Neighbourhood Planning Bill

Public Bill Committee, 20 October 2016.

Jim McMahon (Labour, Oldham West and Royton)

On a point of order, Mr McCabe. I hope you will bear with me when I ask some beginner’s questions, but this is the first Committee in which I have been on the Front Bench. The technical consultation on the Bill finished yesterday, but the public consultation does not finish until 2 November. We are having our debates on the Bill in the absence of that feedback from the public, or from the professionals who took part in the technical consultation. Is that usual? If so, how do we ensure that the comments in the consultation are fed back into the process?

Roberta Blackman-Woods (Labour, City of Durham)

Further to that point of order, Mr McCabe. if there are any additional documents relevant to the deliberations of the Committee, will the Minister ensure that Committee members are aware of them, so that we do not have to go looking for them on the website of the Department for Communities and Local Government?

Duty to have regard to post-examination neighbourhood development plan

Roberta Blackman-Woods (Labour, City of Durham)

I beg to move amendment 4, in clause 1, page 1, line 11, at end insert—

“and insofar as it is consistent with the relevant local plan.”

This amendment ensures that neighbourhood plans are not considered if they are inconsistent with local plans.

Roberta Blackman-Woods (Labour, City of Durham)

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr McCabe.

As the Minister knows from our discussions on Tuesday, we do not see neighbourhood planning and the provisions relating to it as the most controversial aspect of the Bill. Nevertheless, we have a couple of questions embodied in the amendments on which we would like some clarification from the Minister.

Amendment 4 seeks to amend the clause to ensure that the local authority will only have to have regard to neighbourhood plans when they are found to be consistent with the local plan. I am sure that in his response the Minister will say that it is already enshrined in legislation that they have to pay attention to the local plan, but we are seeking clarity on at what stage that needs to happen.

Let me start by saying that we are very supportive of neighbourhood plans and the measures in the Bill to make them more efficient in delivering housing, delivering it where local people want it and having it underpinned by the relevant infrastructure. We feel that planning is always more successful when people feel a part of it, rather than planning being something that is done to them and imposed from above. This point was made powerfully on Tuesday by the National Association of Local Councils, which also reminded the Committee that during the passage of the Bill we probably need to push for greater clarity on the exact role of neighbourhood plans and get some statements about the importance and significance attached to them and, in particular, their relationship to local plans.

The amendment would ensure that neighbourhood plans are only considered if they are in line with the overall strategic aims and visions within a local plan. As we are all no doubt aware, local plans set out a framework for the future development of an area, addressing needs and opportunities relating not only to housing, but to the local economy, community facilities and infrastructure. We are specifically asking the Minister to what extent neighbourhood plans are then being written to address not only the broader strategic aims of the local plan, but what it says about community facilities and infrastructure—that is, if it does. It might not, and if not, is the Minister clear that there is then a key role for the neighbourhood plan to ensure that those less strategic issues are addressed for the locality?

An underlying purpose of the amendment is to try and tease out from the Minister whether he thinks neighbourhood plans could, in fact, be a building block for local plans. There are distinct advantages for planning at a community level for housing supply, if that incorporates real local knowledge and that local knowledge is then put into a wider picture that is able to address local authority-wide needs. Hugh Ellis from the Town and Country Planning Association spoke on Tuesday about the real advantages that could have, saying:

“Neighbourhood plans are great at articulating community aspiration inside the local plan framework. When both work together very powerfully, that can be a very strong framework for a community.”––[Official Report, Neighbourhood Planning Public Bill Committee, 18 October 2016; c. 32, Q50.]

Ruth Reed from RIBA said it would be better for local and neighbourhood plans to be “in sync” to

“ensure coherence and strategy across a local authority to provide housing where it is needed.”––[Official Report, Neighbourhood Planning Public Bill Committee, 18 October 2016; c. 43, Q71.]

Local plans are also only adopted after public consultation and, in my experience, usually very lengthy—in fact, often more than one—public inquiries. As the Minister and all on this Committee will know, they do have considerable weight. It would be very helpful for communities to be able to feed in their vision for development at an early stage in that local plan-making project and process. We also do not want to find ourselves in a situation where strengthened neighbourhood plans are undermining local plans, leading to lots of competing visions of what an area could look like or deliver. Again, we feel that being very clear about the degree to which they have to follow a local plan might help to iron out some of those possible conflicts. As the Local Government Association has pointed out,

“It is important that any proposals do not have the unintended consequence of undermining the ability of a local planning authority to meet the wider strategic objectives set out in an emerging or adopted Local Plan”.

According to the Department’s own figures, about 200 neighbourhood plans that have progressed to the referendum stage have been approved by voters; I suspect the figure is a lot higher now. That shows a really positive reception for neighbourhood planning. I pay tribute to the Minister and his Department for bringing the whole concept forward. However, given the number of neighbourhood plans now being considered—I think it is a few thousand—and the way the Government rightly want to extend them, it seems likely they could end up competing with one another. We are trying to ensure, through the amendment, that that does not happen.

The guidance tells us that it is very important for a neighbourhood plan or order to follow a local plan, but they are not often tested against policies in an emerging plan. I will give an example from my constituency, where we are in precisely this situation, which is partly what prompted my question. A local plan went through a public inquiry and was thrown out by the inspector. The authority was directed to go back to first base in terms of drawing up the local plan, so it is out to consultation at the moment on some of the underpinning objectives, but a number of neighbourhood plans are about to go to referendums. Will those plans simply rely on saved local policies? Will they have to look at the local plan that was thrown out, or will they be tested against the underpinning objectives, which are quite wide-ranging at this stage? It would be interesting to hear from the Minister on that point. There is a need for further clarity, particularly with regard to the stage that the local plan is at.

These are very much probing amendments, as I am sure Committee members have determined. Amendment 5 would mean the local authority need not have regard to the local plan, unless it is consistent with the national planning policy framework and national planning policy guidance. This is a straightforward amendment. We should seek to put best practice at the forefront of neighbourhood planning by requiring that the plans are compatible with the NPPF and any relevant guidance.

Kevin Hollinrake (Conservative, Thirsk and Malton)

Is the hon. Lady aware that paragraph 16 of the NPPF states that neighbourhoods should

“develop plans that support the strategic development needs set out in Local Plans”?

Is that not quite clear?

Roberta Blackman-Woods (Labour, City of Durham)

I am trying to tease out the extent to which the Minister thinks it is important right at the outset for neighbourhood plans to tell us how they are addressing the basic thrust of the NPPF and any relevant policies in it and taking on board guidance that underpins some of those policies. I do not think the issue of guidance is quite so clear. Perhaps it is generally assumed that the NPPF would be followed but not to the degree that planning guidance would have to be taken on board.

We are not trying to load additional burdens on neighbourhood planning forums or parish councils; we are just trying to get a little more clarity on what is expected of them. Ruth Reed pointed out in the Committee on Tuesday that the plans are “generally prepared”, or often prepared, by a lot of volunteers and amateurs, so perhaps it depends which way we look at this. A requirement to follow the NPPF and guidance could put additional burdens on them, but it could be really helpful in assisting groups in how they move forward. This is something that I know from my constituency, where we have neighbourhood plans being prepared by both parish councils and by neighbourhood planning forums.

We will come to this point in a later amendment, but one thing that I have noticed is that where a parish council is supporting a neighbourhood plan there is a basic structure of organisation that can get people together, making it slightly easier to put a neighbourhood plan together.

The neighbourhood planning forum is excellent, but certainly in its early days it did struggle with knowing how to undertake the process. It did eventually draw down money and get expertise that was able to help, and it is hoping to submit its plan quite soon. It really was a case of constituents wandering around with clipboards counting houses in an area, doing a character appraisal, meeting different groups, trying to decide what the priorities should be. A bit more guidance to them about how to act, particularly in those early stages, would be important.

That was a point made very properly by the British Property Federation in its briefing to us:

“Conformity with the NPPF and NPPG is particularly crucial as emerging/adopted neighbourhood plans are already material considerations when determining planning applications and, in certain situations, could be the key determining factor, particularly where a Local Plan is out of date or at an early stage in preparation”.

That is exactly the set of the circumstances that I described when speaking to amendment 4.

We know that neighbourhood plans are often considered in the absence of local plans. That is why we think there probably is a need for them to be as rigorous as possible. I do not want to labour this point much more, but it is worth saying that the only paragraph in the NPPF that seems really relevant to the topic we are discussing is paragraph 16. The Minister may correct me if I am wrong. It says:

“The application of the presumption will have implications for how communities engage in neighbourhood planning. Critically, it will mean that neighbourhoods should: develop plans that support the strategic development needs set out in Local Plans, including policies for housing and economic development; plan positively to support local development, shaping and directing development in their area that is outside the strategic elements of the Local Plan; and identify opportunities to use Neighbourhood Development Orders to enable developments that are consistent with their neighbourhood plan to proceed.”

I think everyone will agree that that is quite broad. A lot of the measures in the NPPF are broad because they are simply trying to direct people in the wider policy framework. I thought that at least if it was clear that they had to do that and address the underpinning guidance, that might give further clarity to the whole process, which is what we are trying to achieve with this and the preceding amendment.

Amendment 3, like amendments 4 and 5, is about how to establish in the Bill best practice in neighbourhood planning. Amendment 5 seeks to do so by ensuring that examination of a neighbourhood plan is conducted by a Royal Town Planning Institute-registered examiner. Before I looked at the provisions in detail, I had not realised that the examiner could be anyone. They do not have to be RTPI-registered.

I am not suggesting that people who have examined neighbourhood plans to date have not been suitably qualified or not done a really good job, but I would like to hear from the Minister why he thinks the person who will examine the plan, particularly as many of them are being examined without a local plan in place, should not have to have an RTPI qualification. I cannot find any guidance on who the examiner should be and what qualifications they should have, but if I have missed it, I will be happy to be corrected by the Minister.

I just wondered whether public confidence in the neighbourhood planning process and the examination system would be enhanced if it was clear that the examiner had to have certain qualifications and, critically for public confidence, that they had undertaken inquiries or examinations before and knew how a neighbourhood plan fits into the overall planning process. The examination process may give communities unrealistic expectations if they do not understand the difference between a local plan being examined and a neighbourhood plan being examined.

The issue could swing either way. There could be too many expectations on the local community because the examiner has not experienced the difference between the local plan examination process and that of the neighbourhood plan; or there could be too few because they could say, “This is only a local plan and in the overall planning system it is not the most critical element.” They could have fairly low expectations.

Jim McMahon (Labour, Oldham West and Royton)

This is a very important point because the provision must not be seen as a way of paying lip service to local opinion. People spend a lot of time trying to work up neighbourhood plans, which go through a massive amount of consultation, and they go round the area with clipboards, but when it comes down to it they are not treated with seriousness in the process. Having this quality assurance would help that.

Roberta Blackman-Woods (Labour, City of Durham)

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. Public confidence in the system is important.

Just to show that I looked, we found that national planning policy guidance includes guidance on the independent examiner’s role, how a neighbourhood plan or order is examined, how the public can make their views known to the independent examiner, who can speak if a public hearing is held and whether the examiner considers the referendum area to be part of their report. However, there is nothing at all—not in that section anyway—about who the independent examiner should be or what qualifications they might be expected to have.

The reason the amendment specifies the RTPI is that it has a mark of quality attached to it, and has been clear about the principles to which examiners should work. There are five core principles. I think this might be helpful, and if the Minister does not want to include it on the face of the Bill, it might be put into regulations.

It is hard to disagree with any of the five core principles, or to suggest a reason why they should not apply to examiners. Those subject to them must act with competence, honesty and integrity; and they must use independent professional judgement. That is particularly important, because we want the examination to be seen as professional. After all, the plans are very important. They should probably have more importance in the planning system. We want to make sure that they will be professionally examined. Examiners must apply due care and diligence; they must act within principles of equality and respect; and obviously, they must exhibit professional behaviour at all times.

That set of core principles seems to me to be very helpful. The RTPI deals with professional planners all the time, and it has provided more detail about what the principles mean with respect to the role of an inspector. I shall not go through them all, because there are too many, but I thought it might be worth looking at a few that seem particularly important.

“Members must take all reasonable steps to maintain their professional competence”.

That seems fairly obvious; we want people who are to examine neighbourhood plans to deal with the planning system as it currently is—not as it was when they trained, which could have been some time ago.

They must also

“take all reasonable steps to ensure that their private, personal, political and financial interests do not conflict with their professional duties.”

Again, that is important. I wonder whether the current system pays attention to any financial, personal, political or other conflict of interest, particularly in relation to examiners. It may, and I hope that the Minister can reassure us on that point, but I think my constituents would want to know that people with a conflict of interest were screened out before the point at which they would get to examine a neighbourhood plan. It is not clear to me at what stage in the current process that happens, or what questions are asked during the appointment process, to ascertain whether there is a conflict of interest.

“Members must not offer or accept inducements, financial or otherwise, to influence a decision or professional point of view”.

That is an issue that councillors are used to having to deal with; but again, it has not been made clear. I do not suggest for a minute that any examiner would have been subject to the taking of financial inducements, or anything of the kind. I just do not know, at this stage, what process there is in place to ensure that that does not happen, or what oversight there is of the examination process. Also, examiners should not disclose to employers or clients what is happening in the neighbourhood plan where it would be to their advantage.

Independent professional judgment is another principle that I think is important. I hope the Minister will say, “The hon. Lady and her constituency need not be worried at all because these are the rigorous processes that we put examiners through,” in which case, fine. We want to see that they do exercise professional judgment, and that there is due care and diligence. I know that in practice that can be quite difficult, but what effort will be made to ensure that whoever undertakes the examination does not discriminate on the grounds of race, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, religion, disability or age? That underpins the examination of local plans and should certainly underpin the examination of neighbourhood plans, and of course they must not seek to discriminate in favour or against particular groups in any way at all.

