Out-Law News 2 min. read
17 Oct 2016, 12:45 pm
The bill, which has now passed to committee stage following its second reading in the House of Commons, will introduce "new ideas, new policies and new legislation" to speed up housing-related planning decisions, according to Elizabeth Wiseman of Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind Out-Law.com. It will do so by restricting the use of pre-commencement conditions when councils grant planning permission and supporting neighbourhood planning, among other measures.
"It is clear from the debate that there is a clear focus on the requirement for all local planning authorities to have a local plan in place to remove any uncertainties within communities," Wiseman said. "It was also recognised that it is necessary to streamline the process, and the Bill can and should be used to achieve this. However, it was clear that the interaction between local plans and neighbourhood plans will need to be discussed further as the Bill moves through parliament, with the strength of neighbourhood plans being questioned."
"Given the focus on the need for cooperation and joint planning at all levels of government, it will be interesting to see how the bill progresses through the House of Lords over the next few months. It is expected that the government will continue to explore every possible angle to increase housing supply through the bill," she said.
If passed in its current form, the Neighbourhood Planning Bill would make neighbourhood plans part of the development plan for an area as soon as they have been approved by local people and businesses in a referendum, without having to be brought into legal force officially by the relevant local planning authority (LPA). LPAs would also be able to make minor modifications to neighbourhood plans with the agreement of the body that brought the plan forward, without the need for public consultation or further examination.
The bill also includes a clause that will prevent LPAs from adding pre-commencement conditions to a planning permission without obtaining the applicant's consent. These conditions, which require actions to be taken by the applicant before a prescribed part of the development can go ahead, can "unreasonably hold up the start of construction" if used inappropriately, communities secretary Sajid Javid told the House of Commons at the start of last week's debate.
"If we are to tackle the housing deficit, it is crucial that shovels hit the ground as soon as possible once permission has been granted for a development," he said.
"Of course, conditions can play a vital role. They ensure that important issues such as flood mitigation and archaeological investigation are undertaken at the right time. That is not going to change, but pre-commencement conditions should not be allowed to become unreasonable barriers to building … To tackle this, the bill reflects best practice by stopping pre-commencement conditions being imposed without the written agreement of the applicant. It will also create a power to restrict the use of certain other types of planning conditions that do not meet the well-established policy tests in the national planning policy framework," he said.
Javid said that he agreed with the "central thrust" of the recommendations of the government's Local Plans Expert Group (LPEG), which published its recommendations on local planning and cross-boundary cooperation in March. The group's recommendations included making local plans a statutory requirement, strengthening the duty to cooperate and streamlining the plan-making process; but it suggested that most of these changes should be made through national policy and guidance rather than through primary legislation.
However, Javid said that if any primary legislation was required to give effect to the group's recommendations, his intention was to use the Neighbourhood Planning Bill as the "vehicle" for doing so.
Later in the debate, housing minister Gavin Barwell confirmed the intention of the government to produce a white paper on house building later in the autumn.