Town and Country Planning (General Permitted Development) (England) (Amendment) (No. 2) Order 2020

Town and Country Planning (General Permitted Development) (England) (Amendment) (No. 3) Order 2020

Town and Country Planning (Use Classes) (Amendment) (England) Regulations 2020

Town and Country Planning (Use Classes) (Amendment) (England) (No. 2) Regulations 2020

Town and Country Planning (Use Classes) (Amendment) (England) (No. 3) Regulations 2020

Motion to Regret

Moved by

That this House regrets that the Town and Country Planning (General Permitted Development) (England) (Amendment) (No. 2) Order 2020 (SI 2020/755), the Town and Country Planning (General Permitted Development) (England) (Amendment) (No. 3) Order 2020 (SI 2020/756), the Town and Country Planning (Use Classes) (Amendment) (England) Regulations 2020 (SI 2020/757), the Town and Country Planning (Use Classes) (Amendment) (England) (No. 2) Regulations 2020 (SI 2020/859), and the Town and Country Planning (Use Classes) (Amendment) (England) (No. 3) Regulations 2020 (SI 2020/895) laid before the House on 21 July were made as delegated legislation because it would have been more appropriate to have brought forward such substantial and wide-ranging changes to the planning system in primary legislation.

My Lords, I have two interconnected reasons for tabling this debate today: first, to examine the significance of the measures in these regulations, and, secondly, to scrutinise the parliamentary procedures used to introduce them. I look forward to the debate and particularly to the two maiden speeches that we will hear today.

The pieces of legislation that we are debating today were introduced using the weakest form of parliamentary scrutiny available—the negative procedure—and yet these measures, now laws, have a significant impact on planning policy in England. If they are indeed significant, and I maintain that they are, they have avoided the proper scrutiny that Parliament is supposed to provide to ensure they provide the best outcomes possible. The role of Parliament is to assess, amend and correct the laws of our land, and to ensure that the impact of any changes is fully understood. The negative procedure that brought these measures into law means that unless a Member prays against them within 40 days of their being laid, they will automatically enter into law. However, it is primarily a procedure meant for routine and non-controversial matters—the least form of scrutiny for the least controversial matters.

The policy issues in these orders have the effect of reducing the level of scrutiny that local people and their local councils have on a range of planning applications. This in turn raises concerns about the ability of local authorities to deal adequately with the needs of their local communities. The policy changes include making it easier to demolish vacant buildings to create new homes, with reduced scrutiny of the quality of new housing, and changing the use of certain properties—for example, changing the use of a building from an office to a restaurant, including a fast food restaurant—without the need for full planning permission.

These new laws also permit the building of additional storeys on houses and flats, with very limited ability for the local council to intervene. Of particular concern is that these additional storey regulations came in two batches, the second of which is before us today. Amazingly, the regulations on the charges to be applied for making these additional storey planning applications came to the House by the affirmative procedure, thereby guaranteeing a debate in the House, whereas the policy changes themselves on additional storeys on properties were brought in by the negative procedure. Therefore, the only way of getting a debate on these and the other planning changes, and the only way of having it discussed by the House, was to put down a take-note or regret Motion, of the kind we are using today.

My Lords, it is a great pleasure and privilege to speak in your Lordships’ House for the first time and to follow the very passionate speech by the noble Lord, Lord German. I am immensely grateful for the warm welcome I have received from all sides of this House. The support from Black Rod, the Clerk of the Parliaments, attendants and other staff has also been greatly appreciated. I am especially grateful to my noble friends Lord Hendy and Lord Haskel for introducing me to this great House, and to my noble friends Lady Crawley and Lord Kennedy of Southwark for mentoring me.

A special year in my life was 1966. It was then that I arrived in England with my family to join my father, who had already come here a few years earlier. Regrettably, my full-time education ended in 1968, when I left school with no qualifications of any kind. After that, I worked full-time and studied part-time to acquire GCE O-levels and A-levels, professional accounting qualifications, an MSc in accounting and finance, a PhD in accounting and a BA in social sciences. Along the way, I worked as an accountant for some of the largest corporations in this country. I subsequently held professorships in accounting, or accounting and finance, at the University of East London, the University of Essex and the University of Sheffield. I published research in scholarly journals on matters such as accounting, auditing, corporate governance, insolvency, globalisation, tax avoidance, bribery and corruption, and my research received recognition from the British Academy and the US Academy.

Over the years, I have given evidence to many parliamentary committees in the UK and the European Union, and advised them as well. Most recently, I advised the House of Commons Work and Pensions Committee on its investigations into the collapse of BHS and Carillion. My research has often focused on what I call the dark side of capitalism. For example, the UK has the highest number of qualified accountants per capita in the world, but this huge social investment has not really given us good corporate governance, reliable financial reports or even honest audits.

My Lords, I am honoured to follow the excellent maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Sikka. He has had an acknowledged academic career, during which he has relentlessly shone a clear spotlight on the self-interested behaviour of various corporations that are acting against the public interest. He has shown how they have often been unchecked by the accountants and the banks—truly, as he said, the dark side of capitalism. His lifetime of working for justice in the taxation and accountancy fields will be of great value to your Lordships’ House, and I look forward to working with him.

