Lord Lansley:

Moved by Lord Lansley

183: Clause 87, page 95, line 5, after “the” insert “up-to-date”Member’s explanatory statementThe amendments to Clause 87 and Clause 231 in the name of Lord Lansley would give statutory weight to up-to-date local plans and enable the Secretary of State to set out the definition of “up-to-date” and the weight to be given, respectively, to emerging plans or to those no longer up-to-date.

My Lords, I put on record my interest as chairman of the Cambridgeshire Development Forum, which of course involves me in a wide range of planning and development-related issues.

I want to say a couple of things at the outset. First, I say a big thank you to my Front Bench colleagues for the time and energy that they and officials have given to discussing many of these amendments. I know they have worked hard, including through the recess, for us to try to reach agreements about some of these things: even if we do not, I want to say how much I appreciate the effort they are putting into it. The other thing I want to mention is that all my amendments, even if I might end up disagreeing with my noble friends on the Front Bench, are intended to make the Bill work better and in the spirit of how it is constructed.

That brings me to this first group of amendments, all in my name. In Committee, we had a very interesting discussion about what constitutes an “up-to-date” local plan. Why is this important? It is important because when we reach that part of the Bill and we have a plan-led system, we need to know whether the plan has full effect. Almost by definition, an up-to-date local plan has full effect and an out-of-date local plan has no effect, some effect or a differing weight. An emerging plan also has weight attached to it, but we also do not know precisely how much weight is to be attached. The Government’s answer to this, of course, is terribly simple and was a very compelling reply to the amendments in Committee. It said that an up-to-date plan is a plan that has been adopted within five years of the preceding plan. That is a cliff edge, they said, and a cliff edge does not do: we need something that is more subtle than that and acknowledges that there are plans that go out of date, but they are not much out of date and they are relevant, and we have emerging plans to which weight should be given.

So, we have constructed a set of amendments that inserts the words “up-to-date” in front of “plan”, because if you have a plan-led system and you just say “local plans” and do not refine what you mean by that, it is rather deficient—and we are intending to have a plan-led system. The Government’s arguments are based, in substance, around the proposition that local authorities need to have up-to-date local plans; otherwise, the system will not work effectively. In so far as they do not, the Bill has, as we shall come on to in the next group, the question of national development management policies which, to a large extent, step in in the determination of planning applications in circumstances where a plan is no longer up to date. So, there are undoubted pressures on local authorities to have a local plan that is up to date, but this is not easy.

Although we have a significant slowdown in the number of local plans being progressed by local authorities—not least because of the uncertainties associated with the revision of the National Planning Policy Framework and the uncertainties, frankly, associated with the passage of this legislation, which is not helping the situation—none the less when the Bill goes through and the NPPF is published we need to give greater certainty, and I think statutory weight behind the expression “an up-to-date local plan” gives certainty.

However, it does not solve the problem of a plan being out of date or there being an emerging plan in relation to the existing one. That is why the most important amendment I have suggested in this group is Amendment 187, which gives the Secretary of State a power in regulations to say what constitutes an up-to-date local plan—enabling that term to be defined—and to specify what weight should be attached to plans that are no longer up to date and to emerging plans. I anticipate that my noble friend may reply, perfectly sensibly, that we can do all that in guidance; my point is that we are creating statute and therefore want to give statutory weight to local plans as such and to up-to-date local plans, and to give a statutory framework for the processes by which Ministers determine how up-to-date plans, out-of-date plans and emerging plans are to be considered in relation to the process of determining applications.

When we come on to national development management policies, the interaction between the regulations saying how much weight should be attached to emerging and out-of-date plans and the Government’s specific provisions in the national development management policies is an important one, which would be assisted by placing all these things into regulations—to which Parliament can have regard, which is, frankly, not an insignificant consideration. As we have encountered a number of times in the planning considerations in this Bill, where the National Planning Policy Framework and guidance to local planning authorities are concerned, Parliament plays, in effect, no role.

We have a chance now to say that we want a role—that we want to see the regulations and, in exceptional circumstances, to dispute them. The key thing is that Parliament should at least have a chance to see and debate them, and to give statutory weight and legislative backing to the meaning of local plans as they appear at the heart of the plan-making process. I beg to move.

My Lords, as this is the first time I have spoken at this stage of the Bill, I draw your Lordships’ attention to my professional and property interests.

I strongly support what the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, has put forward, for reasons which tangentially affect me to some extent where I live, down in Sussex, where no one could quite work out whether a duly made neighbourhood plan was still extant in the absence of a current local plan. This seems to be one of those things where unforeseen consequences have come about. As the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, has mentioned, making local plans and keeping them up to date is certainly not an unonerous burden; it is a process of constant churn in which at a certain date it becomes law, if you like, and at another date it suddenly drops off the cliff edge, as he referred to it, but the neighbourhood plans do not necessarily coincide with that same cycle.

