Housing and Planning Bill — House of Lords, 2016-03-23
Topic: Housing
Anthony Robert Greaves (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, this is a small issue, in a sense. It is a kite-flying amendment not directly related to what is in the Bill, like many other amendments we have been discussing. However, it is an important issue for local authorities that are affected by it. Regulation 123 of the Community Infrastructure Levy Regulations refers to Section 106 agreements. When the CIL regulations were brought in, it was tagged on to them, almost without anybody noticing—although I complained about the regulation when it came to be approved by this House. I am challenging not the regulation as such but the bit of Regulation 123(3)(b) that restricts the number of Section 106 agreements within the area of one local planning authority to five, "which provide for the funding or provision of that … type of infrastructure" That means that a local planning authority can have only five Section 106 agreements in place anywhere within its area for one particular type of infrastructure. I hope that the Minister will understand the very specific point I am making. I will come to it in a minute I want to be clear that I am not objecting to the requirements of Section 106, which nowadays have to be site specific. It used to be that you could have a planning application at one end of an authority and get some money for a playground miles away at the other end of the authority. That was quite rightly stopped. Agreements have to be site specific—in other words, related to the particular planning application or piece of land, as the Minister said earlier. I am not objecting to the restrictions on pooling Section 106 contributions to build up a pot for large schemes, and there is a limit to how far that can be done. It is just ordinary, small Section 106 contributions that are typically connected to retail developments, housing developments and so on. Again, I am not talking about the affordable housing things that we were talking about this morning The limit to five schemes is not logical for four reasons. First, there may well be more than five separate schemes that are relevant or appropriate to particular developments, even though they are of the same type. For example, it may be that Section 106 contributions are being used to support a local bus service—the kind of bus service which is subsidised or supported by the local highways authority under the Transport Act—and a contribution may be made in order to extend the route to serve a particular housing estate or so that it serves the supermarket or whatever. I have had a lot of experience in past decades of helping to support local bus services through this means, at the same time providing public transport to new housing developments or new supermarkets It may well be that a Section 106 agreement is required for a public open space, and it is silly to say that you can have only five open spaces if you have seven developments that would benefit from this provision. So there is no logic to it. It came in as part of the restrictions on making Section 106 agreements site specific and stopping people building up big pots, but it is not now necessary The second reason is that, because Section 106 agreements are now site specific, there is no reason to limit the number. Logic says that the number should be determined by the number of appropriate developments and appropriate schemes. Thirdly—and here I am talking to some extent against a small authority such as my own—the limit applies per local planning authority, however big or small. So it is five for a huge area such as Northumberland or Cornwall, five for a little authority such as Rutland, five for small district councils and five for big cities. It is an arbitrary number and there is no sense to it. Finally, it causes particular problems where a local authority has no CIL contributions. Where the level of CIL has been assessed as zero, it cannot be levied. The kinds of councils I keep talking about during this Bill, including my own in Lancashire and lots of other councils in Lancashire and the north of England, cannot levy a CIL because if you levy a CIL, it takes developments completely over the border into being unviable. In areas where developments are only marginally viable on the best greenfield sites, you cannot levy a CIL Therefore, the contributions for local infrastructure that come from a CIL are not available in areas of that kind, and those areas are by their very nature probably poorer in different ways than the more prosperous parts of the country that can levy a CIL. So poorer areas do not get the infrastructure levy. Therefore we have to rely on what we can get from Section 106, and this restriction on Section 106 is arbitrary and illogical. I hope that the Government will take it away and have a look at it. They do not have to bring it back in this Bill; they can simply make a minor change to the CIL regulations. I beg to move.