Oral evidence - Built Environment

Members present

Baroness O’Cathain (Chairman)

Baroness Andrews

Lord Clement-Jones

Lord Freeman

Lord Inglewood

Earl of Lytton

Baroness Parminter

Baroness Rawlings

Baroness Whitaker

Lord Woolmer of Leeds

Baroness Young of Old Scone

_________________________

Examination of Witnesses

Mr Simon de Beer, Planning Policy and Environment Manager, Bath and North East Somerset Council, Mr Joe Henry, Service Director, Development Management and Building Control, London Borough of Barnet, and Ms Anneliese Hutchinson, Service Director, Development and Public Protection, Gateshead Metropolitan Borough Council

Q261 The Chairman: Good morning. First, thank you very much for giving up your time, submitting your ideas and being willing to be grilled by us, although I can tell you that it is quite painless. Welcome to this evidence session of the Select Committee on National Policy for the Built Environment. You have in front of you a list of the interests that have been declared by members of the Committee. A transcript of the meeting will be taken and published on the Committee website and you will have the opportunity to make corrections to that transcript where necessary. Could I begin by asking each one of you to briefly introduce yourselves to the Committee, please? This is for the purpose of the record and so the transcribers can put the name to the voice.

Simon de Beer: My name is Simon de Beer. I am the Planning Policy Manager at Bath and North East Somerset Council, which is a smallish district council adjoining the city of Bristol, with a population of around 180,000, half of which lives in the city of Bath.

The Chairman: So you actually call it Bath and Bristol?

Simon de Beer: No, it is Bath and North East Somerset Council. We are part of the West of England group of authorities, which is the former Avon County Council, which after reorganisation became a unitary authority.

Joe Henry: My name is Joe Henry. I am service director of planning and building control for Barnet Council. Barnet is a large local authority in London. We are projected to be one of the most populous boroughs in London next year.

Anneliese Hutchinson: Anneliese Hutchinson. I am the service director for development and public protection at Gateshead council. For those of you who do not know, that is on the south banks of the Tyne, so we share our urban core with Newcastle. We have both green belt and urban areas and a population of around 200,000 people.

The Chairman: You have a wonderful concert hall there.

Anneliese Hutchinson: We have, yes.

The Chairman: You did not come down this morning, did you?

Anneliese Hutchinson: No, I came last night.

Q262 The Chairman: Thank you all. The first question is: what are the principal challenges faced by local authority planning departments in the current climate and how are they responding to these challenges? Who would like to start? I take it all three of you would like to answer this.

Anneliese Hutchinson: I am happy to start. There are a number of challenges, the first of which is staffing. We are probably staffed to deal with the economic downturn, so the issues are to do with recruitment and retention of staff. Obviously, the economic climate has improved greatly and the universities et cetera have not necessarily caught up with that, and certainly in the north-east we struggle to recruit new planners and to find students to come in, help us out and be trained. We have also lost a lot of expertise with austerity cuts in the local authority—I do not have anybody in my service over the age of 55—and we have a considerably reduced workforce, so we are having to work more closely with other authorities to share that expertise. For example, we will have the expertise perhaps for flooding in the area, where another authority will have expertise in, say, retail planning.

One of the key things is uncertainty, in that the legislation has changed considerably over time, and often at short notice, which creates its own problems when trying to understand where you need to put your limited resources. On the horizon at the minute is the idea of us having to produce a brownfield land register and local development orders by 2020. Really, I should be putting my service in place to do that now to get to that position by 2020, but there is a lack of detail.

Despite some of the changes, the system is more complicated now. When submitting an application, for example, a lot more information and a considerable amount of upfront investment in terms of the information required, and often some of the things that we have to look at as planners are far more complicated than they were a number of years ago. We need to be experts in sustainable urban drainage systems or the viability of sites, and that has issues as well.

In response, we are obviously much more flexible, we have looked at where we can obtain temporary funding, we are looking at how we can use capital rather than revenue to fund posts, we are looking at how we can work more closely with other authorities, both on a formal and an informal basis, and we look at how to be more commercial in terms of what we can charge for. Also, looking ultimately at why planning is there, we are there to improve economic and housing growth, so we are looking at how, as a council, we can play a role in that vision.

The Chairman: Dealing with that last point, do you think it is also part of your role to try to make the system work quicker and be more customer-friendly?

Anneliese Hutchinson: Definitely, yes. If you get that right, life becomes so much easier. Obviously, the planning system is about making sure that you get the balance between the requirements of local communities, what the developer wants, and the vision for the area. That is my key role as a planner. Sometimes, in some respects, some of the changes have made that more difficult.

The Chairman: I understand absolutely staffing to the downturn. It is nice to know that there is an economic uplift, but it is not great for you. You are a university city. Do you have any link with the university to do sandwich courses for training or apprenticeships?

Anneliese Hutchinson: Yes. Newcastle University runs a planning course and we work very closely with it, both in the work that we do and the help that it gives us on some of our longer-term strategic thinking, but it has reduced its numbers on the courses and the private sector has greatly increased, so obviously if there is a choice it would normally prefer to go to the private sector, I think.

The Chairman: Thank you very much. Mr Henry.

Joe Henry: I agree with a lot of what Anneliese said about bringing in the right people. It is a very competitive market now for the right skills. On the question of how we have addressed that, Barnet’s solution is to outsource. We are now a joint venture company between Barnet Council and Capita. Capita has a 51% share in the company and Barnet Council has a 49% share. The whole of operational management has been outsourced to Capita. The idea was that Barnet wanted to ensure that it could maintain a very high level of service, but obviously with the cuts and the austerity pressures that we were under, it was looking for a company to guarantee a certain price, looking to commit to putting additional revenue into the services, and hopefully being able to share in any profit the company may generate.

The contract ensures a very high level of performance at a set cost. The customer focus, which you mentioned, is the key going forward. The key to our model is also growth, by which I mean that we are looking to generate income to bring in additional resources. We have a number of ideas about additional planning services. For example, you can now fast-track a planning application at a premium price. We are the only council in the country doing that at the moment. We offer premium services on pre-application advice; we now have specialist teams on pre-application advice. We give developers the opportunity to pick their own planner if they have a relationship with one, because relationship management is all part of good customer service. There has been a tendency to go away from that because a conflict of interests may be seen as an issue, but we think that the relationship between planners and developers should be a strong partnership to deliver outcome.

There is one challenge: obviously, when you have contracts, you have clauses to ensure a certain level of performance. Targets can drive bad behaviour. You probably hear that in a lot of senses. That is true for planning as well, and we wanted to make sure that, while we had very strong key performance indicators and performance indicators within the actual contract, we still focused on outcome, the key being the customer experience throughout the whole process and coming to the right outcome, which is in the public interest. The key for our growth model is that we want developers to come into Barnet and deliver good, sustainable development. If we are not attractive to them, the company fails and the community loses out, so the contract in a sense is incentivising the right way to deliver the right outcomes.