It is even more of a problem for communities to make their local plans, because they do not have the same sorts of resources. A lot of it is done by voluntary hard work and endeavour. Yet in areas where a neighbourhood plan is still extant but the local plan has gone out of date, the whole thing is left in limbo. I absolutely buy the point that we need greater certainty and that some parliamentary scrutiny of this process is needed, at least to be able to consider a regulation.

Whether it is right that the Secretary of State should have quite such extensive and untrammelled powers to do this is probably a matter that the two sides of the House will never quite agree on. I think there is a valid point about how far one takes that. However, this degree of uncertainty is highly corrosive and is very damaging to confidence in the local plan and to coherence and trust in the process at neighbourhood and local plan level. I warmly support and thank the noble Lord for raising this very important group of amendments.

My Lords, I remind the House of my interest as an honorary fellow of the RIBA. I support this amendment because I think there is a huge need for people to know where they are. It is very simple but there is so much of this in government—and probably elsewhere—that people find it very hard to understand and react properly because they do not know where they are. In the planning system, this is particularly notable.

As my noble friend Lord Lansley made his speech, it all sounded so obvious and natural. It is exactly what we should do. Therefore, we know what the Government’s answer will be: “We will do that, so we do not need to put it into the Bill”. I am afraid I am becoming less and less willing to accept the promises of Ministers based on simply saying they will do something. We recently had a very good example of this. I thought we understood that we were not going to make deleterious environmental decisions in any legislation at all because we could trust Ministers not to do that. It is very debatable that that is now being maintained.

I say to the Minister that if it is something we do anyway, there is no harm in putting it in the Bill. If the Government object to something because they do not do it, then they should explain that they do not do it. However, if the argument is that the Government already do it and therefore do not need to put it in the Bill, I do not think the House should accept it any more. If the Government feel unhappy with that, I suggest that they remember they are not necessarily going to be the Government permanently. Therefore, when they are thinking deleteriously of those who might replace them, surely they would want to ensure that were they to be replaced, the new Government would have to accept the same rules. I do not think they need to feel unhappy; rather, they should say they are ensuring that the system works for everybody, whoever may be running it. It is also a good thing for a Government to recognise that people really want to know where they are, and this is one of the areas where we do not.

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, has raised a very important point about the effectiveness of a plan-led system if local plans are not up to date. The noble Lord, Lord Deben, has enhanced that argument by saying that people need to know where they are. If this is only in guidance, but we require there to be local plans—as we do in a plan-led system—why is it not incorporated in statute? I hope the Minister will answer this question.

The noble Lord, Lord Lansley, has raised a fundamental issue. Local plans are at the very heart of a plan-led system. As well as setting out local planning policies, the local plan allocates land for new housing developments; it allocates land for business development, thereby allocating land for jobs; and it allocates land to be protected, such as the green-belt land allocation.

If local authorities are not preparing, or do not have, an up-to-date local plan, then land is not being allocated for development. We will later have debates about housing targets, but one of my concerns about housing targets is that, if local authorities do not have an up to date local plan, land is not being allocated or set aside for housing development. If land is not being set aside for housing development, it is very likely that new houses are not going to be built.

The government website helpfully has an alphabetical list of authorities and the status of their local plans—although it is unhelpful in being able to look at them more carefully. The vast majority do not have an up-to-date local plan. In fact, one or two on the list do not appear to have updated their local plan for several years. What that tells me is that, currently, the expectation is that local authorities will develop a local plan and have it agreed, with a full review after five years. Helpfully, my own authority is not one of those that does not have an up-to-date plan, and it is currently beginning a review a year ahead of expectation.

If land is not allocated for housing, how on earth do we expect housebuilding to take place? I hope the Minister will be able to help me with this, because some time ago in a previous debate on this, I thought I recalled the Minister stating that a five-year supply of land will no longer be a requirement and will be waived by the Government. As I understand it, at the moment that is the only stick to encourage—or force, even—local authorities to allocate land for housing in a local plan. Currently, although it may be waived—and I am waiting for the Minister to respond to that—as I understand it, if a local authority does not have a sufficient supply of land for a five-year allocation according to government housing targets, then developers can choose where to develop. It is open season for housebuilding. If that one stick is being waived—and I hope I have remembered that correctly—then I would like to hear from the Minister on how they will encourage local authorities to have up-to-date plans, because without them, I do not see how we will meet housebuilding targets.

