Housing and Planning Bill — House of Lords, 2016-03-22
Topic: Housing
Barbara Young (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, I support Amendment 91 and the amendments down in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, and I simply express the concern about the lack of clarity around the permission in principle process and the technical details stage. I had a very useful session with the policy and Bill team, and a brief one with the Minister about this, and I think that a considerable amount of greater clarity could be given for the benefit of the Committee about what issues will be taken into account at permission in principle stage and what issues will remain for the technical details stage, and what consultation will take place at both these stages I will briefly deal with the content of each stage and the consultation separately. I keep banging on about the need for a flow chart that demonstrates the steps in this process, and I hope that the Minister is going to provide us with that. Very strong assurances were given that the permission in principle could not go ahead if the site was not compliant with the NPPF. But I think that it would be of benefit to noble Lords if it could be spelled out in exquisite detail exactly what that would imply in terms of the sorts of issues that would be resolved at permission in principle stage, and assurance given that they would be also subject to full statutory consultation, including the statutory consultees, because that is the point at which both government agencies and others, and indeed the public, can be alerted to the possibility that a local authority will be granting permission in principle for a site At technical details stage, it is absolutely important—and I endorse what has been said by other noble Lords—that if we are going to be able to give developers the security that permission in principle needs to provide if it is not going to be a hollow process, we need to have resource to some of these hugely important details, which are contained in the NPPF. We need to be sure that local authorities are giving themselves sufficient assurance that things like flood risk, roads, contamination, nature conservation and other infrastructure issues are being dealt with adequately to give the local authority the security to assure developers that permission in principle can be granted. So the technical details stage genuinely becomes simply for the fine-tuning of the site, rather than trying to deal with some of these basic issues, at a point when permission in principle has already been granted on an adequate basis. That would also help with the current proposal that technical details would be subject only to discretionary consultation—that local authorities could decide how much and how far they wanted to consult on the technical details. If they genuinely are fine-tuning, I could just about live with discretionary consultation at that stage. But if they are at all going to deal with fundamental issues, which ought to have been dealt with at permission in principle stage, it would be important that full-scale consultation was required of local authorities at the technical detail stage, and not left for local discretion So I ask the Minister: before we reach Report stage, can we please have my flow chart? I think that that will reassure the Committee that permission in principle is not a hollow process, and that if permission in principle is granted by a local authority because a site is in the local plan, in the neighbourhood plan or in a brownfield register, it has also taken sufficient steps at the point of deciding that it is going to grant permission in principle to have taken account of all these hugely important issues at that stage and fully consulted on them.