Neighbourhood planning, in particular, could have a huge impact on development and land use, if the bill is enacted as currently written. I suspect that any local councillors who read it will immediately get onto their local MPs to ensure that doesn't happen. Neighbourhood planning has no role for local councillors; the onus is on parish councillors and leaders of neighbourhood fora (forums? Spellcheck is unhelpful on this point).
Three new terms are being introduced: neighbourhood development plans (NDPs?), neighbourhood development orders (NDOs?), and community right to build orders (CRBOs?). None of these are obligatory, and there are two prerequisites: a spatially defined neighbourhood and an organisation to represent it. In rural areas, it is assumed that the former will be a parish and the latter a parish council. These are established structures, probably known and supported by most people nearby. For the purposes of the localism bill, the ideal neighbourhood would probably be a large village comprising a single parish, with a well-supported parish council and a good level of community cohesion. A community centre would need to be conveniently available for holding local referenda and discussing the development plan.
There are plenty of such places, but they're the exception rather than the rule. In urban areas, the first hurdle will be agreeing where neighbourhoods are. The minimum requirement is a 'neighbourhood forum' with at least three members. To my mind, this implies that my two housemates and I could set ourselves up as a pocket neighbourhood, stretching from the front yard to the end of the back garden. The responsibility for ensuring that everyone doesn't do this lies with local councils, who have the unenviable task of mediating when competing claims of neighbourhoodity are made. If there are no such claims, presumably some areas will end up in non-neighbourhood limbo. I also assume that local councillors will seek to exert their influence at this point.
But let's say that the chaotic civil war bit is over, and we have neighbourhoods, including a small one that I will call My House. Now a local referendum can be held to decide whether to prepare a neighbourhood development plan. If less than half of the turnout says yes, no plan can be prepared and the neighbourhood forum might as well go home. But in the My House example, say I vote yes and the two other don't vote at all because they're out somewhere. That's a mandate for the preparation of a neighbourhood development plan, which the local planning authority would have to help me write.
Let us ignore for the moment the fact that I live in a rented house and would be contravening my lease if I so much as put in a picture hook without the landlord's permission. The neighbourhood development plan for My House could set out an intention to add four further stories to the place, styled in the manner of a treehouse. Assuming the neighbourhood forum (my housemates and I) are happy with this, and it doesn't directly contradict the Cambridge Local Plan (which I don't believe it does), the plan could be adopted.
The next stage would be to go for a neighbourhood development order. These are potentially powerful tools, as they specify an area of the neighbourhood and what development can take place in it. Once adopted, that development (which could be anything that doesn't need environment impact assessment) can bypass the planning system entirely, leaving the local planning authority with little or no control over it. In the My House case, the local authority would have to help my housemates and I prepare our order, setting out the development we intend (a very large vertical extension). In order to get this order adopted, we'd have to get an independent person to examine it (a planner ex-colleague, perhaps) and hold a further referendum. I could probably convince my housemates to vote yes by this point, if only because they'd want me to stop going on about it. I could then start building a four storey treehouse on the roof of my home, safe in the knowledge that planning officers couldn't stop me. Although building control might have something to say.
This example may sound totally ridiculous, but there's nothing in the bill to stop it happening. Doubtless, local planning authorities would have to deal with these kind of vexatious micro-neighbourhoods, as well as the sensible, cohesive villages making constructive decisions. I haven't mentioned community right to build orders, as these seem to some extent to replicate neighbourhood development orders. However, they can be requested by 'community organisations' (not defined – could this include businesses?) to grant permission for specific development on a specific site. An independent examination and referendum is required, but once again the local planning authority is being taken out of the loop.
Three final points to make about neighbourhood development orders. Firstly, they might never catch on. A lot of legislation is piggybacking on local development orders, which were introduced in the 2004 Planning Act. Since then, ten pilots have been set up and one local development order has been adopted. Neighbourhood development orders are intended to serve exactly the same purpose – extend permitted development rights within a specified area. The difference is the procedure; rather than being introduced through the local planning process, the new orders will supposedly be led by neighbourhoods. So will they be any more popular than their predecessors?
Secondly, neighbourhood development orders are alarmingly powerful. They override duties to consider conservation areas and the historic environment. I am not a lawyer, but my reading of the bill is that they also override green belt designations. There's no detail as to how they'd be enforced, but once in place they effectively convey planning permission in perpetuity and can only be challenged through judicial review.
Thirdly, I'm glad I don't live in London, because if these orders look worrying, the powers being given to the Greater London Authority in the final clauses of the localism bill are a hundred times more so. The mayor of London is being given power to designate 'mayoral development areas' when he/she considers it 'expedient'. These amount to mini-urban development corporations with regeneration objectives. The Secretary of State can pass property, rights and powers to them from councils, the Homes and Communities Agency, the Olympic Delivery Authority, or even a government department. No public consultation, let alone a referendum, is required to set up a mayoral development corporation. Boroughs and the London Assembly must be consulted, but the mayor doesn't even have to accept their comments. A mayoral development corporation may do 'anything it considers appropriate for the purposes of its object or for purposes incidental to those purposes'. This looks to me like an extraordinarily unconstrained power, presumably intended to speed up projects like the Olympics and Crossrail. Entirely mayor-appointed and with no safeguards at all, there's a lot of potential for abuse in these development corporations.
The localism bill is a strange document. The name totally belies the content. It takes a considerable amount of planning power away from the local level, and hands it to neighbourhoods if they want to take it. It also introduces a number of duties on local authorities that smack of centralism. Even the much-touted power of competence on local authorities is constrained, restricting precisely what they need to use it for right now – raising money. This bill is trying to do a lot of things at once, and relying in many places on regulations to be introduced later. I hope that parliament will notice during the second reading that it has the potential to cause total mayhem and paralyse development. Recent news has suggested that chaos is what the government wants, but I can't help doubting that most businesses, local councillors, and people-on-the-street would share that sentiment.
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