Councillor Adam Hug, Councillor Richard Clewer and Councillor Richard Wright gave evidence.

We will now hear evidence from Councillor Adam Hug, chair of the Local Government Association’s local infrastructure and net zero board, and leader of Westminster city council; Councillor Richard Clewer, leader of Wiltshire council and housing and planning spokesperson for the County Councils Network; and Councillor Richard Wright, leader of North Kesteven district council, and planning lead for the District Councils’ Network. We have until 4.25 pm for this session.

Thank you, Councillors, for being here. I put on record that many Committee members are former or still serving councillors.

Including the Chair.

Q Despite some of our earlier witnesses’ words about the democratic mandate of councillors, I respect what you do, so thank you very much.

I will ask two mainstream questions: first, around some of the Government’s wider reforms, which in some cases the Opposition welcome, particularly around local government reform and the advent of new mayoralties—combined authority mayoralties. Do you think that undertaking a huge amount of work in terms of planning reform should come before we have seen the advancement of the reforms under local government reorganisation and mayoralties? In any area in the legislation, are you concerned that some of the intended consequences of the planning reforms will not be able to be delivered as they should, because we do not have the reforms to local government, which will fundamentally impact outcomes in the longer term?

Councillor Hug:

Obviously, the Government are trying to do multiple things at once—that is the case for all Governments at all times on all things; the world does not stand still. The challenge for this piece of legislation, and everything else, is to try to build in the scope to evolve once the overall picture of local government reform is complete. There is quite some way to go on that in different parts of the country. I am speaking from a part of the country that is not currently in that round of discussions yet.

At the heart of it, the local plan has an important role, which we want to make sure is there in any new strategic set-up that is created, and that local councillors have a say. We want to make sure that, whatever core tier there is of local government, it has the ability to work with the new strategic mayoral authority in a collaborative and productive way so that both tiers are working in a partnership, which clearly recognises that the new role has been brought in by the Government and the importance of local councillors and local communities, which understand how to meet some of those strategic objectives in an effective way at a local level. It is about making sure that we are looking to build a partnership approach through any local government reform, and looking at how that then impacts on the planning agenda.

Q Thank you, Councillor Hug—I know that, as leader of Westminster, you have been through your reform many years ago, in terms of the accountability reforms with the advance of the Greater London Authority. I am particularly interested in the views of the district councils and county councils on where we are now in potentially going through some reform in LGR. Are you worried about some of the outcomes of the legislation while we have not got the reforms through yet in LGR?

Councillor Wright:

Yes, completely. You always live in hope. I have sat on planning for 18 years, before any Committee members want to have a go at planning.

It is your fault then.

Councillor Wright:

I have lived in hope that we get clarity on purpose and policy. At the moment, we have far too many policies all coming through at the same time. For instance, the conflict between LGR spatial development plans—it is chicken and egg, and seems to have come at the wrong time.

I have spent the last few months explaining to residents that, because of the huge conflagration of policies at the moment, we have policies that we do not think will achieve what they should. For instance, I refer to the 1.5 million permissions that will be put in place because there is not a single tool in anything we have seen so far that will compel builders to build. We have that on one side, and now we are having to explain to people that, alongside that, they will no longer have a voice in the planning system if some of these policies go through.

This has all been swallowed up. Perhaps the attention of some people in the local authority could rightly be on local government reform and devolution when, really, we need to see this in the round. There are so many policies coming through—conflicting policies and policies that we think are only part-finished. Some of them could achieve a lot of what we want to see and do, and what our residents want to see, but at the moment it is such a hodgepodge that it is very difficult to follow and to see where the concentration needs to be.

Councillor Clewer:

From the county’s point of view, I think you are raising some valid points. Having been through unitarisation, it is extremely disruptive. You are placing an awful lot on districts and counties that are going through that and creating new authorities to then make them look at planning reform of this level of significance. Planning was one of the hardest areas to get into the new unitaries. We still struggle with it 16 years on. It has proved really challenging because of the local, granular impact that planning has.

