Good morning everyone and welcome to the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee in this bigger, grander room; I hope our witnesses and guests at the back can hear us. I am Florence Eshalomi. I am the Chair of the Select Committee. Can I ask my colleagues on the Committee to introduce themselves, please?

I am Chris Curtis. I am the Labour MP for Milton Keynes North.

I am Andrew Lewin, Labour MP for Welwyn Hatfield

I am Naushabah Khan, Labour MP for Gillingham and Rainham.

I am Will Forster, MP for Woking.

I am Lee Dillon, MP for Newbury.

Can I ask our guests to introduce themselves, please?

I am Councillor Adam Hug. I am here as the LGA’s housing and planning spokesperson. I am also the leader of Westminster City Council.

I am Madeleine Jennings. I am head of policy and communications at Local Trust, which is a charity set up to deliver the Big Local programme.

Good morning. I am Victoria Hills. I am the chief executive of the Royal Town Planning Institute.

We have one of our guests joining us virtually who can hear us but cannot see us. I would be grateful if you could introduce yourself, please, Andrew.

I am Andrew Taylor. I am group planning director at Vistry.

Planning and infrastructure has been in the news since the general election last year. It is a key area that is going to help us to turbocharge the building of the 1.5 million homes that the Government have announced they want to build. We know that there are some issues and bottlenecks within the planning system, which is what our questions this morning will focus on. I want to start by asking the witnesses, in terms of the Government’s proposals around the national scheme of delegation, whether that is something that you welcome. What are your thoughts on that?

There is certainly a world in which a national scheme of delegation can work well to give some consistency and help speed up the process of planning in local authorities. The devil is going to be in the detail, and we would very much urge the Government to move as fast as possible on the consultation with local authorities and other stakeholders about how that might be mapped out. In the original consultation document, there were a number of different options that were put forward about how this might work. It is important to recognise that, in a lot of places, most things are going through under delegated authority already. The average in London is about 98% of applications and things like that, with only the more extreme strategically important schemes going to committee. The Government want consistency so that, when you are making an application and something is in alignment with the plan, there is a strong likelihood that that will go through. I think that both local government and the Government share a view of the importance of local plans. Ultimately, there will be a lot of cases where, just because of the nature of reality, schemes will not 100% meet the plan in all aspects. That is traditionally where the role of a local planning committee is to assess the public benefit and make some of those trade-offs there. We would be looking to see a common core of a national scheme of delegation, the ability to flex to urban and rural environments and the ability for councils to go beyond the scheme of delegation—for example, if there is something that would be refused on a rigid interpretation of the plan, but that all common sense suggests is in the public interest to go forward—and move that to committee to unblock it.

Do you think that there will still be an area where councillors retain some scrutiny capacity over contentious applications or where applications have received quite a lot of concerns from local residents?

You have to have that ability in the system. I totally get the point about strengthening the importance of the local plan and making sure that there is greater consultation and buy-in around that. Once that is in place, that gives greater certainty to applicants. I totally accept the principle behind that. It is understanding that, where there are those tensions between plan priorities, local people have the ability to have their say and local councils have the ability to adjudicate. I support the principle of a common core of a scheme of delegation. We have to work through the detail to iron out some of those practical challenges.

The Royal Town Planning Institute broadly supports the principle of a national scheme of delegation. We know from our members but also the development community that one thing that they want is consistency. They also want clarity and competency. We think it is essential, if you are going to move to a national scheme of delegation, that you have a statutory chief planning officer in place, who has the right level of seniority but also the right professional competency. We would argue that it would seem perfectly sensible for a chartered town planner professional to be that person, so that they can hold the ring of that national scheme of delegation. It would be quite a change for some areas and no change at all for others. As the previous speaker just mentioned, some councils delegate pretty much everything already, but others do not. Where the grey area comes in sometimes is on things like discharge of conditions, which can really slow up the commencement of development. Having someone who is professionally competent to deal with some of those matters outwith the committee seems perfectly sensible. While you have the appropriate levels of scrutiny through the local plan process upstream, downstream you can leave the discharge of those conditions to a professionally competent planner. To make it work we will continue to make the case that you need a statutory chief planning officer in every local authority to be the person to hold the ring on that national scheme of delegation.

From our point of view, the important aspect here is neighbourhood planning and how the national scheme of delegation will interact with existing neighbourhood plans, but hopefully strengthen and support neighbourhood planning to be expanded to areas that do not currently have the capacity to do it. It is not that neighbourhood plans are perfect; there are only about 1,500 of them in existence, mostly in wealthier areas with existing civic infrastructure and social infrastructure to support them. But they are currently the only way—and the Bill does not suggest any new way—for communities at the hyper-local level to have an influence on planning decisions. By the time planning committees come around, it is really too late for most communities to have a genuine influence on making changes to planning decisions. They get to the point where the only option is to block or not block. Communities that would like to see development go forward often find themselves co-opted by the usual suspects into more extreme positions. The national scheme of delegation could commit to expanding and strengthening neighbourhood plans, so that more diverse communities can take part in them, and to ensuring that a broader selection of groups could actually bring forward a neighbourhood plan beyond parish and town councils, which typically are not found in disadvantaged areas. If we could ensure that neighbourhood plans, once established, take precedence over other planning tiers, we think that a national scheme of delegation could work quite well.

I am going to echo many of the comments. Consistency across the country is really important. From our perspective, we need to know the process that an application is going to go through early on. I am not going to disagree with the last comments—that local engagement is really important—but we need to focus councillor time on the local plan and the significant applications in their area, then freeing up planning officers, as Victoria Hills mentioned, to be able to delegate and deal with the smaller applications. There is importance in that consistency across the country, but also in the committee processes that we follow after that. We have quite a lot of change at that level as well, so consistency across the board is very important.

Madeleine, I wanted to briefly follow up on your answer, because I found that especially interesting about how we engage more diverse communities in the process. My experience has been that people who are time-poor, living busy lives, are less likely to get involved in a planning process, but actually, particularly if they are younger, it might have the greatest impact on them. I am really interested in your comments and especially keen to know whether you have seen good examples of where broader sectors of the community have got involved and what we could learn from that.

It might be worth adding a tiny bit of context about Local Trust and what we do. We were set up to deliver the Big Local programme, which hands £1 million over to each of 150 communities to spend over 10 years on whatever their priorities are. Because those communities are chosen because they lack social infrastructure and the usual suspects that I referenced before, a lot of those communities have chosen to spend some of that resource on developing the capacity to engage with decision making and planning. One really good example is Arches Local in Chatham, which got together a neighbourhood forum and has put through a neighbourhood development order that prioritises good sustainable homes as well as community social infrastructure. It has done a really great job. There are other examples, such as Leigh Big Local, which committed to Planning for Real as a way of engaging the community. It took over two years but produced great buy‑in from the community in development going forward. It is also worth noting some of the basics. A lot of the communities that we work with are located in overspill estates on the edge of towns and cities. They have poor transport links and no real local news coverage. It is important that information, decision-making proposals and everything is published digitally but also through direct mail to homes. Access to the internet for these communities is expensive and on phones. I do not know whether you have ever read planning documents on a phone, but it is really difficult to do and a genuine barrier to access.

I wanted to ask a follow-up question on that. I am really interested to hear you reference Chatham. Being the neighbouring constituency to me, and being in the same unitary authority that I was a councillor in previously, I am really aware of how that project worked. It was really engaging and they did a lot of work around it, but it took a lot of time. That is the challenge. I would be interested to hear your thoughts on the impact that has on timelines in terms of bringing development forward and if there are ways that we could take some learnings from projects like that, but not necessarily on the same timescale.

