, whether it is an application or whether it is the planning, and very often there is a frustration from communities that then we are saying, “We cannot do that”, or, “We cannot change that, because it is centrally set”. That can cause residents to feel discouraged and maybe excluded. Although they have had their say, having their say does not always mean that they get their answer.

I personally feel that because we need to look at releasing land, there have to be conversations with communities about communities and growth. Most people recognise there needs to be more housing; they hope there is somewhere else it can be built, but if it is going to be built in their community, what is it that their community needs? What are the benefits? This comes back to the fact that it is very often difficult to put those benefits in place in advance, or to guarantee them. It is a bit like jam tomorrow but you have the building works today. There is a lot of frustration, I would say, in local communities with regard to planning.

Baroness Whitaker: We could develop this, but I do not think there is enough time.

The Chairman: I am afraid again we have run out of time. I just want to say that I am sure everybody agrees with me that this has been a brilliant session. You have been very co‑operative and you have put up with some nonsense questions from me and some very erudite ones from the members of the Committee. If there is anything that you think we have really glaringly forgotten, could you just drop us a line and let us know? If you have any other thoughts in the middle of the night or, indeed, even the middle of the day, we would be very grateful to have them. We just want to make sure that our report works well and makes a decent impact. You will be getting the transcript anyway, and eventually a copy of the report. Thank you very much.