Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-39)
YVETTE COOPER
MP, MS MICHELLE
BANKS AND
MS BERNADETTE
KELLY
11 JUNE 2007
Q20 John Cummings: Will you be sharing
that thought with the chairs of select committees before you finally
make your mind up? Will you consult them in any detail?
Yvette Cooper: I think that is
probably a very sensible idea and we would certainly—
Q21 John Cummings: But do you intend
to?
Yvette Cooper: We would certainly
be interested in select committees' views. I am slightly cautious
in saying this in that there are obviously other departments and
other ministers and select committees involved in this, but we
would certainly be very keen to have the select committee's views
on the form that parliamentary scrutiny should take.
Q22 Mr Hands: Can I put it to you
very briefly? In my view, it would be unacceptable to have national
policy statements that have not been subject to a vote of Parliament;
and they could be treated perhaps in the same way as secondary
legislation sent to a committee. If these national policy statements
are going to determine the whole planning framework around a particular
issue, it seems to me inconceivable that it could be going through
without a vote of Parliament. I appreciate you say you want an
increased role for Parliament here, but I think that is essential.
It does not seem at the moment you have any firm commitment that
there be a parliamentary vote on this.
Yvette Cooper: I think this is
not the right stage for us to set out detailed proposals on this.
As I have said, we want to hear views that come forward. Once
we have looked at different views put forward, including from
the Select Committee, then we will take a view about the appropriate
form of parliamentary scrutiny.
Chair: Can we move on to the role of
the Infrastructure Planning Commission?
Q23 Mr Hands: The IPC will have to
make some difficult decisions, obviously. How will the Government
ensure that it would remain independent when it was likely to
come under significant sustained local and/or national pressures?
Yvette Cooper: It is, but the
Planning Inspectorate remains very clearly independent, and that
often has to deal with very controversial applications and operates
in a very clear, independent way when making its recommendations.
Clearly, the IPC would be set out in statute, as part of the legislation;
and that is what would very clearly establish its independence.
Q24 Mr Hands: Clearly, the Planning
Inspectorate is a different kind of body; it is an appeal body
rather than an initiation body. The White Paper calls for the
new IPC commissioners to have eight-year terms, and they could
only be removed, as far as I read it, on grounds of incapacity
or misconduct. Surely, there must be other ways in which one could
remove one of those commissioners if the quality of their decisions
and everything else was incredibly poor, or indeed if there were
a change in government? If there were a change in government,
and a change in national policy statements, would that not suggest
that there might be a change at IPC?
Yvette Cooper: The role of the
IPC is to take decisions in response to a national policy statement.
It would certainly be open to a new government, obviously, or
a new minister, to change the national policy statement; and then
the IPC would respond in accordance with the new national policy
statement and would take decisions in accordance with it. You
are trying to avoid a situation where the members of the IPC feel
that they have to take a decision in a particular way for a particularly
politically controversial application because otherwise they might
get removed from their jobs. You are trying to avoid that kind
of thing and establish appropriate independence. If there are
particular concerns of the Committee, we are very happy to look
at those, but I think you would agree that it would be right to
have an appropriate kind of independence for the—
Q25 Mr Hands: It would certainly
be an appropriate independence, but you have to make them accountable.
If you are going to have them with eight-year terms, where they
cannot be removed for any reason other than misconduct or incapacity,
that is not making them in any way accountable to Parliament,
this Committee or anybody else.
Yvette Cooper: Interestingly,
they have to take decisions that are quasi judicial, and we do
set up systems to take quasi judicial decisions in a way that
is different from the way in which we set up democratically accountable
decisions.
Q26 Mr Hands: Does "quasi judicial"
not imply that there should be a right of appeal? However, it
sounds as though there is no right of appeal!
