Housing and Planning Bill — House of Lords, 2016-03-17
Topic: Housing
Jeremy Hugh Beecham (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, I join other noble Lords in welcoming the concept of neighbourhood planning, particularly where it takes a positive attitude to development in the area. I acknowledge that there is real potential both in urban and in rural areas. The noble Lord, Lord True, is right that we need to be a little cautious about the implications within urban areas. I can best illustrate that from the ward that I represent in Newcastle. It has 18 or 19 discernible communities within it and I think now nine residents associations, each with its own particular perspective on what is going on It is not just a question of planning; it is a question of involving the community in a whole range of issues, be it social care, policing or other matters. It is important to involve local people, but your Lordships must bear in mind the constraint these days on the capacity of planning departments to cope with their ordinary business. It is well known that the number of planning officers is being reduced substantially as a function of the cutbacks that are being suffered. That does not make it any easier, to put it no higher, to support the valuable process of neighbourhood planning. In this context, I recall the words of one of our most famous poets, John Donne: "No man is an island, entire of itself" In my judgment, no neighbourhood is an island entire unto itself unless it happens to be physically remote from others The experience of planning generally is that often planning applications evoke a negative response rather than a positive engagement. I recall particularly some occasions of that close to my heart. One was over 20 years ago when the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, and I were opposing one another. I was leader of the council and he was the leader of the opposition. He will recall that there was a proposal for building on greenfield rather than green-belt land towards the north of the city. This was part of a major plan that we were bringing forward as a council. It was opposed by the noble Lord and some of his more vociferous colleagues, as he will recall, on the grounds that it was unnecessary and so on. In fairness to them, they were reflecting the views of at any rate some of the people living in private housing estates which themselves had been built on green fields perhaps 20 to 30 years beforehand. These people would not contemplate the possibility of housing on the green fields that were in the vicinity of their estate More recently I encountered a similar and disturbing attitude while canvassing in a ward—not my ward—on the edge of the city. Again there were proposals about potentially building on greenfield sites. Here the houses from which we were somewhat vainly endeavouring to elicit support were part of a housing estate built within the last few years. I felt almost constrained to nominate myself for the Nobel Prize for self-restraint when one woman on whose door I knocked said that it was bad enough having any sort of housing built on the fields behind her, which of course a few years before would have encompassed her house, but at least there was not going to be social housing there. We have to take cognisance of the fact that there will be tensions and priorities to be assessed by local authorities which will perhaps transcend the immediate interests or concerns of local communities expressed through their neighbourhood planning or otherwise.