Neighbourhood Planning Bill — House of Lords, 2017-02-23
Topic: Housing
Richard Best (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, I have not declared interests during the course of the Bill so far, so declare that I am a vice-president of the Town and Country Planning Association and a vice-president of the Local Government Association In the debates on what became the Housing and Planning Act 2016, the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, and I jointly proposed an amendment, which the Government supported, to make it easier for new corporations to be set up to establish new settlements, along the lines of the old new towns but probably rather smaller—garden villages or garden towns they are sometimes called. This takes the story to its next stage, as the White Paper from the Government promises to do. It would allow local authorities to have significant influence over the new corporations set up to create new communities. Local authorities would be able to appoint the board and approve their budgets Sadly, without this kind of measure, a lot of local authorities will not think it worth while establishing new corporations for this purpose. This amendment would take away a deterrent to local authorities embarking on this road, fearful that the Secretary of State will dictate what happens in their area. It would instead replace the Secretary of State with the local authority having considerable influence over the new corporation Why are we making such a fuss about this? Why do we need these new settlements? From the perspective of local communities, in order to make sufficient land available for a five-year supply of all the new homes that we are going to need, you sometimes get the choice between 25 homes in 100 or 200 different villages or small towns, and one major development of 5,000 homes—perhaps not quite as much or perhaps a bit more—in one place. Apart from anything else, this means that instead of the hassle of having 200 local community groups opposed to the 25 homes in their village, you have one group. That group probably is opposed to the very large development, but at least the opposition to the development is concentrated in one place, instead of the development disturbing an awful lot of local communities. Putting a number of the homes that we need in one place is in itself helpful to local authorities and to their communities That is a negative. The positive is that having a properly planned new settlement or community, where you have a master plan that ensures that all the facilities that you need—transport, schools and the rest—are all in one place, is itself a really good way to try to achieve this enormous number of new homes which we know the country desperately needs to end housing shortages. I can speak with a bit of experience here because one of my duties for nearly 20 years at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation was looking after the model village of New Earswick, created by our founder, Joseph Rowntree, in 1904. We can look back over 100 and something years to see whether a garden village really works. I can tell your Lordships that this kind of planned community of more than 1,000 homes, with two schools, shops and a wonderful arts and crafts folk hall and community centre, 100 years on, is the way that you get all the things that you need to build a proper, strong community, rather than packing in 25 more homes at the end of the village, which causes nothing but disruption This amendment would put local authorities more in charge and would therefore make it much more likely that we will see these new settlements and communities created in the future. I strongly support it.