Yvette Cooper: There will always
be issues where someone thinks the IPC has not done its job properly
or has not operated within the framework of law that it is supposed
to operate in, and in those circumstances there will clearly be
a role for the courts or for judicial review. We are trying to
set up a framework that is fair and transparent, as part of the
legislation, which gives the IPC a particular role within national
policy statements that are drawn up by Parliament. It is a different
framework from the one that currently operates, and clearly the
detail needs to be got right as part of the legislation, which
is precisely why we are consulting on the White Paper proposals.
Q27 Mr Hands: You say policy statements
drawn up by Parliament, which Parliament, it seems, will not have
the opportunity to vote on, even though Parliament may have the
opportunity to scrutinise them. You are then going to have them
decided by these IPCs, with fixed eight-year terms, which are
totally unaccountable. They even have the right, as I understand
it, to conduct compulsory purchase of land without any consultation
locally or any right of redress locally. Surely that cannot be
right?
Yvette Cooper: Again, we have
set out proposals as part of the White Paper, and again these
are areas where we will be listening to the consultation responses.
The Commission will have to publish reasons for its decision and
account to ministers and Parliament for its overall performance.
If it cannot set out reasons, the whole framework around judicial
review is all based on reasonable behaviour and being able to
set out reasons and so on. There are all sorts of processes where
we ask the Land Tribunal, for example, to take independent decisions
around the kind of compensation that is appropriate, where you
have compulsory purchase orders, where we do set up independent
and quasi judicial frameworks for taking decisions. I think there
is a long tradition of those kinds of approaches in the British
legal system, and we would need to draw on those approaches in
terms of getting the legislation right here.
Q28 Mr Hands: I very much debate
your point as to whether this is a quasi judicial process. As
somebody who has been involved in a lot of quasi judicial processes
it does not sound to me like one. As a final point, how do you
foresee the IPC and local authorities communicating effectively
to deliver a programme around an NPS?
Yvette Cooper: Local authorities,
we think, should have a specific status in terms of drawing up
of national policy statements and in terms of the consultation
process around individual applications. On the quasi judicial
point, you recognise that ministers under the current process
take quasi judicial decisions on the basis of individual planning
applications. The current process involves very different decision-making
processes than many of the ordinary decisions that ministers take
where they are directly accountable to Parliament. We should recognise
that the current process is very different in terms of the decision-making.
To come back to the wider issues, we are trying to suggest a framework
that is different in order to deal with the problems that the
planning system has traditionally had. There are a whole series
of areas where further work needs to be done on the detail, and
that is precisely why we are consulting on the White Paper rather
than going directly to legislation; but we have to recognise the
problems in the current system that it is trying to address.
Q29 Mr Hands: Can you say what the
quango's relationship with current legislation would be? My reading
of the White Paper is that the quango will have the rights to
overrule existing legislation, or even amend existing legislation.
Surely, we cannot have this unelected quango being able to do
that on legislation that has been voted through democratically
by this Parliament, if there is going to be no democratic vote
on amending it?
Yvette Cooper: Again, this area
needs to be set out in more detail when it comes to the draft
legislation. What we are trying to achieve here is to allow the
IPC to be able to take decisions that allow streamlining. There
are areas where a whole series of multiple consents is involved,
where you have a whole series of different regimes being pulled
together, and it is about being able to respond and take the decision
rather than having a whole series of parallel decisions having
to go to ministers where those parallel decisions are consequential
on the original decision of the IPC. That is the framework we
are trying to set out, but, again, this is an area that needs
to be set out in more detail in the legislation.
Q30 Anne Main: How do you envisage
the membership of the IPC; what qualifications would you need
to be a member of the IPC; and how many people would it involve?
Yvette Cooper: We have set out
in part of the White Paper some particular proposals around who
would be on the IPC, around the kinds of experience and expertise
they would have to have. You really want a range of different
people with different kinds of expertise.
Q31 Anne Main: I would like to know
how the choice would be made, not the skills they need.