The average neighbourhood plan takes about 30 months to develop. It is a long-term process but it could well be a gold standard if we roll it out properly across the country and support people to do it. It could also happen faster as a result. In the meantime, there is a genuine lack of ways of engaging communities early on in a process that is fast enough to have a material impact on developments. That is something we would like to see this Bill think about and include perhaps later down the line.

On that, Adam, you represent quite a big, diverse borough in the middle of London. You have a range of diverse constituents, residents and different groups. How do you think the national scheme of delegation will help to give them the confidence that applications being taken by the council will adequately reflect some of their views and concerns? In London you have the additional challenge of the layer of the mayor’s office as well to deal with. Then you also have national Government.

We have a well-established approach to delegation at the moment. There are still some areas that, historically, would have gone to committee when there is notable local objection or whatever triggers it going to committee. I do not know whether that will be influenced in some way. It is interesting that we have a network of neighbourhood plans, but there have been real differences in how quickly some of those processes have developed, depending on the amount of social capital in those local communities. As a council we work to support communities that lack some of that social capital to do that through a range of local grants and other support provided by the council, but it is interesting. In London, you already have that multi-tier process, where a neighbourhood plan has to be in alignment with the local plan, which then has to be in alignment with the London plan. Across the country, we are now going to be adding an SDS process into all of that. That is a further challenge for neighbourhood planning. There is a big push nationally for local authorities to improve their neighbourhood plans, bring them forward, strengthen them and add them into the SDS. That then means a whole other set of challenges at the grassroots level for neighbourhood planning, which will be, I am sure, something Madeleine will have some fun with over the years to come.

I have a quick point on the engagement piece, if I may. One thing we think is missing in the Bill at the moment is the opportunity to also bring consistency to the digitisation of access to planning committees. There is a postcode lottery depending on where you live. In some local authorities you can join committees down the line and participate as well as watch, but actually, importantly, participate in the planning committee in a digital way. In other places you cannot. We think that it is somewhat strange, if the Department is investing a lot of time, effort and taxpayers’ money in digitising the planning system, to then have a digital system that cannot be accessed at the most important point—the decision point—digitally. We would be keen to see a statutory requirement for all planning committees to be accessible digitally. Not only will this increase participation, but it will open up the conversation to a much broader range of people and, we ultimately think, help drive better outcomes.

Going back to your point about diverse communities accessing these things, there is a job of work for all councils to do to improve access and awareness of the planning applications that are going forward. There is the digitalisation approach and the multi-channel approach by the council, rather than just putting stuff up on lamp posts and having a direct letter campaign. There is more we can do, learning from the experience of diverse communities about how best to reach them.

Victoria, you mentioned the desire to see chief planning officers across every local authority. I think that the data reflects that there are chief planning officers across only 23% of local planning authorities. If we move to a system where we have one in every borough and look at the national delegation scheme, bearing in mind some of the issues we have just highlighted here, if applications are approved and you see a big campaign or swell of opposition, could that cause concerns, or even abuse and threats to chief planning officers?

Part of the reason we are advocating for a statutory chief planning officer is that we have this very large Bill here. This is a massive change programme on top of already overstretched local authority planning departments. We have had 25% of local authority planners leave local government in the last seven years. That is against a backdrop of halving of Government Department budgets for local government planning departments—I am talking about the last 10 to 15 years. Introducing a massive change programme on top will not only put strain on the system; it will mean that you need to work in different ways: faster, smarter and more digitally enabled, as I have mentioned. To address your specific point on harassment, it is a change that some decisions that used to go to a committee will now be going to a planner to decide. That is why we think that it is not just a nice-to-have, but essential that that planner is not only professionally competent—chartered—but they have a statutory wraparound. As a statutory position, they then have a level of seniority in local government that provides that gravitas of opinion that is a professional opinion, recommendation and decision. Will it solve the bullying and harassment? Sadly, I do not think so. Will it help? Yes, I think it will do. It enables you to reset that relationship in local government. Let us face it: local government has limited powers to deliver its strategic vision and ambitions. It has fiscal powers and can raise a certain amount of tax locally, but its only tool to deliver its corporate vision and strategy is the local plan. You need a statutory officer to deliver that statutory document. We think that that will go some way to redressing the balance that we now find ourselves in, where some of our members have to have police escorts out of meetings because the harassment has got so bad. We have to move away from that. We have to change the conversation. Yes, we have to involve the public, but we also need to bring the right level of seniority back in and make planning great again in local government.

Following on from those comments, my questions are a little bit about planning fees. Do you think that the recent increase in planning fees has allowed for an improved service from planning departments?

The recent increase in planning fees has been a welcome shot in the arm, but it is against that backdrop. It is helping to plug some of the gap. Will it solve everything overnight? No, absolutely not. In this Bill we are pleased to see a ringfencing of fees, which is something we have been asking for for many years. It is really good news—it should not be good news; it should be normal—that the money that applicants, developers, households and commercial businesses pay for the service is going to be spent on the service. That is really good news, but that solves only half of the planning system. That is the development control, development management and applications part of it. We have to remember that the most important part comes back to the point I was just making on the local plan. Only 40% of local authorities have an up-to-date local plan in place. That local plan is currently funded by local taxpayers. As Madeleine said, it is quite right that the local community want to get involved in it—they are paying for it. We think that there is a missed opportunity in ringfencing those fees so that we could have some of the fees going towards paying for the business of the local plan. It is very expensive to produce and local authorities have to think very carefully and strategically when they are doing it. The missed opportunity in this fees enhancement, which is most welcome and much needed, is actually, “Don’t forget the local plan part of the process.” How can we get the development sector contributing to that? Ultimately, it would benefit them as much as it benefits the community. If a local plan is in place and provides that clarity and consistency over what we want, where we want it, why we need it, what it is looking like and where it is going, that helps everybody. We would urge the Government to think again on how they can fund the business of the local plan.

We welcome the previous increase in fees and are keen that that moves forward to help tackle some of those financial shortfalls. As has been said, you have had, I think between 2010 and 2021, a net decrease in spending per person on planning. It has dropped by about 59%. There has been a huge capacity withdrawal from local planning authorities. It has not been something that people necessarily want to get into. We also have to be careful around some of the way in which the debate happens nationally around planning; getting good planning is actually a great way to support the national objectives of growth and everything like that. We want planning to be a career that people want to go into so that we do not have capacity gaps. There is a long-term programme between local government and the Government to encourage more people into the sector, but that has to be based on a consistent view about the future financial situation and it being a career that people want to get into. It will take time to build back that capacity gap, particularly when a lot of people are being poached by the private sector from local council planning departments. That is a real challenge as well. We need more planners to be able to move things through the system quickly, particularly if we are moving to delegated authority. In terms of some of the pressures, residents can be okay with decisions that do not go their way, provided they feel they have had a chance to have a say, that their views have been heard and listened to, and that some of the points have been picked up. If planning officers are overwhelmed by the throughput of information, particularly if local members are taken out of the process, that will put greater pressure on the individual planning officers. The fee stuff is really welcome, but we have to boost capacity overall to meet the Government’s objectives.

The first thing to say is that we, and most developers, support the increase in planning fees to ensure we have a well-resourced local planning authority. That is a really important thing to get across. The consultation on increasing planning fees also talked about increasing performance, and I do not think that we have yet seen that across the board. I will agree with Victoria Hills that this is a process and it is important to get the funding in to ensure we continue to improve, but we need to make sure that those improvements in service, which are not just about speed, are met and delivered by local authorities. On ringfencing, it should be the whole planning service. You cannot disaggregate development management from the policy and enforcement element. You need that. I also think that the local council has a responsibility on its future plan to put its financial resources behind the development of the local plan. It is determining the future of its area and it is important that, as a government sector, that is financed appropriately as part of that.