If you then want to look at the issue around the spatial plans, when some of us do not have mayors, or even mayoral geographies, I have no idea how we are meant to be talking with equal voices to create spatial delivery plans when we have that hodgepodge. At the very least, we have to know our mayoral geographies to be able to make any headway in coming up with a meaningful plan. Honestly, without the mayors, and the authority, funding and the voice to central Government that comes with them, it will put everyone else at risk. That really concerns me. It creates the ability for mayors, perhaps in metropolitan areas, to push development into more rural areas when the rural areas do not have the voice and the same ability to express their challenges and concerns. You need the granularity to understand the impact of planning on the local level.

Q I come from the school of thought that local authorities generally and genuinely try to do the right things for their local residents and start with trying to deliver change. Looking at the Minister’s new clause 44—

“Applications for development consent: removal of certain pre-application requirements”— could you each, within the remits that you have, outline your concerns around removing some of the pre-application requirements, and what the impact might be on your workforce, which is trying to determine what is and is not right for your areas? Do you accept the premise of removing certain pre-application requirements to speed up planning processes?

Councillor Hug:

Are you referring to new clause 44, not clause 44?

Yes.

Nationally significant infrastructure projects, which I do not think you have chosen to talk about.

Councillor Hug:

No—they are coming through very quickly. From a local authority perspective, I think the point is making sure that, if they are not formal consultees, there is some other mechanism for local authorities and others to feed into the process in a structured way to make sure that their voices are heard, even if formal statutory consultees are being reformed.

We are removing statutory consultees.

Councillor Clewer:

There is significant concern about that removal. That process is how you identify some of the specific issues on the ground that need significant further investigation. I do not think you will save any time by removing that, because the investigation will turn up at the planning stage. You will just delay planning, because these will be areas around statutory consultees. What it will do is give the public the impression that things are just being rubber stamped and railroaded through. That will be catastrophic. NSIPs are such contested spaces already. We have to give people the chance to raise concerns to identify issues on the ground at local level that need further work and further attention. If we do not do that, people will lose all faith in that process, and they are already sceptical enough.

Councillor Wright:

I have the same concerns. NSIPs are decided by the Secretary of State. I have five in my district at the moment, including battery farms, solar farms and a reservoir. It is not about objection—consultation can bring forth some really good ideas, some solutions and some changes. It is massively important. For instance, even if there will be an impact on your community, the community benefit could be discussed right at the start. All sorts of improvements could be put in place through consultation before it gets to the formal stage. It is also about the appearance of removing that consultation. At a time when LGR devolution is meant to be bringing decentralisation, to just say that this is all going to be decided centrally is not a good picture.

Q Could I ask you about the reforms in the Bill relating to planning decisions, and specifically our intention to take powers to introduce a national scheme of delegation? How do you think that could be best designed? What are the types of applications that you think should always be taken by planning committees, and which types of applications could be appropriately delegated to expert planning officers?

Councillor Wright:

For a start, the vast majority of planning permissions or planning applications are already decided by officers anyway in many councils—something like 97% in my authority were decided—so what exactly do you think we are now going to pass when under more pressure?

Q We heard earlier from the RTPI about the variation in the quality and effectiveness of schemes of delegation at a local level.

Councillor Wright:

With regard to a national scheme, if it was advisory not mandatory—if there was some general advice out there that could be given as guidance —that would be better than mandating. What could be mandated for one area, when you look at super-urban areas compared with rural areas, might not be exactly the same sort of decision making that you are looking for.

Q The Bill will mandate it, so I am asking you what you think is the most effective design for the national scheme of delegation that we intend to introduce. It is perfectly fine if you do not want it, but I am trying to get to that, given that we are intending to introduce it.

Councillor Hug:

I think there should be a common core. I am not quite sure how the mayoralties and others will feed into responding to particular issues around the urban and rural geographies. I think there should be a basic common core to this. Looking at how it might operate, again, I am coming from an authority that has only 3% going to committees—all told, it is about 1.4%, if you include all the advertising and listed building concerns that get through. A very small amount go through, so there is a lot of good practice happening already.