As for recruiting the right people, we are still competing in the market. We cannot pay over the odds and there is a lot of competition. One of our long-term strategies in Barnet has been to “grow your own”, and we employ people who are non-planners but might have, say, a geography background. We say to them, “We will invest in you to go to university”—and there are plenty of universities in London—“on day release”. Retention of staff is important, so we have golden handcuffs in a sense: we invest in you, we will pay for your courses. Of course, if you want to leave, you can, but you will have to pay back your course fees. That is an incentive to stay with us.

The model has also helped us to attract people, because they see it as something different. We also offer private consultancy work. As Anneliese said, you are competing against the private sector for planners. There is, I suppose, this idea that the local planning authority has one type of planning officers, and private sector planners are different. That gulf in perspective is quite large. We offer both; we offer people the opportunity to work in the private sector as well, because we have our own private consultancy.

The Chairman: That is very interesting. Can I ask a supplementary question? I will be quick, because we have to watch the time. First, did you invent this model? Has it been taken up by other local authorities?

Joe Henry: This model is unique to Barnet.

The Chairman: You should flog it on a consultancy basis.

Joe Henry: We are trying to.

Baroness Rawlings: How long has it been in existence?

Joe Henry: We have been operating it for two years up to last October.

Lord Inglewood: Chairman, presumably they cannot offer consultancy for money in their own area?

Joe Henry: Yes, we do, and I will explain why and how. We form relationships through the planning process when dealing with planning applications. We have a monopoly there, but in terms of the private consultancy we are competing with the outside world. We prefer to work with people, and rather than have these sometimes difficult relations with private consultants acting for people, we say, “We can act for you”, but the people who do that are separated from the decision-makers, so we have a very strong and clear conflict of interest protocol. The industry likes that, so we are developing a strong partnership with developers, and they are not just using us because they think they have an angle in the authority—because they are using us for outside Barnet. We recently acquired a £50,000 job in Dover, because the client was really happy with the service that we were offering in Barnet and saw the skillset that we could transfer into other authorities. They also see it as an advantage that we know how local authorities work.

The Chairman: So long as they do not use that to skim off your good people.

Joe Henry: No, obviously we have to have very good people to do that work, and that is a recruitment challenge again, but you have to have a good balance between business as usual and the consultancy work.

The Chairman: We have to crack on. Mr de Beer, your initial comments, please.

Simon de Beer: I will not repeat anything. Some of the comments I concur with. Our authority in particular is retaining public confidence in the planning system. We in our authority have embraced neighbourhood planning and working with our local communities on the provision of neighbourhood plans. We have advised them that being in control of development in their communities is the way forward for them, which they have understood, and they have done a phenomenal amount of work locally on local village character assessments. For the first time in my history—and I have been a planner for nearly 30 years—our villages are offering us housing sites. If a site is coming from them, they are quite happy to propose a development site—or two development sites, which I have never seen before—and nearly all our villages are happy to propose a site if it is a product of the work they have done locally. However, because you can give no weight in the planning decision system to a plan until it is adopted, if a developer comes forward midway through the process and puts an application in that is not bad enough to refuse, it usurps the local community’s hard work, and some of them are quite disillusioned with this process where there is a lot of development pressure. The fault is that there is an inability in the system to give any weight to an emerging plan that a community is producing. It has virtually no weight until it is almost right past the process. So whilst the Government and the authorities are promising to hand power to communities, it does not happen because of the nature of the system.

The Chairman: Are you going to unblock all that and make sure that you have the answer?

Simon de Beer: We are working as best we can to support them. We have devoted an officer to give them assistance so they can progress their plans as quickly as possible.

Q263 Baroness Andrews: I have a couple of quick questions. Do you each have a local plan in place?

Joe Henry: Yes.

Simon de Beer: Yes.

Baroness Andrews: So your housing sites are now basically determined. Are they very different in number and distribution from what they would have been under the old regional plan? That is one for each of you.

Anneliese Hutchinson: If I could go first, we have a joint plan with Newcastle. Looking at the population change, we had to take sites out of the green belt in our local plan to become housing sites, so we did a strategic land review. Our previous plan obviously did not have those sites in, if that was the question.

Baroness Andrews: That was absolutely the question.

Joe Henry: We have an adopted plan, but we are still going through a site allocation process. Where there are any opportunities whatever in our area, developers are coming forward very quickly, because of the nature of London.

Simon de Beer: We have an adopted plan. The housing figure is half what the RSS was proposing.

Q264 Baroness Andrews: That is the sort of answer we need. My next question follows from that. You talked about uncertainty. Clearly what no planning department wants is greater uncertainty about planning, yet you have the Housing and Planning Bill coming down the track. What will be the impact of that on your plans, particularly when you put it together with the changes in brownfield policy?

The Chairman: Can I just interject before the answers? Are we sure what the format is likely to be at the end of the parliamentary process on this Bill?

Baroness Andrews: Probably the greatest change will be to zoning, so that will be different. The rest of the Bill will be more targeted at changes in things like housing associations, but zoning presents a real challenge for local authority planning, I think.

The Chairman: Let us not go into that at the moment. If we have time, perhaps we could explore that.

Q265 Baroness Young of Old Scone: I have a factual question for Mr Henry. Is everything outsourced, or do you keep your plan preparation in-house?

Joe Henry: The whole planning service—regeneration, environmental health and highways—has been outsourced.

Baroness Young of Old Scone: So your plan preparation is outsourced as well?

Joe Henry: It was, yes, but the plan was adopted before it was outsourced.

Baroness Young of Old Scone: If you are coming to a review of the plan at some stage, can having it done by an outsourced organisation work?

Joe Henry: It is the same people who are employed, so I see no reason why not.

Baroness Young of Old Scone: Thank you.

Q266 Lord Inglewood: Having been a chairman of a development control committee myself, I know that the relationship between the officers and the members is very important. Clearly, I do not want to embarrass you, but have you, over your careers, seen any general change in the nature of the relationship between the officers and the members? Secondly, and following on from that, do you think that the balance between what I might call political decision-making and professional decision-making, where the officer delegation lies, is right in general? There are two parts to each question to each of you, in short form please.

Anneliese Hutchinson: I think it has changed over time for the better, and it is really within the hands of local authorities to make sure that that balance works between the professional officer giving advice and the members making that decision. The key to that, and one of the reasons why it has got better, is partly technology, in that for the planning committee it is easier now to provide full information in relation to the application that is being considered. We work with members to make sure that we train them in relation to any new issues on the horizon and that we get good legal advice.

The other key thing that has helped in smoothing the way, which is probably related to some of the things that Mr Henry said, is that we ensure that members have pre-application presentations, so at the first thought of a developer wanting to develop a big site in the area, or one that we know is likely to be contentious, we will ask the developer to come in front of the committee, and any other members of the council who want to come along, to give a presentation of their thoughts, so that we get a feel for the issues in the local area.