A lot of what I was going to pick up on has been referred to in those answers, but I can see that a tension exists between what Victoria was saying and what Andrew has just said. We have a bit of a challenge in planning departments, where they feel like they have been under-resourced—they have been under‑resourced; planning officers have left. The planning fees are part of that answer and a potential way to help, but actually, as you were suggesting, Victoria, that will not go far enough. It will not solve all the issues. The other side of that challenge is that, to unlock what we need to happen and move quickly, as Andrew said, we need some change in that space. We need some timings and timeframes, although you said that it is not just about timings; it is other things as well. I have picked up some suggestions, but is there anything else that would help to move this situation along? Is my understanding correct that planning fees alone are not going to solve the challenges in our planning departments?

I would add that there is a need for innovation in how to fund and finance capacity and capability in local governments. One of the greatest innovations that the profession has been the beneficiary of is the level 7 apprenticeship. The chartered town planner apprenticeship came in in 2019. Over 60% of apprentices are now in local government. It has been a huge success story. It is bringing in the first generation of people going to university. It is bringing a diverse cohort into a profession and putting them on a professional pathway into a career, mostly in local government currently. We completely understand why the Government want to reform the apprenticeship levy and why there is an urgent need to tackle the NEETs. We completely accept that, but we are asking for a special deal and a dispensation. For the Government’s sixth mission—the housing target—we need to keep the chartered town planner apprenticeship. The reason I am raising it in answer to this question is because I have not met a single chief planner in any local government department who will be able to afford to replace that chartered town planner apprentice if they cannot access the level 7 funding. That means that those several hundred apprentices who we currently have in local government will no longer be funded. Effectively, it is turning a tap off. Of course we need to look to the future and what we have there in seniority now to deal with applications, but we need to be bringing that pipeline in as my colleague from local government here has said. If we turn that tap off, we are taking one step forward with the fees and have just taken two steps back again. I cannot make it any clearer than that.

We have been advocating for these for some time. The real benefit of having these documents is that you can look at housing, environment, community, employment and industry. You could look at any thematic policy area you need to look at in an area that does not stop at a district or borough county boundary. We know the importance of looking at infrastructure, particularly energy, water, nature and homes. It is a very complicated and complex area and you need to look at these things holistically. We absolutely support the Government’s intention to move to a strategic plan-led approach. It can work and has been demonstrated to work, so we support the principle.

We think that it will speed up the delivery of housing. It looks at the housing allocation in a much more pragmatic and spatially evidenced way, beyond the smaller boundaries. At the moment, we have examples where a housing target has been given to a council—I will not name it—and it cannot deliver it because it does not have the land available to deliver it, or the land is designated and it cannot deliver it. That is why you have 60% of local authorities saying, “We cannot do the local plan. We will not do the local plan. We cannot find those homes.” If you take the conversation out of the micro level, or out of that district or borough level, and look at it holistically across an area and take into account broader principles, which could include nature and infrastructure, and look at housing through that lens, we believe that you can come up with a much more pragmatic and common-sense approach, quite frankly, to where the homes need to go. That has been the missing part of the jigsaw puzzle that has got us into this situation. We think that it can do. Will it help overnight? No, possibly not. Is it where we need to get to? Yes. We have been very clear that a public purpose of planning is for the longer public good, so looking at things holistically is where we need to get to.

Yes, SDSs are good. They need to be in place. If we can know 12 months after they are brought in, that would be really good. I am concerned about local government reorganisation and the impact that will have in terms of the process for these. Housing targets and distribution in the SDSs need to be mandatory. That needs to be an important part of that process and that will help to speed up the delivery of local plans by the constituent councils after that. It would also be useful if SDSs can allocate a site, certainly strategic sites. That would help to speed up that process and therefore speed up the delivery of the housing as it goes through that process.

We would like to see the Bill amended so that SDSs also have to mandate the distribution of social infrastructure in an area. Areas with higher density of social infrastructure have much better socioeconomic outcomes across the board, whether that is employment, mental health, health or life expectancy. For this purpose, we define social infrastructure not as the current working paper on infrastructure puts it, so not prisons, schools and hospitals, but as the physical community assets—places and spaces where communities gather, such as pubs, community centres and playing fields—and the community activity, so the groups that animate these spaces, as well as connectivity, so transport and access, including digital access, so broadband speeds as well as networks. Social infrastructure is incredibly important for the success of new developments, but not just new developments. We think that spatial development strategies could be really important to redress the imbalance of social infrastructure in existing doubly disadvantaged neighbourhoods. They are doubly disadvantaged because they are highly deprived materially, but also lacking in crucial social infrastructure. On the one hand, the strategies are dealing with the present, but also preventing doubly disadvantaged developments of the future.

I totally understand that the Government are trying to juggle a lot of balls and keep them in the air at the same time, doing LGR, devo and this at the same time. We get that the promised land is a more unified set of local councils with a mayor at the strategic level over the top of them. This is what the Government are looking for. That will help define the SDSs. The key thing from a local authority perspective is to get buy-in for that. To get buy-in for the ability at a strategic level to, ultimately, impose certain things that may be certain local challenges is about having some say in the shaping of that overall plan, so that local authorities can feed into the strategic objectives of the wider area and make sure there are some trade‑offs and quid pro quos and there is benefit at the local level. It is having that link between the local and the strategic, which is obviously the direction of travel for combined authorities that the Government have set out in the other Bills that are going through Parliament. The key thing is the local voice being able to influence and inform where strategic sites might be put. Local authorities may moan and have some problems with stuff being imposed on them, but, ultimately, they will know in their local area where may be best for certain things to go. It is having that as part of a broader discussion with the new strategic level. We appreciate that some of the stuff in the Bill is about how you bridge that role with the Secretary of State and others until you have those new structures in place. The key thing is remembering that, through the process, when we get there in the long term, the local council voice has to be heard in the decision making of that overall strategic plan.

My question is whether there should be more mechanisms in place to ensure that there is more democratic accountability of new development corporations, but also whether these development corporations should be given additional powers to lead on building houses alongside the private sector. I would be interested to hear the panel’s thoughts.

I can have a go at speaking to this one. I will declare an interest: I established the second mayoral development corporation in 2015, but under different legislation. That was the Localism Act. There is an important point there that the powers still exist under that Act, so there are plenty of powers that elected mayors can use to establish development corporations. I am answering the question within that lens. Yes, it is perfectly reasonable to expect the community to be involved in it—indeed, that is very sensible for anyone in the business of establishing a development corporation, but also bringing forward development. Why would they not want the community involved in some shape or form? As we just heard from the councillor, they know what is going on in their local area. They know what is important, but, most importantly, they know what they need. I will just share an anecdote. When we established the development corporation at Old Oak, we thought initially that the most urgent need was for homes, but actually the community told us, no, they wanted jobs for their children: could we work on some employment-creating activities early doors and then the homes would come? I can absolutely see the merits of involving the community and we advocate that they should have appropriate representation. The way that the mayoral development corporations are set up currently under the Localism Act is that there is an opportunity for neighbourhood representatives to be on the board. I see no reason why you would not take a similar approach here. We found it very beneficial at Old Oak to have the community as part of the conversation, and they were that link back to the neighbourhood groups, plural. I would think that it is commonly good practice for our members to be engaging with the community as part of those proposals coming forward. In answer to your question about whether those development corporations should be contributing directly to housing delivery, history has told us that they have done quite a big job of that in previous years. I know that there is some excellent research recently that has pulled together the entire history of development corporations right back to the New Towns Act. We can see that some of the big developments were direct delivery. I am sure it will be for locally elected leaders to work out what good looks like for them, but I would envisage that we would see an element of direct delivery coming forward, as well as a combination of other types of delivery, because the need is there for homes urgently. I am sure that we are all looking forward to the time soon when the new towns commission reports on what it is going to report on and where these locations are going to be. There will be an urgent need to get going on those. We look forward to commenting on the detailed proposals. Yes, we would imagine that there will be an element of community and direct delivery in both of them.