In terms of how that works, one of the things that we want to ensure that we do not lose is the ability, for example if a scheme is likely to be rejected by officers, to put that to a committee that might come to a more pragmatic decision than just a rigid response based on policy. There are some other things, such as we want to ensure that there are opportunities for councils to go beyond the scheme of delegations; if there was a nationally set thing, you want to make sure that it is not just a cap on what is delegated.

I think that some flexibility around urban and rural, and working with local authorities about the design of the specific scheme, would be good. It is clear that they will want as much guidance as possible about the types of things that the Government are wanting to see happen. Obviously, from our perspective we understand the point about the centrality of getting the local plans and making them as robust as possible to give people clarity about what goes on in future.

The challenge comes when quite a lot of schemes come forward that are not in full compliance with policy, because the real world is messy and things have to be traded off against each other. The question is basically to what extent can those trade-offs be dealt with at office level versus at committee. That is why we want to get into the details of that with you, to make it work effectively.

Q I should say that we are formally consulting about this matter alongside the Bill, but it is useful to draw out what you think in design terms.

Councillor Clewer:

I have a couple of points to add. There are elements in what you are proposing that I would welcome. On mandatory training, goodness knows why we do not have that already—it is desperately needed. I am not sure that Richard would entirely agree, but when it comes to local plan allocated sites, I struggle with the idea that they could come to committee to then be refused. I think there is a benefit in committees or someone looking at elements of design and whether 106s are being carried out appropriately, but once something has gone through a local plan, I think we have to be careful about where committees step in.

To give an example of where I think you have to be incredibly careful with this, I took a planning application to committee last week for a listed building where someone wanted to cut and raise a beam by 10 inches. They had had a stroke, and they were in a position where they were literally having to live in a conservatory. Officers had said no. I got that application to a committee so that the beam could be raised to allow a stairlift to go in—when the person leaves the beam could be lowered—and the committee almost unanimously approved it.

We had the ability at an incredibly basic level to give someone the dignity of being able to get to their bathroom through a planning system where the harm was conceived by everyone as minimal. We cannot lose that ability to resolve those local and micro issues in a really local way. Finding the balance there is going to be challenging. Too much permitted development, too many automatics, will prevent us from being able to do that. I am sure we could all give further examples of where we have needed to use that ability to deal with things, very often with refusals, to enable them to be granted.

On the flipside, sometimes it is fair to say that members will get something that is recommended for approval and call to committee because they do not like it. I think we have to be able to justify on good planning grounds why on earth we are calling something to committee. If we do not have them I have no problem with officers turning round and saying, “I am sorry; you haven’t got planning grounds,” but it is about finding the right balance.

Councillor Wright:

With regard to local plans and to what Richard has just referred to there, we have already instigated that in our authority you have to give planning reasons for bringing something to the planning committee. You might consider that you could just delegate a decision on a local plan allocated piece of land, but some of those could be of considerable size; they could be for a sustainable urban extension, for instance, so you cannot just act on the principle that because it is in the plan it does not need to be at committee.

We are makers of place: we build homes, not houses. We do not want to see officers suddenly having to make a delegated decision on how many houses go on a piece of land based on how the developer wants to bring it forward. The master planning, the design coding and all those issues need to be taken into consideration. It should not be left to officers who will end up getting the same grief that members get, but as unelected officers.

Q If I have understood you, I do not think we are suggesting that. We want the most important, most significant major applications to come to committee. Given the examples we have given before, should every reserved matters application come before a committee?

Councillor Clewer:

No.

Q Should every small site application come before a committee?

Councillor Hug:

No. We had a thing where someone in a public report was saying we had only built x number of houses, but the reality was that far more homes had gone through under delegated authority than had actually gone to committee, so we were being wronged by the fact we had done that process.

Councillor Clewer:

But there may be some specific circumstance that creates a nuanced judgment where it absolutely should go to committee. And please do not just talk about the big projects; it is those small ones that are deeply personal to people where national policy says no, but circumstance actually says that you can get round national policy.

I take the point about the nuance. That is helpful—thank you.