I also welcome the opportunity that the noble Lord, Lord German, has grasped in bringing forward his concerns. These statutory instruments reveal how the Government have become excessively fixated on housing delivery in their approach to the planning system, almost to the exclusion of all other issues. According to a government response to a Parliamentary Question, these instruments are aimed at reducing planning bureaucracy and speeding up housing development. Now everyone in this House recognises the need to build more houses of good quality in the right place, and which are, above all, affordable; but we also know that laying the blame for lack of housing delivery at the feet of the planning system is a wrong premise. There are already over 1 million houses that have been granted planning approval which have not yet been built and will not be built for many years, as developers build out sites sparingly to avoid reducing housing prices locally—the exact opposite of what the Government are trying to achieve.

These statutory instruments are also harbingers of the sort of stripping down of the planning system that the Government’s overall planning reforms, which are currently out for consultation, will bring. Those proposals will considerably reduce the say of local people over what gets built and where in their local area. The planning system used to be one of the few forms of genuine democracy in this country, balancing competing local development needs and making decisions locally. But local authority planning departments have been hollowed out, denuded of specialists and hounded by an unholy alliance of government and housebuilders to give in to any housing development that will help them meet the government-imposed housebuilding targets.

My Lords, it is a tremendous honour to be able to contribute to this important debate, and to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Young. I add my congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, on his excellent maiden speech.

I will start by thanking all those—both Members and staff of this House—who have been so kind with their time and generous in welcoming me to this place. In particular, I thank my two introducers, my noble friend Lord Arbuthnot, who 15 years ago took me under his wing when he was chair of the Defence Select Committee and I a new Member, and my noble friend Lord Randall. I must say that ours was a slightly less cordial first meeting when I was a very junior Member of Parliament and he a very senior Whip. After what, frankly, could only be described as a good dinner with fellow new MPs, I found myself coerced into being a rebel Teller on the Crossrail Bill, which was something of a surprise to the Whips. We all know that Whips do not like surprises but, to my noble friend’s credit, his only concern was not that I was rebelling but that I knew what I was doing and did not make a fool of myself in the Chamber of the House of Commons—and we have been firm friends ever since. It was fun, but government Whips can rest easy; I might wait a couple of weeks before trying the same thing here.

I confess that I was rather hoping to be able to give my maiden speech on 5 November. Fifteen years ago—exactly 400 years after the Gunpowder Plot—I became the first fireworks manufacturer to be elected to Parliament. My family firm, sadly now sold, was founded by my father, the Reverend Lancaster—to some an eccentric cleric, to me my dad, and to the industry affectionately known as the “Master Blaster Pastor”. Noble Lords will have seen his fireworks at the Hong Kong handover, the London Olympics and, for many years, on New Year’s Eve here on the river. Alas, my date of 5 November was not to be. It appears that my arrival in this place has caused such concern that we may not be sitting next Friday, for fear that I will attempt to repeat the events of 1605.

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, on his excellent maiden speech. I am sure we look forward to many such contributions in future.

I also congratulate my noble friend Lord Lancaster of Kimbolton on his fine maiden speech. We entered the House of Commons together 15 years ago. He served for far longer than I did as a Minister and, as he reminded us, was and is a serving officer in the Army. His bomb disposal experience is a talent that may well be deployed in the Whips’ Office; I am sure they will be in touch with him shortly. At the tender age of 50, he is one of the younger Members of your Lordships’ House. His achievements are indeed so great that I am reminded of Gore Vidal’s much-quoted statement that

“Whenever a friend succeeds”

in politics,

“a little something in me dies.”

I must say to my noble friend that that was not the case in relation to his excellent speech.

On the legislation, I want to make two simple points. First, irrespective of the process issues raised by the noble Lord, Lord German, I believe it is a good thing in principle that government policy is focused on encouraging and facilitating development on brownfield sites, so that it is as easy and rapid as possible; otherwise, we face very difficult choices regarding the development of greenfield sites. One can imagine that the Covid epidemic will result in considerable changes in the use of buildings. That particular permitted development has led to the creation of tens of thousands of homes.

Process apart, the use of these orders has given rise to two concerns, the first of which is design quality. I urge the Minister and the Government to have regard to good design in how these permitted development orders are applied, because it is the absence of good design that has driven down public support for development generally.

I am delighted to be sharing the Chamber today with our two new Members, who are clearly going to bring to it the considerable expertise for which we are known and renowned—but, I expect, from very different perspectives.

My noble friend Lord German was right to table his Motion as it seems there is much disquiet about these and previous SIs, as well as the proposals in the Government’s current White Paper. Our concern is that taken together these constitute, in the words of a government Minister, the most significant changes to the planning system in 20 years and, in the words of another, a complete overhaul of the planning system. Thus, we feel there has not been sufficient consultation, or opportunities to really know and understand the cumulative impact of the Government’s legislative changes.

I too question the premise on which the current policy direction appears to be based: that the underdelivery of homes is largely the fault of the planning system. It has been mentioned many times in this Chamber that 90% of permissions are actually granted and that close to a million permissions have still not been built out. I wonder if there is something in the Government’s new proposal to take care of that, but I do not believe there is. The Letwin report also made it clear that the financial model on which the construction industry is based is far more significant in affecting the actual delivery of homes. I hope that we can have another debate on this issue, as in my experience it is a very complex one and government agencies also play their part in planning delays.

Permitted development rights were rightly introduced to reduce bureaucracy in specific and clearly understood circumstances, but these SIs drive a coach and horses through the normal system of judging and determining a proposed development. Together, the changes represent a significant shift in control away from local authorities and the communities they represent towards a significantly less regulated environment. I believe that nationally prescribed development rights disempower communities and local councils. Is it too cynical of me to suggest that that is the intention?