Draft Town and Country Planning (Fees for Applications, Deemed Applications, Requests and Site Visits) (England) (Amendment) Regulations 2013
The Committee consisted of the following Members:
† Bacon, Mr Richard (South Norfolk) (Con)
† Blackman-Woods, Roberta (City of Durham) (Lab)
† Boles, Nick (Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government)
† Bradley, Karen (Staffordshire Moorlands) (Con)
† Champion, Sarah (Rotherham) (Lab)
† Kelly, Chris (Dudley South) (Con)
† Kirby, Simon (Brighton, Kemptown) (Con)
† McCann, Mr Michael (East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow) (Lab)
† Redwood, Mr John (Wokingham) (Con)
† Reed, Mr Steve (Croydon North) (Lab)
Shannon, Jim (Strangford) (DUP)
† Skinner, Mr Dennis (Bolsover) (Lab)
† Stunell, Sir Andrew (Hazel Grove) (LD)
† Turner, Karl (Kingston upon Hull East) (Lab)
† Ward, Mr David (Bradford East) (LD)
† Whittaker, Craig (Calder Valley) (Con)
† Wood, Mike (Batley and Spen) (Lab)
Farrah Bhatti, Committee Clerk
† attended the Committee
Sixth Delegated Legislation Committee
Wednesday 19 June 2013
[Andrew Rosindell in the Chair]
Draft Town and Country Planning (Fees for Applications, Deemed Applications, Requests and Site Visits) (England) (Amendment) Regulations 2013
2.30 pm
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Nick Boles): I beg to move,
That the Committee has considered the draft Town and Country Planning (Fees for Applications, Deemed Applications, Requests and Site Visits) (England) (Amendment) Regulations 2013.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Rosindell, on the most beautiful day in the year. I am sure that you, like all of us on the Committee, could not think of anywhere we would rather be than in Committee Room 9. I hope not to detain the Committee too long—that is, if the hon. Member for City of Durham also agrees not to do so.
The regulations, laid before the House on 20 May 2013, introduce new and amending regulations to support recent planning reforms that will give applicants the confidence to submit planning applications for development, businesses the confidence to invest to support growth, and communities greater certainty. The proposed changes to the fees regulations emanate from a variety of changes in both primary and secondary legislation, as well as from policy, which I will outline to the Committee. If approved by the House and the other place, the regulations will come into force on 1 October 2013.
Delays in getting a decision on a planning application can mean frustration, unnecessary expense and the loss of investment and jobs. We should not forget that planning is a quasi-judicial process, and justice delayed is justice denied. We have therefore introduced, through the Growth and Infrastructure Act 2013, measures to enable quicker and better decisions when there are clear failures in local planning authority performance.
In such situations, planning applicants will have the option of submitting applications for major development directly to the Planning Inspectorate, on behalf of the Secretary of State. Where that happens, regulation 3 will allow the planning application fee to be paid to the Secretary of State rather than the local planning authority, to enable the Planning Inspectorate to recoup the costs of determining the application in place of the local planning authority. I assure hon. Members that the fee to be paid will be exactly the same as would have been paid to the local planning authority; it is simply going to a different place, when the applicant chooses that alternative route. There will be no difference for the applicant.
Pre-application discussions on planning proposals play an important part in the planning process. They can help to iron out issues at an early stage and avoid
time being wasted on ill-conceived applications. Local planning authorities are able to charge for such advice under section 93 of the Local Government Act 2003.It is important that pre-application advice is available to applicants who choose to apply to the Planning Inspectorate when the local authority has been designated on the basis of poor performance. Regulation 2 will make provision for the inspectorate to charge for such advice, strictly on a cost-recovery basis, as is the case for local planning authorities.
The plan for growth has already put in place the planning guarantee to promote timely decisions on planning applications. It provides certainty by setting a one-year limit on the time that any planning application should spend with decision makers.
Mr John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con): Will the Minister remind the Committee what the current charge rate is for a planning inspector?
Nick Boles: If I may, I will be happy to return to my right hon. Friend in my response to any other points raised. I would not want to give him inaccurate figures, and I am not good at remembering figures off the top of my head. As he knows, a variety of fees may be charged depending on the type of application. I will come back to him with the full detail.