Joe Henry: Obviously member engagement is key. I have noticed that they have more confidence in officers, and we have seen an increase in the delegated powers that are given to them. That is key for a quicker decision-making process. Four years ago, 85% of all decisions were made by officers. Now it is 96%. The comfort that we give to members is that if they want to call an application in, they can. That is how we sell giving us more powers. They are on board in terms of the need to deliver more housing, but obviously the challenge is that people want to protect the status quo. That will always be a challenge. There will be the odd occasion where members go against officer advice, but we make sure we have training that outlines the clear risks of going to appeal. The Planning Inspectorate can of course overrule a decision and allow something. Also, we may lose contributions that have been offered, and more onerous conditions that members might have wanted and the developer was happy to put on before might not be re-imposed. There is also the financial risk of being unreasonable in the approach: if you cannot robustly defend a decision—and we are clear to members about this—there could be a big financial penalty in terms of costs.

Lord Inglewood: Taken in the round, at the most general level, are members quite sensible, in your own authority and elsewhere?

Joe Henry: In my experience in Barnet, yes.

Simon de Beer: On the whole, yes. The officers are aware that they have a different driver—a political driver, and it is about being wise to that. But at the end of the day in the planning preparation process, people make recommendations based on technical information, not necessarily on a political basis, and once they have understood that—and we have member training and a close working relationship—they realise that will be the outcome, so they need to take the technical aspects in sight and not just their own political drivers.

Q267 Baroness Whitaker: I have a question about outsourcing. I am very interested in the Barnet example. My question is first to Mr Henry on the challenges and opportunities that are associated with outsourcing. In particular, I have been very interested to see how you assure yourself that the design of the whole place, place-making, is properly contributed by Capita. I think you said that you outsourced health.

Joe Henry: Environmental health.

Baroness Whitaker: What is the liaison between Capita and your other outsourced functions in the areas that affect the whole of a place, such as health, transport, environmental protection? That is one area I would be very interested to hear about. The other is the management of your relationship not with officials of any kind, in or out, but the ratepayer and the education of the ratepayer to accept developments that might be a bit of a surprise or long-standing problems. For instance, do you have any Traveller sites in Barnet?

Joe Henry: No.

Baroness Whitaker: Anyway, the management of the relationship with the citizen is the other area I would be interested in, in view of outsourcing.

Joe Henry: The way we operate has not really changed in terms of who we consult, how we deal with interested parties who are engaged and statutory consultees. Nothing has changed in that respect. In terms of the pressure that may come about in coming to an outcome more quickly, because obviously the more quickly you come to an outcome, the cheaper it is to deliver that outcome, there are a lot of checks in place, the key ones being the public and members. As I said, they can call any application they want to committee, and that is where the check is. We also monitor how many we refuse and how many we approve.

Baroness Whitaker: Am I right that you consider the involvement of local people after proposals have been made? You do not involve them in the early development of the vision for Barnet.

Joe Henry: Like most authorities, we encourage developers to engage early on with the community.

Baroness Whitaker: On specific proposals?

Joe Henry: On any specific proposal, yes. When they speak to us through pre-application, we advise them to engage with the community to try and get them on board, because that will make it easier to go through the process, and ultimately, if it has to go to a committee, if the committee can see that they have engaged with the community and the community are on board, or that they have at least tried to address what the community has put forward—you will always end up with a product which the community may not want overall because it is close to them but you have to look at the public interest, but at least they have tried to address those concerns—that is seen as a big positive.

Baroness Whitaker: Just one more on this aspect: how does that allow an opportunity for the local people to think about the externalities of a particular development—say, the impact on amenity, leisure, transport or health?

Joe Henry: That will still be considered, as it always was, and that is a very important consideration. We have to have robust justification of all our planning decisions.

Baroness Whitaker: What about the general place-making function on the part of Capita? How are you sure they have the state of the art there?

Joe Henry: There are strong relationships and engagement with the main client, which is Barnet Council. They have commissioners who we are always working with. We have a champion for designing the place, a director of place. That was a specific part of the contract, and was not a title or position before we outsourced, to try to ensure that we are delivering to the aspirations the council envisaged.

Baroness Whitaker: Before Lady Andrews comes in, I would like to hear from the other two witnesses the arguments for and against in-house and outsourcing, particularly in view of the two considerations that we have aired so far.

Anneliese Hutchinson: We have considered outsourcing. Obviously every authority has had to consider the best way of delivering its services in the future. For us, in terms of development, compared to what is happening in the south-east, there is not that much going on. We do not make a profit from planning alone. If it were to be considered, it would have to be part of a package with other uses. For example, our planning fees last year were just over £500,000, so not a huge amount. The other issue is exactly what you mentioned: the place-shaping element. When we have had the discussion with our councillors, one of the benefits of keeping everything in-house is that we have place-shaping very much at the forefront. It is considered at cabinets and in portfolio briefings, and there has been some concern about how we would maintain that through local decision-making if it were outsourced. We have also looked at what other authorities have done, and some are starting to change. When we are talking about shared services, those that have jumped earlier on and gone with a particular package now have less flexibility but face much stronger budget concerns than a few years ago. The issue for most local authorities in the north-east is trying to keep things in-house so that we can grow our way out of this and encourage economic growth, and that gives us the benefits to help subsidise other services in the council.

Simon de Beer: In light of the financial pressures, we continue to look at different ways of providing the service, and we have never got very far down the road of considering outsourcing. The most we have done is put elements of the service out, particularly development management, if there are high workloads or particular expertise needed. We have generally found, though, that the in-house approach provides the service more economically, and we retain the benefit of a cohesive and effective provision of service because we can retain the knowledge that you build up doing a bit of work. If you put a project out to propose, as we did to a consultancy to make proposals for some of our large green-belt site releases, it can take a lot of time to brief them and bring them up to speed with local knowledge. Once the consultancy had done the work, it left and that was all lost. If we had kept it internally, we would have had the benefit of that.

Baroness Whitaker: So it was a loss of value from your point of view?

Simon de Beer: In that wider context, yes, and it was fairly expensive. That bit of work cost us nearly £30,000—it was a fairly high-level project—whereas internally we could have done it with staff at a lower cost.

The Chairman: Do you make massive use of the developments in technology to communicate with the ratepayers, as they are called—council tax payers? I have seen towns where the local post office has the local news, say the West Ham television news, and you see that in pubs. I will not mention my town, but that is what happens, so when people queue to buy things in the post office they see this, and it is a way of communicating with them, for example, that there is a meeting in the town hall. Have you thought about that? Some companies are doing just that. It might be a way. People’s homes are their biggest investment and interest, and we want to make sure they have a bit of an input, if not a huge amount. Has anybody heard of this or thought about it?

