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.