What the planning guarantee means in practice is that it will take no more than 26 weeks to decide an application, and no more than a further 26 weeks to decide any appeal that may follow a decision. We are strengthening the guarantee by underpinning it with a refund of the application fee if a planning authority fails to determine the application within 26 weeks from the date a valid application is made, as set out in regulation 5.
The statutory period for determination is 13 weeks for major applications and eight weeks for other applications. That means that the planning guarantee is twice as long as the statutory period for major applications and more than three times that for other types. If an applicant does not receive a decision within that period, we think that it is manifestly unreasonable for them not to get their money back. That is why we have introduced the regulations. Our aim is to ensure that the system speeds up decisions and operates fairly.
We have made some limited exemptions from the guarantee to allow common-sense approaches to prevail, for instance where the applicant and the planning authority agree that more than 26 weeks are needed to deal with a particularly complex proposal. The refund will also not apply in cases where enforcement action prompts an application for deemed planning consent, there is a re-determination following a successful judicial review, or an application has been called in by the Secretary of State and is subject to a bespoke timetable agreed with the parties.
In line with the Government’s aim to streamline the heritage protection system, provisions to abolish the need for conservation area consent to demolish an unlisted building in a conservation area and in future to require planning permission were included in the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013. The provisions simply replicate the existing level of protection, but in a streamlined way.
Fees are not currently payable for conservation area consent, and regulation 4 will maintain that principle by excluding fees for applications to demolish unlisted buildings in a conservation area from the planning regime. That will be simpler for planning applicants, but they will not see any difference in the fee that they have to pay.
Mr Redwood: Proposed new regulation 11A(4)(a) states that paragraph (1) will not apply if the development is
“of the same character or description as the development to which the application relates”.
Will the Minister explain that? Does it mean that the application has to be exactly the same, or is he allowing variation between the first and second applications?
Nick Boles: Again, I hope that my right hon. Friend will accept that I will come back to him in a few minutes, after I have set out the proposals. I know that he is a stickler for detail, and I certainly want to provide him with the detailed answers that he has every right to expect.
To allow flexibility in the planning system, we have introduced new permitted development rights for change of use in order to enable better use of existing buildings, and to cut bureaucracy and encourage growth. To make sure that the changes can be carried out without unacceptable impact on a local area, we have put in place a light-touch prior approval process for some changes. That will allow local planning authorities to consider the impact of specific issues, such as flooding or traffic.
Regulation 6 will introduce an £80 fee for such prior approval applications. We recognise that a change of use may sometimes also require associated development. Where a planning application for associated changes is made at the same time as the prior approval application, the £80 fee will not apply.
Finally, there are two minor amendments to the regulations. Regulation 7 will amend the fee for applications to extend the time limits for implementing outline planning permissions that have been partially commenced. That is to ensure that the current lower fee for time extension applications is payable, rather than the full outline application fee. The amendment will correct an inconsistency between the fee to extend unimplemented planning permissions and the fee to extend partly implemented outline planning permissions. Regulation 7 will also amend the 2012 regulations to correct a typographical error by inserting “0.1” between the words “additional” and “hectare” in schedule 1, part 2, category 3, paragraph (1)(b).
It is vital that communities and developers looking to provide homes and jobs have confidence that their planning applications will be handled as quickly as possible. The measures are an important part of the package that we are introducing to ensure that decisions are made swiftly and reliably. I commend the regulations to the Committee.
2.40 pm
Roberta Blackman-Woods (City of Durham) (Lab): It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Rosindell. I start by thanking the Minister for giving us a chance to debate this change to the planning
system. Of late, he has made big changes to the planning system through negative statutory instruments. I want to take the opportunity this afternoon to discourage him from using the negative procedure, even though it means that we have to be in here on this beautiful day discussing an SI, when I am sure we would all rather be somewhere else. It is important that we have the opportunity properly to air our views and interrogate the Minister on changes to the planning system.The Minister will hardly be surprised to learn that the Opposition are very much against the statutory instrument. In the Growth and Infrastructure Bill Committee, we strongly opposed the early clauses of what is now the Growth and Infrastructure Act. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that we oppose the SI that underpins some of its provisions.