Anneliese Hutchinson: I know that some authorities broadcast their planning committees on the web. We have certainly tried to make the best use of technology, for example in presentations using Street View, satellite photos—that type of thing. In terms of the local plan, we tried to do some things on Facebook and that kind of thing, and it was not that successful. We engaged with all our voluntary organisations and tried to build on that. If we knew that the local history society would be at a local pub on a Tuesday night, we went and talked to them, and we found by having a face-to-face dialogue on some of the very important issues we may be able to communicate much more closely.

The Chairman: I do not want to disrupt the discussion, and it is not a question, but I just thought of this point of trying to make the contact between the customer and the provider.

Q268 Lord Woolmer of Leeds: Does the national system of planning fees affect the ability of councils to carry out their planning functions? Do you have a view on whether or not fees should fully devolve to local authorities? Separately, are there other initiatives that councils can undertake to increase their planning income? Mr Henry has already mentioned some, of course, but I would be grateful if you could deal with the first two questions initially.

Anneliese Hutchinson: Yes and yes. Our fees do not fully cover the costs of dealing with a planning application, so it would be wonderful if we could meet our full costs through planning fees. It is subsidised by the taxpayer, and it may not affect everybody, particularly in determination of planning applications. We recently calculated what the local plan had added to our economy, and in council tax, business rates and the new homes bonus alone it was £104 million between now and 2030, and £1.7 billion in terms of the supply chain. If you look at that for a very small authority like Gateshead and what it would be for somewhere like Barnet, obviously we have a significant impact on the economy, but at the minute, particularly looking at how local authority finance might change over coming years, I would need to be much more self-sufficient, and being able to get back the full costs of dealing with a planning application would be very helpful. Like Mr Henry, we charge for pre-application advice. We work with other authorities either on a mutual aid basis or by allowing officers to maybe work with them on particular specialisms. We are working with the development community to see what they would be prepared to pay for, but obviously, first and foremost, it is about customer service.

Lord Woolmer of Leeds: So that we get a feel for what this actually means, taking one case in the past, how much would a planning fee have been and what would it be if you charged full cost?

Anneliese Hutchinson: I thought you might ask me that, so I have brought some figures, particularly in relation to some of the more recent changes in relation to how we now deal with permitted development. In the past a fee might be charged for a planning application for some of the smaller developments. There has been a change in the system, so now a determination of prior approval is requested and that attracts a smaller fee. In Gateshead we have had 116 of those types of applications. If we had had them in as planning applications, it would have been £19,000, so we have lost about £19,000 on that. There have been changes to the system there. We reckon that in the last year we have lost nearly £4,000 on that as well. That is a very small example of it.

The other thing is that, say, an application for a quarry would obviously involve a lot of local discussion about the environmental impacts, lots of liaison with the Environment Agency and other statutory consultees. It can take a long time to get the right decision in the right place, and the fee might be 20% of the cost.

Joe Henry: Fees are set nationally, and part of our concern is obviously that costs to deliver in certain areas are a lot higher than in other areas. In that sense, the fees are not properly reflective. I agree that they do not cover the cost of providing the planning service. Our response to that has been, as I just pointed out, additional services. For example, our enhanced pre-application service is projected to generate £500,000 by the end of this year, which is equivalent to all the planning fees Ms Hutchinson just mentioned in Gateshead. All those services are subsidising our services to the point where we are self-reliant, and are actually producing a little bit more than our costs, I suspect.

The cost of applications is an interesting point. We did a benchmark exercise with some local authorities about five years ago; the Government were looking at devolving planning fees around that time, so we were doing that exercise. We deal with 3,000 to 4,000 planning applications for householder extensions—lots of people want to do extensions to houses in Barnet. The fee for that at the moment is about £170, and when we did the analysis of the cost to deliver that, five years ago for Barnet it was £230 to 240, from memory, but the London average was £500, so if fees were devolved you would see individual house extension fees going go up quite significantly, because meeting that cost could be justified. Major applications and other applications in a sense subsidise those smaller applications, so the residents we are trying to look after actually get a benefit from the major applications fee. All the other work that we do, all the planning performance agreements that we have the developers, all feeds into subsidising a lot of work we do. For a lot of the permitted development stuff that has come in recently, the fee is nowhere near the cost to administer, but we absorb that through all the additional services I have just mentioned. We always forget about the Cinderella of planning: enforcement. There is a considerable cost to deliver that, and very little income. There is also plan-making.

The Chairman: Do you have anything to add, Mr de Beer?

Simon de Beer: I would just add that the cost of delivering, as my colleagues have said, is topped up by the taxpayer, and that makes the service vulnerable to cuts, which then would impact on service delivery and the service the customer receives. In somewhere like Bath and North East Somerset, Bath, which is a world heritage site, some of the very complex proposals we receive are obviously nowhere near covered by the cost of a planning application, so we do what colleagues do pre-application: we give proposals a dedicated officer to take a scheme through and have a development team approach whereby an applicant can present and discuss a proposal with a variety of specialists—a paid-for service—to get an early understanding of what improvements they could make to their scheme before submitting it for a planning application.

The Chairman: Thank you.

Q269 Earl of Lytton: I am interested in this question of charging the full rate for fees, particularly what Ms Hutchinson said about the relatively low economic values being dealt with in her part of the world as against the London Borough of Barnet. Would these fees be disproportionately higher in, say, the north-east compared with Barnet, where there is perhaps more activity, or in Bath and North East Somerset? Secondly, would you charge for listed building work, where a lot of applications have to be made for things that would not normally attract planning? I declare an interest as an owner of several listed buildings. Thirdly, how does all this, in terms of the permitted development policy the Government are pursuing, interact with your ability or otherwise to make Article 4 directions, which I believe is still a facility? Chairman, that is where a local planning authority can make a direction that certain permitted development rights are removed within the authority area or part of the authority area. Those are the things I am interested in on that score.

Anneliese Hutchinson: In terms of devolving fees locally, we have had to do a lot to be more efficient. My understanding is also that we could charge only in terms of recovering our costs. It is not something that we would be able to make a profit on, so the costs would reflect the actual cost of determining that application. Certainly across the board, with the help of the Planning Advisory Service, we are all looking at how we can cut those costs and be as efficient as possible. With that national overview, I would hope that would help in setting fees. Certainly building control has local fee-setting, and it has had various working groups that have worked together to come up with a regional approach so, based on all the information that it has on the costs to deal with particular applications, it has come up with a level playing field on that.

Listed buildings are probably something that, again, would need to be considered locally. It is difficult to comment at this time, as obviously there are particular costs associated with listed buildings, and they would have to be considered in light of that.

In terms of Article 4 directions, yes, there is that availability, which means that we can look at areas where we may not want permitted development rights to be considered, but there is a considerable amount of work associated with that, so it is done infrequently, basically because of the amount of time and effort involved in bringing together an Article 4 direction.

