Housing and Planning Bill — House of Lords, 2016-03-22
Topic: Housing
Donald Foster (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, quite rightly said that all three of these amendments are related. However, there are differences. The amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord True, as I understand it, merely says that there will continue to be a nationally imposed fee framework, but in which full cost recovery will be possible, whereas the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Gardner of Parkes, and the amendment that my name is attached to, suggest the devolution of responsibility for fee setting to local authorities. I hope that that is the direction that the Minister will be prepared to go in When I was the Member of Parliament for the wonderful city of Bath, my local authority had real problems because, as a world heritage city, it had extra things to deal with, such as archaeological issues, for the very large number of properties that it had to give various forms of planning consent to—as listed buildings and so on. Of course, that also cannot be reflected in the fee structure, so, like many other councils, it had a huge deficit between the fees that it could charge and the costs it incurred In 2012, when the Government were carrying out the previous review of the fee structure, it participated in an exercise in which there was a very detailed analysis of every minute and hour spent by staff employed and all the other costs. It showed very clearly that it was recovering no more than 50% of its costs. That is reflected by many councils; I am sure that many noble Lords have seen the figures from London Councils, which show that they are many tens of millions of pounds adrift each year The problem is that if we look at this just as giving councils the ability to charge more to cover their costs, I can see the Minister looking horrified, because she wants improvements in standards to go alongside it. The interesting thing is that there is a real opportunity to combine the two. Although I accept what the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, said about planning performance approaches adopted through the planning performance agreements, nevertheless they have demonstrated very clearly in the one area where local authorities can charge over and above the fee structure that they can develop some very innovative and ambitious approaches. If we give this additional power over fee-level decision-making to our local councils and local planning authorities, I believe that that will be combined with some very adventurous and innovative ways forward Finally, I have one simple question for the Minister. If she is not going at least to allow the amendment proposed by the noble Lord, Lord True, with full cost recovery, I wonder how she envisages a later part of the Bill when she wants to give the opportunity for experimentation to private organisations coming into the planning operation. No commercial organisation I know is going to enter a deal where the starting base is only 50% back for any investment. It simply will not happen. I am sure that the Minister has an answer, which will be to accept the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord True or, better still, the other two amendments.