I want to be very clear at the outset that we firmly disagree with the Government’s policy position. Unlike the Minister, we do not believe it will bring the development that communities up and down the country desperately need. The idea of stripping local people of their democratic right to have a say in planning applications is wrong, and proves beyond all doubt that the Government have abandoned any last pretence of localism.
My position is supported by many others. For example, the Campaign to Protect Rural England states:
“It marks a dramatic shift away from the Government’s commitment to localism.”
The Local Government Association states:
“This measure fundamentally undermines the democratic basis of the planning system and it is something that the LGA consistently opposed throughout the passage of the Growth and Infrastructure Act.”
The LGA goes on to say that the reforms are
“heavy handed and counter-productive,”
“result in a focus on targets and deadlines”
rather than “local people” and
“the sustainable development and economic growth that our country so desperately needs.”
As we are debating the financial fate of planning authorities, will the Minister tell us how many local authorities are, at present, likely to be designated in October as a failing planning authority? How many will be stripped of resources by the legislation and how many communities will be stripped of a say about what happens in their area? Last year 17 local authorities decided 30% or fewer of their applications in 13 weeks or less, and national speed had fallen from 60% determination in 2011 to 56% in 2012 as a result of the chaos the Government have caused in the planning system. What is the Minister’s current projection of the numbers?
The detail of the SI also reveals that while the Secretary of State is busily taking fees away from local authorities for the determination of planning permissions, he is awarding those fees to himself. Can the Minister explain why the Secretary of State needs resources to determine applications but local authorities do not? Should not the Secretary of State be leading by example?
These apparent double standards are made even more outlandish, given section 7.5 of the explanatory memorandum, which acknowledges the importance of fees. It says:
“Whilst planning application fees are a small part of the overall costs of development, they are important in meeting the costs of those charged with determining applications and therefore in providing an efficient planning service.”
Will the Minister tell us why that logic is not being applied to applications for extensions? He has taken away local authorities’ ability to charge for planning permission being sought for huge extensions. Why therefore is the Minister acknowledging, in this particular statutory instrument, that fees are necessary to support the determination of planning applications? He is not doing that for the permitted development that he is allowing for extensions. Why does he think that the Secretary of State needs resources but local authorities do not? The Minister’s position is even more untenable when one considers that section 1 of the Growth and Infrastructure Act allows the Secretary of State to demand that a planning authority he has deemed to be failing carry out all or part of the work for a planning application that has been referred to the Secretary of State.
Mr Steve Reed (Croydon North) (Lab): Does my hon. Friend agree that one of the main reasons why local authorities may be slow at considering applications is that they have suffered a 40% reduction in discretionary funding from the Government, which means that they no longer have the funding available to provide the necessary number of planning officers necessary to push applications through at a reasonable pace?
Roberta Blackman-Woods: My hon. Friend makes an excellent point, which the Minister has consistently failed to address. It was raised several times during the passage of the Growth and Infrastructure Act. Local authorities in many areas simply do not have the resources available to them to speed up planning determination.
This SI leaves us with the bizarre situation of local authorities, which, as my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon North says, are already struggling to decide on applications in a timely fashion, being further stripped of resources but not of the work. By the Government’s own admission in paragraph 7.5 of the explanatory memorandum, local authorities will be less able to provide an “efficient planning service” as a result of the measure. The Minister must give us some explanation of how he thinks local authorities will cope with the extremely onerous burden that is about to be placed on them.
The Minister cannot attempt to deny that accusation, which has been put to him on several occasions, as paragraph 8.1 of the explanatory memorandum, which summarises responses to the consultation, clearly states:
“Where responses considered the issue of fees, it was mainly to express dissatisfaction with the proposal that local planning authorities should be required to perform administrative tasks in connection with an application to be determined by the Planning Inspectorate without receiving a proportion of the fee.”