Lord Woolmer of Leeds: I wonder if I could have an answer to my third question: are there other initiatives that councils can undertake to increase their planning income? Mr Henry, you have had a go at it. Could you let the others have a go first and, if you want to add anything, come in?

Anneliese Hutchinson: I mentioned charging for pre-application advice. The other thing we are looking at is how we can offer our specialist services to other local authorities, such as tree advice or landscape advice. We have spoken to local agents and asked if they would be willing to pay for a lesser, quicker service, and their answer has been no. Again, that might be because in the north-east we deal with things quite quickly anyway, so we have to look at that. There is a limit. Obviously the other issue is that we can charge but we have to look at only recovering our costs; we cannot make a profit on a lot of what we do.

Simon de Beer: Particularly focusing in our case on planning performance agreements with developers on particular schemes, offering them a particular service through an agreement that we give an enhanced level of service with a dedicated officer does generate income to cover the additional costs.

Lord Woolmer of Leeds: Is this significant or is it at the margin?

Simon de Beer: I do not have the figures, I am afraid, but it does make quite a bit of difference to the council’s income.

Joe Henry: Planning performance agreements can make a significant difference to bringing in income. I have mentioned the enhanced service that we do pre-application, and I gave a figure of what is coming in now. The fast-track service is a premium service in a sense, but it is an optional service, so just because someone might say they do not want it, it is still an option, and I would rather give that option. That is our philosophy: we want to give as many services as possible to the customer, but they are optional. That is key to everything we do.

Another service we offer which residents really like is that if you want to build an extension to your house, we say, “We can send someone down there and tell you what you can do under permitted development, but if you want to go a bit bigger, you need planning permission”. We will do the drawings and submit the application for you, and a colleague will process the application. From beginning to end the process is very fast. Then we link that with the building control service. In a sense, we are trying to concentrate on a one-stop shop approach to delivering services. I apologise; what was the other question?

Lord Woolmer of Leeds: Other initiatives that a council can undertake to increase their planning income.

Joe Henry: I have mentioned the ones we are undertaking.

The Chairman: I am very taken with the option one. I think that is a brilliant way of looking at it.

Joe Henry: It is just an option.

Lord Woolmer of Leeds: You get a different feel depending on where you are from what the development pressures are on it. If you are in an area where there is a lot of development pressure, it is easier to pass on costs and to have other services than it is if you do not have those pressures, you really want development and you do not want to discourage it. Is that a fair assessment of the situation?

Joe Henry: I would say, from my experience talking to developers, that they are more than happy to pay premium fees because of the land values in London. Every day is money. That is why, while the fees can be a lot higher than the planning application fees themselves, they see the benefits. Planning performance agreements are key, and most authorities now adopt them. Where they get a bespoke, dedicated resource to deal with one particular application and they are more than happy to pay for it.

Baroness Andrews: The logic of that suggests, however, that there ought to be some sort of equalisation between the resources available for planning authorities—top-slicing some of your income and that of other boroughs that are doing really well—to be redistributed to local authorities that need all the help they can get to create imaginative development strategies. Otherwise, we are going to have a polarisation of planning resource in capacity across the country. Would you agree with that?

Joe Henry: We need an incentive to generate additional income. If we devolve planning fee setting, the concern I will have—I do not think it is shared by any of my peers—is that we are a monopoly in planning. In my opinion, there would be an upward pressure on costs and there would be no strong incentive to deliver cost savings. You can always justify increasing your fees because you say that you need to do this additional work. I am service director of building control as well, and we do local fee setting for building control, but it competes against the market. If we do not set it at the right level, you can use another service, whereas in planning you have a monopoly; you have no choice but to go to the local planning authority.

Baroness Young of Old Scone: As a bit of a sideline, can I just challenge that? I used to run the Environment Agency. We were a monopoly service, and the downward pressure on our fee structure from British business and because we set ourselves RPI-minus targets every year was huge. So it does not always mean it goes up; other fee offers are available.

Joe Henry: Going back to whether we should have a fee for listed building works, I would advocate that we should not, because there is a lot of work involved in listed building applications. They are exempt from fees at the moment, but it is very important to protect our heritage, and the last thing we want is to encourage people to do works without permission and have a significant detrimental impact on the heritage value. So I would strongly advocate that we do not set fees at the local level for listed building applications, because I see the benefit of not doing that.

Q270 Lord Inglewood: Mr Henry touched on this. Plan-making seems to me to be a community benefit that is being created there. Surely, the community as a whole should pay for it through council tax, the rates. Secondly, specifically for Mr Henry, did you receive criticism on the grounds that the premium service was one law for the rich and another one for the poor?

Joe Henry: Yes, and I addressed that. I had to get it through a committee and that problem was voiced to me. I was clear that the only way this could work in the perception of the public was not to have a two-tier system, and the only way to demonstrate that is if the ordinary service—maybe that is the wrong word to use—is still an excellent service when you benchmark it against other local authorities. So long as we can demonstrate—and that is the challenge that I have to keep meeting—that the ordinary service is still excellent, if someone wants to pay for the Rolls-Royce of all services, why not?

Lord Inglewood: What about my comment to the three of you about whether plan-making should be paid for by the council tax/rate payer?

Anneliese Hutchinson: Obviously, it does benefit the whole of the community, and the spatial plan is almost the embodiment of each council’s sustainable community strategy, so yes, it is for the benefit of the community. Maybe though, when you look at the whole of it, the delivery of some of the things in the plan becomes difficult because of the difference, say, between the north and the south and the workload required to get the vision from that plan into bricks and mortar on the ground. That is where there may be a gap, in that there is not the viability in the development increase in the north as opposed to the south, and therefore maybe not the ability to fund the staff in a way to make that happen.

Simon de Beer: The outcome of a plan-making would be that certain landowners would benefit from land, and that is recouped to the community through CIL or the new homes bonus. At the moment plan-making is subsidised, it is paid for by the ratepayer, and the community gets the benefit through CIL payments and Section 106 contributions.

Lord Inglewood: My point is simply, looking at it conceptually, whether that should be paid for by the wider community or by the planning applications.

Simon de Beer: At the moment it is by the wider community.

Lord Inglewood: Yes, but is that right?

Simon de Beer: It is. The planning fees do not even cover the development management process.

Joe Henry: You could argue that the other people who benefit from plan-making are the developers.

Lord Inglewood: But they are paying for the applications they put in anyway. I am just raising it as a point in the debate; I am not taking any sides in the argument.