It seemed to me that the code the RTPI has put in place, and which has been adopted by its members, is a straightforward and helpful mechanism. I want to mention things in it in passing to the Minister and perhaps he will answer questions on it. I do not know how an examiner is removed from a neighbourhood plan examination process if they are found not to be doing the job correctly. If there is a serious breach, I am not sure whether disciplinary action can be taken against the examiner. The hon. Member for North West Hampshire is shaking his head at me. If he wants to intervene, I am happy to take an intervention.

Kit Malthouse (Conservative, North West Hampshire)

I was going to speak later.

Roberta Blackman-Woods (Labour, City of Durham)

I am not trying to suggest there has been a problem in the past, but we have neighbourhood planning provisions before us in a Bill that seeks to strengthen and streamline the process of neighbourhood planning. It is the Opposition’s job to seek ways of improving the Bill and one way might be to give greater clarity and confidence to the public and all our constituents that neighbourhood plans are being effectively and efficiently examined. That provides more confidence in the process, which we are incredibly supportive of.

Jim McMahon (Labour, Oldham West and Royton)

I actually think—I am sure my hon. Friend will agree—this is a gift for the Minister. Imagine a situation in which there is no quality assurance in place and no mechanism built into the membership organisation to deal with complaints. Where else would the complaints come but across our desks?

Roberta Blackman-Woods (Labour, City of Durham)

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. It drives home the point we are making. We have tried to be incredibly helpful in tabling the amendment. The point has not been raised only by Opposition Members. As I pointed out earlier, it was raised by people who gave evidence to the Committee. It is important as a matter of public record that we are clear about how the plans will be examined and about the qualifications of the examiners. As my hon. Friend said, the RTPI has given a gift to the Minister by saying there is already a code of conduct and already professional guidance in place, so why does not the Minister simply adopt it and then we will all have better reassurances about the qualifications—[Interruption.] I am sure the hon. Member for North West Hampshire can intervene on me if he wishes to do so, and I will seek to answer his question.

If I may, I will move on to new clause 1. Although we have tabled it as a new clause, it is really just a further probing amendment to find out whether the Minister thinks there should be a threshold for the number of electors who will turn up to vote for a neighbourhood plan. Again, I am not trying to make the process of having a neighbourhood plan more difficult, because we are terribly supportive of neighbourhood plans and want as many of them in place as possible.

In fact, because the Minister is extremely good at reading the Lyons report, he will know that we had a whole section in that report about local plan-making and how we might marry up neighbourhood plans with the local plan-making system. That was not to take powers away from local neighbourhoods, but to have these as an initial building block for local plans so that local plans are not something that is seen to be imposed on a local community, but are something that develops organically from looking at a whole range of neighbourhood plans. He knows that the Lyons report also talked about how we could fund that, because if we are going to adopt a system where neighbourhood plans are the building blocks of local plans, resource will clearly need to be put into neighbourhood plans.

If I may again use the example of my constituency, we are now back at the beginning, more or less, of our local plan-making process. I think I am right in saying that process started in 2007; if I was being really generous to the local authority I might say 2008, but really we had preliminary discussions in 2007. Here we are in 2016, I think 11 rounds of consultation later, and we still have no local plan in place. In fact, we would be lucky to get a local plan in place in the next couple of years.

John Mann (Labour, Bassetlaw)

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way. Does she agree with my research that shows that 95% of local plans had to be stopped and recreated after the absurdity of the coalition Government’s decision of March 2013, when they required them all to have to consult adjoining authorities? Ninety-five per cent. have had to be recreated, creating a huge delay and uncertainty in house building and the provision of other amenities.

Roberta Blackman-Woods (Labour, City of Durham)

As always, my hon. Friend makes a very interesting point. We did have a brief exchange with the Minister on Tuesday about the fact that the duty to co-operate has not worked in practice, and the real need for a different set of provisions. I know the Minister is seeking to address that at a later stage in the Bill’s passage, so we look forward to seeing the provisions that will address that aspect of local plan-making and how the duty to co-operate can be made to work more effectively in practice. My hon. Friend has raised a very valid point.

I think we are on our 11th round of consultation, and there will be further rounds before we actually get a local plan in place. Huge resource is then put into the consultation, which has gone on for many years. The huge amount of documentation that goes with each of those public consultations has a resource attached to it. I should have thought that it was possible to have a system of local plan-making that was very streamlined and did not require the huge amount of documentation that it currently does; that would free up resources. One of the things we argued in Lyons was that those resources could then be used to effectively support neighbourhoods and local authorities to use neighbourhood plans as the building block for their local plans.

I am coming to my argument about new clause 1. If these plans are to have considerable weight attached to them, and if they are going to be, as they currently are, part of the local plan once they go through a referendum and a material consideration, should there be a minimum level of buy-in from the local community, in terms of turning out to vote? I am sure the Minister will say that the votes for these neighbourhood plans are extraordinary, that 89% or 90% of the people who turn out regularly vote for the neighbourhood plan, that they understand why it is important to their community and that a lot of them will have turned up to consultation events.

It is heartening that so many of the plans get that percentage of people supporting them. It is actually quite rare for them to be turned down or to have fairly low percentages. At the moment we are at about a 32.4% turnout from the local community. I am sure all of us here think that is actually not bad when compared with the turnout for some local council elections, but if we are talking about a plan that will have a very strong influence on what happens in the neighbourhood area for perhaps 10 or 15 years or even longer, I suggest there might need to be a 40% threshold, but that could be lower or higher.

Gavin Barwell (Conservative, Croydon Central)

I am interested in the argument the hon. Lady is making. My local authority is going through the process of agreeing its local plan at the moment, so I share her pain. Do the Opposition think the same arguments should apply to local plans? Should the people of Croydon have the chance to vote in a referendum on the local plan that Croydon Council is proposing?

Roberta Blackman-Woods (Labour, City of Durham)

The Minister makes an interesting point. It is something I will mull over and think about. Does the Minister think it is important to have a particular threshold? Again, that point is not being put forward only by the Opposition. It was also put forward by the BPF, which said:

“As neighbourhood plans affect large sectors of the community, a minimum turnout would ensure that what is to become a development plan document as part of the Local Development Framework is agreed and accepted by a sufficient majority—and would also help ensure the implementation of neighbourhood plans.”

That is an important point.

John Mann (Labour, Bassetlaw)

I am glad this is a probing new clause. The British Property Federation would say they, wouldn’t they? Is there not a danger that a threshold will shift power to middle-class communities and away from working-class communities, where people work shifts and where there is a more transient population because of private rented accommodation? Turnouts have traditionally and historically been low in all elections in those communities through no fault of the local people. They have a desire to vote, as we saw in the EU referendum, but people are having to work ridiculously long hours to make a living. Indeed, turnover in property is hugely large. Are those not the dangers of having a threshold? Any system must not discriminate against working-class communities.

Roberta Blackman-Woods (Labour, City of Durham)

I am sure my hon. Friend will be delighted to note that an amendment has been tabled for a later discussion in the Committee on how we ensure that disadvantaged communities are not discriminated against.

Oliver Colvile (Conservative, Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport)

Will the hon. Lady give way?

Roberta Blackman-Woods (Labour, City of Durham)

I will give way to the hon. Gentleman in just a moment, after I have dealt with the intervention by my hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw.

We should not abandon the idea of a threshold just because it might be more difficult for some people to attend a polling station or another building to register a vote. We all want to ensure that as many people as possible are engaged in the neighbourhood planning process and, indeed, in voting more generally—but I will stick to neighbourhood plans, to avoid getting a direction from the Chair. Polling over a given period of time, and good use of postal votes or electronic voting are among the many different mechanisms that could be applied locally to ensure that the threshold is reached, and that people really are engaged in the neighbourhood planning process.

Jim McMahon (Labour, Oldham West and Royton)

That is the crux of the issue. The gift of a neighbourhood plan is that it binds a local community together to agree collectively what is best for that community. The benefit of a threshold is that a bar is put in place to say, “You have to be able to demonstrate that the plan has the community support in place.” If one of the arguments is that disadvantaged communities are disfranchised from such processes in a way that middle-class communities are not, a threshold would place a greater onus on ensuring that people are included in the process and in more active ways.

Roberta Blackman-Woods (Labour, City of Durham)

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point, and one that I was going to come to: a minimum threshold could ensure that additional work had to be put in to get a wider, more representative group coming forward and voting for a plan. I was going to draw the Minister’s attention to the activities of Planning Aid England, which works a great deal with disadvantaged communities, trying to get them engaged in the planning process. If the Minister was keen to put a minimum threshold in place, he might want to think about how Planning Aid could be supported, in particular to work with disadvantaged communities to ensure not only that people turn up to vote for the neighbourhood plan, but that they are fully engaged in the plan-making process itself.

When we discuss the later amendment, we will see that analysis of the plans so far indicates that—this is the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw was making earlier—they have a bias towards more middle-class communities.

Oliver Colvile (Conservative, Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport)

Thank you, Mr McCabe, for allowing me to serve under your chairmanship. The point that I would make is that if we are going to be doing public consultation—which is incredibly important, and I have made that quite clear—we need to use Planning for Real weekends, so that members of the local community may have the opportunity to come in, physically, and say what they are expecting from the whole thing, although postal and proxy votes can be used, too, and a lot of people do so.

Roberta Blackman-Woods (Labour, City of Durham)

The hon. Gentleman makes an excellent point. As well as Planning Aid, I should have mentioned Planning for Real, which also does amazing work in communities getting people to engage with the neighbourhood planning process. Such work could be continued to encourage people to turn up and vote in the decision whether to adopt the neighbourhood plan.

As I said at the outset of our debate on this group of amendments, they are probing ones, intended to get greater clarity from the Minister about the whole range of issues that we have raised. I look forward to hearing what he has to say.

Kit Malthouse (Conservative, North West Hampshire)

I realise that the hon. Member for City of Durham is benignly motivated, but I had a horrible feeling that she might have been seized by Stockholm syndrome with regard to the planning industry. She referred quite a lot to what the planning industry had to say, but I think she misunderstands the great advantage of neighbourhood plans. They are organic community creations outside the accepted rules, shibboleths, morals and principles of the planning system. She seems in her amendments to be trying to put barriers and bureaucracy into neighbourhood plans, which they are specifically designed to overcome.

There are already safeguards in the neighbourhood planning process. When a neighbourhood plan is approved by referendum, it must go to the local council where there is democratic oversight; it must be adopted as part of the local plan before it is accepted completely; and it must be examined. By the way, I am not surprised the RTPI was willing selflessly to put itself forward as the monopoly examiners of plans for a fee, adding yet more cost to the process.

It strikes me that the hon. Lady is creating bureaucracy in the system—

Roberta Blackman-Woods (Labour, City of Durham)

May I say at the outset that I do not accept the hon. Gentleman’s characterisation of what I was seeking to do? I was seeking to get further clarity in the Minister’s legislation, not to put prescription in place. As far as I can recall, I did not mention fees for the RTPI.

Kit Malthouse (Conservative, North West Hampshire)

No, I accept what the hon. Lady says and I apologise. She said these are probing amendments and I was being slightly flippant, but I doubt very much whether a member of the RTPI would do the examination free. The point is that if you restrict it to just them, I imagine the fees might rise slightly. Basic economics is that the smaller the pool of people, the more fees will rise.

I acknowledged that the amendments were probing, but I am not sure what problem the hon. Lady is trying to solve. Thousands of neighbourhood plans have come forward and there are two major issues, which the Bill solves. The first is more assistance from local authorities, because obviously the plans have to conform with the local plan and they are often developed in parallel. Certainly mine were developed in parallel with the local plan. There is quite a lot of iterative process between the two and the Bill allows that. Secondly, if they are going to do this work, there should be protection in the planning system, which is also in the Bill.

Beyond that, I fear the hon. Lady is trying to create with the amendments—I accept they are probing—a sort of recreation of the whole planning system on a local scale, instead of realising that the process is organic and should be exactly that without as much restriction as the formal planning and plan development process has, notwithstanding the fact that there will be supervision by the local council.

Jim McMahon (Labour, Oldham West and Royton)

I cannot understand why the hon. Gentleman would want to water down the integrity of this process. If it is to have any credibility in the system, it must be tested in the system. We do not want a neighbourhood plan that does not stand that test and is treated in a second-rate way.

I also cannot understand the point about levying a fee. People do not generally work for free in their profession. Someone will want to be paid as part of that process. All that my hon. Friend the Member for City of Durham is trying to do in the amendment, which is open to debate, is to make sure that a standard is applied and it provides that standard. If this is not accepted, what is the alternative to provide that surety?

Kit Malthouse (Conservative, North West Hampshire)

This may be a philosophical difference between us. I am naturally inclined to deregulation, whereas this is obviously an attempt to impose regulation on the neighbourhood planning process. In my experience, regulation generally gets in the way of speed and efficiency, and frankly of people even bothering to get involved.

In my neighbourhood there has been huge enthusiasm, wide acceptance and a recognition that there are two issues—first, more assistance from the local authority and secondly, more regard from the planning system as it is. It would be a mistake for us to try in the Bill to reproduce the same level of planning regulation that exists at local authority level for what is, frankly, often a group of volunteers who are trying to put together an imaginative plan for their neighbourhood. They should be left with as little restriction as possible to do that as far as they can, and when they realise their plan needs to be in conformity with the local plan and it has to go to democratic approval, to modify it accordingly. If we are to have acceptance, we must do it that way. Once we start putting rules and regulations and hurdles in their way, I am afraid the enthusiasm will drop away.

I would not support a 40% threshold. As the hon. Member for Bassetlaw said, there lots of reasons why not, but we do not apply that for any other election in this country, including referendums and elections for police and crime commissioners. There is no other election or exercise of the democratic process in this country where we do that and I do not think we should start now.

John Mann (Labour, Bassetlaw)

It is always a pleasure—actually it is the first time, but it always will be a pleasure—to be given the opportunity by the Whips to serve under your chairing, Mr McCabe. I thank the Whips, although I am not sure that those on the Labour Front Bench will necessarily thank them, for putting me on this Bill Committee.