The Government apparently rejected that concern because the tasks are “not burdensome”. We all know, however, that gathering the information necessary to determine an application can be fairly burdensome. Will the Minister explain what the Secretary of State will be doing that requires fees that will not, under any circumstances, be carried out by the local authority? What is it that the
Secretary of State or PINs will be requested to do and not the local authority? It is not clear from the legislation or the statutory instrument.Paragraph 7.6 of the explanatory memorandum says:
“The Government is keen to encourage applicants to undertake as much preparation as possible on planning proposals, including discussions at an early stage with the planning authority”.
We are led to believe that most of the work that will be needed to determine these applications, particularly at this pre-application stage, will be dealt with by the local authority and not depend on the Secretary of State. Will the Minister admit that those discussions take resources away from local authorities and that, without planning fees, it will be much more difficult for them to carry out the pre-application stage? Will the Secretary of State, therefore, undertake his own pre-consultation work with local communities or is it simply not possible for a local authority to perform that task?
The Government’s changes are more likely to create inefficiency in the system, stymie development and cause a spiral of decline in those local authorities unlucky enough to suffer the Secretary of State’s wrath. Is that what the Minister intended when he said that he wanted to replace the planning system with chaos? Out there, they say that this will certainly lead to chaos. Will he tell us why he reached the conclusion, in paragraph 7.3 of the explanatory memorandum, that these measures
“will help to ensure that that the planning guarantee is met”?
Surely a possible outcome is that the system of determination will be slowed down further.
Paragraph 7.7 of the explanatory memorandum goes on to talk of the importance of standard fees for dealing with prior approvals for change of use permitted development. Prior approvals, and thus these fees, will not apply to changes of use in the high street even where there may be considerable detrimental impact, such as more betting shops where they are not wanted or more payday loan companies where we have already gone beyond saturation point.
I understand that the planning Minister finally admitted to the Communities and Local Government Committee this week that his changes to permitted development for use class orders will result in the likelihood of more payday lenders. Is that really what he intends to achieve through his policy?
Local authorities will now have far fewer resources to deal with their high streets and much reduced powers to shape them. Does the Minister’s right hand know what his left hand is doing or, indeed, vice versa? Paragraph 8.5 of the memorandum, at first glance, would support the assumption that neither hand even knows of the other’s existence. Given the scale of support for prior approvals that it cites, will he explain why he has introduced a new permitted development right without any prior approvals, or means for the council to consider the impact on the local community?
Finally, in paragraph 9 we have the promise of yet further guidance. Will the Minister update us on how many pages of promised guidance we are now up to?
2.53 pm
Mr Redwood: The Minister does not have an easy task because he needs to strike a balance. I sympathise with what he is trying to do, but I want him to be as
localist as possible. Most of us here think that, usually, the best way to determine a planning application of local significance is to entrust it to local councillors who are elected to do that job, so we do not want to see him taking away from any movement to local decision.However, most of us also agree that there are occasions when, for good or bad reasons, councils do not get on with the job, and delay is unacceptable to both sides. It can be unacceptable to the applicant who has a perfectly reasonable application that is delayed, incurring extra expense of a result when their application should go through. It may also be unacceptable to a local community, because there may be a case where a local community finds the proposal unacceptable but the council is unwilling to say that quickly enough and come to the right determination and the local community is therefore unhappy with the progress.
I see, therefore, what the Minister is trying to do: he is trying to find a way of ensuring that if a council, for good or bad reason, is unable to proceed swiftly, there is another mechanism. That, of course, is the opposite of localism. It is centralism, and it rests upon the inspectorate. That is why, in my first intervention on the Minister, I wanted to clarify what the costs are that we are talking about, because if more matters are to be determined in the centre because some local councils are unable or unwilling to do the job in time, we need to make sure that the Minister is protecting the applicants from unreasonable costs.
We have here a formula. I have no objections in principle to the formula, but of course the formula is incomplete, because the costs would depend on what the charge-out rate for a planning inspector is, which is what the Committee needs to know to make a judgment, and on how many hours of work an inspector thinks a given application needs. The Minister is our defender in this. He should be on the side of the applicants’ wanting swift and fair justice, so it is his duty to run the Planning Inspectorate in such a way that the unit costs of inspectors are realistic for decent professionals, and that they do their job in a timely way so that the costs do not get out of control. If he wishes to have more development, he needs to ensure that the costs of reasonable applications are not unrealistically high, as well as ensure that the timeliness of judgments is a priority so that the community can be put out of doubt and the developer of a legitimate development can get on with it.