Q271 Baroness Rawlings: Could I ask Mr Henry this? This seems like a completely new approach—new to me—a different approach. Is this Capita’s first project like this? Have other councils taken on this format because they see the success of it, or is it mainly because of the area you are in? All three of you mentioned that fees do not cover the costs, and the costs of enforcement, and I wondered in what other areas fees are raised that would cover the costs. I am sorry; there are a lot of questions here. Finally—a question I think you have sort of answered—what has been the impact on planning teams of the national reforms, such as the extension of permitted development rights? I was really interested in the first one.

Joe Henry: I apologise. What was the first question again?

Baroness Rawlings: Is it Capita’s first project, and have other councils followed suit?

Joe Henry: There are a couple of outsourced planning services. There is one in north Tyneside, and there has been a secondment model in Salford, but they operate differently; it is a completely different model. The model we work under is unique; no one else has adopted that model. We have tried to talk to other local authorities to see whether they are interested in buying into our model, but planning is quite difficult to sell as a service that you could outsource because of the political pressures to keep it in-house, and you hear the benefits of keeping it in-house. What was the second question?

Baroness Rawlings: The fees do not cover the costs and the costs of enforcement, so do you raise fees from other areas to make ends meet, if it is going to be on a profitable basis?

Joe Henry: In the model that we have adopted, enforcement was seen as key. It was a member priority, so we had to protect the resources that go into enforcement. There are a number of key performance indicators, planning performance indicators, which have to be met contractually, so the risk of delivering enforcement, the cost of it, is all met by Capita. The council has a commitment to deliver those services at a certain cost, and Capita absorbs that cost. Obviously, we then have to generate additional income through other avenues to pay for that.

The Chairman: Do you constantly update your negotiations with Capita?

Joe Henry: No, the contract is set in stone now.

The Chairman: For how long?

Joe Henry: Ten years.

Lord Clement-Jones: Costs as well over ten years?

Joe Henry: Yes. There are uplifts. I do not know the mechanisms of the contract in detail but there are changes in fee base that come in, and actually the cost to the council decreases over time, because it is anticipated that, as the business grows, with benefit to Capita and the company itself, which the council then share in any profit, which we see as a justification to reduce the core fee, as we call it.

Q272 Baroness Andrews: I want to ask you about the extension of development rights, and I would like to ask you one thing in particular. This is one of the things that is really changing your room for manoeuvre, is it not, within local authorities, and it presumably will be affecting you in quite different ways. I have a specific question for Bath and North East Somerset because of the weight of your historic environment and the impact on conservation areas. One of the things we are concerned about is whether, by extending permitted development rights, there is any danger that we are going to degrade the historic fabric, because people will be trying to manoeuvre around it, as it were. Are you concerned about these issues? What are the things that really concern you about the impact of that extension?

Simon de Beer: We have found that introduction quite unhelpful, and even quite perverse in its outcome. To my understanding, it was intended to help flexibility, to respond to the housing crisis, and for the areas where there is surplus or vacant offices, to convert that to residential. In the case of our authority, we have made provision for sufficient housing to meet our identified need, including land out of the green belt, including redeveloping brownfield sites. We are quite a growth-oriented authority. We are trying to maximise or change the nature of employment from a heavily retail, low-paid, base—which is surprising in Bath, but that is the case—tourism and retail base, to more of a high-tech, office-based centre. A lot of our high-grade office has now gone to residential. We did not need to go there; there was a sufficient supply of housing. Also, some of the key office space—for instance, some of the starter office units and mixed use offices, and also some of the seedbed office base—now also has permission in principle to convert to residential.

Baroness Andrews: That is change of use regs, is it, rather than permitted development?

Simon de Beer: They have change of use under the permitted development rights. That did not apply previously in conservation areas or heritage sites. The extension now does, so whilst we were marginally affected before in parts of the district, we are going to be potentially severely affected by the extension, which does relate to the city of Bath.

Baroness Andrews: With Bath, because of the historic protections on so much of your fabric and your conservation areas, what are you most concerned about, and how will you be able to fight that?

Simon de Beer: We could consider an Article 4 direction. We did consider seeking exemption in the first round.

Baroness Andrews: Take a whole conservation area out?

Simon de Beer: That is a possibility, in order to safeguard at least our higher grade office base. We were expecting to lose some of the old Georgian office stock back to residential, which would not have been a particular problem; we could have coped with that. What is happening is not so much that that is going—that is staying in office; what we are losing is the change of use from modern office space to apartments.

Baroness Andrews: Does it lend itself to apartments?

Simon de Beer: It is not necessarily a good living environment. It is more the loss of the opportunity to start-up businesses that is the problem. We have units that are full of start-up businesses, the seedbed of economic growth, which the whole thrust of this proposal I suppose is intended to address, losing the office space and their base as a community group of businesses to residential. There is a loss of needed space for offices, and in an area where there is pressure, in Bath, we have very limited space to create new offices because of the heritage situation.

Baroness Andrews: So it is actually working against the development presumption in the NPPF, is it?

Simon de Beer: Absolutely perversely, contrary to what it was intended to achieve.

Baroness Andrews: That is very interesting. Thank you very much. What about the experiences in the other areas?

Joe Henry: The office-to-residential permitted development rights have led to a large number of offices being converted into residential. You could argue, though, that that is helping to deliver housing units, but the problem is twofold, as has been touched upon. One is that the offices could have existing people in them who have had businesses going for many years. We had an example recently where a whole office block was converted. It had existing tenants, and it was converted into 112 residential units. I understand that the whole floor space was occupied by businesses, and they had to find somewhere else. The other disbenefit is that there are no planning standards, so you could theoretically build rabbit hutches, as people sometimes refer to them, if you wanted to, whereas planning standards that define a good-quality size of units are almost set in stone. They still have to meet the building regulations. I am just talking about space standards.

Baroness Andrews: This is really important. You are saying that when you convert an office space to housing, you are not required to observe planning standards in relation to space.

Joe Henry: Correct.

Baroness Andrews: That is extraordinary. We did not know that. Or presumably design. What about ventilation? Building standards presumably cover that.

Joe Henry: You do not have to meet anything, so there could be environmental concerns. No, actually, if you have environmental concerns, we can raise them through the prior notification process, so there is some safeguard.

The other permitted development rights that I think you are concerned about are extensions to houses. That affects Barnet significantly, because we have a lot of suburban dwellings. They are generous but in conservation areas, which I think is your main concern, I do not think you can actually apply for the prior notification. In any case, as touched upon, if local authorities feel they need extra control, they can impose an Article 4 direction.

Baroness Andrews: What about the loss of gardens? Presumably that will happen. Are you losing a lot of garden space, for example?

Joe Henry: We will be losing garden space, but a typical garden in Barnet is quite large, so the extent of the extension would not have a significant impact on character. In inner London areas, where gardens are smaller, you might see that being an issue.

The Chairman: Can I just make a point to the members of the Committee? As always, we are running out of time, so can we keep supplementary questions short?

Baroness Young of Old Scone: This is very important.