Q As a former councillor whose wife is a current councillor, I know the struggles and challenges. You have made a powerful case about the importance of councillors and the public acceptance of the decisions that you are talking about, and you have highlighted approvals where the recommendation has been refusal. As Liberal Democrats we oppose the clause completely, but if the Government insist on it, would you want to see in the Bill some qualification of the power of central Government to write your delegation agreements to your officers, because at the moment the regulations that could be laid are completely unqualified?

Councillor Hug:

As the Minister pointed out, the consultation is going on in parallel with the Bill. Hopefully we can make this national scheme of delegation work, provided that there is a degree of flexibility built into it. I hope that working between local government and national Government can help to resolve some of those issues at pace. Obviously some things may need to be specified, but we are hopeful that that kind of engagement can help to resolve some of the issues.

Councillor Clewer:

If in the scheme of delegation we see guidelines around how a scheme of delegation should work, I am not sure that that would concern me hugely. If they are prescriptive rather than guidelines, we will fall into the problem that you will create cases where you need to get round them but you cannot.

This is a simplistic example—I will get into trouble now with the New Forest national park authority—but we allow parish councils there to call things into committee. I think that that is crazy. It ends up with all sorts of things coming to committee that should never go near them. I would love a delegation that said that they cannot do that, on a personal level. There are elements where I think Government guidance would be really helpful.

Guidance?

Councillor Clewer:

Yes. Pretty firm guidance, but still guidance, with the ability where you really have the nuance to be able to work around it.

Councillor Hug:

It goes to the point about having a common core of things, with certain things that apply in certain areas but then a space for guidance on top of that.

Councillor Wright:

I agree that it should be guidance, not mandatory. We always seem to see policy brought forward on the basis that there is a problem. Perhaps for once we could go out to where planning is actually done well—where authorities have gone through modernisation and done things in the way you would expect them to be done—and work with those authorities, instead of assuming that there is a problem in the planning system.

Also, how far will this delegation go? If it turns into nothing more than delegation that is almost similar to permitted development rights, if people think that that is not dangerous, they should look at a picture of Terminus House in Harlow. They would see somewhere where they would not want to live. Members were nowhere near that.

It is great to have three very experienced councillors before the Committee. We have heard evidence today, including from two former special advisers to No. 10 under the last Government, that the Bill will help with energy security and energy costs, driving forward housing and getting jobs and significant investment. To channel your discussion about the beam in the person’s house, Councillor Clewer, a significant amount of frustration was evinced about where we are with things in planning more generally. Could each of you identify what you see as positive in the Bill?Q

Councillor Clewer:

I agree that there are areas at the moment where planning simply delays or blocks infrastructure provision. That needs changing; I absolutely agree with that. I suspect people will judge the extent to which it needs changing based on where they live and the specific infrastructure that they are facing, but I think that that needs unblocking.

You need to be very careful with the assumption that the Bill will build more houses. It will not build more houses. The Bill, and the reforms that we have seen to the NPPF, will see more planning permissions. I have 18,837 extant planning permissions in Wiltshire at the moment. Developers told me that they could build only about 6,000 the last time I asked them, which strangely enough was just under the four-year housing land supply under the last Government. I am sure that if I asked them today, they would say that they could build just about 8,000.

I have 2,400 houses south of Trowbridge that have been stuck, failing to get the section 106 agreement signed, for something like 14 years. There has to be something in the Bill that forces building. If we are to issue planning, it has to come with the actual development. We have to compel. If developers have signed a commitment that they will complete houses on whatever basis and have fallen behind, they need to start paying the council tax on them or something. At the moment, the Bill is not going to do that, I am afraid. I do not see anything in it that will actually achieve that.

Councillor Hug:

I support Richard’s point about working for more “use it or lose it” powers to ensure that planning permission does not just go on the books to raise land value and not do much else, although I note the points about hope value and everything. We recognise that there is a whole heap of challenges to delivery that sit outside the scope of the Bill.

On the Bill, we support the Government’s general principles about clarification and simplification. We recognise that the strong national growth and infrastructure demands open up some of the opportunities for green energy and all sorts of other things that we are calling for in local government.