I was a little worried about some of the drafting of the regulations. It is a long and complicated document and I thought that we were in the business of trying to simplify planning. Although the Minister has valiantly tried to simplify it, in my local area it is still quite complicated and I hope he will take other opportunities to make it simpler. When we look at the language that I highlighted at the top of page 3, for example, it is by no means clear to normal readers exactly what is envisaged. As soon as such language is used, we add time, cost and complexity, because a developer will have to go off to a lawyer to get advice on what it really signifies, whether the application has to be identical or whether there is permitted variation and so forth. That is just one example— I did not want to detain the Committee by highlighting the half a dozen I had noted when I read the documents for the first time.
I hope the Minister will note those comments when thinking about his future development planning law, and realise that it is exactly this kind of system—a very complicated and costly system—which he inherited that needs to change. He says he wishes to streamline it, so that means that streamlining must be exercised on everything that goes through, but the regulations do not look very streamlined to me. I appreciate the measure is a case of take it or leave it, and I am not saying that I wish not to take it.
Roberta Blackman-Woods: This complication is of the Government’s own making. We know from the Royal Town Planning Institute and others that if we want to tackle the issue of authorities determining applications too slowly, we need to give them support to speed up decision making, not designate them as failing and then bypass the whole planning system by referring the matter to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.
Mr Redwood: The hon. Lady is making an important contribution to the debate. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response to her and to me. I have no intention of trying to stop the proposal, because I am broadly in sympathy with it and understand it. I simply think that in future it would be a good idea if we had greater simplicity, less complexity and less cost, because as the Minister goes about reforming the planning system, there is the danger that he will recreate the very complexity, cost and delays that he is strenuously trying to stop. I pass that on in a friendly spirit and look forward to his answers to my specific points at the end of the debate—if he catches your eye, Mr Rosindell.
2.58 pm
Sir Andrew Stunell (Hazel Grove) (LD): It is a pleasure to speak in this discussion. It is also a rarity for me to be encouraged to do so by the Government Whip, which I am probably not supposed to reveal.
I want to draw attention to the notes. The hon. Member for City of Durham drew attention to paragraph 7.5. I will draw her attention briefly to paragraph 7.6, which states:
“The Government is keen to encourage applicants to undertake as much preparation as possible on planning proposals, including discussions at an early stage with the planning authority...This is to reduce wasted time and resources, by both applicant and the authority, on ill-conceived projects.”
I draw the Minister’s attention to the performance of one planning authority that has done particularly well in that respect. It relates to Asda’s application for a supermarket in the town of Marple in my constituency, which was indeed an ill-conceived project. The planning authority has behaved with exemplary diligence and been very quick and precise in dealing with the application, which has now been rejected. I am delighted to report to the Minister that it will not be troubling him further, because Asda has withdrawn its application. I would not want it to be thought that planning authorities and, in particular, Stockport local planning authority, were not exemplary performers. In his reply, he may want to acknowledge and thank the campaign group Marple in Action, which worked hard to make it clear that the
community felt the proposal to be ill-conceived. In support of that, the planning authority has induced Asda to withdraw its application.3 pm
Mr Dennis Skinner (Bolsover) (Lab): A long, long time ago, I was a member of a local council, and in those halcyon days of the 1960s, local authorities had considerable power, in the sense that little of it had been taken away by central Government. It all began with Ted Heath deciding that he wanted to decide what the rents would be in any given local authority, and he brought forward a Bill. In Clay Cross, they opposed that change for the very reason that the right hon. Member for Wokingham mentioned: they believed that they should continue to have the power to make that decision. That was the very beginning, way back in 1972.
Now it is called localism. I do not know where the Government got that word from, but they have acted in opposition to localism almost every single day since they thought it up. The Local Government Association is not always a one-party body; its members invariably work together. My guess is—I may be wrong—that the LGA is against the regulations in total, and it will represent all parties.