I will first deal with the question of thresholds. It is a good idea but I would suggest that the wrong threshold has been suggested, so I am glad that the new clause is a probing one. When I was first elected as a councillor, I got 86% of the vote on a 40% turnout. That means that I got a higher share of the electorate than the majority of MPs elected in the last general election. Given that, who would be the more statistically valid representative?

The interesting question is whether a threshold should be based on the vote. Should someone on a low turnout get through on 50% to 49%? That would suggest that there is quite a split in the community. There would be a coherent case for suggesting that the neighbourhood development plan needs to have a threshold of a majority for it to be seen to be coherent across a community. I am not aware of anywhere, certainly not in my area, where there is that sort of division, but such situations could exist.

The Secretary of State said that too many people

“object to houses being built next to us”

and that we are going to have to change that attitude. He was, rightly, very outspoken in Bentley in Redditch in 2015 against the proposals for 2,800 houses there, as he was in Hagley in 2012. He, like me, has supported the local people against the planning system and the way it works, but that does not coincide with his commentary at his party’s conference.

In Croydon, one local Member of Parliament talked of the overwhelming opposition to housing in Shirley, with the Save Shirley campaign. He said that the proposals to build there were “a pile of nonsense.” Clearly, there were divisions in Croydon between people who wanted to build in one place and those who wanted to build in another. Some people did not want the development in one place; others did not want it in another.

The Opposition have proposed a threshold but, in the Croydon example, a threshold of how many people vote for a neighbourhood development plan or, indeed, for a local plan would be a good idea. Otherwise, those supporting the residents of Shirley might lose out. They might be very angry at losing out and vent their anger against their local MP.

Chris Philp (Conservative, Croydon South)

If the hon. Gentleman is casting aspersions on my constituency neighbour for his Save Shirley campaign, may I point out his outstanding record of supporting building in the town centre?

What the hon. Member for Bassetlaw proposes by way of a threshold effectively gives weight to the opinions of people who do not bother to vote. Does he not agree that giving weight to the opinions of those who cannot even be bothered to vote in any election, including the one we are discussing, would not be appropriate?

John Mann (Labour, Bassetlaw)

I am merely throwing into the mix for consideration the suggestion that the Government may wish to come back with an amendment, in the spirit proposed by Her Majesty’s Opposition, involving a threshold determined not by the percentage of the electorate, but by a percentage threshold of the majority in the vote. That would help to avoid a conflict situation and lead to more local negotiation in places such as Shirley.

There are lots of places like Shirley. Ministers do intervene. They are intervening in Bradford, for example. The hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) was delighted, when the Minister was intervening there, to object to house building. There will always be people who object to house building next to them, and there is nothing wrong with that. If there is a bad planning application, I can fill a public hall at any time. I get hundreds and hundreds of people there very regularly. Indeed, I have a meeting tomorrow.

John Mann (Labour, Bassetlaw)

I am suitably admonished, Mr McCabe, but this is a way of getting directly into the amendments. Having spoken to new clause 1 very precisely, I am now speaking to amendments 4 and 5 very precisely, because these amendments explicitly probe the issue of conflict between the local plan and the neighbourhood plan. In other words, one set of people want to do one thing, but another set may want to do something else.

The danger, as recognised by the Government but not solved sufficiently, even by clause 1, is this. Let us say that people have accepted that there should be more housing. That applies to all the neighbourhood development plans that have been voted through or are in the pipeline in my area, and virtually all the villages of Bassetlaw have them—I think we are in the lead in doing these plans, which are heavily promoted by myself. Each one has said, “We will have more housing. Here is the kind of housing that is needed in our communities.” Hardly surprisingly, they have suggested that there should be affordable housing for young couples and that there should be more housing to allow elderly people, not least single elderly people, to remain in their villages. That is vital to the coherence of our villages. They see living in them far too many people like me—people whose kids are no longer there and who are living there but working elsewhere and not contributing sufficiently to the health of the village. Well, they will always want people like me, but not too many as a proportion of the village. We want some mix in a village.

The Minister knows the rationale and the motivations there, but people go through the whole process and then, as the people of Ranskill are finding, hence their meeting with me tomorrow—the people of Sturton have a meeting on Saturday morning—they are being turned over. That creates a democratic deficit, which is why I put it to the Minister that he needs to consider the amendments. Even with clause 1, the law will not be strong enough. There needs to be some certainty.

Where a neighbourhood plan is not agreeing new housing, clearly a conflict might emerge with the local plan. I am not quite in that consensus that we must build everywhere, but there is certainly a cross-party consensus in Parliament for mass house building and 1 million new homes, so that is what will be there; that is what is there. And that is the opportunity, where people accept new housing appropriately, to say, “We are not going to break from that and we are going to provide more powers in order to give that certainty. If you want to build, build in the spaces that have been agreed locally. If you don’t, go build somewhere else.”

That has transformed the attitude in the rural community in Bassetlaw. At the time of previous local plan discussions, zero new housing was being proposed in most of the villages. However, in every single neighbourhood plan that has been voted on, and in all those in the pipeline, people are actually coming forward with more housing proposals than the planners could come up with, because they know the little problems that could be addressed and the little areas where one or two houses could be fitted in very sensibly. They know about the barn that could and should have been converted. They can see, because they live there, more than the distant planner, whose time is divided across entire districts and bigger areas in larger metropolitan boroughs.

Roberta Blackman-Woods (Labour, City of Durham)

My hon. Friend is making a powerful case in support of neighbourhood planning. Does he agree that the success of neighbourhood planning, which Labour Members welcome and applaud, is precisely what makes it such a good building block for local plans?

John Mann (Labour, Bassetlaw)

It is absolutely a building block. We will come at a later stage to how we deal with less affluent communities, which is important, but when it comes to all neighbourhood plans, there is a great opportunity here for the Minister. He will need to come back with a bit more, otherwise the certainty is not there. One likes certainty in life. We know where we stand with a local plan. We would know where we stand with a neighbourhood plan. So a neighbourhood plan voted through where there is house building built in ought to be the certainty for the foreseeable future, which, in planning terms, seems to be 15 years. Such certainty seems reasonable enough to me. If the Minister could deliver on that, when I go back to my local communities he will find that there is even more enthusiasm. I will be able to get the urban communities saying, “This is a great idea, and by the way we will have more housing. We will change this and we will change that. We will create more open spaces. We will want space for our community facilities.”

Large numbers will participate in the planning debate and decision making, given the chance. The Minister has the proof already. Let us unleash more of this local empowerment. He will then be a very popular Minister.

Jim McMahon (Labour, Oldham West and Royton)

This has been a fascinating debate. We are all localists. We all come from our communities—that is why we are here in the first place—and the spirit of the Bill embraces that. We are fine-tuning the Bill to ensure it works in practice. We do not want to set people up to be disappointed. We do not want them to be given this power, to be told that after years of having things done to them they are suddenly empowered, and then to go through the process of having an application submitted only for it to be completely against what they want. That is really important. In the local context of Greater Manchester, we have got the spatial framework. Within that process there is a call for sites, so developers and landowners put sites forward as part of the mix.

A member of the public has the local plan that has been agreed, but now they also have in consultation a strategic plan with sites that have been put forward by developers and landowners, and not necessarily with the agreement of the local authority. However, that causes a lot of tension because some of the sites are controversial. Landowners do not always take into account local opinion before they submit sites to get the development value that could be achieved afterwards. In an odd way, that could be the thing that inspires the local community to come together. Instead of having something done to us, let us get together and design what we want our community to be. We could think further about design quality, open space provision and how a community works more generally.

I will certainly be a champion for this type of planning in my local community. Let us be honest: in deprived, working-class communities, people have for decades and generations been told, “This is what you are getting, whether you like it or not.” I see this legislation as a route for empowering people to have far more control over their lives and communities, so it is welcome. However, let us not lose an opportunity to make sure that this is a really decent piece of legislation and a really decent process that people can feel empowered by. When a planning application goes through the system and is tested—when it is submitted and goes for approval—it is important that it has enough weight to ensure that the professional planners, and those sitting on the planning committee if it goes for determination, treat it with the respect it deserves. That is in the spirit of today’s amendment and the amendments we will discuss at a later date.

I want to return to the point I made earlier about the consultation process. If we say that we want to put the community at the heart of the process and have a community voice to make people feel more empowered, it seems odd that the public consultation on this issue does not close until 2 November, because here we are determining the legislation that will by and large have been debated before that date. Can the Minister tell us why that has not been sequenced in the right way? How can we ensure that the responses to the consultation are fed in? If significant issues come up in that process, what mechanism does Parliament have to make sure that those are picked up at the appropriate time?

Gavin Barwell (Conservative, Croydon Central)

It is a pleasure to serve for the first time under your chairmanship, Mr McCabe. With your permission, I will start by responding briefly to the point of order raised by the hon. Member for Oldham West and Royton so that I can provide some reassurance. I have worked very hard to try to ensure that Parliament has as much of the material relating to the Bill as possible, and as early as possible in the process. There was an earlier consultation on neighbourhood planning this year, our response to which was published at the same time as the Bill. This is a technical consultation about how we are going to implement some of these provisions.

The assurance we have given the House, and the business managers more widely, is that when the Bill gets to the Lords stages we intend to have the draft regulations or policy statements published. I agree with the hon. Member for Oldham West and Royton that in an ideal world all this would be ready when a Bill first comes to Parliament, but if we look historically we see that is the case for virtually no Bills. I am keen to learn the lessons of the Housing and Planning Act, which received Royal Assent earlier this year, and get the material out as early as possible and give people as much opportunity as possible to scrutinise the measures.

Jim McMahon (Labour, Oldham West and Royton)

Just to clarify, there are two separate consultations. There is a technical consultation that closed on 19 October, and there is a wider public consultation on the pre-condition element that closes in November. I would not necessarily consider the second one to be just a technical consultation. I would not want it to be lost in the mix and not treated with importance, because residents and community organisations will respond to it expecting it to be treated appropriately.

Gavin Barwell (Conservative, Croydon Central)

The intention behind that consultation paper was to be helpful to Parliament and wider stakeholders interested in these issues. When we announced the Bill in the Queen’s Speech and set out the broad measures that were going to be in it, there was concern about what the impact of these reforms to planning conditions might have. Our feeling was that publishing a consultation paper setting out exactly how the Secretary of State might use these powers, if the Bill receives Royal Assent, would be helpful. The intention was to try to assist.

I am grateful to all hon. Members who have contributed to the debate, which has raised important areas about neighbourhood plans, their relationship with local plans and national planning policy, the examination process and the extent of the democratic mandate they receive through a referendum. Before addressing each amendment, I would like to make a few general comments.

As the Committee will know, the role that communities play in planning has been revolutionised, at least in certain parts of the country, by the neighbourhood planning process. More than 200 communities have recognised the opportunity to shape the development of their area. The numbers speak for themselves. Nearly 2,000 communities have started the process, as the hon. Member for City of Durham said, in areas that cover nearly 10 million people in England, and 240 referendums have been held, all of which have been successful. The Government are hugely proud of neighbourhood planning and of the communities that have taken up the opportunities we have provided for them. We have been clear that we want an effective system that will inspire communities, as the hon. Member for Bassetlaw said, and give them confidence that their views matter, while delivering the growth and additional housing we need.

Clause 1 helps to achieve that. I accept the point made by the hon. Member for Bassetlaw that it is not a solution on its own and that more action will be needed. The White Paper will set out some accompanying policy changes that will try to address the issue. The clause inserts a new paragraph and new subsections (3B) and (3C) into section 70 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990. It will require decision makers to have regard to post-examination neighbourhood plans where the decision has been made by the local planning authority, or in certain cases the Secretary of the State, that the plan should go to a referendum. We might call that the Malthouse clause, because it originates from an issue with the neighbourhood plan in Oakley and Deane, in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire. Essentially, an appeal was granted just before the referendum was going to be held.

Kit Malthouse (Conservative, North West Hampshire)

Seven days before.

Gavin Barwell (Conservative, Croydon Central)

The plan had therefore been through the examination. My hon. Friend’s lobbying for his community led the Government to reflect and then bring forward this clause.

The key point is the one made by the hon. Member for Bassetlaw: in communities that produce neighbourhood plans, people give a lot of time and effort to produce them, and therefore we need to ensure that work is recognised in the system at the earliest possible opportunity. We are making it clear in legislation—not just through planning guidance—that regard should be given to advanced neighbourhood plans, so communities can have confidence that their plans will get proper consideration in planning decisions, where the plan is material to the application.

Turning to the amendments tabled by the hon. Member for City of Durham, I hope that I can reassure all hon. Members that the Bill—this includes the Government amendments on local plans, which I have written to Committee members about this morning—does not alter the local plan-led system, which I am sure we all support. We have been clear from the start that the neighbourhood’s ambition should be aligned with the strategic needs and priorities of the wider local area, but that outside those strategic elements neighbourhood plans are able to shape and direct sustainable development in their area.

One of the tests that an advanced plan will have met, once it has gone through its examination, is whether its policies are in general conformity with the strategic policies of the relevant local plan. That will have been tested both by the independent person appointed to examine the plan and by the local planning authority. That is set out in schedule 4B to the Town and Country Planning Act 1990.

Perhaps I can also reassure the hon. Member for City of Durham by reading from the national planning policy framework. Paragraph 184 states:

“Neighbourhood plans must be in general conformity with the strategic policies of the Local Plan. To facilitate this, local planning authorities should set out clearly their strategic policies for the area and ensure that an up-to-date Local Plan is in place as quickly as possible. Neighbourhood plans should reflect these policies and neighbourhoods should plan positively to support them. Neighbourhood plans and orders should not promote less development than set out in the Local Plan or undermine its strategic policies.”

The crucial paragraph—this is the reason I am asking the hon. Lady to withdraw the amendment—states:

“Outside these strategic elements, neighbourhood plans will be able to shape and direct sustainable development in their area. Once a neighbourhood plan has demonstrated its general conformity with the strategic policies of the Local Plan and is brought into force, the policies it contains take precedence over existing non-strategic policies in the Local Plan for that neighbourhood, where they are in conflict.”