I want to draw attention to the work being done on planning fees. Ensuring that local authorities have the best possible remuneration for the work to make sure they are covering their costs fully is key to making the system work well to deliver the outcomes that you are looking for. But we recognise that that alone will not deal with it, so we have to look at how we can further strengthen the planning workforce. Again, that is about making sure that the language does not say that the planning system or the planners are the problem. We want people to go into the industry and we want them to do it, but the planning fee stuff is helpful in supporting that.

We support the principles, but the key thing is to ensure that the local authorities retain a voice in what goes forward and work with the Government on some of the practical things such as the scheme of delegations.

Councillor Wright:

I think we have got close to it. As we said, we have nothing against the professional training of planning committees so that the industry knows what it is dealing with and so that the idea that we do not know what we are doing on planning committees cannot be used to beat us over the head all the time. In my district, similarly to Richard’s, 11,500 permissions were put in place between 2016 and 2024 and 5,500 were built out. There is no excuse for the rest not to be built.

Unfortunately, the proposals that have been put forward do not include anything at all to mandate that builders will build. There is a proposal over CPO powers, and the missing thing that we would like to see is “build it or lose it”. If there is an allocated site and they have permissions, but they simply do not build on it, give us the CPO powers so we can CPO that. That would help to build houses, because we could then start to control the destiny of those sites. At the moment, there are some really useful things that could have been in the Bill that are missing.

Councillor Clewer:

But CPO it at agricultural value.

Councillor Wright:

Yes: agricultural value, not hope value.

Councillor Hug:

I very much support the planning training. The LGA supports the approach to hope value that the Government are taking. The CPO power is particularly being deployed in urban settings around land assembly, which is the intent behind the Bill.

Q I have two connected questions. A lot has been said about the role of local authorities in decision making on planning. I am aware that councils are not short of planning guidance from central Government—every element of a local plan must already be in detailed conformity with 19 chapters of the national planning policy framework. Is there any element of your local planning process that is there for any other purpose than complying with the law, as passed by Parliament, in respect of planning? Have you gold plated locally?

Secondly, coming back to the point about strategic infrastructure projects, one of the issues is that local authorities have a lot of obligations, particularly under environmental law, whereby they have a specific legal duty around issues like air quality. Effectively excluding them from the decision-making process or even a failure to intervene in the process would leave them open to legal challenge. Air quality is a good example: I know from my experience at Heathrow airport that there was a local authority fine of £300 million per annum for the level of air quality breaches caused by Heathrow airport, through which we would have been judicially reviewed by ClientEarth had we not judicially reviewed central Government over their proposals to expand that.

Can you think of some other areas, around either environmental or other legal obligations, that are imposed on local authorities where the role you play in either the development and consent order process or those national strategic infrastructure projects is arising not simply out of local politics but because of legal obligations to your residents that you have to fulfil?

Councillor Wright:

With regard to nationally significant infrastructure projects, for instance, I was thinking about the fact that we are responsible for the environmental impact assessments. I worry at times that we do not have enough weight with those when it comes to the actual decision making.

One example, which we are testing at the moment, relates to battery storage—a new thing that is exciting lots of people—and whether we can predict not just the here and now, but what would happen in the event of a problem. If we are going to have a huge array of batteries on what was good agricultural land suddenly blighting the landscape, we could ensure that the industry is not allowed to use a type of battery that is more prone to cause huge environmental issues if it catches fire, when there are already good batteries that could be used. But it comes down to a financial decision. In some places, we would actually like more weight to be given to the powers that we already have, but quite often, as you say, we find ourselves guarding the place but not being able to make the decisions that would avoid the need for guards in the first place.

Councillor Hug:

My concern is not about gold plating. It is about the question whether local authorities across the country have the capacity on their planning teams to deal with the range and breadth of the requirements that are placed on them. That is one reason why local government reform is in the air, but I would also welcome some movement on fees. We have to make sure that planning is seen as a field that people want to go into, to help unlock these things, rather than these people being seen purely as the blockers. Ultimately, part of the blockage is that the system is not working effectively. The question is how we can work with local authorities to deliver not only training to communities, but greater support to the officer core so that they can move stuff through as quickly as possible.