Mr Reed: To add to the points my hon. Friend is making, does he agree that the highly prescriptive anti-localist nature of many of these regulations will militate against the development of strong partnerships between local authorities and developers, like the one that was developed around the Shell centre, just across the river from this building? That partnership led to a highly satisfactory and timely outcome on the proposals to redevelop that site.
Mr Skinner: A lot of that activity takes place, but what worries me is that local authorities have had cuts of more than 30%, and there will be a net result. The chief executive of Bolsover council is now also the chief executive of North East Derbyshire council and many committees and departments have been drawn together. I know that those councils are taking steps to try to minimise the problem, but when a council gets a request to build a supermarket in the middle of a town and there is serious objection from large sections of the community, the process will not be as quick as it would be for someone’s proposal to build a couple of bungalows on a little bit of land. It is not the same.
Then, of course, there is fracking. It is a new development and, believe me, it will cause mayhem in local authorities—it already is. In my area, there are requests for sinking boreholes and finding out, and the people know that those developments are on the map and they are against them. North East Derbyshire council will be inundated with people sending in their comments. As Members of Parliament, we all know that when there is a big planning issue in our local authorities, we get e-mails by the hundred in this new age of social media, and we are obliged, I think, to send them on to the planning chief and all the rest of it. Do we seriously think that this system is appropriate in this e-mail society? I have never
sent an e-mail in my life, by the way; I just put that on record, but I know that millions of people operate that way, and the net result is that it is bound to cause delay.What about windmills? Without a doubt, there are more objections to windmills than any other planning application.
The Chair: Order. I remind the hon. Gentleman that he must stick to the subject that we are debating.
Mr Skinner: Well, windmills need planning permission. That is what they need, and that is where the trouble starts, because there are people in organisations that say, “We can give you a bob or two for the local community if you’ll have half a dozen windmills.” Are you telling me that in this wonderful, localist big society, people are not saying, “Well I’m going to say my piece about this”? They are. That is what prompted me to ask for windmills not to be built within 3 km of people living in built-up villages.
All I say is that when we talk about planning, we must talk about the real thing. Fracking is going to be a big subject of planning applications, and without doubt, they are going to finish up in the office of the Secretary of State. Thereby hangs a political story. Is this being done so that the Government, who are in favour of fracking—lots of us are against it because we can see all the problems—the Planning Inspectorate and the Secretary of State play a bigger role in making these decisions?
Yes, it is a minefield, but ask anyone who has served in local authorities: we all know that planning is one of those subjects that ain’t easy. There are people on different sides of the argument on almost every single occasion. In this period when local authorities are inundated with cuts, is it any wonder that the Local Government Association says, “We’re against it”? They can see all the difficulties piling up.
I am pleased that our Front Bench speakers are opposing the regulations, because I wanted to anyway. Quite frankly, we are on the side of those thousands, millions of people spread around in our communities who do not think it is a great idea to give more power to this tinpot coalition Government to be deciding things, when councils have been democratically elected to do the job. The movement from local authorities to central Government has gone too far already, so I am happy to vote agin it.
3.8 pm
Nick Boles: The debate has been fascinating, and fuller than I had perhaps anticipated. I am sorry to have underestimated the enthusiasm of the Committee.
What we heard this afternoon will certainly be familiar to my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham, which is that the Opposition are never so exercised as when they are defending failure in parts of Government and the public sector. There is no cause for which they are more willing to run to the barricades than to defend those who are not discharging their responsibilities to the public and the people who elect them, even though they are very well remunerated for doing so.
It is therefore no surprise—indeed, we heard it in all the debates on the Growth and Infrastructure Bill, now an Act—that we heard a sense of outrage that anyone
should hold local authorities to account for their failure to deliver planning decisions in a timely fashion. Nobody on the Government Benches and nothing in the Act or the regulations requires planning authorities to decide either yes or no. That is not what they are being judged on. They are being judged simply on whether they make a decision at all within a reasonable amount of time.We made it clear, throughout the debates in the Chamber and in Committee, that our hope and earnest desire was that as few authorities as possible should fall into the position of designation. Indeed, we hoped that the very fact that we were bringing forward the designation measure would deter authorities that were failing to make planning decisions quickly, and that we would end up not having to designate any.