The Chairman: You can get important things in a few words too. Limit it to three minutes.

Baroness Young of Old Scone: In three minutes, can you tell me your feeling about the Housing and Planning Bill and the zoning proposition that is virtually de facto brought about by it? A minute each.

Simon de Beer: In relation to the zoning, the issues will be similar and will relate to the lack of control over quality of the new scheme. We are not quite sure how much control there will be. We often find, without being rude to developers, that a lot of their schemes are considerably improved through the process of a planning application. Some of the schemes that are submitted are quite poor in terms of the design and the urban design, and they are improved through the planning application process, whereas with permission in principle I can see that all we are going to be able to control, as I understand it, would be some of the very basic highways issues, plus flooding. I am not quite sure what the other elements are until we see the scheme, but I can imagine it would quite easily lead to a poor quality scheme in some of the key parts of our towns.

The Chairman: Are you following its development in the Commons at the moment?

Simon de Beer: At a high level.

Joe Henry: Yes, not at a detailed level. We wait for the detail before we put too much resource into trying to second-guess.

The Chairman: Good point.

Joe Henry: I share the views of Mr de Beer. I do not think it will impact Barnet, so I have not really looked in detail at what the impact would be.

Anneliese Hutchinson: I would echo that. The devil will be in the detail, and obviously that is not available at the minute so it is difficult to tell. I have some concerns in that I think the existing planning system works quite well, and I am not really convinced as to what improvements zoning will lead to.

Q273 Baroness Whitaker: This is the obverse of Lady Andrews’ question really. To what extent does the present system allow you to preserve workplace sites that are threatened, when they contribute to jobs and economic development?

Joe Henry: We have a policy to protect workplaces.

Baroness Whitaker: But under the system of laws now.

Joe Henry: We mentioned the permitted development of offices.

Baroness Whitaker: It enables you nevertheless to safeguard workplaces.

Joe Henry: We cannot safeguard the offices, but we can serve an Article 4. The problem with serving an Article 4 to stop permitted development rights of offices to residential is that you have to pay compensation for the difference in values, so we would have to give 12 months’ notification of what we intend to do. If you do that, you are not liable to compensation.

Baroness Whitaker: So it is cumbersome.

Lord Clement-Jones: That is for an individual office block, is it?

Joe Henry: You could do an Article 4 for the whole borough area but you have to have a justification for it, and the Secretary of State has to sign it off, so we cannot willy-nilly say that we want to serve an Article 4; there has to be robust justification for it. As I say, we would always give 12 months’ notification because of the cost implications of compensation.

Anneliese Hutchinson: Interestingly, under national policy we can safeguard land for housing but we cannot safeguard it for employment, so one of the issues might be looking at the urban areas for the future and where you might want offices. That cannot be safeguarded through the local plan.

The Chairman: Do you intend through your trade associations or whatever groupings—the National Federation of Builders, et cetera—at least to give input when the Bill comes, for example, to the House of Lords from the House of Commons? Has it struck you that this might be a way to do things?

Joe Henry: We go through our professional bodies. The Planning Officers Society is one that we would feed into, and then there would be one view put forward that represents all of us, because we feel that is stronger than doing it individually.

Q274 Lord Clement-Jones: I am going to ask what sounds like rather a general question but it has a specific point. In your experience, how can local planning teams deliver more efficient and effective planning, and what plan-making models are available to achieve this? What we are really trying to get at is that, given your experience with joint arrangements, the duty to co-operate, upcoming combined authorities, do you think those can deliver that in the light of regional spatial strategies being abolished?

Anneliese Hutchinson: I think there has been a gap as a result of regional spatial strategies going, and the duty to co-operate has been a difficult procedure to follow to try to fill that gap. Certainly in the north-east we are very keen, across all the authorities, to have economic growth, and that has been demonstrated in our SEP, our strategic economic plan, which has been produced by the local enterprise partnerships. There is a difference between that and the National Planning Policy Framework in terms of what it tells us to do for local plans, so there is an ambition, and then there is a spatial plan, which is based on the evidence, and there is a gap between the two. I think the regional spatial strategies helped us to have that discussion. It might well be that combined authorities will help us do that.

Lord Clement-Jones: You might return to some of the larger—

Anneliese Hutchinson: Yes.

Lord Clement-Jones: That will include a broader range of matters that you will be able to plan for as well?

Anneliese Hutchinson: Yes. That is one of the things we are looking at in our devolution bid for the north-east. We have suggested that we probably need a north-east spatial strategy, and one of the things we are tasking ourselves with is what form that will be in, whether it would be a strategy document or something different, and what would it need to cover.

Lord Clement-Jones: I have seen you have this great agreement with government. Does that allow you to do that under a plan?

Anneliese Hutchinson: That is one of the asks. Obviously, we are still having negotiations on what that will mean. Basically, the duty to co-operate is across seven authorities in the north-east, but they are all at very different stages in the plan-making process, so it is difficult to get agreement on where you want it to go in the overall strategic view.

Lord Clement-Jones: So people will be relying on your experience in your current joint working in order to go across seven authorities. Is that going to happen?

Anneliese Hutchinson: Yes, obviously to get our local plan—Newcastle and Gateshead’s joint plan—through, we had to work with our neighbours anyway, and that dialogue is ongoing, but at the same time the seven authorities have been developing the devolution deal and a strategic economic plan. Things also change over time, so it is definitely work in progress.

Lord Clement-Jones: We will come back to all the resource issues and so on and so forth, I have no doubt.

Anneliese Hutchinson: Definitely, working together makes life easier and has probably meant reduced cost. We shared the cost of the evidence base. Some of the evidence base we did across seven authorities, some we did across two. I think it helped with the inquiry costs in that we shared them between ourselves and Newcastle. We had a critical friend there as well, which was great in terms of getting into the detail of draft policies, actually having somebody sitting at your elbow saying, “Does that make sense? What are you trying to get to?” That has all helped, but the duty to co-operate has not necessarily filled the gap left by the regional spatial strategy.

Lord Clement-Jones: But your new structure might?

Anneliese Hutchinson: Yes.

Lord Clement-Jones: That is very interesting, because you have two entirely different contexts here. London borough?

Joe Henry: Obviously, a strategic view and vision is critical in plan-making. We could say that we are lucky in London, because we have that vision through the London plan, so, unlike colleagues, we feel comfortable in that set-up.

Lord Clement-Jones: In terms of relationships with neighbouring boroughs, you have a very clear structure.

Joe Henry: We have to be compliant with the London plan, so that brings us all together with one strategic vision.

Lord Clement-Jones: London exceptionalism in a sense already.

The Chairman: Whose idea was that? Was it Livingstone?

Joe Henry: I cannot remember, to be honest.

Lord Clement-Jones: But it is longstanding?

Joe Henry: It is longstanding, yes.

The Chairman: That is interesting.