Councillor Clewer:

I do not think we gold plate our local plans. There are many councils that want to go beyond existing guidance, particularly on net zero, for example. That is mostly to stop expensive retrofitting in future and make people’s bills cheaper. There are areas where councils will want to go beyond existing national policy, but every example I can think of was done for a very good reason and will end up with broad public support.

On the bigger issue of legislation, yes, there are some real challenges. Some environmental legislation can be significantly challenging when you want to see building or when you are looking to find a way to mitigate or even unlock. For example, I have a brownfield site in Trowbridge where they need to leave a bat corridor by a train line. How on earth that makes sense I honestly do not know, but it is making the viability of the site really challenging. Some sort of off-site provision would be far more appropriate: it would be far better for the bats and would help to unlock development.

There are also problems around highways issues, for example. Whether it be for economic development or building land, there is an inability for us to work properly with National Highways to deal with motorway junctions, or the A36 in my case. The constraints that that places on us can be real blockers to our desire to build in areas that would be sensible, as opposed to in areas where developers are putting forward planning permissions.

Lastly, it would be really nice if we could tell developers where they should be building, rather than developers saying, “This bit of land? We can’t build on it yet,” when we know full well that we will get a speculative application the moment the local plan is through for that bit of land as well, having just fought the contentious bit of land.

Q I am not a councillor, so I am coming at this from a different angle. We had some answers from the previous panel on compulsory purchase orders, particularly from the NFU. I am not dismissing its comments in any way, but not all compulsory purchase orders are about farmland and areas like that. In my city of Portsmouth, we have buildings and derelict land that have had no planning on them for decades. How could the Government support local authorities to deliver schemes in the public interest using these powers?

Councillor Hug:

The LGA broadly supports the new powers. Obviously we are looking to find ways to ensure that local authorities can take advantage of those new powers when they come in. That goes back to helping councils to be more entrepreneurial about unlocking land and giving them the support that they need to do that. Whether it is in Portsmouth—a place I know well; I was born there—or to a certain extent in parts of my patch, these are important tools in the arsenal, but it is also about unlocking those conversations. Having that on the books should hopefully enable those conversations to happen, because ultimately you want to come to an agreement with a partner to avoid having to use legal powers. It will help to unlock those conversations. It is still not going to be a magic wand, and I am not going to be able to walk down my high street and say, “That, that and that,” and suddenly unlock all these things. There are processes in place to prevent this being misused. We strongly welcome the intention to go into this space and the proposals in front of us.

Councillor Clewer:

If you look at the points about London and land assembly, they make a great deal of sense to me. Please be careful, however, with the assumption that brownfield land will be made viable simply through compulsory purchase. The problem with most brownfield development is a viability one. By the time you have demolished what is on it and then remediated the land, the net value of that land is negative.

There is no point in a council compulsorily purchasing something that then has negative value for the council. That will just bankrupt councils. If we are going to unlock brownfield, something more significant has to be done, either to use some sort of brownfield development fund—that feels a bit wrong, but it is a way you could look at it—or to compel developers to deal with brownfield before they are allowed to build on greenfield. We would suddenly see town centres all over the country being redeveloped if developers were not allowed to build on the greenfield until they had built on the brownfield.

Councillor Wright:

I will not repeat any points. Brownfield, for instance, in a rural area could be something that had glass houses on it. It could be a site that has no connectivity whatever to any settlement and has no services, and still be brownfield land. It would potentially come under CPO. At DCN, we think that there should be a subsection to CPO, and not just concentrating on land. If we want to look at regeneration and the issues in town centres, where there are vacant properties and areas blighted by crime or that just need added value, at the moment the CPO process is still a little too legal-heavy. The route to appeal, which a lot of it will go through, takes far too long. Perhaps there is a role going forward with mayoral authorities for that to be the appeal route. If we could see a system that shortens the CPO process for regen of property in town centres, different from land assembly, that would be useful.

That brings us to the end of the allocated time for questions. I thank the panel for answering the questions and for their time.