Neighbourhood Planning Bill — House of Commons, 2016-12-13
Topic: Housing
Oliver Letwin (Conservative, Centre-right): My hon. Friend illustrates very well the point I am trying to make. There is actually perfect clarity on that subject in the local plan that his local authority and mine have jointly drawn up, but an expert is needed to interpret it for the neighbourhood. We cannot expect the parish council to know the answers to the questions, and if it asks inexpert people, it will get conflicting answers—very possibly more than two wrong answers if it consults more than two inexpert experts. A certain amount of money is required so that the parish council can employ a genuine expert who can give it good, clear answers to questions. As I have said, a second person is also needed—quite a different sort of person who can imagine for the neighbourhood what things could look like. By putting those together, we can overcome the obstacles to neighbourhood planning Unfortunately, those people do not come for free; they have to be paid for. Over the years, the Department has rightly produced funds to enable parish and town councils and neighbourhood forums to employ people, but unfortunately the funds were based on the presumption, which is now mercifully falsified, that neighbourhood planning would be slow to take off, and that very few plans would be produced at any given moment I am delighted that the number of neighbourhood plans is very great, and I hope it will be much greater—I hope that they become the norm and that tens of thousands arise in our country in the coming years. However, I very much doubt that the Chancellor of Exchequer, who faces one of the most difficult fiscal situations in our history, will come up with the funds required to meet that need, given the other priorities he faces. New clause 5 would find a solution to that problem and provide the money to employ experts on behalf of neighbourhood planners in parish and town councils. It would do so by using an existing pool of funds, as there is already a provision to share the community infrastructure levy that arises from each house built. Under the law, 25% is due to the parish or town council in the area where the neighbourhood plan is drawn up One problem is that the CIL money comes in after the houses are built, whereas the money is needed before—it is needed even before the neighbourhood plan is in place so that experts can be employed to help its production. The question is how we advance those funds. The new clause suggests that we could, through the Bill, put beyond doubt a local planning authority’s lawful ability to advance sums that would accrue to the neighbourhood when the neighbourhood plan is up and running and the houses are built for the purpose of employing experts to assist in the production of the neighbourhood plan. In that way, the houses could be built and the money could come in from the community infrastructure levy, meaning that the local planning authority could be repaid Despite the helpful way in which the Minister has engaged in the discussion, I do not say that the mechanics of the proposal are perfect. I hope he is willing to look at it in detail as part of a range of options for solving the problem to which I allude. I hope that, when the matter is considered in the other place, the Government will come forward with their own vastly superior, rock-solid measure to solve the problem. Otherwise, neighbourhood planning could be stymied not just by the problems that my right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs cited, but by an inability to pay for the expertise required.