Yvette Cooper: They would be appointed
by ministers but according to the Commissioner for Public Appointments'
Code of Practice. You would need obviously to have a very transparent
process, but you also want people with expertise around planning,
engineering, economics, environment and so on.
Q32 Anne Main: As far as my colleague's
point on eight years or ten years, you could understand why a
new set of ministers might be somewhat unhappy with a group of
people chosen by the outgoing set of ministers.
Yvette Cooper: The individuals
appointed would obviously have to operate within a clear framework
that was set out by the national policy statement; and it would
be up to ministers to revise the national policy statement very
swiftly, should they so choose.
Chair: We should move on to the next
section, which is the Planning White Paper's policies related
to climate change.
Q33 Emily Thornberry: Chapter 7 contains
quite a lot on climate change. One of the things we wanted to
ask you was in relation to the house-building industry. As far
as we understand it, local authorities have lots of different
policies, and we particularly want to know about how to meet the
zero carbon development. We also wondered whether, given the importance
of economies of scale, consideration was being given to guidance
being given to local authorities so that things are standardised
across Britain.
Yvette Cooper: The Building Regulations
are national standards. The reason for that is to allow builders/developers
to make economies of scale and to be able to operate within a
clear, transparent framework that does not vary as soon as you
move half a mile up the road into a different local authority
area. It is certainly the case that, in terms of getting to the
zero carbon homes within ten years, what we do not want to have
is hundreds of different sets of standards in every part of the
country, where in one local authority area you have to put turf
on the roof, and in another local authority area it is all wind
turbines and in another local authority area it is something different.
That is why we are clear that we want the national framework of
Building Regulations to increase the standards and cut carbon
emissions. We have set out a timetable at three years, six years
and ten years. We do think that there will be areas where on sites
it might be appropriate to go further and faster. For example,
if you have a site where you know that you can put in place a
good CHP scheme linked to a local power station, or local industry,
or where you have for a particular geographic reason an opportunity
to generate renewable energy for the new development—on
those sites it might be appropriate to say, "We should be
able to demand higher standards." We have said that that
should be done through the development plan and tested so that
there is a proper opportunity to scrutinise it, not simply to
be done at the last minute in an arbitrary way. Secondly, we should
specify levels according to the Code for Sustainable Homes, so
you would set out code level 3 or code level 4 (or whatever the
appropriate code level should be) rather than setting out the
detail of particular technologies that should be used. In that
way you give developers and industry the flexibility to meet the
standards in the way they think is most appropriate, rather than
specifying the inputs at a local authority level.
Q34 Emily Thornberry: You have talked
about the building regulations and the importance of them. Are
you intending to alter them so that they remain the fundamental
regulatory tool in order to reduce carbon emissions?
Yvette Cooper: Yes.
Q35 Emily Thornberry: Are you thinking
about introducing, when people put in a planning application,
that they not only put in a planning application but they also
put in a related document which is about their carbon reduction
assessment?
Yvette Cooper: We set up a package
before Christmas, which was the new draft planning policy statement
on climate change alongside the timetable for what would effectively
be revisions to the building regulations in order to get to the
zero carbon framework. We currently have a task force which has
been set up working with the house builders but also with the
LGA, with the supply industry and so on, to look at what other
things might be needed in order to support that and in order to
make sure that you can deliver the steps along the way to get
to the zero carbon homes. What we will do is consider any other
proposals as part of that work.
Q36 Emily Thornberry: So it will
be worth considering when people are putting in a planning application
that part of that was this?
Yvette Cooper: We would probably
want to look at this as part of that work with the task force
but also as part of the consultation responses to the package
that we put out before Christmas.
Q37 David Wright: Given this additional
workload, how are you going to support local authority planning
departments in actually making assessments of applications? Certainly,
my experience, particularly in the Midlands, is that where you
have large-scale developments coming forward, developers are saying
to me that local planning authorities do not have the capacity
in terms of planning skills within their departments to deal with
applications that are becoming increasingly complex. How are you
going to support local authorities?