I have to declare a related interest, which is that I chaired the Harlesden neighbourhood forum, which did a lot of work on engagement with Old Oak Common, as well as the Grand Union Alliance. We at Local Trust feel strongly that there is a role here for paid community development workers. That is something that a lot of development corporations already do, but we think it should be mandated and a prerequisite for engagement with the community. Without it, it is very difficult for communities to suddenly get together the capacity to engage properly.

As we are all declaring interests now, I have some experience of a development corporation being created in a somewhat unusual manner for an unusual task. The learnings from that experience, and other things, would be that we should encourage, as early as possible, some engagement between the strategic authority and the local level to work out what the needs and priorities are. We would encourage there to be an adjudication route that could take place first before Secretary of State sign‑off to iron out those kinks. Ultimately, these things work well when you have buy-in from the local authorities and the local communities through that process to make the things work as effectively as possible. We recognise that they have an important role to play, including in helping the Government’s delivery of 1.5 million new homes, to break through some of those blockages. It has to be done in a way that engages with local stakeholders and values their input.

Finally, we are coming on to bats and newts and environmental delivery plans.

The Prime Minister has said that the Government will no longer accept the absurd spectacle of a £100 million bat tunnel. Will the Bill prevent future infrastructure projects from being held up by what some consider disproportionate environmental requirements? My second question is on the cost of infrastructure, which is often linked to the UK’s planning requirements. We tend to pay eight times the cost of a similar infrastructure project in Europe, whether that be road or rail. Is this Bill going to reduce that disparity in costs?

On road and rail costing more, they have cost more in some circumstances, but that has not always been the case. High Speed 1 was delivered on time and on budget. It is still within quite recent living memory that we were able to deliver those sorts of projects in that way. I would put that down as a marker that it can be done and we need to get back to some of that. That goes perhaps beyond the realms of this Bill; it comes down to good project management but, more importantly, perhaps not going out to market and saying what something is going to cost before you launch it. We have done it before. We can do it again. We need to get back to some of that greatness. In terms of disproportionate environmental requirements, as a starting point, we do not recognise the word “disproportionate”, but we recognise environmental requirements. It is the case that there are lots of requirements on planning. Every time a new requirement comes up, it has been quite convenient to put it into the planning system. We are not averse to it going into the planning system, as long as it has been resourced adequately to consider all those impacts in an expedient way. Moving forward, we support the principle of the proposals to move to environmental delivery plans and for Natural England to be responsible for delivering those, but only with the caveat that they are appropriately resourced to produce those delivery plans and, more importantly, monitor them. In very recent experience with biodiversity net gain, we have seen a system introduced that has not been resourced and nobody is monitoring it. It is no wonder that the public are starting to lose some trust in whether any biodiversity net gain is being consistently delivered. Moving towards an environmental delivery plan, if we are going to fundamentally change the way that that is being dealt with, not at a local level—it is going to a national agency, which will look at it strategically—we support the principle of looking at it holistically, because we know nature does not stop at district boundaries. We are not against the principle of it. We are against having another biodiversity net gain, where something has been set up and has not been adequately resourced and nobody is monitoring it. Those are not my words; that is the National Audit Office report last May that said that about biodiversity net gain. We have seen what happens when something is established in that way. We want environmental delivery plans to work. Everybody wants them to work, but Natural England are going to need some serious resourcing for them to be able to work. That is something that will need a close eye on it. We look forward to working with Natural England on it. I declare an interest: we have members working in Natural England. They are perfectly capable of getting this working, if they are resourced to do so.

We support the Government’s approach to trying to be more strategic about how we deal with nature, so understanding that the best way to spend £100 million on bats probably is not your tunnel there. It is how to strengthen and improve the natural environment elsewhere that can create a better habitat. The overall approach is to be welcomed. In terms of the minutiae of it, at the moment the suggestion is that the consultation window for EDPs will be 28 days. We think that that is possibly a bit tight to get the right level of input in this, so we should look at being a bit more flexible on that. You do not want to kick the can down the road forever, but 28 days is a bit of a tight timetable to get the right level of information together.

We cannot kick the bats, Adam.

Yes, environmental delivery plans are really sensible. They build on the good work that local nature recovery strategies are starting to do at a local authority level, taking it up into a broader geographic scale. It is much more sensible to look at bringing nature back to the level it needs to be at, on a landscape and catchment area level, and dealing with these issues that are stopping development now, such as the nutrient issues. Delivering those at a catchment area level is much more sensible than the piecemeal approach we have at the moment, which is very cumbersome. It is not a development versus nature issue, and there is too much of that rhetoric at the moment, unfortunately. These two things can co-exist, whether that is housing or infrastructure and nature. EDPs are a good balance between that and developing that broader strategy that Natural England will be doing. I echo the other comments. Natural England needs to be resourced to deliver these as quickly as possible next year to ensure that we can make use of this sensible approach.

Blue and green spaces are often the only shared space that communities have. They are an important form of social infrastructure. Although we do not necessarily disagree with any of the other panellists on this, we know that communities have spent a lot of time restoring and undoing damage done to their green and blue spaces. It would be really important, from a growth perspective, that we do not find ourselves making those mistakes again. The cost of health alone in doubly disadvantaged neighbourhoods to the public purse is £29 billion annually. Given the health and wellbeing impact of green and blue spaces and local wildlife places, we have to take that into consideration

Andrew’s point is really important there. What is most offensive about the current system is not just that it blocks development, but that we have become one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world, so it is failing completely on its own terms. Getting this bit right is probably most important. I cannot turn around to my constituents and justify the offensive waste of money that is being spent on projects that are not really helping nature at all under the current system, so getting this right needs to be one of the most important bits of the Bill. I am conscious of the number of people who seem to be not particularly confident that it is going to work, particularly for national infrastructure projects. Coming back to the bat tunnel question, Catherine Howard, a planning lawyer, has written that it probably will not particularly work. To slightly reframe Will’s question, if this law had been passed three or four years ago, do you think the bat tunnel would still have been built?

It would help reduce the likelihood of it. If you are able to behave strategically and think, “Where is the best place for that in this particular part of the world?”, you can make some of those trade-offs in a more sensible manner. I take the point that Madeleine made. I live very close to the Westway that drove a massive infrastructure thing right through the middle of town. There are always impacts of things that are done at pace without the right level of local consultation. We are trying to streamline some of those things up front, so you can be aware of the challenges and work out how to mitigate them, rather than it being a blocker and you having to do your bat tunnels.

The point here about these environmental plans is that they take the principle of a strategic approach—looking at things strategically. I would support the point just made of being able to look at whether you can do something else alternatively to creating that structure. It may be the case that that was the only solution for those bats, but it may be that there was another solution. It may be that, because that was not part of the considerations—it was a very linear approach and it was not looked at strategically—that is where the answer came. It is rather unfortunate, not least for the bats but for the broader conversation, that this tunnel has become, if you like, the poster boy or poster animal of this discussion. We are possibly in danger of losing the point here that there is a real opportunity with the Bill to do it better, as you say. We need to ensure that it is resourced to do it better. In looking at things strategically, if different agencies and people had been part of that conversation, it is highly likely that a number of different options would have been on the table apart from one particular tunnel. We will never know, because that time has now gone and it has moved on.