The hon. Member for City of Durham asked how many local authorities are due for designation. I do not know yet, because the data on which they will be judged have not yet all been collected. Indeed, some of it has not yet happened. I am sure that she can predict the future, but it is not something that I claim to be able to do. The hon. Lady and other hon. Members are encouraged to review the data on timeliness of decision making. That is public, and there will be further data in July. We will consider the data that come forward in September before making designations in October. It will be only at the end of September, or the beginning of October when we know which authorities have failed according to the measure. However, the measure is public. It was well discussed, so it is open to anyone to judge which authorities are at risk.
It is important to note that the provision does not require applications to go to the Planning Inspectorate in the case of authorities that have been designated. It will still be entirely open to applicants to continue to make their planning applications to an authority, even if that authority has been designated for poor performance. It is meant to be an option and an opportunity for people who are being failed by planning authorities that are not discharging even the minimum of their responsibilities to make decisions quickly. It is only if a developer or an applicant chooses to route their application to the Planning Inspectorate that the whole question of to whom the fee should be paid arises.
In a case when an authority has been designated as poorly performing and an applicant has decided to take a major application—as that is what the provision relates to—to the Planning Inspectorate, it seems entirely reasonable and fair that the local authority should not be paid the full fee for doing much less work, when the whole point of the measure is that it is meant to be both a deterrent for failure and, indeed, to some extent a punishment for failure by the very few authorities that fall into that position. We should not be rewarding them for failure by paying them fees, when they will not have to do the core work of determination.
It is true that one or two tasks will still be discharged by the local authority, but they will be few. The authority will be sending out notices to the neighbourhood about the planning application. That is not a hugely onerous task. It is not something that justifies the fee that it would receive if it were dealing with the application, and it is entirely right that the authority should still be required to do that because it is, after all, its failure and poor performance that got it into the situation in the first place.
I shall explain why the Planning Inspectorate needs a fee. It is funded by two sources. It is funded by fees paid by applicants, and it is funded by the taxpayer. If a fee is not asked for a piece of work that has been landed in the planning inspector’s lap, it will be the taxpayer who pays. Just as I do not see a reason why a local authority that is failing to discharge its planning responsibilities should receive fees, nor do I see a reason why the general taxpayer should be penalised for the failure of an authority in a particular area. That is why it is right that the same planning fee is transferred to the Planning Inspectorate to fund its work.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham asked an extremely fair question about the fees that the planning inspector would be likely to charge, and how they would be calculated. The position is a little complicated because, currently, planning inspectors do not determine applications of this nature. They determine appeals; they examine local plans, but they do not determine these applications. We therefore do not have a history of their charging fees for such work. It is important to remember that it is voluntary and entirely optional whether the applicant wants to take the application to the Planning Inspectorate but in that case, the fee that the inspectorate will receive will be the set fee.
The only case in which we will get into the question of the hourly rate at which an inspector’s time is charged out is if the applicant were to seek pre-application advice. Furthermore, even if the applicant were taking the application to the Planning Inspectorate for determination, they could ask for pre-application advice from the local authority, and therefore incur the fees that the local authority would charge. Or they could choose not to ask for any pre-application advice at all. Again, nobody is being forced into those fees. It is reasonable to point out that we need to keep a close eye on what amounts are being charged for that. I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for bringing that to my attention and I give the commitment to keep a beady eye on it when applications start to be determined by the Planning Inspectorate.
Roberta Blackman-Woods: Will the amount of the fee be known to the developer in advance, and will the amount be published so that everyone else can know?
Nick Boles: Obviously, the set fee for the determination of the application will be published and known to the applicant. The hourly rate of the pre-application fee will certainly be known, and probably an estimate of the number of hours it will take. If an applicant seeks a much greater amount of pre-application advice than was originally indicated, the inspector will need to charge more.
The hourly rate will not be withheld from them. I will have to get back to the hon. Lady about whether that will be publicly available or shared just with the applicant. I do not know if it will be published [ Interruption. ] Apparently, it will be published. I am not sure if I was meant to take directions from the box, but I was happy to do so, and I hope, Mr Chairman, you will forgive me.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham also made another fair point about the drafting, in particular in relation to the provision about an application for something similar in character and description.
