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Lord Bassam of Brighton: My Lords, the noble Baroness has accurately predicted the outcome of our short discussion. We said in Committee that we had some sympathy with the original amendment. We have decided that the Secretary of State and the National Assembly for Wales should be required to give reasons for modifying a local development order. We would in any case expect the Secretary of State and the National Assembly for Wales to give reasons for modifying a local development order, but we will amend the Bill to make it clear that they will be required to do so.
We have also decided that we should make clear that if the Secretary of State or the National Assembly for Wales revoke a local development order, they should again be required to give reasons for doing so. We shall table a further amendment in due course to give effect to that as well.
I hope that the noble Baroness will feel able to withdraw her amendment.
Baroness Hamwee: My Lords, I think that I should do so. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
[Amendment No. 123 had been withdrawn from the Marshalled List.]
Schedule 1 [Local development orders: procedure]:
Lord Bassam of Brighton moved Amendment No. 123A:
- Page 102, line 12, at end insert ", revocation"
The noble Lord said: My Lords, this amendment will enable a development order to include provision as to the revocation of a local development order. We have already consulted on draft amendments to the Town and Country Planning (General Development Procedure) Order 1995 which sets out the procedures a local planning authority should follow when revoking a local development order. For example, we want to prescribe the publicity arrangements a local planning authority should follow should it revoke a local development order.
We decided that the Bill as drafted did not enable us to provide for this in a development order. This amendment will put that right. I beg to move.
On Question, amendment agreed to.
Clause 42 [Statement of development principles]:
Lord Hanningfield moved Amendment No. 124:
- Page 25, line 11, leave out "must" and insert "may"
The noble Lord said: My Lords, in moving Amendment No. 124, I shall speak also to Amendments Nos. 125, 126, 127 and 129 in the group. These amendments aim to give more discretion to local authorities in the issue of statements of development principles. They will prevent the provision of statements of development principles from placing an undue burden on local planning authorities and will allow authorities to refuse to grant a statement of development principles on the basis of insufficient information.
When I spoke to these amendments in Committee, I did not feel that the Government had truly got to grips with the concerns we sought to express. Amendment No. 124 aims to give local authorities more discretion in the issue of statements of development principles than is proposed in the Bill. Amendments Nos. 126 and 127 are complementary to that aim in that they support specific aspects of local authorities' discretion. These three amendments would enable local authorities to decline to issue statements of development principles on the basis of insufficient information.
Amendment No. 125 is a probing amendment which simply seeks clarification from the Government on whether it will be local authorities which ultimately decide whether the development plan is material to the request for a statement of development principles.
Finally, Amendment No. 129 is a probing amendment designed to test the Government's thinking on how they propose to minimise the level of deliberate frustration within the planning system. Further, if Amendment No. 124 is accepted, Clause 42(5) would in any case be unnecessary.
We strongly believe that the Government have not yet made the case for how statements of development principles will add value to the planning system in this country. In Committee, the Minister said that the Government were placing increasing emphasis on the importance of pre-application discussions. The formalisation of this through statements of development principles may provide developers and local authorities with an additional tool for building up an agreed development prospectus for a site. Nevertheless, the Government should explain exactly how they envisage statements of development principles working on the ground.
We think that statements of development principles are a classic example of something that seems like a good idea in theory but is actually a major headache when it comes to implementation—and can even be counter-productive. There will be an unnecessary burden on local authorities and it is not clear how they will achieve greater transparency in the pre-application process. The statements risk becoming a major bureaucratic process in their own right.
As far as I can see, there is no discernible benefit to applicants, local planning authorities or the public. If the overall aim is to address the weaknesses associated with outline planning permission, why not address those problems directly, for example by encouraging discussions in the application process between developers and planning departments?
The interested organisations that I have spoken to, including the Council for the Protection of Rural England and London First, as well as many other professional planners, have all spoken out against statements of development principles. There simply is no support for them. Amendments Nos. 124 and 126 are aimed at ensuring that local planning authorities will not feel compelled to approve or refuse applications when they simply do not have sufficient evidence by which to judge the merits of an application. This could happen because, as the Bill currently stands, there is no provision to allow the local authority to decline a request to issue a statement of development principles on the grounds of insufficient information. Hundreds of people will ask for these statements—people are very confused about it—and that could lead to a tremendous workload for a department that could not cope with it.
Local authorities may be put in the position where they do not have enough confidence in their legal position to say that the application is entirely unacceptable, which I believe is the only grounds on which they can decline to issue a statement of development principles. However, they may also feel that they have not been provided with sufficient information, such as information on design or infrastructure, on which to base their decisions. As
organisations such as CPRE have pointed out, this would put pressure on local authorities to issue statements of development principles that agree with the proposed developments and then spend valuable time and resources trying to decide what safeguards and conditions should be placed on them to meet any eventuality.The Minister said in Committee that if insufficient information were provided, the statement of development principles would be correspondingly general. However, if is to be so general as to be meaningless, why have it? A statement of development principles will be an important material consideration in the final decision on the planning permission. We therefore need to give local authorities more discretion on how they issue them.