The problem is that there is a difference between looking at things strategically and achieving things strategically. I get that the Bill is introducing a way of looking at things strategically, but you are still applying the precautionary principle to EDPs. When you have an organisation such as Natural England that has traditionally been quite risk averse, the bar that it is going to have to jump over to clear an EDP is arguably still going to be quite high. There is no real pressure and incentive, I think many would argue, on it to do so because there is no other workaround. The Bill is basically putting it into the primary legislation that, if the EDP does not work or end up achieving the things that we hope, either through lack of resourcing, because that precautionary principle still applies, or because of a whole range of other issues, there is very little we can do about this later. That is, again, why I think that it is really important to get it right. Do you think that there is something that we could be looking at at this stage? I get that you cannot say that the bat tunnel would have been built, but none of you seems confident in saying that it would have stopped the bat tunnel being built, which the Prime Minister has said multiple times we need to achieve. Is there anything that you think we could do in this legislation to increase confidence that we would be able to stop the bat tunnels or similar projects in future?

On national infrastructure, there is a clear steer that empowers the Secretary of State and central Government. On the pre-application stuff, there is a whole range of things that are designed to speed things up. You get the sense that more tools are being given to central Government for those things that are nationally strategic. I am sure that the Government will continue in that vein if they find they are not making progress. No one can sit here and give absolute confidence on this, but the direction of travel is fairly clear.

To be clear, I am not allowed to comment on specific proposals because it is our members who are ultimately involved in giving the consent for those schemes. We support looking at these things holistically. You started your statement by saying “the most nature-depleted”, so we have to look at these things seriously and take the right amount of time to look at them. Sometimes taking the right amount of time to look at them may be frustrating. Some of the comments you referenced are political comments, and that is fine. Elected politicians are elected and can make those comments, but the professionals need to have the right amount of time to look at these things and come up with the right solutions. As I said about the bat tunnel, that may have been the only solution. There may have been other solutions on the table. In a new looking‑at‑things‑strategically environment, perhaps—we talked about local government reorganisation—with a local mayor involved, they may have looked at it and said, “Could we look at this a bit more pragmatically? Does that particular piece of infrastructure need to be built in that way, in that place, or could we do things differently?” We think that the new strategic approach coming in provides the opportunity to have those conversations differently, but I do not think that any of us is prepared to sit here and say that the bat tunnel would or would not happen. We will leave it at that. I cannot even say it with a straight face—sorry.

Part of this is also about how Natural England works, how that is governed, how its priorities are tweaked and what role its Secretary of State has in terms of managing some of those priorities. That is possibly beyond the scope of this particular discussion.

I think that we will safely discuss the bats and newts on another occasion. Thank you to everyone for attending this session this morning. You have given us some really important points and areas that we will develop further as we see the Bill progressing. Witnesses: Chris Young, Catriona Riddell and Matthew Spry.

Good morning. Can I ask our guests to introduce themselves for Hansard, please?

I am Catriona Riddell. I am an independent consultant. I work mainly with local planning authorities but have spent a lot of time on strategic planning in various guises. I currently chair a national strategic planning group that has been looking at how the new system of spatial development strategies could work.

My name is Chris Young. I am King’s counsel. I am a barrister and I work for developers, local authorities and third parties, usually at appeal or examinations in public, so the sharp end of decision making.

Good morning. I am Matthew Spry. I am a senior director at Lichfields, one of the country’s largest planning and development consultancies.

Good morning, everyone. I am going to start, if we can, with planning committees. The Government have a stated objective of finding a balance between promoting sustainable development and protecting local decision making. I am interested in the views of the panel, perhaps starting with you, Matthew, on what a national scheme of delegation might look like and if there are any particular functions that you think should be delegated to planning officers.

The starting point to think about with this is that this proposal will have an impact, but it will be small in the short term, because most of the proposals that were discussed in the working paper revolve around projects that are or are not in accordance with the local plan. Because we have such low coverage of up-to-date local plans at the moment, most major proposals—and by “major” we mean projects of over 10 homes—will not be in accordance with the development plan. Even under these proposals, it is highly likely that the majority of major schemes will still go to planning committees and therefore elected members will be making judgments over those schemes. Over time, the principle is to avoid double-handling of decisions. You want more of those decisions made upstream through local plans and through the setting of clear policies. Provided proposals come forward that comply with those policies, there should in theory be no need to look at them again, no need to look at reserved matters again and no need to look at the discharge of conditions. That is the endgame. The working paper put forward options for how you do that and what a scheme of delegation looks like. Logic takes you to a scheme focused on compliance with the development plan, but it will require care because, within the planning system, what ought to be a binary decision often is not. Different development plan policies pull in different directions, so you have to arrive at a conclusion about compliance with the development plan as a whole. Planning officers need to do that in determining or recommending on applications anyway. They will also be doing that to determine whether it should go to committee. You need to make sure there is no cross-infection, if you like, of those two exercises that are being carried out. We also need to avoid a perverse incentive for local authorities not to prepare local plans if they think it disempowers them from making decisions on the big applications in their area. Whatever is in the scheme of delegation needs to be accompanied by a very strong shift towards ensuring that local plans are in place, so that the balance of elected member input is going into that process, rather than individual applications. The final thing to say on this is that, with the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act, there will in turn be national development management policies taking on the role that is currently formed by policies in development plans. There will be a need to future-proof any scheme of delegation to deal with compliance with NDMPs as well as with local plan policies.

There is lots there. There is one point in particular I am keen to follow up on. You said that the principle was about avoiding double-handling. It is one that I would endorse; I think that is important if we need to get things moving through the system, but it might not be a view that is universally held. Do you think that the principle of avoiding double-handling is right?

Yes, absolutely. It is the way most countries organise their planning systems.

Great. That is excellent, thank you. I think that this part of the Bill is going to get a lot of attention. I am interested in the views of Matthew, but also the whole panel, on whether you believe the Bill should go further in setting out the details at this stage, rather than it being subject to future regulation.

I suspect it is possibly not helpful to set out lots of detail, because these things are quite difficult to get right, quite frankly. You want the ability to flex and take account of unintended consequences without having to go back to the primary legislation. In my view, it makes sense to do it through regulations, but those need to come forward quickly.

I picked up on this with the previous panel, but I want to get this panel’s thoughts on planning fees. How prescriptive is the Bill’s ringfencing of planning fees?

The ringfencing is provided in a provision that says that, in effect, fees have to be focused on the functions. The technical addition is proposed new subsection (8C) in clause 44. It says, “A local planning authority…must secure that their income from fees or charges paid in pursuance of regulations…is applied towards the carrying out of functions that the authority…has”. Those functions are defined specifically in relation to determining planning applications and certificates of lawfulness. What that does not do is fund local plan-making, which, as you heard from earlier speakers, comes from council tax. There is an argument to say that, if we are going to have a plan-led system, we should have a focus on funding the plans properly. The Government have injected a whole load of money recently to fund the plans. In relation to the last issue, once the members have done what they should do, which is make the difficult decisions about allocating sites, you should leave it to the professional officers to determine the applications. The detail does not need to be in the regulations. The reason for that is we do not democratise everything we do. The NHS spends huge amounts of money, and it makes decisions based on professional judgments. The judgments about applications are often best made by the professional officers themselves and all the statutory consultees that advise them. In terms of what the fee is doing, the Bill is seeking to give local authorities more of an ability to set their own fees. That is fine provided that the provision in the Bill, which is set out at proposed new subsection (8B) of clause 44, makes it clear that the local authority will have to ensure that the fees it is charging do not exceed the cost of carrying out the function. If that is in relation to the carrying out of the function of determining planning applications, that money is not available for local plans. That is how it stands at the moment. It is worth considering whether some of that money should relate to local plans because, ultimately, a lot less time needs to be spent on planning applications if there is an allocation, particularly if you couple that with delegation and say that once a site is allocated you do not need the members to redetermine it. You certainly do not need them to determine the reserved matters. I did an appeal recently where there were 20 reasons for refusal on an allocated site with outline planning permission, but not one of them stood up on appeal. There are some really dubious decisions being taken to determine planning applications unrelated to professional planning advice and national policy. Can I make one other point? Do developers want a better service? Yes, they absolutely do. The service at the moment is not adequate. It is very slow and very cumbersome. That is delaying and will delay the 1.5 million that the Government want to achieve. Are developers willing to pay for a better service? Yes, they are, provided that the fee increase results in that. The biggest problem is the lack of planners. As things hot up and we see more applications going in for large sites on the grey belt and green belt, the developers are going to want more professional planners. They are going to go to the planning consultancies to get more staff. The planning consultancies are going to take people from local authorities to fill their positions. You really need Government funding of planning schools—that is postgraduate and undergraduate courses—on a much bigger scale to deliver lots more planners. My final point is about fees. The Government have looked at this in the amendments. The fees need to cover the statutory consultees. A massive brake on the system at the moment is how long it is taking Natural England and the Environment Agency to respond. They are taking ages to respond. They do not see any of the fees. There needs to be a total assessment of the cost of the process. That is what this is seeking to do. It is seeking to let authorities look at the total cost. It does vary in different areas. It varies if you have a lot of ecological constraints, which they have in parts of Sussex, for example. It allows them to look at the total cost, including the statutory consultees, and set the fees according to that. At the moment, we have planning performance agreements, which are unregulated. There can be huge sums of money just for one meeting—it could be £10,000 for a single online meeting with the mayor’s office. That needs to be regulated. The legislation does not do that yet. We need a similar control in relation to regulating planning performance agreement fees, tied to the nature of the work that is being done.