That is very clear, and I want to explain why the amendment would be a mistake. It would add the words

“and insofar as it is consistent with the relevant local plan”.

It misses out the crucial reference to strategic policies.

Since the hon. Member for Bassetlaw took Croydon as an example, let me provide an example. He talked about Shirley, where there is a big row because the Labour council wants to allow housing to be built on what is currently metropolitan open land. For those who do not represent London constituencies, that is basically equivalent to the green belt. The law as currently drafted provides that if the people of Shirley want to produce a neighbourhood plan—I suspect they may well want to now—they cannot try to reduce the number of homes that councillors say need to be built in Shirley. However, they can say, “Well, the council’s view was that the homes should be built on these plots of metropolitan open land, but we don’t like that and think these alternative sites would be better.”

The danger with the amendment is that its wording in the Bill would mean that neighbourhood plans had to be consistent with all the policies in the local plan. At that point, what would be the point of making one? That is the key argument on amendment 4. I am sure that it was not what the hon. Lady intended, because she said that she agreed very much that people should be part of planning, and not have planning done to them. However, if the Committee were to accept the amendment, the effect would be the opposite of what she wanted.

Similar arguments apply to amendment 5. Schedule 4B to the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 states that at examination plans must have regard to national policies, including the national planning policy framework and advice contained in guidance issued by the Secretary of State. There is already a requirement.

There is also some reference to the issue in paragraph 151 of the national planning policy framework:

“Local Plans must be prepared with the objective of contributing to the achievement of sustainable development. To this end, they should be consistent with the principles and policies set out in this Framework”.

So for local plans the position is clear in the NPPF. It is not in legislation; it is set out in policy.

The first thing that I would say about the amendment is that it seeks to do for neighbourhood plans something that we do not do for local ones: write the requirement into legislation instead of the NPPF. Also, the schedule already sets out that the test in question is one that the examiner must apply.

Furthermore, because a neighbourhood plan must be consistent with the strategic policies of the local plan, and the local plan itself must be consistent with the NPPF, there should never be a situation where a neighbourhood plan is wholly inconsistent with national policy. I hope that that point will reassure the hon. Lady.

Amendment 3 is about trying to ensure that the people doing the important work of examining plans are suitably qualified. The hon. Member for Oldham West and Royton, who I should have welcomed to his position on the Front Bench—I look forward to working with him—kindly said that he wanted to ensure that such problems do not end up on my desk. Well, my experience in the first three months of this job is that lots of things do end up on my desk, sometimes through my own decisions and sometimes not. I hope that I can provide some reassurance on that point.

We are in agreement that those examining a neighbourhood plan must be suitably qualified and experienced. I have no argument with that at all. It is an important point for the Opposition to probe. However, there are already clear requirements. I refer back to my good friend schedule 4B to the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, which states that the person appointed must be appropriately qualified and experienced, must be independent of the qualifying body—the parish council or neighbourhood forum that has produced the plan—and, importantly, must not have any interest in any land that may be affected by the plan.

Roberta Blackman-Woods (Labour, City of Durham)

The clarity that the Minister provided is helpful. Can he tell us where the provisions for examiners have been applied in legislation to those examining a neighbourhood plan, as opposed to a local plan?

Gavin Barwell (Conservative, Croydon Central)

I am sorry; I did not make myself clear enough. Those provisions are in relation to people examining a neighbourhood plan.

The hon. Lady raised a couple of points that are worthy of clarification, including the important point on equalities, which she was quite right to mention. The public sector equality duty does not sit on the examiner. It sits on the council appointing the examiner to ensure that it is confident that it appoints someone who will fulfil that duty.

I recognise that the amendment is purely a probing one, but I want to deal with the point picked up on by my hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire about the particular group of people that the hon. Member for City of Durham suggested should do the work. The Government’s understanding is that many local planning authorities have used the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors’ neighbourhood planning independent examiner referral service to source an examiner. That seems to be standard practice. That service offers examiners that it has assessed as suitably qualified to carry out examinations. The RICS maintains that members of the panel are continually monitored to ensure that they maintain performance and standards.

Although I am a huge fan of the RTPI, the amendment is neither necessary nor sufficient. In other words, there are some experienced planners who would do a perfectly good job and are not registered with the RTPI. There might also be a newly qualified planner who is registered but may not have particular experience in neighbourhood planning and, therefore, might not be the ideal person. I completely understand the thrust of what she seeks reassurance on, and I share her view, but the relevant safeguards are in schedule 4B to the Town and Country Planning Act 1990.

To a degree, we should trust councils. They have a clear interest in ensuring that the neighbourhood plan is properly examined, because they share the hon. Lady’s concern that it should be in conformity with the strategic policies of their local plan. Therefore, I do not think that we, sitting here, need overly to pre-judge that councils are not capable of ensuring that we get the right people to do what I accept is important work.

I turn to new clause 1. As I said earlier in the week, neighbourhood planning referendums have an average turnout of 33%, which is not too dissimilar to the average turnout in local elections. At the moment, support needs to be gained purely from 50% of those who vote in the referendum. That is a fairly consistent principle that we apply across our democratic system. Although new clause 1 was tabled to probe, it may be useful for the Committee to know what its effect would be. Of the approximately 240 referendums that have taken place to date, about 170 would not have passed the test proposed by the hon. Member for City of Durham. I want to make three more quick points.

Jim McMahon (Labour, Oldham West and Royton)

Will the Minister give way?

Gavin Barwell (Conservative, Croydon Central)

I am slightly conscious of the time. It might be helpful to the Committee if we finished consideration of these amendments before 1 o’clock.

The hon. Member for Bassetlaw made an important point about the effect of a threshold on more deprived communities, where turnout tends to be lower. I think there was a consensus in the oral evidence sessions that neighbourhood planning has been too concentrated in certain parts of the country. We must be wary of that because we want to ensure that everyone is benefiting.

It is also important to note that for local plans, which arguably have a much bigger impact on communities, there is no requirement to hold a referendum. I think the people of Croydon would be delighted if they had a chance to have a referendum on the Croydon local plan. In questioning the exact wording of the new clause, the hon. Member for Bassetlaw said that we should look at having a threshold for how many people vote in favour—the proportion of the electorate that had voted yes. I am wary of that for the reasons mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire, but it might reassure the hon. Gentleman a little to hear that the average yes vote in the 240-odd referendums that have taken place so far is 89%. That shows what is happening where people are proposing referendums. Nevertheless, he is quite right to say that there could be, theoretically, a situation in which that is not the case.

John Mann (Labour, Bassetlaw)

This is an important point. So far, the referendums have been for clearly defined communities. In urban areas, where communities are less defined, there is more opportunity for the creation of communities that might not totally work and that might not be fully accepted. The issues we are discussing could become more significant in an urban area where, by definition, the community is not defined. One could see how that might work out, particularly for those trying to protect areas against development. I am sure that there are already lots of examples in London.

Gavin Barwell (Conservative, Croydon Central)

The hon. Gentleman makes a perfectly legitimate point. In relation to the first three amendments, I hope I have given clear reassurances that the necessary protection is there. In relation to new clause 1, the arguments about thresholds for elections will go on for all kinds of different elections. On balance, I do not see any reason to apply a test that is different from elsewhere in relation to the particular referendums we are discussing. In practice, thus far, the issue has not arisen, but we can certainly keep matters under review.

Chris Philp (Conservative, Croydon South)

Given what the Minister just said about referendums for local plans, will he consider amending the Bill to make provision for such referendums? That would certainly have my support.

Gavin Barwell (Conservative, Croydon Central)

Given my personal circumstances, I wonder whether I have too much of a personal interest in such matters. There is an issue, in that we would probably argue that in relation to most local council policies, councils have a democratic mandate from their elections. The same could be argued of parish councils with regard to neighbourhood plans, but neighbourhood plans can also be proposed by neighbourhood forums, which do not have that democratic mandate. That is probably why referendums are needed. I was trying to tease out the shadow Minister on why the Opposition were making such a suggestion here but not for local plans.

I hope I have provided reassurance on the first three amendments. On new clause 1, I do not see the need to treat the referendums we are discussing differently from others. With that, I hope that the hon. Lady will withdraw the amendment.

Roberta Blackman-Woods (Labour, City of Durham)

I have listened carefully to what the Minister had to say. Our probing amendments 4 and 5 were helpful in getting clarity about the degree to which local plans and their provisions should be taken on board and what scope there is for neighbourhood plans to put their mark on the plan-making process. We also got additional information from the Minister about the degree to which the plans have to follow the national planning policy framework, but perhaps not about the attached guidance. I shall leave the Minister to ponder that; we may return to it later in proceedings.

The point of amendment 3 was that, in addition to what is in schedule 4B to the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, it might be helpful to think about applying a code of conduct for examiners. That could be a Royal Town Planning Institute code or a Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors code. If the Minister does not like that amendment, I am quite happy for him to come back with another of his own. I shall go away and look again at schedule 4B to see whether it does what we think is absolutely necessary in maintaining public confidence, but I shall leave it for the time being.

Finally, the Opposition are seeking to raise the Government’s ambitions for the percentage of people who will get actively involved in neighbourhood plans. If the Minister wants to come back with other measures that demonstrate that he does in fact have high ambitions for the number of people involved, that would be a good thing. With that, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Status of approved neighbourhood development plan

Roberta Blackman-Woods (Labour, City of Durham)

I beg to move amendment 11, in clause 2, page 2, line 16, at the end insert—

“(3A) To support Neighbourhood Plans, the Secretary of State should set out the weight that should be given to approved development plans at key stages in the planning process.”

This amendment gives weight to Neighbourhood Plans at key stages along the process and not just at the post-referendum stage.

I stress at the outset that this is very much a probing amendment to try to determine whether we need greater clarity, either in the Bill or somewhere else, about what weight, if any, should be given to a neighbourhood plan before a referendum has been held, and before the plan is adopted by the local authority and becomes part of its local plan documents. Given the number of witnesses who mentioned the lack of clarity, it is important that we get additional clarity from the Minister.

The Minister will know that various stakeholders said on Tuesday that this is a key concern. The Local Government Association has previously said:

“It is important that any proposals do not have the unintended consequence of undermining the ability of a local planning authority to meet the wider strategic objectives”.

I suppose the LGA was trying to clarify at what stage attention needs to be paid to the neighbourhood plan. If the neighbourhood plan does something outwith the local plan objectives, when does the local planning authority need to intervene to point that out to the neighbourhood planning forum or parish council?

Similarly, the British Property Federation said:

“Clarity must be provided about the level of weight attributed to neighbourhood plans at every stage of their preparation (for example, whether a draft plan’s general ‘direction of travel’ would be considered in the determination of a planning application)… The relationship between the statutory development plan-making framework and such material considerations must be clear for all stakeholders, in order to allow greater certainty in the development decision-taking process”.

Matt Thomson from the Campaign to Protect Rural England put it well when he said:

“The question reflects one of the key problems that we have been facing with the operation of the planning system for decades. That is…where you have tiers of nested planning policy documents, there is always a question of which has precedence over the other. It should not necessarily be just a question of the one that is produced most recently holding the most weight in a planning application environment.”––[Official Report, Neighbourhood Planning Public Bill Committee, 18 October 2016; c. 51, Q92.]

A number of our witnesses were dealing with a situation—I am sure that it will be well known to a number of members of the Committee—in which there is a controversial planning application that would not be allowed by a neighbourhood plan. When other sites for development have been designated but the plan has not yet been adopted, what weight should the local planning authority give to the general direction of travel in that neighbourhood plan?

I have met many parish councils and neighbourhood planning forums over the years who find that to be a frustrating aspect of the neighbourhood planning system. They might have been through extensive work locally. They might have done all the preliminary stages, including looking at the economy and the wider social environment, and doing character and neighbourhood assessments. I have seen many forums identify bits of land that nobody else knows about but that they believe are important to bring forward for development. They put a huge amount of work into the plan. Just before they have a draft plan but after they have identified sites, they find that their whole direction of travel is knocked aside because a significant site that they do not want to be developed, or that they do not want to be developed in the way described in a particular application, is not only considered but approved. That causes major headaches.

In some cases, the forums or parish councils almost have to start again with land use allocation or in the identification of sites. Furthermore, that situation undermines faith in the process. People say, “We did all this work, identified all the sites and did what the Government wanted us to do. We have put the plan in, but it has not been voted on. Nobody, particularly the local authority, seems to be paying any attention to it.”

It is about certainty not only for the people who put the plan together, but for developers. If a developer knows that a plan that is about to be submitted for a referendum has a lot of weight attached to it, they might not seek planning permission for a site that is not in the neighbourhood plan, or for an inappropriate use of the site. It is about the Government giving certainty not only to communities, but to developers, so that everybody is clearer at an earlier stage in the process what weight should be attached to the neighbourhood plan.

Gavin Barwell (Conservative, Croydon Central)

Clause 2 builds on clause 1 to ensure that neighbourhood plans come into force sooner as part of the development plan for their area. It inserts a new subsection 3A into section 38 of the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 to provide for a neighbourhood plan to become part of the development plan for that area when it is approved in the relevant referendum.

Without that change, there is a risk that neighbourhood plans might not be given sufficient consideration by decision makers in the period between the community expressing its support for the relevant plan at a referendum and the formal decision by the local planning authority to make the plan. When the neighbourhood plan provision was originally introduced, there was no fixed time period between those events. The Housing and Planning Act 2016 established an eight-week limit. The clause essentially says that the relevant neighbourhood plan will be part of the development plan for the area immediately after a successful referendum.

The hon. Lady made two or three points and it is important to disentangle them. For some of the time she spoke about precedence, which was raised repeatedly in the evidence we received. I hope I satisfied the Committee on that point earlier when I quoted paragraph 185 of the national planning policy framework, which states:

“Once a neighbourhood plan has demonstrated its general conformity with the strategic policies of the Local Plan and is brought into force, the policies it contains take precedence over existing non-strategic policies in the Local Plan”.