Yvette Cooper: The planning delivery
grants have made a big difference, I think, to planning departments
across the country. Those have made some difference in many areas.
We are looking at a range of ways of being able to further support
planning departments. One is to be able to take away from them
some of the minor applications that currently take up an awful
lot of their time. We have a specific separate consultation on
that. The second is to look at the future of planning delivery
grants, linking it to the housing delivery grant and other options
in terms of providing incentives and investment for the future
to support planning. The third is to look at planning delivery
agreements—these have been very popular where they have
been tried—where you have an individual agreement between
the developer and the local council about what the timescale should
be. It might be a longer timescale but you actually set out what
a clear timescale should be and you can look at different ways
of funding that if you have a major development, different approaches
to planning fees and so on, where you could envisage developers
paying more for a particular application in order to make sure
that they actually can provide the capacity to get those decisions
taken. We are consulting on a range of those sorts of possibilities,
around planning fees, planning delivery agreements and other approaches.
We think there is considerable potential there but obviously it
has to be done in an appropriate way.
Q38 Mr Betts: Coming on to micro-generation
measures and how we might be considering changing permitted development,
particularly in terms of wind turbines. I suppose there has a
suspicion around that while there may be individuals who like
putting their eco-credentials, their green credentials, on their
CV by sticking a wind turbine on their roof, actually, in most
cases they are pretty inefficient. They are probably not a terribly
good use of resources and average wind speeds are not high enough
to make them work effectively, so why do we allow them to proliferate
and despoil the built environment?
Yvette Cooper: I think what we
want to do is to make it easier in general to make minor improvements
and minor changes to people's houses. Secondly, we want to make
it easier to promote micro-generation. A lot of that might also
be about solar panels and so on. I do not want to go into detailed
comment on individual technologies other than to mention one particular
site visit I went on where they had these homes that were a kind
of passive housing, many of them. It was a really great design
development where they had a large wind turbine to support the
overall development, but the man who showed me round, who was
very passionate about cutting carbon emissions, showed me his
fridge; he had a fantastic new fridge, and he was strongly against
individual wind turbines on individual houses and pointed to his
fridge and said that by installing this one fridge he had cut
far more carbon emissions than most people did by individual wind
turbines on their houses. That was his view. I am not an expert
on individual wind turbines so obviously I cannot comment further.
What we want to do is to provide more flexibility through the
planning system. We are consulting on the idea of local authorities
being able to remove some of these permitted development rights,
if, for example, it was an area where it was not appropriate,
for example, there was not any wind in that area and this was
something that was not going to be effective. Again, what we want
to do is get the responses to the consultation before making final
decisions on that.
Q39 Chair: Can I ask a number of
questions relating to economic development? The first one is why
the Government has not made any clear statement that land that
is currently allocated for employment should be retained for this
purpose. I am conscious, for example, in my own constituency of
enormous pressure to convert employment land to housing, notwithstanding
the fact that we are actually trying to reduce the number of people
travelling to work and therefore need to retain a balance between
employment and housing.
Yvette Cooper: We want to do a
revised PPS4, which looks at the overall approach to planning
for economic development, just as we did with PPS3 for housing.
We have previously made statements about local authorities looking
seriously at their land which is allocated for employment because
we know there are some areas where land has been held for employment
for a long time and it should be better used for housing in areas
where there is a shortage of housing supply and in fact there
is no demand in that area for the additional employment land.
Of course, it is right that local authorities need to get the
balance right and need to recognise areas where they need land
for economic development. The PPS4 we would envisage will look
at the issues around land supply for economic development as well
as the appropriate criteria to be taken into account around individual
applications in terms of economic development as well. That is
the opportunity for us to look further at this issue. What we
would not want to do, however, as I said, is to prevent brownfield
land being used for housing in areas where it is much needed and
where it is not needed for economic development.
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