Communities and Local Government CommitteeCorrespondence from Communities and Local Government Committee

Thank you for giving evidence to the Committee on Monday 17 June. There are six points where either you agreed to supply a note or, after reviewing the transcript, it would be useful to have a note.

First, it would be useful to have a note on the extent to which owners can extend HMOs. You said:

Q3 Nick Boles: I think that most reasonable people would understand that flogging off the end of your garden for somebody else to build an apartment block or a couple of houses in is very different from extending your own property at a single-storey level—no higher than four metres—in order to cater for your own growing family. Those are two very, very different cases, and that is why we have very different policy responses to the two of them.

Q4 Chair: That policy would also apply to extending a HMO, which many more people come and live in.

Nick Boles: They cannot, of course, go above the limit. I think the limit is six for a small HMO, and then they cannot take advantage. If they are going to try and import more people in it, so that it effectively becomes a large HMO, then they cannot do that under the permitted development right.

Chair: Yes, they can, Minister. If it is not three storeys, it does not count as a HMO that is required to be licensed under the legislation.

Nick Boles: I may have to come back to you. My understanding was, as I say, that it is an opportunity that can only be taken advantage of if it is a small HMO that is not above six. I think it is six, but if I can come back to you with the detail, I will.

Chair: It is that, and storeys. There are two requirements.

Second, it would be useful to have a note on the on the definition of “neighbour”. You said:

Q48 Chair: Just coming on to what a neighbour is, is it the person living in the property or the person who owns the property?

Nick Boles: I am sorry for taking advice, for phoning a friend. It is an owner or occupier.

Chair: Owner or occupier.

Nick Boles: Apparently in the same way as for a planning application. I am very happy to write to the Committee. As you can tell, it is not something on which I was previously knowledgeable, but I understand it is the same as for a planning application. It is the owner or occupier. So for a planning application, equally, if you were consulting, it would be the owner or the occupier.

Third, it would be useful to have a note on the application for prior approval and whether the noise of an existing adjacent building would be taken account of. I asked:

Q62 Chair: ... if converting to residential use with a property, say, commercial or industrial next door and, as a result, that industrial property has noise from working at 12 o’clock at night, which affects on a statutory basis the new residences next door to it, then it will have an impact on that business. The council’s officers are likely to come along and close that business down and stop them from working during those hours. Is that going to be taken account of or not in this prior approval regime? You seem to be saying it is not. Nick Boles: I am very glad we have gone here, because what this reveals is a fundamentally different world view. You believe, Mr Chairman—and probably most members of your Party believe and I entirely respect it—that unless you regulate to stop things happening that are bad, lots of bad things will happen. I believe that unless you can demonstrate that people acting freely have an interest in doing bad things that therefore require regulation, you should not have those regulations. In the specific case you have just suggested, you are suggesting that somebody, a property owner, will find it an economically sensible thing to do to take a property that is valuable as an office but that happens to be sited next door to a noisy factory and convert it to a block of flats. I would put it to you that that person would be an idiot, because they would never sell the flats, because no mug is going to buy a flat that is next to a noisy factory.

I should be grateful for your clarification of whether the noise from an existing adjacent business should be taken account of in the prior approval regime.

Fourth, it would be useful to have a note on the wind farms. I asked:

Q76 Chair: Finally, just a point of clarification: when Mark Prisk came to answer questions about wind farms and new rights for communities in the Chamber on 6 June—this is a point of clarification that you may have to take away and have a look at—he made reference to applications that were with the Planning Inspectorate for consideration and said that they would now, where that was the case, be able to take account of the new guidance in reaching a decision. I wonder whether you could give some clarification to that point. My understanding would be that, if the Inspector has already started hearing or collecting evidence on a particular application, on a particular appeal, then it would not be appropriate halfway through that process to suddenly introduce consideration of the new guidance. He would almost have to go back to square one and inform all the interested parties that that was what he was going to do and take further evidence from them.

Nick Boles: Mr Chairman, I am afraid I am going to have to get somebody to write to you on that, simply because I do not deal with wind planning policy. The Secretary of State has been dealing with it, so I would not want to give you a misleading answer.

Fifth, in response to Qq 22–23 on the reduction in the consultation period from eight to six weeks, you said:

My understanding is that the Cabinet Office undertook a consultation on consultation times across Government, just because there was this slight sense that we were in this endless planes-circling-around-waiting-to-land of consultations. They decided, therefore, that six weeks would be appropriate for certain kinds of consultation and it was decided that this was one for which six weeks was sufficient. All I would say to you is that there certainly was no shortage of responses as a result of the reduced period, so the views were fully expressed even if some were less lengthy than you might have hoped.

This underlines some of the concerns expressed by the House of Lords Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee in its 22nd and 29th reports of session 2012–13 on the Government’s new approach to consultation. In particular, the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee considered that, although the proposal had the superficial attraction of speeding up consultations, which seemed to be a concern to you, there was a clear risk that quality would suffer if interested parties were not allowed sufficient time to gather appropriate evidence.1 On that point, at Q 25 you said:

The people who are going to benefit from this change are millions of individuals, families and businesses, who have no idea that there was a consultation taking place on this particular permitted development change; if they had an idea, probably relatively few of them would feel sufficiently excited by the prospect as to want to submit a response. That is an inbuilt bias in all consultations, which is why one should always take all of the responses very seriously for the quality of their arguments.

There must be a question that a six-week consultation period put the quality of responses at risk. This would underline the Lords witnesses’ doubts that consultation will become a mere public relations exercise rather than a genuine means of influencing policy.

I should be grateful for your response that more time is needed to ensure the quality of response to any consultation, and on how the Department intends to approach future consultations. Certainly several of those responding to AskBoles were concerned about the shortness of time allowed.

Sixth, and further to this issue, on the day you gave evidence to us, the House of Lords Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee also published a report on the Draft Town and Country Planning (Fees for Applications, Deemed Applications, Requests and Site Visits) (England) (Amendment) Regulations 2013 and Improving Planning Performance—Draft Designation Criteria Document [HL Paper 28]. The Lords Committee drew these instruments to the special attention of the House on the ground that they gave rise to issues of public policy likely to be of interest to the House.

In particular the Lords Committee was concerned that the Department had not laid the development order—to set out how the Secretary of State would handle planning applications that were submitted to him instead of to the designated LPA—at the same time as the Regulations mentioned above. The Committee said that without the order, Parliament was being shown only an incomplete picture of the new arrangements.

It was clear to the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee that the Government was firmly committed to making these changes to the planning system, which, among other things, would reduce the involvement of certain local planning authorities in the process of deciding on major developments in their areas and require authorities generally to refund planning application fees where certain deadlines were not met.

Consultation had, however, shown there was only minority support among respondents for these changes. During the parliamentary passage of the Bill which became the Growth and Infrastructure Act 2013, the Government was pressed to justify the proposals that are now being taken forward through the draft Regulations and the designation criteria document. What assurance can the Government provide on the effectiveness of the changes, given that they have attracted limited support among interested parties?

Clive Betts MP
Chair, Communities and Local Government Committee

June 2013