I do not think I can make it any clearer than that. Neighbourhood plans must be consistent with the relevant local plans, in terms of the strategic framework, but once they come into force they take precedence over the relevant local plan on detailed non-strategic issues.

The hon. Lady raised, and the hon. Member for Bassetlaw expressed powerfully, the wider concern that people can put a lot of work into producing a neighbourhood plan and then find that decisions about applications in their area that are contrary to their neighbourhood plan are being approved, either by their council or by the Planning Inspectorate on appeal. Clearly that is enormously frustrating. I am not sure whether I can guarantee that it will never happen, but we should certainly seek to minimise it. I argued in response to the hon. Gentleman that clause 1 will help—I think he accepted that—but I accepted that it is not a complete answer. I promised that in the White Paper coming later this year there will be further policy measures that will go a long way towards satisfying him.

The amendment would introduce a third term—this is where my problem comes—that is about weight. I will try to clarify the position, because this is a complex area. First, let me say to the hon. Lady by way of reassurance that the Government’s policy is clear that decision takers may give weight to relevant policies in emerging plans. The national planning policy framework sets out with some clarity the matters they should consider. I will read an excerpt from it, because it will help the Committee:

“From the day of publication, decision-takers may also give weight to relevant policies in emerging plans according to: the stage of preparation of the emerging plan (the more advanced the preparation, the greater the weight that may be given); the extent to which there are unresolved objections to relevant policies (the less significant the unresolved objections, the greater the weight that may be given); and the degree of consistency of the relevant policies in the emerging plan to the policies in this Framework (the closer the policies in the emerging plan to the policies in the Framework, the greater the weight that may be given).”

In relation to a neighbourhood plan, that would imply that the greater the consistency with the strategic policies of the relevant local plan, the greater the weight that could be given.

We need to remember that the essence of our planning system, particularly when considering individual applications for development, requires choices to be made. We should not seek to alter the long-established principle that it is for the decision maker in each case to determine precisely what weight should be attributed to different material considerations. Let us take the concerns expressed by the hon. Member for Bassetlaw and imagine a hypothetical situation in which a local planning authority does not have a local plan with a five-year land supply and is well below that. There is a neighbourhood plan in place that sets out where the community thinks appropriate development should go. A decision maker would then have to look at this.

The presumption in favour of sustainable development would apply because the five-year land supply is not there, so that would be one material consideration. The neighbourhood plan would be a material consideration pointing in the opposite direction, presuming the application was for a site that was not identified in the neighbourhood plan. There may be other material considerations—the views of local people will clearly be one. The site in question may be green belt or prime agricultural land, and there may be policies in the NPPF that would be material considerations. We have to accept that, in the way our planning system works, it is for the decision maker—whether that is a council planning officer, the planning committee of the relevant council, a planning inspector or, in some of the largest applications, a Minister—to look at the different weights to be applied to those material considerations.

Without referencing specific applications, which would not be appropriate, I can tell the Committee that in the three months I have been doing this job, I have had applications where a recommendation has come to me from one of my inspectors saying, “The decision should be x,” and I have taken the contrary view, because the weight that the inspector has given to a particular issue is not the weight that I would give to it. It is important to say that that does not mean that the inspector made a mistake. It is for the different decision makers to weigh the evidence before them, in the same way a judge does in a court of law.

My fear about the amendment is that changing the Bill to require the Secretary of State to set out precisely the weight that should be given to neighbourhood plans in all circumstances would take away some of the vital flexibility that decision makers have. The factors that I have talked about, including how far down the road the plan has gone, and whether there is unanimity that it is a great plan and there are no objections to it—as the hon. Member for Bassetlaw said, real contention can sometimes arise about the policies in a particular plan—have to be judged on a case-by-case basis.

I hope that the hon. Member for City of Durham will withdraw the amendment. The NPPF is very clear that weight can be given to emerging plans, but I do not think that we should be setting out in detail what weight should be attached to each part of the process, with the sole exception of what we have done in clause 1. We know that when a plan has gone through an examination process, those issues have been resolved and somebody has tested conformity with national planning policy and the relevant local plan. There is therefore a much higher degree of confidence at that point in the process.

Roberta Blackman-Woods (Labour, City of Durham)

I have listened to what the Minister has to say, and I am not sure that his comments really addressed the very real concerns expressed both by those putting together neighbourhood plans and by those who might have to abide by them, in terms of the planning applications they wish to make. We can have a discussion about the degree of exactitude we might put into guidance about the weight at different stages of the neighbourhood planning process, but I would have thought that it is perfectly possible for some rough idea to be put into guidance or subsequent regulations so people sitting on a planning committee understand the sort of weight they should attach in certain conditions and how the neighbourhood plan should be weighed against other considerations.

It is clear—there are lots of examples of this from across the country—that many planning committees are unsure how to give weight to a neighbourhood plan if it has not gone through a referendum and been adopted. In fact—I am sure the Minister has heard of many groups that have had this experience—neighbourhood plans are often completely ignored by planning committees, which might not even be aware that a plan has been undertaken in a particular area.

If the Minister does not want to put guidance in place, I urge him to think about how local planning authorities can be a bit clearer about what they can and cannot do with a neighbourhood plan at different stages in the process. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Modification of neighbourhood development order or plan

Roberta Blackman-Woods (Labour, City of Durham)

I beg to move amendment 6, in clause 3, page 2, line 25, at end insert

“after consultation with the local area involved.”

This amendment ensures that any changes to a neighbourhood development order or plan are first subject to consultation with the local area involved.

The amendment seeks to amend proposed new subsection 4A, which states:

“A local planning authority may at any time by order modify a neighbourhood development order they have made if they consider that the modification does not materially affect any planning permission granted by the order.”

The Minister might say that a modification to a neighbourhood development order or plan would not in any circumstances be made without the local community that put the plan or order in place being aware of it. Again, I seek clarity from the Minister. It would help our understanding of what the clause is trying to achieve if he would explain the circumstances in which he thinks a modification would be undertaken by a local planning authority. Does he see any circumstances in which it would wish to make such a modification without having a period of consultation with the local community or at least checking whether they were not unhappy with the proposed modification?

That is an important test of the Government’s commitment to localism, of which there will be a number this afternoon. As we have already mentioned, a lot of people put a great deal of effort and work into producing neighbourhood plans and, indeed, applying for and getting neighbourhood development orders. They would be really concerned if, at some whim of the local authority, their plan or development order could be modified, and indeed they might not know anything about that modification. I have sat in meetings in which people spend an afternoon on a neighbourhood planning forum arguing over the content of one paragraph in the neighbourhood plan to ensure that they get it absolutely right and that it reflects what they think is the consensus of opinion. People could spend a great deal of time putting together an evidence base and then, for some reason that the clause is not entirely clear about, seemingly the plan could be modified without them knowing anything at all about the modification or the reasons underpinning it.

It could be that we are quite wrong about that and that somewhere else it is clear that the local authority must consult and ensure that the local community is on board. While I am talking about the amount of effort that local communities put into getting the plans and orders together, they are also often done at considerable cost in time and resources. Locality makes it clear in its “Neighbourhood Plans Roadmap Guide” that

“There will be costs associated with preparing a neighbourhood plan. Estimates vary widely; from less than ten thousand pounds to several times this amount”.

I certainly know that some have cost in excess of £50,000.

The point is that that is a considerable resource for local communities. Clearly, they will get some of that from the Government’s support for neighbourhood planning forums and neighbourhood plans, but in a number of circumstances they will have had to raise additional sums of money. They would not want to go through the whole process of raising the money and getting their plan in place only to find that, five modifications down the line, some central tenets of the plan no longer hold.

We also know that putting a neighbourhood plan together can take a long time. The average time communities appear to spend is somewhere between 18 and 24 months. I know that the Government are seeking to reduce that time with a process that is much easier and quicker and that this legislation is part of that. Nevertheless, even after the Bill is enacted it is still likely to take communities a considerable amount of time—easily a year—to get all the documentation together and go through the various stages of the process. It will also take a lot of person hours because, as I said earlier, the groups get together and have to do substantial amounts of work in order to get their various assessments and policies together.

We are all committed to neighbourhood planning and to making neighbourhood plans work, and we would not want the clause to worry neighbourhood planning forums or parish councils that, having done all of that work on their plans, carrying out the referendum and getting the plan adopted, it could simply be modified out of existence by the local planning authority. That could perhaps happen because the direction of the local plan changes, or because the authority is thinking about changing it and it does not like what is in the neighbourhood plan.

I am not entirely certain about the circumstances in which the clause would be used, so it would be helpful to hear about that from the Minister. Will he outline the circumstances in which he thinks the provisions in clause 3 will be used, and how extensive he thinks the use of those provisions will be? What assurances can he give to neighbourhood planning forums and parish councils that their neighbourhood plans will not be modified out of existence without them knowing anything about it?

Oliver Colvile (Conservative, Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport)

I declare an interest: I am a shareholder in a small communications company that I set up, coincidentally, with a partner who was a Labour councillor in the London Borough of Enfield. We worked very closely together on a number of planning applications and gave advice to developers on how they could get planning permission, which I have always felt very strongly is about good community consultation. That is listed in my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.

I have spent about 15 or 20 years working on these kinds of issues. I am going to give some examples of where I think, with good community consultation and by involving the local community, we achieved an awful lot. The first is Sainsbury’s in Nine Elms, which is now being developed. We did an enormous amount of public consultation. We were advised by the leader of the Labour-controlled council to talk to the local community, which we did. We had public exhibitions, Planning for Real weekends and everything like that. I am delighted to say that we would have got the application through within six weeks of when it was needed. The only problem was that my client failed to talk to the retailers about their planning application, so it was a story of the property department at Sainsbury’s not talking to the retailers; that was an issue.

The second example, which I was very much involved in, is what is currently known as “Tesco tower”, which is down on Cromwell Road near the M4 out of London. We looked with our client at developing a block of flats on top of it. It got very close at one stage. We even got to the stage of being minded to approve, but the leadership of the local authority decided that they were not happy with it because they had received a lot of concerns from local communities, which ended up stopping it. What then happened was that the director of planning in the Royal Borough, who is now working in my hon. Friend the Minister’s Department, decided that he was going to do a masterplan, in which the local community was going to be very much involved.

In all those issues, the really big story was the massing and the height of developments that were taking place. On the Hoe, which is a conservation area in my constituency of Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport, an application was recently agreed for Pearson House. It did not have the support of the local community at all. It was thought to be too high, the massing was not right and it did not have any land around the outside either. Unfortunately, the council approved it. I argue that it might have ended up setting a precedent for other activities within the conservation area, so this is very important.

My concern about the amendment, if I am honest, is that it might cut across the strategic interest in the rest of the local authority, and I think that needs to be looked at.

Roberta Blackman-Woods (Labour, City of Durham)

The amendment would not prevent the local planning authority from making a modification; it merely suggests that it should consult the community before doing so.

Oliver Colvile (Conservative, Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport)

I shall be interested to hear what the Minister has to say about that. The point I am making is that it is vital that a neighbourhood plan, with all the hard work that people do, reflects what the height and the massing should be.

Gavin Barwell (Conservative, Croydon Central)

As the neighbourhood planning system matures, we need to ensure that it will be suitably flexible to respond to changes in community aspirations. It is now almost five years since the first neighbourhood plans were prepared. As we have heard, well over 200 are now in force and more than 240 have been approved in referendums. We are aware that some of the early pioneers of the system want to update their plans.

Currently, the process for updating a neighbourhood plan is the same as the process for preparing a brand new one, regardless of the scale or significance of the changes proposed. The clause on changing the area that a plan covers, and the clauses that we shall come on to, are designed to address that fundamental problem. The hon. Member for Bassetlaw is nodding. He has lots of plans in his area, so clearly he has some experience of this.

The Government therefore believe that it is important to introduce a more proportionate way of revising plans to ensure that they remain up to date. Clause 3 will achieve that by introducing two new modification processes. I think that the confusion may have arisen—it is possible, at any rate; I cannot read the mind of the hon. Member for City of Durham—because there are two different processes. I will explain them, in the hope that that will provide some reassurance.

First, a process is being introduced to allow a local authority to make minor modifications to a neighbourhood plan or an order at any time, in the same way as an authority can currently correct errors. Clause 3 does that by amending section 61M of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990. On the key point that the hon. Member for City of Durham raised, I can absolutely reassure her that a local planning authority will need the consent of the relevant neighbourhood planning group to make the modification. That is clearly an important point. Her concern was that people would put a lot of work into producing their neighbourhood plans and then councils could modify them in some way without proper consultation. I can reassure her that that would require the consent of the relevant neighbourhood planning group, whether a parish council or a neighbourhood forum.

Secondly, any proposed modification that uses that minor change procedure cannot materially affect any of the policies in the neighbourhood plan or, if we are talking about a neighbourhood development order, the planning permission granted. Although there is no consultation requirement, the local planning authority must publicise what it has done, so people will be aware that the decision has been taken.

That is an important change, because currently even the most minor modifications, such as amending the wording of supporting text to clarify what a policy means, cannot be made without going through the same process to produce a new plan, including holding a referendum, which clearly involves a significant cost at a time when I think we are all aware of the pressures on local authorities. We strongly believe that that is overly burdensome.

However, the clause also provides a means by which more significant modifications may be made to a neighbourhood plan, through a streamlined procedure. It does that by inserting new subsections into sections 38A and 38C of the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004, along with a new schedule A2. The new schedule sets out in more detail the process to be followed in bringing forward draft proposals to modify a plan.

The streamlined procedure has a stronger expectation that the independent examination of the revised proposals, which we have been discussing, will be paper-based, with hearings only in exceptional circumstances. Additionally, there is no referendum. So the examiners’ recommendations will in most cases be binding. We have the minor modification procedure, the completely new plan procedure and an intermediate one, which may be used where the proposed modifications are not so significant or substantial as to change the fundamental nature of the plan but none the less are more than simple, minor modifications.