Amendment No. 127 addresses our concerns that the statement of development principles does not have to take into account whether the proposed development would require an environmental impact assessment. We are aware that the Government have stated that because the statement of development principles does not itself grant consent to allow a development to go ahead, an environmental impact assessment is not a requirement. However, we would like a reassurance from the Minister that this arrangement, whereby the principle of a development has been agreed prior to the outcome of an environmental impact assessment, will not undermine the integrity of the environmental impact assessment and its capacity to reach a different conclusion from that reached in the statement of development principles.
As I already mentioned, with regard to the workload of planning departments, we also believe that statements of development principles would mark an unacceptable shift in the burden of planning applications from the applicant to the local authority. This is not just an argument about planning authorities having insufficient information and then dealing with the consequences. We are also raising it because the number of requests for statements of development principles will be much higher than that of outline planning applications. This flows from the fact that anybody can ask the local authority for a statement of development principles.
In relation to Amendment No. 129 I would like some reassurance from the Minister that the new procedures for statements of development principles will not be used as a spoiling tactic to frustrate legitimate development. This could certainly happen, given that anyone will be able to request a statement of development principles. Our concern is that in some circumstances local authorities might be asked to determine requests for statements of development principles before the information upon which requests could be judged is available.
Clause 42 states that a local authority "may" decline to issue a statement of development principles before the end of the two-year period if it disagrees with the principles of the development. However, as I understand it, a local planning authority could quite
legitimately issue a new statement of development principles that agrees with a development proposal before the end of the two-year period.Is subsection (5) a mechanism through which to deal with any potential exploitation of statements of development principles by those who just want to stop all development regardless of its benefits? If it is, it is still unfair that the burden falls on planning departments. I wish that the noble Lord, Lord Winston were here. I am not in favour of cloning, but I have been thinking during this series of debates that we should be able to clone planners. It is possibly the only way forward.
I believe that deleting Clause 42(5) would be in line with the preceding amendments. The fundamental point of those amendments is that it would be much simpler and more democratic to give a local planning authority the discretion to decide whether to issue statements of development principles in respect of a particular development.
7.15 pm
Baroness Hamwee: My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, the noble Baroness, Lady Maddock and I have put our names to a number of these amendments. We very much support what the noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield said. It is hard to find anyone who supports the direction taken by the Government on this matter. If that sounds too harsh, conversely we support the Government's consideration of whether outline planning permission should be required to include more detail. As I understood it, that was one of the Government's considerations when considering whether to abolish outline planning permission. I cannot think about statements of development principles without at the same time thinking about outline planning permission, which is why I put the two together.
We need to know from the Minister how the thinking and the consultation on this matter is progressing and when decisions might be taken. I am very uneasy about deciding legislation when we know that there are other ideas in the pipeline and the Government are looking to leave their options open through primary legislation. I am not at all comfortable with that. I can see that I am not alone in that view, but Hansard will not know who nodded in agreement.
We have talked about the problems with outline permissions and the lesson that more detail is necessary. One has that in spades in the case of statements of development principles. The noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield talked about the increase in workload that this provision forebodes for local planning authorities. A part of this will be to consider how they will deal with requests for statements when they will more or less have to compose the application, or, at any rate, understand what the application for the statement in itself implies.
I did not mean to add our names to Amendment No. 125. I accepted at the previous stage that it was not the best of the amendments on offer. I wanted to add our
names to Amendment No. 126, which refers to "sufficient information". I accept the point made by the Minister at the previous stage that the amendment in itself is ineffective to achieve what we are arguing about. However, it makes the point.As to Amendment No. 127, the Minister said at the previous stage that the matter would be dealt with in secondary legislation. Perhaps he will explain today where there is a regulation-making power relating to proposed new Section 61E. It may be in the 1990 Act or it may be one of the matters that I have not identified correctly. However, if the Government are relying in their arguments on the fact that regulations may be made to achieve some of what we are seeking, I should like to be assured as to the mechanism for making the regulations. It may be that the power is within subsection (7) of new Section 61E, which refers to a development order, but it is not immediately obvious to me that that is the case.
The noble Lord also referred to the delays inherent in this process because of its somewhat amorphous nature. That would go wholly against what the Government are trying to achieve. Abolishing outline permission would leave developers without the certainty they want and the fundable permission they need. As I say, no one seems to support the process except those who have composed statements of development principles. Perhaps the Minister can also explain what support there has been from outside Parliament to give the Government the confidence to include this in the Bill in the first place.
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