The issues that the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, raised, are fundamental. When he replies, will he say whether he wishes to test the opinion of the House on this? Without an up-to-date plan, all the Government’s housing targets approach—which my party does not necessarily agree with—comes to nothing. Only the authorities that do the right thing, having difficult discussions with communities about allocating land for housing and other development, will supply the houses that need to be built. Everyone across parties accepts the importance of building more houses; how we get there is the issue. However, I would love to hear from the Minister how that will be enforced without an up-to-date local plan. If the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, in responding wishes to push this further, we will support him.

My Lords, it is good to be back in your Lordships’ House. I remind the House of my interests as a serving councillor on both a district and a county council, and as a vice-president of the District Councils’ Network. I say for the record that, in spite of the considerable difficulties in doing so, not least the local MP calling our local plan in and it sitting on the Secretary of State’s desk for 451 days, my local authority has an up-to-date local plan.

During my several recent visits to Mid Bedfordshire—for reasons of which many Members of this House will be aware—it has become clear that the public are becoming increasingly aware of the key role that the planning system plays in determining the future of their area. This is very healthy, and I hope it will continue. That makes it even more important that local plans are up to date and meeting the current challenges of local areas and their communities. The importance and precedence of local plans within the new planning system envisaged in the Bill will be even more diminished where local authorities do not take responsibility for updating their local plans seriously. The figures we heard in Committee, that only 39% of local authorities have an up-to-date plan in place, and that there are around 60 local planning authorities whose plans are paused or stalled, already expose those areas to developers who want to take advantage of the absence of clear local direction. They are destined under the new regime in the Bill to see the views of local people overridden by NDMPs and other government direction. Our fear is that this will just reduce the incentive for local government to keep its plans up to date.

We have also seen that, in order to keep pace with rapid changes to local economies, it is vital that local authorities work with their business community to ensure that their local development plan is up to date and fit for purpose for that reason, as well as due to all the issues around land use.

The CPRE’s review of the impact of local plans led to its conclusion that

“the government needs to give councils more support and consider how to redefine the test for plans being ‘up-to-date’ in order to reinvigorate democratically accountable locally-led planning”.

For fear of misinterpretation, this does not mean the kind of centralisation of plans we see via proposed NDMPs or removing the powers to higher tiers, which we see in a government amendment that will be debated later today. Those options simply remove the connection between the local plan and engagement in its development by local people and communities.

I agree with and support all the comments that were made by the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, about the weight that is given to out-of-date and emerging plans. They need to have that statutory weight, and that needs to apply to all plans that are considered. On recent issues, the development industry, for example—the noble Lord, Lord Deben, mentioned this—has been very keen to stress the importance of it having more certainty in the planning system. Therefore, without clarifying even this element of plan making, about what is out of date and what is not, we leave the “how long is a piece of string” theory in place, which will hold sway in planning. Placing all these matters into guidance, as the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, said, does not give Parliament any role in this; on many occasions recently we have seen what happens when that occurs.

The noble Earl, Lord Lytton, mentioned that the uncertainty about the weight placed on an out-of-date or emerging plan, how out of date it has to be before it is actually out of date, and what a judge is going to say is and is not out of date, damages confidence in and the coherence of our planning system. The noble Lord, Lord Deben, referred to the huge need for people to know where they are, and I could not agree more. If we think we are going to do it anyway, what is the harm putting it in the Bill so that we can all refer back to it? I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, for talking about effectiveness of a plan-led system and the impact that out-of-date plans can have on the delivery of housing targets and the amount of housing needed in local areas.

I have read carefully the Hansard of our previous discussions in Committee on this subject, and we see no reason why the Government would resist introducing some clarity to the definition of an up-to-date plan or the weighting to be given to up-to-date or emerging plans, so we support the amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Lansley.

My Lords, I have great sympathy for the intention behind the amendments tabled by my noble friend Lord Lansley. The value in having up-to-date plans in place is something we can all agree on and is a goal which several of the measures in this Bill are designed to support. Where I must part company with my noble friend is on the best way of achieving that.

These amendments would create a hard cliff edge for policies in plans. A local plan or a neighbourhood plan could be departed from only if there are “strong reasons”, or—if it passes its sell-by date—would be relegated to being just a material consideration. This would risk undermining the important policy safeguards in plans, which could allow the wrong development in the wrong places. Within any plan, some individual policies are likely to have continuing importance and relevance, irrespective of the actual base date of the plan. For example, policies which set the boundaries of important designated areas, such as the green belt, are expected to endure for some time. Because of this, it is a well-established principle that planning decisions rely on a judgment about which policies are relevant at the point of making a decision. If we created the sort of all-or-nothing cliff edge that these amendments imply, we would put this pragmatism at risk and could undermine important protections.