Crucially, with regard to safeguards, the local planning authority and the independent examiner will need to agree that that is the case in order for a draft plan to proceed through the streamlined procedure. In this case, we are taking powers to regulate the process. We are consulting on that, but I can say to the hon. Member for City of Durham that in the intermediate procedure our intention is that the local authority must publicise what it is doing and consult in the same way that it would for a new neighbourhood plan.

To sum up, in the case of the most minor modifications, it is the Government’s contention that a full consultation of the kind we would have for the streamlined or new plan procedure is not necessary, but there is the safeguard that the relevant body that drew up the plan must give its consent to what is being done. However, if we are looking for more significant changes, although not those that would trigger a new referendum, it is important that there is some consultation.

I hope that I have provided the reassurance that the hon. Lady’s probing amendment was looking for, and that my explanation has been useful in helping Members understand the two procedures and when they would be used.

Roberta Blackman-Woods (Labour, City of Durham)

Having listened to the Minister, I think that the probing amendment did its job effectively. There is now much greater clarity on exactly what the provisions of the clause mean. On the minor modification process, I take the Minister’s point about a simple drafting error that can be corrected easily and perhaps without going out to full consultation, but I would still expect a process for notifying the neighbourhood planning forum or the parish council that the modification has been made or is about to be made.

Gavin Barwell (Conservative, Croydon Central)

It goes further than that. The relevant neighbourhood planning body has to give its consent even for the most minor modifications, and then the wider public are notified.

Roberta Blackman-Woods (Labour, City of Durham)

That is a helpful clarification. In the second set of circumstances, I take the Minister’s point that this is perhaps an intermediate measure in order to allow modifications that are a bit larger to take place and that the community would clearly be involved in that. Given the Minister’s helpful clarifications, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

New Schedule A2 to the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004

Gavin Barwell (Conservative, Croydon Central)

I will not detain the Committee on the schedule, which sets out in detail the process to be followed when proposing to modify a plan. In order to respond to the amendment tabled by the hon. Member for City of Durham, I have described that process already, so I commend the schedule to the Committee.

Roberta Blackman-Woods (Labour, City of Durham)

I fully accept what the Minister says.

Changes to neighbourhood areas etc

Roberta Blackman-Woods (Labour, City of Durham)

I beg to move amendment 7, in clause 4, page 4, line 3, at end insert

“providing the subsequent area is not smaller than a parish or town council area or local authority ward.”

This amendment ensures that the size of a neighbourhood area is not smaller than a parish or town council area or local authority ward.

Roberta Blackman-Woods (Labour, City of Durham)

This is a probing amendment, to test the Government’s thinking, if indeed there is any, on the appropriate size of a neighbourhood area—[Laughter.] Sorry, I did not quite mean that. The clause allows a change to be made to a neighbourhood area and outlines the process for doing that.

Some developers who are concerned about this clause have brought to our attention the question of whether there is a minimum size for a neighbourhood area. The concern raised is about a situation where three streets in a particular area have their own neighbourhood plan, while another three streets next to them have a different neighbourhood plan. Those two plans might not speak to each other or be travelling in the same direction with regard to some of the detail, yet they will both be given sufficient weight.

This is an attempt to tease out from the Minister whether he thinks there is any value in setting a limit, such as a given number of electors. The amendment says that a neighbourhood area should not be smaller than a parish or town council area or local authority ward. I am not particularly tied to the exact wording of the amendment, but we want to find out: if it is not a local authority ward or a parish area, what is it?

Gavin Barwell (Conservative, Croydon Central)

I understand that this is a probing amendment, but are there any examples of existing neighbourhood plans that the Opposition feel cover too small an area?

Roberta Blackman-Woods (Labour, City of Durham)

I am not aware of any. We are trying to ensure that the provisions in this legislation will not lead to neighbourhood areas that are very, very small indeed. Of course the Minister will say, “Well, it’s up to the local authority to decide whether it is an appropriate area,” but the authority might come under particular pressure to agree a specific area or think it is in its interest to promote a very small area, because it will not have so many people to deal with in terms of neighbourhood planning.

We know that the whole of neighbourhood planning legislation leaves it very much up to the community to set the boundaries and to say what brings that neighbourhood together, why they think it is important that the boundaries are set where they are and what the spatial dimension is to the plan. Usually it is very obvious, because they are using village boundaries or some sort of settlement boundary, or there is something that binds that particular community together. They also have to talk, and are usually very good at looking at the community networks and informal networks that might underpin those. The physical characteristics of the neighbourhood will also come into play.

The community will decide whether it is a business area. They will talk about the natural features. There is a huge list of things that the community will look at when putting the initial application together, in terms of determining why the boundaries are really important and what binds the neighbourhood together. That is a very good thing, and I know it has led to some really interesting discussions in communities—I am sure the Minister has seen this—about what is important to them in their neighbourhood and what binds them together. That can facilitate the next stage of development: what they want their community to look like in 15 years and what they need to put into the neighbourhood plan to achieve that.

It seems to us that there is nothing beyond those general characteristics to indicate to a community or neighbourhood that the area should be of a certain size. It may be that we have been lucky to date and no one has brought forward a very small area. I cannot see anything in the Bill that would prevent that from happening. That is why we tabled amendment 7. It is pretty much the same as the others in asking for greater clarity and some reassurance for people who have to deal with neighbour plans and neighbourhood planning forums.

Amendment 8 continues our discussion about modifications and changes not being made without community consultation. In clause 4, the modification is a change to the neighbourhood area. The amendment seeks to ensure that neighbourhood areas are changed only after consultation with the local community and that changes are driven only by what the community, not the local planning authority, wants.

I will not rehearse our earlier arguments about modifications to a neighbourhood plan or a neighbourhood development order, but they apply, and we want a positive and constructive dialogue with the local community should there be a boundary change. We absolutely understand the need for boundary changes. Areas may change and parish council boundaries may be redesignated; there may be a new development resulting in too many people, or there may be lots of new developments requiring a new parish area to be created. All sorts of things may happen that require initial boundaries to be changed.

We are not saying that boundaries have be set in stone and cannot be changed. That would be ridiculous. However, we want an assurance that any boundary changes will be made with the agreement of the community and, critically, that they make sense to the community and all the things that bind them together. We do not want communities to find one day that, having thought they were living in one neighbourhood plan area, the boundary has been changed.

John Mann (Labour, Bassetlaw)

Mr McCabe, I trust it is in order to make comments appropriate to clause stand part, as well as to the amendment.

John Mann (Labour, Bassetlaw)

Thank you, Mr McCabe. That is helpful, because the amendment probes the critical issue—this is not a criticism of the Government—of the real potential for inventiveness for neighbourhood planning in urban areas and occasionally in rural areas. I will give some illustrations. So far, the model has been community orientated and based on existing structures. In my area, we have 22 plans under way. Only two parishes do not have one and I am going to those parishes to encourage them to move down this path quickly.

Parish councils and villages have been beneficiaries from successive Governments. They get more lottery money for village halls and village sports facilities because they are defined areas and it is much easier to make an argument. There is a danger that neighbourhood planning and neighbourhood development plans will reinforce that further. One could argue that the inventive parish councils will, for example, build in areas for future recreational development that might not already exist. That would be a smart move. In other words, the parish council might say, “This piece of land will be for a future playground for children we don’t yet have.”

Without doubt, having got that through, bids for money would be more successful, as one would be part-way through the planning process, even for larger structures that might require detailed planning consent—of course, it could also apply to change of use of land—such as village halls and that kind of facility. We have precisely that situation in Ranskill, a parish in my area, where the community is expanding. It is quite a big village—I am meeting people from there in the next 48 hours—but it does not have a village hall. The people of Ranskill are more than happy to have more housing, if it is in the right place, and to use planning gain to fund what they have long wanted and not managed to achieve. They would see this as rather assisting them, if it goes the right way. Other issues, which we dealt with previously, are clouding that, with developers jumping the gun.

Oliver Colvile (Conservative, Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport)

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

John Mann (Labour, Bassetlaw)

I will, but it might be more helpful if I make a little progress first—the hon. Gentleman could make an even more succinct point later. I will come back to him, but I will first expand on what I am saying about opportunities with two examples.

I will start with a rural example—not an abstract example, but the example of a mountain: Blencathra in the lake district. Plenty of effort is being made to save Blencathra mountain for the nation. There are many byways, roads and properties around Blencathra. In my view, it would make perfect sense, should local people wish it, to designate the mountain and its surrounds as the neighbourhood.

Given the size and nature of mountains, that neighbourhood would probably cross constituency, council and parish boundaries—parishes do not go around mountains, but take segments of them. However, for housing, the amenity, facilities, walking routes and highways, the key determining factor is their relationship to the mountain. That would be the case for many other examples in the lake district. Neighbourhood planning on Blencathra would do something fairly revolutionary, because it would take the whole of the amenity under the democratic control of the people living there, because they are the ones defining things. That would be very powerful indeed.

Secondly, at the priory church in Worksop, working with the Prince’s Foundation for Building Community, I have proposed that the area defined historically by the priory church as its immediate parish—not the current parish boundaries, which are all over the place, because churches like to increase their congregations, but the original boundary—should be the boundary of the neighbourhood plan. That is how we are proceeding. Even better, part of that boundary has been created in more modern times—300 years ago—by the canal, so it is a natural boundary. We have a grand, huge church, once the largest in the world, which defined the buildings around the community, and we now have the ability to reset the church building for the community, the surrounding housing and future housing development. We are also taking the worst bit of the Chesterfield canal and reopening it.

What should be done is fairly obvious. The Prince’s Foundation has done the masterplan, which has been created, and the community is engaged—what the community is interested in are things such as antisocial behaviour, but from a planning point of view that means where pubs are, their opening hours, or where people walk, drive and park. They are very happy for housing to go on brownfield sites—blighted spaces—of which there are two. They would be very happy to have a car park on one of those, which is a former gasworks site, where housing probably could not go. These are all great opportunities.

There is no controversy about that with the population; they are after other things. That is a community of 200 or 300 houses. It is tiny, but its impact on the centre of Worksop and the amenity for tens of thousands of people is huge, because the other part of the community is bounded by what one would describe as the park, although that is not the term we use in Worksop. I would like to turn it into a park and give it more space; indeed, one of the conclusions of the neighbourhood planning might be that we define a proper park boundary.

This is hugely exciting stuff for the residents, who are both tenants and home occupiers. If they are occupiers, their property values will go up, so they will be quite happy. Antisocial behaviour undoubtedly will go down because their quality of life will go up. New housing will be at a premium, because it will be near a canal and a park in a beautiful, well-designed area. Everybody is a winner. It is a classic case of where neighbourhood planning would open up an area in which the local authority has never once proposed housing, because of land ownership and because there has been no minor master planning.

Oliver Colvile (Conservative, Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport)

I am a rather unique Conservative Member, in that I represent a totally inner-city seat outside London, as the hon. Gentleman may know. I only have the Ponderosa pony sanctuary—a rather muddy meadow—in my constituency. Does he not think there is an argument for urban conurbations such as mine to also have their own parish councils? It should not just be left to rural communities.

John Mann (Labour, Bassetlaw)

There is such an argument, but in a small community with 200 or 300 houses, a parish council may be too grandiose. In that example, I would like to see the church managing and leading the development and consultation process, because that is the fixed community entity. I could give other examples in my area where the church building can be redefined as the church at the core of the community, precisely because the building was built as a community venue. Of the great cathedrals, Lincoln would be a great example, but the best of all is St Paul’s. If this was available 30 or 40 years ago, one could imagine that the buildings around the great St Paul’s cathedral would be more in tune with it, as opposed to what has been built haphazardly and chaotically around it. That is where smaller areas could be very empowered. I will give another example [Interruption.] The Whips are always keen to put Members on Committees and then try to restrict important debate.

This is fundamental to the Minister’s thinking and to his civil servants’ thinking. Planning is being seen in terms of housing and structures, with an additional side of highways, which have a major and fundamental role. The Prince’s Foundation work was done by Ben Bolgar, the top person there, and Fred Taggart, who are two brilliant planners—real planners, not just planners for real. They looked at where people historically moved and walked, which is what defines a community.

The walkways and jitties that are a problem could be closed off. That could be specified in a very localised plan: “We don’t want a walkway here. Close that off and get rid of it, because there’s antisocial behaviour. We want people to walk this way, drive that way and park here rather than there.” One gets into real localism, which never in a local plan would be possible. One could not in a local plan specify, “This little jitty will be closed down and we’ll create a walkway here. This bit should be grassed to allow more access to the canal.” That is far too much minutiae.

However, local people are hugely engaged in how that would operate. Those precise, minor details are actually the major details for them because they define their communities. If the price of that is to have to spend time saying, “Also, here’s the kind of housing we would like in the spare spaces that are available; here’s where we don’t want them and here’s where we do,” local people are more than happy to do it. Indeed, they propose more housing than would ever have been proposed before because they can work out the geometry and geography of the local area and the blights that should be resolved.

That is why I appeal to the Minister, in the context of amendment 7, to go more and more small scale and to actually think through how, even with a neighbourhood plan in place in a larger conurbation, it should be logical to take that plan as a basis for micro-ising it for things like walkways and adding further detail, so that people have some control over their communities. When there is planning gain, they can then say to developers, “No, your cycleway will go here because it fits the community,” or, “There will be a cycleway because the community needs it, and you will have a footpath because it suits pensioners and young people and the kids going on their route to school.”

School routes—this is the final thing I will say—ought to be part of the local planning process and could be built in. There is nothing to stop it being built into the neighbourhood planning process. That really would be powerful, and I hope the Minister will be able to demonstrate that he is more than open to that, and that he is fully engaged in thinking through, with his brilliant officials, how this could be best and most quickly done.

Gavin Barwell (Conservative, Croydon Central)

Let me start by saying the hon. Gentleman knows how to push his agenda effectively with officials and with the Minister. I thank the hon. Member for City of Durham for tabling these probing amendments to clause 4. Before I address the amendments I will make some general remarks about clause 4, which aims to ensure that neighbourhood planning is suitably flexible to respond to changes in community aspirations.

