Best laid plans

The communities secretary’s letter told them to treat the government’s intention to abolish regional spatial strategies as a ‘material planning consideration’ when they considered new applications. 

But Conservative and Lib Dem MPs queued up in a Westminster Hall debate last week to raise questions about what will happen in the meantime and how the new system will work and they did not get many answers.

Instead the debate saw warnings of paralysis and chaos in the planning system. Planning minister Bob Neill admitted that the govermnent has ‘a legal minefield to walk through’ and former housing minister John Healey confessed that Labour’s system had been too top-down and inflexible. 

The debate was secured by the Conservative MP for Milton Keynes North, Mark Lancaster, who asked whether primary legislation would be needed to scrap the strategies, whether there would be an interim mechanism to allow planners to resist or defer applications. He also raised a series of questions about how the new system will work in Milton Keynes, including its infrastructure tarriff and relations with neighbouring authorities.

The Tory MP for Milton Keynes South, Iain Stewart, said council officials had told him that there is a legal doubt about whether the Pickles letter will be treated as a material consideration at appeal. 

That was echoed by Geoffrey Clinton-Brown (Con, Cotswold), who was concerned that the Pickles letter would not stand up in court because it assumes that the strategies will be abolished even though the matter has not yet been determined by parliament. ‘Whether or not such views are correct, it should not allow the paralysis of the planning system.’

Clinton-Brown said a ‘window of ambiguity’ had been opened that risked small councils like his incurring major costs at appeal

It was clear from the local issues raised by other MPs that many local planning authorities do not know what to do. Duncan Hames (Lib Dem, Chippenham) said: “Local conservation campaigners fear that if Wiltshire council does not adopt a core strategy, its draft core strategy, which sought to conform to the regional spatial strategy, may impose regional housing targets by the back door while a local policy vacuum remains.’ 

Chris Skidmore (Con, Kingswood) asked what would happen to the current obligation on planners to ‘consider favourably’ applications for housing where the authority cannot show that a five-year supply of land is in place and warned this was being used by developers to challenge decisions.

John Healey admitted that ‘our approach was too top-down’ and that the Labour government’s approach to planning had been ‘too inflexible to reflect some of the differences between regions’. But he said the new system was ‘simply a charter for nimby resistance to new homes’.

Bob Neill said that abolishing the strategies would require primary legislation in the  localism bill that will be introduced in this session of parliament. But he added that: ‘We will also explore the possibility of using secondary legislation to remove the most difficult part of the regional strategies in advance of that. We are actively discussing with officials the means by which this may be done.’

He said that the government’s advice was that the Pickles letter was legal. ‘I am aware that there has been some attempt to dispute that, but I will simply say that lawyers disagree.’

Further guidance would be issued soon, he said, and local authorities would be able to partially revise local plans to reflect the abolition of the strategies. ‘Everybody wants to move as swiftly as possible but, because the arrangements for planning regulations under the previous government were so complex, we have something of a legal minefield to walk through to ensure that we get it right. If we make important changes, we are determined that we do not have any false starts.’

So far, so complicated - and that’s just abolishing the old system let alone creating the new one.