I do not have any expertise in terms of building regulations. It is important to say that. I do not know what fees are charged in relation to that. I know there is a problem, but the problem is, again, a lack of staff. In planning, for example, there have been two rounds of fee increases in the last six months, one at the end of last year and then a bumper addition in the last year. One of your questions was, “Has that improved the service?” It is too early to say whether those increases will improve the service. I spoke to a head of planning this morning, who was telling me, “It is all very well having more fees, but, if I do not have the staff, I cannot provide the service.” This is going to take a number of years to work through, and in particular what we desperately need is a lot more planners.

The National Federation of Builders has raised concerns about the issue of localised fees increasing. They touched on the point that the fees have increased twice in the last five years with no service improvement. Another suggestion is around training for elected members on planning committees. Is that another area that would help?

I will just answer that briefly. Yes, absolutely, it would help to increase the amount of training. There is no question. I have 100,000 hours in planning at the front end and I am still learning all the time. It is an incredibly complicated system. That is why it is best entrusted to planners. Some 98% of decisions are already delegated, but the fact is that those are about household extensions. We are talking about the major applications. Matthew is talking about applications of 10 or more. For some of the ones that I deal with—I am in an inquiry at the moment—it is 8,000 houses. Angela Rayner has called that in as the Secretary of State. At least as far as these recommendations are concerned, that should be determined by officers initially and then by members. There are a lot of schemes for 100 or 200 homes that are perfectly capable of being subject to delegated authority. As for the master builders, they particularly represent the small and medium-sized sector. That is much more of an issue for them. We need to look at graduated fees. When you are developing a greenfield site for 1,000 homes, the gross development value is in the billions, so the fee increase is not a significant issue. If you are a small builder doing five houses, these fee increases are significant. That is why I agree that a lot of this should not be in the legislation. It needs to be researched further and then put into secondary legislation.

I have a couple of points to make about this. It is all linked in terms of the scheme of delegation, member training and the planning fees. We work in a planning system. All of this is focused on the downstream bit. We are trying to get a plan-led system working so, as Chris said, we have to find a way of resourcing the upstream bit—the local plan bit. I work with a lot of local planning authorities. The policy teams, those responsible for preparing local plans, are tiny. Quite often, they are lucky if they have two or three people. Local authorities’ success is measured on the speed of how they deal with applications and the housing delivery test. All the things that they get tested on and that get measured happen at the application stage. Inevitably, all the funding goes into development management. As Chris said, we do not have enough planners to go around. The priority is always given to the downstream development management side of things. If we are going to have a plan-led system—there is a lot in this that will help that—specifically in terms of fees we need to find a way of making sure that, if they are ringfenced, they are ringfenced for the planning service. There might also be a question about how easy it is to ringfence funding specifically for part of a service, but that is a very specific question. The other point I would make is around future-proofing. If we are going to have universal coverage of mayoral strategic authorities and they are going to have development management powers, we need to think about that in the context of both the national scheme of delegation and the planning fees. In terms of member training, we have to get member training right across the board. It is not just about making decisions on planning applications. It is the same point I made earlier. We need members to be trained on how to deal with a planning application and what the purpose of planning is. That is probably a whole-council role. I do not think member training should be exclusively for those who sit on a planning committee. I would also make the point that there are different planning committees. You touched on development corporations earlier. National parks have a very different composition as well. They have elected members, parish members and members directly appointed by the Secretary of State. They have a very different composition. We are also likely to have more development corporations. There are different make-ups of committees that we need to take into account. The whole Bill needs to be future-proofed for local government restructuring and the devolution aspects that will come forward in the English devolution Bill.

I want to briefly touch on compulsory purchase issues. Is it possible that, in some cases, landowners could be offered less than the price they originally paid for the land if hope value is disregarded?

Yes, in a word.

I know the Chair will love that answer because we are a bit short of time. That is really helpful. What impact would that have? What safeguards could be put in place to stop CPO powers being abused?

This is not really in this Bill. It was in LURA, the Levelling‑up and Regeneration Act. It was the previous Government’s idea to remove hope value. They just misunderstood what it is, to be honest. I have spoken to various practitioners who specialise in compulsory purchase. They have told me that the mistake that the then Government and the Secretary of State, Lord Gove, made was he seemed to think hope value was something in addition to market value. It is not. Hope value is the increase from agricultural land value—£12,000 or £20,000 an acre—if that land is on the edge of a town, but that is its market value. It is encouraging that this Government have not continued to pursue this point with any great rigour. The difficulty is you will see landowners extremely reluctant to release their land if it is compulsorily purchased at the agricultural land value, knowing that they could achieve a different figure. They simply will not allow the land to go down that route. A CPO will take two or three years and there will be legal challenges. Anybody who has their land compulsorily purchased for the agricultural land value will pursue that to the Supreme Court because you are fundamentally taking away the value of somebody’s land. This whole area has largely been parked, and rightly so, because it is a misunderstanding of CPO powers and a misunderstanding of value.

Every year, the local planning system relies on evidence from landowners, paid for by landowners and developers, that the sites that are potentially to be allocated or granted permission are deliverable, suitable and so on. That is essentially paid for by a form of hope value. It is paid for by the expectation that, if permission is granted, the value increases. That is the basis on which the site is allocated. If you remove willing landowners from the equation at the outset of the process, because of the fear of CPOs on a widespread scale, you risk not enough land being advanced through the system in the first place. A lot of the legwork is done by landowners contributing to call for sites processes, local plan processes and so on.

I want to jump in briefly on this point because the logic is slightly lost on me. We know that, particularly at the moment, land is often overpaid for by developers compared with what the local authority may want to extract from the land value through section 106. They will come back later and say, particularly given what we have just been through in recent years with inflation going out of control, “We can no longer pay for it.” They are really saying, “We overpaid for land three, four or five years ago compared with what is deliverable now.” It is not undesirable to get land values down for development, given the consequences of that are increasing the amount of housing and affordable housing we can get built. I get your point about the land not coming forward, but surely the CPO powers will rarely be used. But having that leverage—the potential for that to be used—will push or incentivise landowners in some places to come to a deal and release that land in an appropriate way at a fairer price, because they would know that lever could be used if they did not.