Currently, there is complete agreement that it is not possible to modify a neighbourhood area if that would result in a neighbourhood plan or an order covering more than one neighbourhood area or more than one plan in one area. The practical effect of that is that, once a neighbourhood plan is in place, it may not be possible to make a new neighbourhood plan for an amended area without first entirely revoking the existing plan. That would leave that community without the plan it had worked so hard to produce until the new one came into force. Clause 4 amends sections 61F, 61G and 61J of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, and sections 38A, 38B and 38C of the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 to change the procedure for modifying the boundary of a neighbourhood area.

Clause 4 will, for example, allow parish councils that had previously worked together to produce a multi-parish neighbourhood plan to apply for the neighbourhood area to be amended so that they can prepare a plan just for their individual parishes in the future. Equally, it would allow neighbouring forums that had previously prepared their own plans to apply for the area to be amended, so that they could come together to write a plan for both of those areas.

I reassure the hon. Member for City of Durham that I fully understand her concern in relation to both amendments. The Government have considered whether a designated neighbourhood area should follow ward boundaries. We sought views and consulted on that question as part of a technical consultation on our planning reforms in July 2014. The answer to that consultation was, almost unanimously, no, they should not. We, and nearly everybody who responded, believe that it is necessary, first that there is flexibility for communities to ensure that the area plan reflects the aspirations of that community, and secondly that the local planning authority has a positive and constructive dialogue, in order to arrive at a final decision for the area.

I represent a constituency within a London borough. Mr McCabe, you are probably the best example of this: you represent a constituency in the City of Birmingham. I think I am right in saying that your authority has the largest wards of any local authority in England, and some of those wards will cover more than one community. I can certainly think of examples from my own constituency. The hon. Member for Bassetlaw earlier mentioned the Shirley ward. Most of that ward includes an area in which most people would think of themselves as living in Spring Park, but there is also a separate development that used to be a large children’s home run by Lambeth Council—where, sadly, some shocking abuse took place—called Shirley Oaks. That is a separate and distinct community. If the people of Shirley Oaks wanted to produce a neighbourhood plan for their area, we should not be legislating to say that they cannot do that.

The hon. Member for Bassetlaw made his case powerfully from his own experience. So far in this Committee, I find myself agreeing with him on a number of points. If his objective was to stop being appointed to future Bill Committees, he is probably doing very well, but we can tell from the passion with which he speaks that he really believes in what he says. It is great to hear about the number of neighbourhood plans in his area. He has put it on the record that he is on his way to the two remaining parishes that do not have one, and nothing could do more to drive progress than the prospect of his imminent arrival to push the case. He raises a powerful point.

John Mann (Labour, Bassetlaw)

Just a flippant point: the way that we got residents to come to the priory church initial meeting was with a letter from the MP, using parliamentary envelopes and headed paper. That got far more people than a letter from a council would have done.

Gavin Barwell (Conservative, Croydon Central)

I was gently teasing the hon. Gentleman. I wish more Members of this House had done what he has. He has clearly put in a huge amount of work in his constituency to encourage people to take up the reform from the Localism Act 2011. It is fantastic that he has done so and it is great to have him on the Committee as such a powerful champion of the process.

There is a really gritty issue here, which is that when asked, “Where do you live? What community are you part of?” people do not necessarily say what the local council might expect them to. In some cases—for example, if people are part of a village with a distinct identity—the village will be the right unit of identity. However, in urban areas—the hon. Member for Bassetlaw has given some interesting examples of rural areas—there may be other creative ways of thinking and bringing people together.

I very much share the hon. Gentleman’s view, which is that we should not prescribe in legislation the maximum or minimum size of the unit. We should let a thousand flowers bloom and see what people think of the appropriate units. Earlier, I asked the hon. Member for City of Durham for examples of neighbourhood areas that cover too small an area, and I do not think there is any evidence that things are happening at such a micro level as to cause a problem. She is quite rightly probing and asking the questions, but it is clear that the view of the Committee is that we should allow for the current flexibility.

On amendment 8, which is on the consultation arrangements required when a neighbourhood area is changed, I am sure we can all agree that consultation with the wider community is crucial. I assure hon. Members that there is already provision for that to happen where a designated neighbourhood area is amended and a neighbourhood plan is already in force. It is currently the case that where all or part of a neighbourhood area has already been designated, the local planning authority must publish and consult on any modifications to that area for at least six weeks. If the hon. Member for City of Durham would like to add to her reading list, that is in regulation 6(c) of the Neighbourhood Planning (General) Regulations 2012. That should keep her busy this evening. Exactly the same regulations will apply to the new provisions.

The clause will ensure that, as neighbourhood planning continues to mature, the system is suitably flexible to respond to changes in people’s aspirations when it comes to the nature of the geographic area covered by the plan. It will also ensure—the hon. Member for City of Durham was quite right to raise the point—that any proposed changes are properly consulted on, and that the public have the chance to feed into the process. I ask the hon. Lady to withdraw the amendment, and I hope that clause 4 stands part of the Bill.

Roberta Blackman-Woods (Labour, City of Durham)

I have listened carefully to the Minister, and he has given us the reassurances we sought. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Assistance in connection with neighbourhood planning

Roberta Blackman-Woods (Labour, City of Durham)

I beg to move amendment 1, in clause 5, page 4, line 40, leave out “as follows” and insert

“in accordance with subsections (2) to (4)”.

Roberta Blackman-Woods (Labour, City of Durham)

I want to speak to amendments 1 and 2 and the other amendments in the group. I will start with amendment 9, which seeks to ensure that there is full recovery of costs for assisting with the development of the neighbourhood plan, with the costs recovered by the local authority. One thing came through clearly from the evidence the Committee received on Tuesday: many voices were all saying—indeed the Minister acknowledged this—that planning departments are massively under-resourced.

I was keen to table the amendment because we are anxious that neighbourhood planning is properly resourced. That is really important. However, we are mindful of the huge demands placed on our local authorities at the moment, especially at a time of cuts. I hope the Minister feels able to adopt the amendment, or at least that he will make it clear to the Committee how the additional cost of supporting neighbourhood planning forums and parish councils in drawing up their neighbourhood plans will be met.

The Minister will have heard the Royal Town Planning Institute, Local Government Association, Town and Country Planning Association and British Property Federation all point to the fact that, because of the success of neighbourhood plans, there are now greater expectations in our local communities that they will not only be able to draw up neighbourhood plans but have the resources to do so in a meaningful way that allows them to include much of the community and produce a quality document that really reflects what the community wants to achieve. They therefore want it to reflect the high aspirations of the community.

We do not want to see any area being held back because it does not get the resources it needs. The local authority is only able to give a small amount of money to support the exercise, so we want to hear from the Minister a reiteration of what he said in Committee on Tuesday—recognition that resourcing of planning departments is an issue. What can he do to assist local authorities in meeting their obligations under the clause to support neighbourhood plans?

The Minister will know that the situation for planning departments has got so much worse since 2010. More than half think that under-resourcing will present a significant challenge to their ability to undertake their functions in the next year. On Tuesday, Richard Blyth from RTPI told the Committee:

“We have completed a survey of local planning authorities in north-west England that shows that between 2010 and 2015 there was a fall of 37% in planning policy staff. These are the staff who tend to get asked not only to provide the support for neighbourhood plans, but are under a deadline of completing a local plan by the end of March 2017.”

He went on to say:

“I am a bit concerned that legislation is being used in a way that may not be possible to support in terms of the resources available to local planning authorities.”––[Official Report, Neighbourhood Planning Public Bill Committee, 18 October 2016; c. 66, Q118.]

We know the reason for that: it is because many of our councils are facing huge cuts. We heard from Locality, again on Tuesday, that,

“local planning authorities have been stripped of funding and they have reduced huge amounts”––[Official Report, Neighbourhood Planning Public Bill Committee, 18 October 2016; c. 51, Q92.]

of their very highly skilled staff—often losing them to the private sector, which is able to provide them with not only higher salaries but, in the current environment, more secure jobs.

Spending on planning by local authorities has almost halved from £2.2 billion in 2010 to £1.2 billion last year. Given the huge under-resourcing of local planning departments, where does the Minister think planning departments will find the resources to support neighbourhood planning groups and parish councils in drawing up neighbourhood plans? As we have heard, about 200 plans have been approved, but about 2,000 are in process, and I think there will be more. This issue is not just affecting a handful of authorities; it is affecting most local authorities and it is incredibly serious. I hope the Minister can say something this afternoon to give some reassurance, not only to local government that it will get resources from central Government to support neighbourhood planning, but critically, for the communities themselves, so that they will know that they will be properly resourced to draw up neighbourhood plans.

I am going to move on swiftly to amendment 2. We touched on this very important amendment in the Committee’s deliberations this morning. It is about how we ensure that neighbourhood areas, neighbourhood forums and parish councils that are in more disadvantaged areas of the country are able to have the necessary resources to draw up a neighbourhood plan. The amendment seeks to ensure that they are prioritised for financial assistance, so that,

“no less than 50 per cent of the total value of the financial assistance provided under this”

clause

“is provided to deprived”

neighbourhoods.

I did not hear anything in what the Minister said on Tuesday, or indeed this morning, that demonstrated that the Government recognise that, in a time of limited resources, some prioritisation might need to be given to certain areas, in particular where they would find it difficult to raise money themselves. We know from work that has been undertaken so far in evaluating neighbourhood planning—I quote a study carried out by the Centre for Urban Development and Environmental Management at Leeds Met University—that neighbourhood planning appears to be for

“those with most resources and to increase their privileged access to decision-making while excluding still further those groups already marginalised by the uneven development”.

It said that there is an

“uneven spread of plans, and the unequal distribution of the resources needed to help neighbourhoods draw them up”.

This is a really serious issue. If the Government want all areas of the country to have the ability to draw up a neighbourhood plan and have a say in what happens to their areas, we need to see some prioritisation in the system of allocating resources, so that it recognises disadvantaged areas. If the Minister does not wish to go down that route, I suggest that he does need to ensure that there are enough resources available for all areas.

Amendment 10 seeks to tease out whether the Minister thinks local councils will have a development plan in place by next year, and what he thinks he can do, perhaps using this legislation, to require a plan to be put in place. We thought that a reasonable date might be December 2017. I know that the Government have talked about March 2017, but does he have a proposal in mind? Especially given the conversation this morning about the importance of local councils having local plans in place, what is he intending to do? Some Government amendments on local plan-making have been tabled, and it will be interesting to hear whether the Minister thinks that a date is necessary, whether in the Bill or the supporting legislation, so that we can all be confident that those authorities that are being slow in producing a neighbourhood plan get on with the task.

New clause 2 is intended to make some suggestions, if the Minister will allow me, of how he might move some money to neighbourhood planning forums or parish councils: he could give them a share of the new homes bonus or a higher share of the community infrastructure levy. I look forward to hearing what he has to say.

John Mann (Labour, Bassetlaw)

It is not just middle-class areas that have created such plans. The biggest one in my area is for Harworth, which until fairly recently was one of the last working collieries in the country. It has a huge working-class community. Its neighbourhood plan has been adopted by referendum and agreed by the district council, and it involves 1,500 new allocated housing spaces and vast amounts of new land allocated for employment. The community, knowing and demanding what it wants, has got on with it. So it is feasible to do that, and to do it quickly and in all communities.

I have two questions for the Minister. First, the reason why Harworth has been able to create a plan is that it has a part-time town clerk, so it had a bureaucratic system in place. In other areas in my constituency and in neighbouring constituencies, lots of places do not need to be creating bureaucratic structures. The last thing that most of my communities want is more paid public servants who do not live in the area , but would be going in and telling them what to do. All they want is power, so how will we stop bureaucracies building up on the back of neighbourhood planning?

Secondly, and complementary to the first question, instead of simply doling out money, which would suggest employment and other contracts, requiring institutions to deal with that, what are the prospects for the secondment of expertise? I have suggested that the Canal and River Trust could second a planner to assist the process in my area. The ability to second people in with the technical expertise to assist communities, with no pretence that those people are living or staying in the community, would empower neighbourhoods and have a dramatic positive impact, allowing other former mining communities in my area to repeat what Harworth has done.

Oliver Colvile (Conservative, Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport)

May I make one small point to the hon. Gentleman? I have a university in my constituency that has a planning school. Perhaps something to encourage is co-opting some of those students to help people seeking to develop neighbourhood plans.

John Mann (Labour, Bassetlaw)

We would be more than happy to have students and professors from Plymouth, although I suspect Sheffield might be a more realistic scenario, but on exactly the same logic—the hon. Gentleman makes a good point.

I put it to the Minister that secondment rather than cash could rapidly lead to positive results. Those communities are far more likely to say, “We want employment land. We want more housing. We want the petrol stations and supermarkets we do not have.” In my experience, working-class communities are far less nimby than middle-class communities. They want what middle-class communities have taken for granted—albeit they prefer to drive a little distance to get to them—and they will demand them on their doorstep. This is great untapped potential for the country and empowerment is the issue. Does the Minister agree, and how will he help?

Gavin Barwell (Conservative, Croydon Central)

I thank hon. Members for tabling the amendments, which provide an opportunity to discuss the important matters of the advice, assistance and resources available to communities and local planning authorities in supporting their take-up of neighbourhood planning. Before I respond to individual amendments and if you agree, Mr McCabe, I will say a few words about why we are introducing the measures in clause 5.

We believe that the clause will ensure that when communities consider whether to prepare a neighbourhood plan or order, they can make the decision with a full range of advice and assistance available to them. We believe that will assist in building the positive and constructive relationship between a local planning authority and the relevant local authority that is necessary to make neighbourhood planning work.

Amendment 1 simply facilitates amendment 2, which I will consider shortly. I will start with amendment 9, as the hon. Member for City of Durham did. I appreciate the desire to ensure that adequate resources are available to the relevant local council. We believe the amendment is unnecessary because local planning authorities can already claim funding for their duties in relation to neighbourhood planning. We will obviously continue to review the costs incurred by councils in delivering neighbourhood plans and these will change as the take-up of neighbourhood planning increases and local authorities, local communities and others become more familiar with the process.