Simon de Beer: I think it is a big ask for a small authority like Bath and North East Somerset, which has only 180,000 people, to provide both a strategic planning level and the detailed planning level. In the first round of post-RSS plans in our area the wheels almost came off all the plans. We went through a really arduous process, trying to work together, trying to work out the duty to co-operate. We managed to get through it, but I think it was a very inefficient process and took a lot longer and was a more expensive way to write a plan. We missed that level of strategic direction.

In the first review process we are joining the authorities around Bristol to do a joint spatial plan, so there will be one statutory plan covering the four authorities, to deal with high-level issues like housing, employment and infrastructure. One thing we hugely benefit from is being able to test the housing figure through some kind of examination process before we finalise our spatial strategy, but the system does not allow for it at the moment and you end up going to an examination with a housing figure and a strategy untested, and if the housing figure is wrong, the strategy is wrong.

Lord Clement-Jones: Do you have more clout as a result of having done that exercise with the other authorities?

Simon de Beer: There are benefits in terms of economies of scale, as was discussed; it is cheaper to have one commission to do the housing requirement. In terms of clout, the biggest challenge is for the politicians, because you are dealing with a big city and three surrounding rural authorities, and a city that is full and needs to overspill, so technically you can do the work but it is down to the politicians in the end. There is no obligation, so the vulnerability at some point is that if one of them does not like what is coming their way they can pull out of the process, and I think that is a big vulnerability, which we have lost from the strategy planning.

Lord Clement-Jones: Does the duty to co-operate provide any pressure, or could this have happened without any duty, so to speak?

Simon de Beer: I think it has been a bit of a lever, but it has been a very difficult learning process as to what the duty to co-operate actually means. Pressures such as five-year housing land supply are a greater lever on our political masters to actually get on and review the up-to-date plans, because obviously they want to stay in control of the development.

Lord Clement-Jones: Can you see moving forward in terms of some sort of combined authority in your region?

Simon de Beer: The four authorities have made a devolution bid that entails a combined authority, but obviously the devil is in the detail in terms of precisely how that works and who has the power: the elected mayor or the authority leaders.

Lord Clement-Jones: Quite. What is the deal?

The Chairman: Of course, you are very widespread geographically.

Simon de Beer: We are, but Bristol and the three surrounding authorities are a surprisingly compact sub-region.

Q275 Baroness Young of Old Scone: Is green belt policy still fit for purpose, or would you like to see changes?

Simon de Beer: It depends on what you are trying to achieve. I know that is a bit of a glib answer, but it has been extremely successful in terms of containing the growth of large cities. We have a Bristol and Bath green belt, which has been there for the last 50 years, and has been very effective in doing it. However, we have managed to remove bits of the green belt where we have shown that there is a particular need to take land out. In our adopted plan we had to take four locations out of the green belt. They were not massively strategic; they were about 300 to 500 houses, so they were not large, but we were able to do it. We have been able to protect the outward sprawl of settlements and keep land open and meet the needs for development in a sustainable way. In a sense, from our point of view—and I know that many criticise green belt for forcing unsustainable patterns—it has been fairly successful in the Bath and North East Somerset context.

Joe Henry: I would agree. Green belt policy, if you are looking to restrict or stop growth into those areas, has been successful. The challenge, though, is that sometimes you might identify some green belt areas and could question how valuable they are. You can review, but it is quite a cumbersome and long process. You might only identify one little site, but you have to review the green belt in the whole area to justify taking something out. If there were an easier way to take out maybe a bit of land in the green belt in isolation, that might be helpful.

Baroness Young of Old Scone: You do not think that will be death by a thousand cuts?

Joe Henry: I am just putting a view forward and suggesting that you might identify one area. I do not think it is right to put a process in place that is very cumbersome and long just to try to stop you doing something in isolation. In a sense, if the will was there to take a small, isolated area out, you will go through the whole review process, but why go through all that when you are clear about what you want to deliver? There could be proper checks and challenges. I do not know what the solution is; I am just saying that it could be an issue if you identify one particular site.

Baroness Young of Old Scone: You raise the question of small sites that you cannot see the purpose of. What sort of criteria are in the back of your mind when questioning the value of those particular sites as compared to the rest of the green belt?

Joe Henry: We have metropolitan open land as well in Barnet, which has the same protection status as green belt, so I look at it in exactly the same way. I know of one particular site sitting amongst a residential development, surrounded by the very busy North Circular Road. It was earmarked for a pavilion to be built. The pavilion was built through an old Section 106 agreement, but there is nothing in place to ensure its longevity, and this piece of land is going to waste as far as I am concerned. Car boot sales come now and again; we serve enforcement notices to stop that. That is an example I have seen on the ground where I personally think that perhaps we should look at taking that particular site out of the green belt.

Baroness Andrews: Is that green belt or greenfield?

Joe Henry: It is just a field right beside the North Circular.

Baroness Andrews: Is the distinction between greenfield and green belt a problem? There is less now to distinguish, and the degraded bits of the green belt you could say are not only more vulnerable but maybe should be a bit more vulnerable if we are so desperate for land? That is a radical proposition, but is it dangerous to say that?

Joe Henry: I think we should have the ability to review quickly.

Simon de Beer: Could I just add one point there? I think the value of green belts is their permanence and the strength of policy, but there are ways round it. As well as the four sites we have taken out of the green belt for housing, we have allowed a large Gypsy Traveller site and a small Gypsy Traveller site, and we have allowed a sub-regional fire station, all in the green belt, so if there is an overwhelming and demonstrable need in that location, you can permit development in the green belt as appropriate, but you still have the protection.

Joe Henry: You have to demonstrate very special circumstances. That is the key test for any development in the green belt. Most development in the green belt is considered to be inappropriate by definition, and you could justify development only in very special circumstances. In a sense we are looking at schools, because we have run out of sites, but we have to demonstrate very special circumstances to be able to deliver that.

Anneliese Hutchinson: Very quickly, I think the green belt policy works well. I think the issue is how we review that. It should be done only in exceptional circumstances, through a local plan process, and if it operates in that way, it works. The issue is probably the guidance on how you would do a green belt review, because there is no national guidance, so everybody adopts their own opinion as to how that should happen, which is probably why it sometimes takes an awfully long time: because it has to be justified so much in the local area. If we had national guidance about how to do it, or best practice, that might be helpful.

The Chairman: That has really been a very helpful session. Thank you very much indeed. We touched on a few things that we probably should have gone into more deeply, and we probably went too deeply into some things that we could have done more easily or quicker. If you have any ideas that come to you, particularly on your train back to Gateshead—and we are very grateful to you for coming down—perhaps you could scribble a few words, because we want to make this report really important, and we have been so blessed in having really good witnesses, amongst whom of course I would name you. We are still not there, but it is all systems go until March or thereabouts, so we would be most grateful. Thank you very much indeed.