Chris will have a comment on this. In theory, yes, but the key thing is that the sites are mainly being promoted in the first place by promoters that work on the basis that they will take a share of the uplift in land value once permission is granted. That is the basis on which they effectively invest by paying for the feasibility work to take it through the planning system. I agree that if it is a rare intervention in very unusual circumstances, there ought to be confidence to move forward on that basis. It would be different if it were to become a more widespread threat. This is particularly an issue for more marginal schemes. If schemes are straightforwardly deliverable, they will come forward. Where schemes get stuck is where some issue arises around infrastructure or where viability is crunched. That is where there is potentially more of a stand-off in terms of delivery. If the threat of a CPO at existing use value is more likely, those more marginal or difficult sites may be less likely to come forward.

The system works, so do not try to fix it. It works really well. Huge amounts of money are extracted out of the increase in land value—it is billions.

It is not necessarily about increasing the amount of money that is extracted. It is about stopping what we have now: housing in this country has completely stopped because all projects have suddenly stopped becoming viable because the way we extract land value in this country is very far from being ideal in our current situation. It is about trying to think about how this could be done better. It feels like that CPO lever, that leverage, could be one of the ways of solving that problem.

If you have the threat of saying, “We will take your land at agricultural land values,” that would be a lever. I cannot deny that. In truth, what happens can vary a lot. If you think about the Government’s new grey belt policy, the condition there is to have 50% affordable housing. That comes off the land value. The landowners are now all adjusting and applications are being submitted with a very significant reduction. Bear in mind there are also huge road transport infrastructure costs to be paid for, and the ecological benefits, so you can make it work only so hard. Certainly the land values in the green belt are lower because there are much higher house prices, but they can afford the 50%. If you do development schemes in urban areas and they are tall buildings, most of them cannot afford the affordable housing. It just does not work because they are so expensive to build. Regeneration is great. I do not think all the schemes have stopped. What has happened is the registered providers have been told to focus, particularly by the previous Government, on the existing stock and improving their stock. I am not saying that is not a legitimate issue, but they are now not going to the market and agreeing to do section 106 schemes. They do not want to take on section 106 schemes. If that happens, the greenfield sites do not come forward. It is the greenfield sites that deliver affordable housing at scale. Social housing delivery in this country has absolutely collapsed because of the focus on brownfield sites. I am not against regeneration, but we need to recognise that it is all those grey belt and green belt sites that will deliver affordable housing at scale.

I take a slightly different view on this. I have worked in the system since 1990. Before 2008-09, viability was not an issue because it was a planning-led development world, where the plan dictated where the development would go. We did not have calls for sites or things like that. Viability did not exist. Viability was introduced into the system post the global crash in 2008 because a lot of landowners, particularly in the south east, had overpaid for land. It was to try to get the house-building system going again, but it has stayed with us. With compulsory purchase, local authorities are generally very risk averse, so they do not use it. If we want to start rebuilding a plan-led system and getting developments built in the right places as opposed to where developers want to build them—hopefully that is the same thing, but it is not always—we need to start thinking about what these levers are and how we can use them more effectively. There is an awful lot being asked of the planning system. In terms of affordable housing, that is absolutely the case. The planning system is increasingly having to do an awful lot of the heavy lifting around biodiversity and everything else. All of that is good, but the system is creaking in terms of what you can get out of it. The other day somebody asked me whether I had ever looked at the profit margins of the major house builders. I do not genuinely believe that viability is an issue for some of these large house builders, especially in the southern half of the country and around the cities where they make most of their profits. That may be a slightly different view from my colleagues.

On the theme of biodiversity, I know that the panel members do not have expertise in environmental delivery plans, but Chris had a question for you all on that.

I do not know whether you watched the previous panel, but I want to come in on that point. You will have seen what Catherine Howard has written, particularly when it comes to large national infrastructure projects. I have spoken to other planning lawyers as well. I spoke to one yesterday, who said that, if he were to guess, he would expect one of these to be in place by 2029. What is your view on how likely it is that these will be rolled out efficiently and effectively? If there is some worry about that, what can we do to ensure that they are?

I think they should be welcomed. They are very clearly capable of overcoming some significant problems. You have probably all heard about nutrient neutrality, which is a major issue that is stopping house building. Having a joined-up approach to addressing that issue in a comprehensive way is undoubtedly the right solution. There is no question about that. We are talking about the extent to which nature depletion has taken place in this country. There is a suggestion that we are one of the worst in the world in terms of our nature. When it comes to nutrients and other issues, you have to look at the agricultural sector. The agricultural sector overwhelmingly contributes to the nutrient problem, but, with the greatest respect, parliamentarians are not quick to front up to the agricultural sector. They are the main polluters. That is where the problem is. House building is a tiny proportion of the nutrient problem, and yet it has stopped hundreds of thousands of houses being built. This solution, which I know has been looked at for a long time, is a very pragmatic and sensible approach. The petition by 34 leading charities and organisations raising concern about this is more focused on individual species protection. You are going to listen and take account of that, but, again, we need a comprehensive approach. Biodiversity net gain can be dealt with on site, for example, if I take a different topic. In some areas such as Buckingham, they have biodiversity enhancement zones. To focus on a particular area in a comprehensive and joined-up way is very sensible. Your question is about the timescale. This is going to take an awful lot of work by Natural England. They are going to need the funding to do this. We do not have all the detail. It is a good idea. The secondary legislation, policy and guidance is where we are going to see the detail of that. You are also concerned about legal challenges. Yes, there is the risk of legal challenges at various stages through that process, if you look at all the provisions. It might be sensible to introduce what exists for local plans, which is called a preclusive provision, which means there will not be a legal challenge until the point at which it is adopted. You stop constant legal challenges. There will be lots of legal challenges. One final comfort to you is that, until these are in place, the existing system will have to continue.

That is not a comfort.

The existing system does spend a lot of time and energy—you have the bat tunnel example—focusing on ecology. Ecology is by far the most significant issue looked at in planning applications now. Site‑specific solutions are not always the answer.

I completely agree on that. I am completely sold on the need for the changes and EDPs. My worry is purely that this is not going to stop the bat tunnels or their equivalents—whatever we are looking at—getting built. The consequences of not getting this right are quite severe in terms of building enough homes and being able to deal with climate change. We have not built a reservoir in decades. We have become awful at building big national infrastructure projects as a country. The consequences of not fixing that situation are pretty severe, and this feels like one of the big blockers to making sure that we can. I want to be reassured that we are going far enough in this Bill. Do you have any ideas of where we could be going further?

Further to Chris’s point, are Natural England adequately resourced in terms of working with the range of different third parties they are going to have to consult and liaise with, such as farmers, habitat banks and environmental NGOs, to make sure that they bring forward a good and concrete EDP?

That is a very valid question. The answer is simply no. Ecology has become a massive issue. Some would say a massive industry, if you look at all the reports that are produced in relation to it. My sister is a planning officer. She looks at all these reports. She says she has perhaps gone into the wrong profession and that she should have become an ecologist because there seems to be a boundless amount of work on this. It is all for the good, but it is extremely expensive. It is very difficult for small and medium-sized builders. You have to have reports on bats and newts, flora and fauna and everything else. It is very regulated. It is slowing down developments and creating a huge amount of delay. Proper resourcing of Natural England is absolutely fundamental. The levy and what is proposed here is a way of doing that because the costs of managing it will be included in the costs of running it. Developers are willing to pay significant amounts of money to deal with ecology and to make sure that there is a biodiversity net gain and proper ecological protection. A more co-ordinated approach with a properly funded Natural England is absolutely the right answer. They are not properly funded now. There are really committed officers, but there is only so much they can do. Going back to fees, local authorities need to have a lot more specialist staff. They need ecologists. They need other people. That is why the fees are probably crucial to all of this.