There is a substantive point and a form point. The substantive point is that this is a good measure because it is reasonable: one effectively gets a free go if one is doing something that is not identical but substantially similar. That cannot be laid out in criteria; I promise that the legislation would be a lot longer if it were. It has to be for the judgment of the decision maker.I agree with my right hon. Friend that it seems a long piece of drafting. This is only a partial defence: it is a copy of the language in the existing regulations relating to the fees currently charged by local authorities. All we have done is cut and pasted. That is not an excuse for bad or over-lengthy drafting. I will ensure that is looked at. There is a red tape challenge on planning administration underway at the moment. I invite my right hon. Friend to offer this as a regulation that is perhaps in need of tidying up.
My right hon. Friend will be even more pleased to hear that just as my predecessors in this post and the former Minister in the Department, my right hon. Friend the Member for Hazel Grove, not noble but knighted, managed to reduce planning policy massively to this extremely readable short document of the national policy planning framework, so I am engaged in a humbler but no less important task of reducing planning guidance, with the assistance of Lord Taylor and others.
We are hoping to get planning guidance, which currently amounts to 7,000 pages, reduced to under a few hundred pages, all of it on a website. Nothing that is not on that website will be planning guidance. I promise that our commitment to deregulation, clarification, simplification and streamlining is in no way diminished.
I hope that I have answered most of the questions. My right hon. Friend the Member for Hazel Grove raised a case in his constituency. I am delighted to hear that, through the efforts of the Marple action group and the wise, swift and certain determination of Stockport planning authority—an example to planning authorities, to which I hope Opposition Members will look—a good outcome was achieved. That is exactly the kind of decision making that we want locally.
I shall end on the challenge from the most fearsome member of the Committee. I have never had the opportunity to engage, through you, Mr Rosindell, with the hon. Gentleman directly and I relish that opportunity, because there is almost no hon. Member whom I enjoy listening to more in the Chamber. However, he makes the classic mistake—thinking that localism is about local government—albeit a noble position to take, because the party for which he stands believes in Government as the best source of decision making. We believe in people, families and businesses—
Mr Skinner: Will the Minister give way before he goes any further?
Nick Boles: I am happy to do so after finishing my sentence.
We believe in individuals, families, businesses and communities making decisions. When a local authority fails to make decisions, it fails people—families, businesses and communities—and I will not support it.
Mr Skinner: I said what I said because I took part in local democracy. It was not about being on a public body, but about being a member of a council elected to represent the people where I lived and worked in the pit. The point that I am making about localism is purely on that basis. There is a virtue in being elected to go on a planning committee and do the best you can. Set against all the cuts, I am just trying to tell the Minister that the regulations will result in a lot more delay than otherwise would be the case.
Now that he has opened his gills a bit further and talked about the planning inspectors getting this hourly rate, although he does not know what it is, I forecast that, ere long, after this has been set up, just like those stupid police commissioners and all the rest—I put it in the same bracket—some planning inspector will be talked to by a S unday Times reporter about how much money he wants for his hourly rate. That will be a sting, won’t it? I hope that I have not given them a tip, but it is bound to happen.
Nick Boles: I relished every moment of that. If my career in the House comes to an end tomorrow, I will be glad that today happened.
I reassure the hon. Gentleman that I, too, served as a local councillor and had the pleasure—I guess we have to call it that—of serving on various committees on the council, so I know full well the importance of that. However, in that or any post in local government, it is the person’s duty and responsibility to make decisions on behalf of their communities. I do not presume to tell them what decisions they should make, but we presume, through legislation, to tell them that they must make those decisions and do so in a timely fashion, and that if they do not, somebody else will do that for them.
In conclusion, the changes set out in the regulations are the key to delivering important changes to enable the Secretary of State to handle applications where local authorities have consistently failed to meet statutory deadlines, and to bring into force changes to fees to support the Government’s wider measures to simplify the planning system.
The Committee divided: Ayes 10, Noes 7.
AYES
NOES
Question accordingly agreed to.
That the Committee has considered the draft Town and Country Planning (Fees for Applications, Deemed Applications, Requests and Site Visits) (England) (Amendment) Regulations 2013.