It is probably worth putting on the record what the current arrangements are. Local authorities receive £5,000 for each of the first five neighbourhood areas they designate and £5,000 for each of the first five neighbourhood forums they designate. They then receive £20,000 for every single neighbourhood plan when a referendum date has been set. The idea is that there is some initial pump-priming for the first five to 10 times they deal with the process, but also a set amount of money because of the costs involved in examination and then in holding a referendum.

The hon. Lady made a wider point about resourcing planning departments and was keen that I reiterate what I said in the evidence session. I am happy to do that. I recognise absolutely that there is an issue. Reflecting back on the evidence that was given to us, I respectfully suggest to her that I did not hear a lot of evidence that the Government were not properly funding the specific burden of organising neighbourhood planning. I heard a lot of evidence that in more general terms planning departments are underfunded and the Government need to look at the level of planning fees being charged.

Roberta Blackman-Woods (Labour, City of Durham)

The Minister is absolutely right, but people made the point about resourcing because of the specific obligation in the Bill for local authorities to support neighbourhood plans.

Gavin Barwell (Conservative, Croydon Central)

I respectfully argue that the sums of money that local councils are having to spend on neighbourhood planning constitute a very small share of their overall planning departments. The fundamental issue, which I absolutely take on board, is the level of fees that planning departments are able to charge to cover their costs. I said during the evidence session—I am happy to repeat it now—that it has struck me during the three months I have been doing this job that whereas on many issues conflicting opinions are expressed to me by different people in the housing and planning world, on this issue there is unanimity. Developers and council planning departments alike say that there is an issue.

John Mann (Labour, Bassetlaw)

There is not unanimity everywhere because land prices and build prices are dramatically different in different parts of the country. We see that even more starkly with prefabricated housing. The proportionate cost for someone who sells a house for £600,000 in London, which would be a tiny one, or £600,000 in an area like mine, which would be rather a large house, is very different. There is a danger that if the planning fees for cheap, affordable housing are too high, that will discourage self-build and small developers.

Gavin Barwell (Conservative, Croydon Central)

We can always rely on the hon. Gentleman to shatter unanimity when it is in danger of breaking out. He makes a fair point. The cost of building, say, five new homes in his constituency will be lower than the cost of building five new homes in the City of Westminster. He is quite right to sound the alarm that we should not allow fees to go too high, but I suspect that if I spoke even to developers and the planning department in his own patch, they would say there is still an issue in terms of financing.

The hon. Gentleman did not say this, but the point is relevant. We tend to hear from developers, and we have to bear in mind that these fees are also paid by householders when they make applications to extend their properties or something like that. The voices we tend to hear are those of the large developers, but these fees are paid by others. None the less, the hon. Lady asked me to reiterate that I accept there is a problem, and I absolutely do. The Government have consulted on this issue, and the White Paper will contain our response. I think I have given a pretty good steer as to where I want to go.

I want to make a slightly partisan but important point. While I entirely accept the pressures that planning departments and, indeed, councils in general are under, it is important to note that despite the difficult period they have been through, they have had huge successes in driving up performance. I will give the Committee some figures. When the coalition Government came to power, 17% of councils had a local plan. As of this September, the figure was 72%. In the second quarter of this year, in the most recent figures available, 83% of major planning applications were decided within the time limit, which is the highest ever performance on record. In the year up to 30 June, our planning system gave planning permission for 277,000 homes. That is the highest ever figure on record.

I pay tribute to local authority planning departments. Despite the financial restrictions they have been under, they have raised their game significantly. I gently tease the Labour leader of my local council about this, because he flip-flops between press releases saying that the Government have financially crippled him and ones that boast about how well the council is performing. While I do not in any way underestimate the difficulties local councils have had, when this period is looked back on, it will be seen as one where public services have raised their game, despite the restrictions on resources.

John Mann (Labour, Bassetlaw)

rose—

Gavin Barwell (Conservative, Croydon Central)

I have goaded the hon. Gentleman, so I have to allow him to intervene.

John Mann (Labour, Bassetlaw)

The Minister cannot get away with that, because we all know that technology and the Planning Portal have totally transformed the speed of planning, very effectively. It is technology and the portal that have done this, not the Government. We do not care, but they should not take credit for things that they have not done.

Gavin Barwell (Conservative, Croydon Central)

It is a range of things. Technology certainly plays a part. I also observe that the designation regime introduced by the coalition Government has played a part. I do not want to go on too long, because this is not directly relevant to the point we are considering. However, I genuinely believe that when we look back on this period—this is not all down to the Government, if that makes it easier for the hon. Gentleman to accept—we will say that despite the financial restrictions public services were under, public servants have done an amazing job of improving the services they provide. That is the point I wanted to make.

I welcome the intent of amendment 2, but I cannot agree that it is necessary. I hope I can reassure Committee members that even in these times of tight public finances, we are supporting neighbourhood planning groups. We have made £22.5 million available to do that. More than 1,500 payments have been made to date. Since 1 April this year, all groups can apply for a grant of up to £9,000. We are providing additional support to priority areas, which include more deprived areas and those with the highest housing growth. Communities that fall within those priority groups can apply for up to £15,000 and can also access technical planning support.

I agree with the hon. Member for Bassetlaw—this is becoming a worrying trend for both of us—that this is not just about money. It is also about having good advice and assistance. We have a national network at the moment of 132 neighbourhood planning champions, who are there to provide exactly that kind of advice and assistance. While I understand what the amendment is trying to do, which is quite rightly to say that thus far neighbourhood planning has been adopted mainly in more rural parts of the country and that we need to ensure that it is also well used in urban and more deprived and more transient communities—there is no argument there—I am not sure whether saying 50% of the money has to go to such areas is right, because by definition it is a demand-led budget.

I want to encourage people from all around the country to set up groups and ensure that funding is there to support them. If it helps the hon. Member for City of Durham, I assure her that if we ever get to a point where the budget is running out because there are so many applications, I will be the first person knocking on the Treasury’s door to ensure that there is extra support. However, I think if we passed a law to say that 50% must go to these places and 50% to those, we could run the risk that some people would run out of money when the other pot had not been used. That does not seem to be a logical way to deal with the issue.

I completely understand the aspiration behind amendment 10. We agree that in order to provide clarity to neighbourhood planning groups about the context within which they prepare their plans all areas should have a local plan. In the evidence session and on numerous other occasions I have spoken strongly about the importance I attach to having local plans in place. If the Committee will permit me for a minute, let me reiterate the main point. The planning applications that tend to come across my desk are nearly all speculative applications where essentially the local planning authority has not had a local plan in place with a five-year land supply. Developers have then come in and picked the sites that they want to build on—those are not the aspirations of the local community but where the developers want to see development go—and things escalate and end up on my desk. I want to remove all that unnecessary conflict from our planning system and the way to do that is to ensure that we have complete coverage in place.

I appreciate that again this is a probing amendment so I will not be too critical, but, rather than accepting an amendment that asserts that something should happen by this timescale, we have tabled a series of amendments that seek to advance that agenda. I also want to make plan making much quicker and make it much easier for planning authorities to update their plans.

The hon. Member for Bassetlaw has previously spoken about—he mentioned it today—his frustration at the delay when the coalition Government changed the national planning framework. Actually, I think we were quite right to do that because we needed to ensure that when one council does not meet its housing need, those houses do not disappear from the system but are spread out in surrounding authorities. He is, however, quite right to say that because the process is so slow at the moment, that imposes a big delay when that happens. Therefore it is important both to make sure that we have plans in place and try to make the process quicker so that when they need updating—because either Government policy changes or the facts on the ground change—that can be done much more quickly.

I do not want to labour the point, because I know the amendment is a probing one, but its wording mentions just having a plan in place. We would all probably agree that we actually need an up-to-date plan that takes account of the latest household projections and an accurate assessment of housing needs. A lot of authorities currently have a plan, but not a plan that is based in any way on the latest information about what the area requires. I hope that I have reassured the hon. Member for City of Durham on the underlying issue, even if we disagree on the amendment.

Finally, I turn to the interesting issue in new clause 2, which I am grateful to the hon. Lady for raising. We are looking at the matter in general terms at the moment. We have always been clear that we would like to see the new homes bonus benefiting communities that support development, such as those that produce neighbourhood plans, and we strongly encourage local authorities to allocate funding from the new homes bonus in that way. Indeed, it is already possible for councils and areas where a neighbourhood plan is in place to reach agreement in exactly the way she suggests in her new clause.

With regard to the second part of the new clause and the community infrastructure levy, communities where a neighbourhood plan or order is in force receive 25% of the CIL arising from development in their area, whereas the figure for communities without a neighbourhood plan is only 15%, so there is already a key incentive. Three questions are posed by the new clause. First, should we actually legislate to require something similar in relation to the new homes bonus? Secondly, should we raise those percentages in relation to CIL? Thirdly, should we force everybody to have a CIL? I will take those in turn.

On the first question, that is an interesting idea. I hope that the hon. Lady will allow me to reflect on that some more in the White Paper. The Prime Minister is very interested in ensuring that communities that go for growth are properly rewarded, so that people feel that if their community accepts more housing, their quality of life improves, rather than them finding it harder to get a GP appointment or to get a child into the local school, or finding their train more overcrowded. I am not sure that we should legislate in the way she suggests, but I am very interested in the underlying grain of the idea.

On CIL percentages, there is a balance that we need to be wary of. We can take Bassetlaw as an example of a particular area with a local plan and think about what we want to do with the money that the state captures out of land uplift. We certainly want to do things in that local community, but we might also need to make sure that major bits of infrastructure across the district happen. If we put too much into one local area, we will lose the money that might pay for the new junction on the dual carriageway, or a spur off the main roundabout, or whatever the right project is. There is a tension that we need to recognise.

We probably also need to recognise that it is not necessarily in the interests of every single local authority to have a community infrastructure levy. One could at least think of circumstances in which land values were sufficiently low and development therefore marginal in terms of viability. Introducing a CIL might then push crucial regeneration projects, which would otherwise have been viable, and make them non-viable. I am not sure that forcing every local council to introduce a CIL, if they judge that to do so would not be in the best interests of their area, is the right thing to do.

In summary, the hon. Lady is quite right to raise all those questions. They are at the heart of the debate about what we need to do to ensure that communities are incentivised to go for growth, but I hope that I have pointed out some of the points of detail as to why we do not want to accept the amendment.

Roberta Blackman-Woods (Labour, City of Durham)

I have heard what the Minister has said, and we obviously look forward to seeing what he has to say in the White Paper about resourcing planning departments. We will closely monitor the budget for neighbourhood planning to ensure that it goes to all areas that need it. I look forward to seeing what he comes back with regarding the new homes bonus and CIL. It is important that he keeps what is happening with deprived areas on his agenda, so that everything is done to support their bringing forward a neighbourhood plan. On that basis, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Roberta Blackman-Woods (Labour, City of Durham)

I beg to move amendment 13, in clause 5, page 5, line 6, at end insert—

“(2BA) Such statements of community involvement must include a right for members of the community to be heard.”

This amendment would give local people and communities a statutory right to be heard.

Roberta Blackman-Woods (Labour, City of Durham)

The amendment is straightforward. We all know that the National Association of Local Councils has been calling for this for some time. It said in evidence:

“We are calling for a right to be heard, or a right of appeal, so that where decisions are taken contrary to a neighbourhood plan and a local plan, people may have some reference to the Secretary of State or Minister to take a final view”.––[Official Report, Neighbourhood Planning Public Bill Committee, 18 October 2016; c. 44, Q73.]

That, in essence, is what the amendment asks for. I will be interested to hear what the Minister has to say.

Amendment 14 seeks to make it easier for a community to set up a local parish council. We know that areas that have a parish council are much more likely to bring forward a neighbourhood plan. One way of facilitating neighbourhood plans is to ensure that it is easier to bring forward parish councils. I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say.

Gavin Barwell (Conservative, Croydon Central)

Amendment 13 raises some interesting questions. Communities already have a right to be heard in the planning system in lots of ways. I can run through some of them. Local people have the chance to have their say as local plans and neighbourhood plans are developed, when individual planning applications come forward and if a planning application is turned down and there is an appeal, and they can call for applications to be called in by Ministers. I think that the amendment is probing, because its wording is generic and does not define what the right to be heard is, although I guess that is essentially what the hon. Lady was referring to.

The Government’s view is that there is no need to change the law in this regard. Most of the concerns of the NALC and others—the hon. Member for Bassetlaw has expressed them powerfully—are partially addressed by clause 1, and the policy changes in the White Paper that we want to make will also help significantly in that regard. The other powers talked about here—for example, the power to ask me to call applications in—already exist. I am reluctant to use those powers too frequently, because my starting point is that the planning system should be locally driven. However, if there are planning applications that I think raise issues of national importance about the way national policy is playing out on the ground, I am happy to call them in. In the three months that I have been doing this job, I have called in a couple of applications where I felt a decision had been taken that was contrary to a neighbourhood plan and I wanted to look at the issues myself. I think that the fundamental issues that the amendment probes are already in the system or will be addressed by the policy changes in the White Paper.

Amendment 14 was the amendment that most interested me. I do not agree with putting it into law, but I agree with the fundamental idea behind it. I think that the hon. Member for City of Durham is saying that we may want to tell people in a statement of community involvement how to go about setting up a parish council, because that is clearly one of the ways in which they could drive a neighbourhood plan. If I was writing a statement of community involvement, I would absolutely think it appropriate to put that in it, but I am not sure that we want to get into the business of writing into statute what the content of statements of community involvement should be. Indeed, when we come to clause 6, I will address why the Government do not want to get into the business of saying what is a good or bad statement of community involvement. We have to trust local councils to set that information out. If the hon. Lady is reassured by me saying that that is the kind of information that I would expect to see in such statements, I am happy to put that on the record.

Roberta Blackman-Woods (Labour, City of Durham)

Yes, I did find that reassuring. With amendment 14, we were seeking to ensure that communities knew how to set up a parish council and that that process was made as easy as possible. On that basis, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Written evidence reported to the House