None of this is to excuse slow plan-making, and I agree entirely with my noble friend that we must do more to get up-to-date plans in place. We have a comprehensive set of actions to do just that. The national development management policies will mean that plans have to contain fewer generic policies than they do now; our digital and procedural reforms in the Bill will make it easier to prepare and approve policies; there will be more proactive intervention through the new gateway checks on emerging plans; and the Bill also bolsters the intervention powers that may be used as a last resort. Our current consultation on plan-making reiterates the Government’s aim that future plans should be produced in 30 months, not years.

We expect the new plan-making system to go live in late 2024. There will be a requirement on local planning authorities to start work on new plans by, at the latest, five years after the adoption of their previous plan and to adopt the new plan within 30 months. Under the new proposals, the Secretary of State will retain existing powers to intervene if authorities fail, and these include the ability to make formal directions and, ultimately, to take steps into an authority’s shoes and take over plan-making responsibilities. The plan also provides a new option for the Secretary of State where authorities are failing: local plan commissioners could be appointed by the Secretary of State at any stage of the new plan-making process.

However, we are going consulting. We are asking for views on the proposals to implement the parts of the Bill that relate to plan-making ,and to make plans simpler, faster to prepare and more accessible. That consultation opened in July and will close on 18 October. If any noble Lords would like to see it, it is available on GOV.UK.

The noble Earl, Lord Lytton, asked whether neighbourhood plans will still be relevant without a local plan. They will: they are still relevant if the planning application is relevant to the neighbourhood plan.

The noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, asked about the five-year land supply requirement. We have proposed removing that requirement only where plans are less than five years old. This will be an incentive to keep plans up to date by reducing the threat of speculative development where local authorities have done the right thing in having an up-to-date local plan.

It is important that we give these reforms a chance to work, rather than introducing measures that would complicate decision-making and could weaken protections. Therefore, although I understand the intention behind these amendments, I hope that my noble friend has been persuaded to withdraw Amendment 183.

My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have spoken on this group of amendments. I am particularly grateful for the support that noble Lords from all sides of the House have given to the principles behind my amendment.

My noble friend the Minister said that she is sympathetic to what these amendments set out to achieve. I am slightly surprised, because she continued to say that I am looking for something with a cliff edge, as it were. The whole point of Amendment 187 is to give Ministers the regulation-making power to graduate the cliff edge and show the steps up to and down from it. At the same time, my noble friend is trying to use cliff edges. She is saying, “Well, it’s five years, then something happens, then two and half years is the limit on the time available”. Sometimes, these timetables serve a purpose. My noble friend is right to say that local plan-making needs to be accelerated; setting these timetables is clearly a part of that.

This is interesting, because we are not necessarily debating the five-year housing supply elsewhere. The noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, made a good point. My noble friend the Minister said that the Government are getting rid of the five-year supply requirement in relation to the plan itself. So, in effect, the local plan can say, “Well, this is our housing requirement, and this is how we are meeting it”. However, if you go beyond five years and fall off the proverbial cliff edge, and if a local planning authority does not maintain an annual statement of how it will meet the housing requirement it has identified for its area for the five years ahead, it will in effect see a housing delivery test come in—and it will fail that test. We would return to the situation where developers are able to come in, and that may or may not be a bad thing; but it is not as simple as saying, “We have a housing delivery test”, “We don’t have a housing delivery test”, “We have a different housing delivery test”, “We don’t have the buffer”, and so on.

This issue is all part of the problem that my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham and I will return to in our debate on a later group of amendments, concerning the lack of constraints on local planning authorities that will get them to the point of delivering on the Government’s housing targets. The watering down of the housing delivery test is a significant part of that, as is the buffer built into it in trying to meet the deficiencies in supply by local planning authorities.

My noble friend the Minister made some reasonable points. However, the whole point of this amendment is that we need certainty, as my noble friend Lord Deben rightly said. We need that to be achieved in the wake of this consultation on plan-making. It is not about cliff edges; it is about understanding what an emerging plan means in relation to an existing plan and setting that out in very clear terms. Past efforts have not succeeded. For example, Regulation 10A of the town and country planning regulations sets out that a review must start within five years. We saw the results of that. A local planning authority in my area initiated a review on five years plus one day and said, “We don’t really need to review all of this. We’ll just look at the one thing that we don’t like, which is the housing supply number, and we’ll review it and lower it”—and that was the end of it. The planning inspector said that they did not have the power to say that there should be a more wide-ranging review.

I hope—and believe—that this will be sorted in this consultation on plan-making. However, my point, which I think that my noble friend completely accords with, is that even if we do not do this in regulations—and I will not press the point—it must be done, with clarity and soon; otherwise, we will move to a new system into which all the past uncertainties will be reimported, with local developers and planning authorities going head to head as they have in the past and which has not been helpful. We want to see them using the certainty of the system to manage the supply of housing more effectively in the future.

With that thought of hope over experience, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 183 withdrawn.

Amendment 184 not moved.