On that point, I know we are coming on to strategic planning and spatial development strategies, but in the past that was a critical role of the regional strategies. I was director of planning for the South East England regional assembly. We worked really closely with all the Government agencies, including the Environment Agency and Natural England, on addressing some of this. I will give you two really important examples. Two water reservoirs were proposed in the South East Plan. Those never happened because the South East Plan disappeared. We worked really closely with the Environment Agency and all the local authorities. We looked well in advance at where we were going to be dealing with water shortages. Horsham fell by the wayside last week in terms of their local plan. One of the reservoirs was to sort out that whole Sussex area. The other thing we had in the South East Plan—it was a policy that survived—was around the Thames Basin Heaths. Again, we worked across parts of Surrey, Hampshire and Berkshire to make sure the heaths were managed within the whole approach to growth and housing. Strategic planning is the answer to a lot of this.

The plan was abolished.

Regional strategies were a bit of a blip. We had structure plans for decades before that and they survived. It may have been political ideology, rather than the fact it did not work, that abolished regional strategies. None the less, I was involved in research last year that looked at the last 14 years of strategic planning. In the survey work that we did, there was overwhelming support from stakeholders and local authorities around having something that was mandatory and universally applied, and that had robust governance structures. A lot of what we were talking about was risk. It was about technical risk, political risk and financial risk. What we are seeing in the Planning and Infrastructure Bill will help reduce the risks. Fundamentally, strategic planning—I call it the ringmaster—is a spatial investment framework. Whatever model you use, it is a spatial investment framework. It acts in that ringmaster role around place, looking at how places should be shaped in terms of what is needed for the economy, the environment and climate. Health is going to be a huge part of this too. It is about looking at places in an integrated way, as Dr Hills was talking about earlier. That is one thing. We need to have that strong governance. One of the challenges is that we are going through a process of major local government restructuring in large parts of the country. There will be evolving governance structures, but, fundamentally, it will be really important to have that separation from local planning authorities and a higher but fully democratic authority that is making decisions around some of the important things, such as housing numbers, and looking at integration, spatial strategy and a number of other things In Oxfordshire and across the board, some local authorities have fallen by the wayside when they have tried to work together. Having that separation of decision making is going to be incredibly important as we go through the process. Keeping it tight and narrow and not letting in mission creep means we will be able to do these really quickly and address some of the big challenges that we have around infrastructure deficits and the environment. We can do these quickly. We have done them very quickly in the past. We just need to get some of the resourcing in place and manage that process of change over time. The mayors will have a huge amount of responsibility to lift these strategies off the page and deliver them.

I need to go because we are over-running, so I do not know whether the Chair wants to hear the answer or whether you could provide a written response. I am interested in your views about what should be covered in national development management policies and whether the Government need to do any other planning reforms to deliver 1.5 million homes, which is one of their main pledges.

The Government have made a really good start with the NPPF. They deserve a lot of credit for that. They have got it in place quickly and developers are responding. The Land, Planning and Development Federation reported a 160% increase in the preparation of planning applications in response to the NPPF, which will be submitted in the first half of this year. We all know what the OBR said about that in terms of scoring the 170,000 extra homes by 2029. There are still some significant challenges. These really relate to the time that it is going to take for those planning applications to be determined. We are about to publish some research next week, which we can supply to the Committee, looking at how long it has taken for outline planning applications for residential developments over 10 homes to be determined between 2014 and last year. That essentially shows that the average time taken has risen to two years up from eight months in 2014. In 2014, 78% of applications were determined in less than a year. Now, only 36% are. Only 4% are determined within the 13 weeks that statute sets as an expectation. Over the same period, the number of applications of that sort has fallen by two thirds. Fewer than 600 of those applications were submitted last year compared with 2,500 in 2014. It is not just that type of applications; the volume has fallen for all types. It is now quicker, by six months on average, to get a decision at appeal than it is locally. The level of resource is clearly part of that—we have heard that consistently—but there is also a productivity crisis in planning because the volume of applications has fallen by more than the amount of resources that seem to be going into the system and the number of officers administering it. Why is that? It is due to policy load and the challenges around nutrient neutrality, viability and all of those things, but it is also about the expectation of detail that we have in the system. We want to gold-plate applications; we want all the detail up front. If you commission a report for an application, you commission another report to review it. All this is adding to the volume of stuff that SMEs and planning departments are dealing with. The question was about what reforms are needed to NDMPs. There are four areas that are worth thinking about. The first one is about policy. The NDMPs are a real opportunity to build on the NPPF, to have better codified policy tests and to strengthen the presumption in favour. In particular, having a small sites NDMP would support SMEs to deliver small-scale development. We should clarify the weights to be attached to certain policy factors in the planning balance, so you have a clearer set of rules about what does or does not accord with policy. There are then process points. The Planning Inspectorate turned its act around with the Rosewell review, identifying the end-to-end process and how that could be improved. A similar process is needed for local decision taking. Part of that is letting outlines be outlined. If you look at an outline planning application now compared with one when I started out, the amount of detail that goes into them now is off the scale. It is incredible how that has changed. That needs to move on. There are points about practice, such as targeting efficiency gains from digitalisation and the use of AI in local authorities to reduce the demands on applicants and officers while still leaving room for planning judgment. Local authority working practices need to change. That goes to the point Victoria Hills made about having properly senior chief officers who can make those quite knotty but crucial planning judgments that junior officers are struggling with. They are almost getting policy paralysis with all the information. Finally, it is about performance. The official statistics on planning application performance do not measure what matters. Applications keep on getting extended in time. Most applications are decided in time, even though they now take over two years to determine. We need to start measuring what is meaningful. That goes for statutory consultees as well. Yes, we need to put in more resources, but we also need to strip back the detail, simplify the policy and make sure we have a better performance management regime in place.

Could I just answer the second part of that question? I would make one small point about utility companies that I will throw in there. One of the biggest blockages on long-term planning is private sector utility companies, whether that is water companies or energy companies. There is nothing in the Bill that really forces them to the table up front. It could be a really positive approach if the spatial development strategies and mayors could bring some of the utility companies to the table and get them to plan long term and feed in at the start of the process and not at the end, when more often than not they say, “We cannot do what you need us to do.” Generally, we need to get infrastructure providers to the table upstream, specifically private sector utility companies. I am not sure what you can do about that in terms of legislation. It might be difficult to enforce, but even just getting something in the Bill would send the right message.

Yes, energy companies and electricity companies could be added into that as well.

On the request for topics that the national development management policies could cover, I would add town centre regeneration. We used to have more guidance on this. We definitely need some new guidance on that. I would also highlight affordable housing delivery. We have targets—we have the five-year housing land supply—for general housing, but we do not have a target for affordable housing. We also do not have one for the huge growing sector of old people’s accommodation. There are virtually no targets for that. The one thing that would change the system would be to change paragraph 11(b) of the NPPF and make every local authority have to meet its housing target. I know we have moved to mandatory targets, but the mandatory targets can still be undermined by constraints in the area. That does not include the green belt now, but there are other constraints. Every area should meet its housing need, unless and until it can find a neighbour to take it or there is a sub-regional or regional plan—which is why we need regional plans and why the last 15 years have been, frankly, really difficult. We have had no regional or higher-level plans. You cannot plan the country’s planning requirements and housing requirements focusing largely on neighbourhood plans and a patchwork of occasional local plans. The whole system needs to get real. You need to have plans in place to meet these housing targets unless somebody else will meet some of your target for you.

On that note, we will bring the Committee to an end. Many of our constituents who are watching will recognise that they too have a voice in this. Ultimately, they want plans to work locally. They want to see developments come forward. It is about how we bring everyone together to make sure everything is working in sync. Thank you all for coming this morning.