The Government has promised further guidance on the implications of the Coalition’s decision to scrap Regional Strategies and suggested that the administration may use secondary legislation rather than wait for primary legislation to make the change in the planning regime.
That was the message from planning minister Bob Neill when he responded to a Commons debate on Regional Strategies during which Conservative and Liberal Democrat MPs asked for clarification of the status of the letter sent by communities secretary Eric Pickles. MPs warned of a “policy vacuum” because of a lack of transitional guidance while others pointed to conflicting legal advice over whether the letter could be treated as a “material consideration”.
Conservative backbencher Geoffrey Clifton-Brown insisted that Government must not allow uncertainty to lead to “paralysis” of the planning system and costly legal challenges by judicial review.
He said: “With no timeline in place for the proposed Decentralisation and Localism Bill that the Government intends to introduce, there is concern that councils throughout the country will face a number of hugely costly legal challenges by judicial review and appeals to defend. Therefore, the difficulty for decision makers is what legitimate weight they should accord the Secretary of State’s letter.”
During the debate in Westminster Hall, MPs welcomed Pickles’ decision to scrap the Regional Strategies. He wrote to all local authorities in England on 27 May, informing them of his intention to scrap them, a move that would free councils from central Government housing targets.
Mark Lancaster, the Conservative MP for Milton Keynes North who secured the debate, said: “I welcome the secretary of state’s decision to abolish Regional Strategies. However, this does raise a number of serious questions and the sooner we have the answers the sooner local authorities will be able to move forward in implementing local issues.”
Bob Neill told MPs that ministers were satisfied with the legal advice that they had been given about the letter and ‘that it is a material consideration and should be regarded as such, both by local planning authorities, in considering applications, and by the inspectorate’.
He said: “Ultimately, there will be a need for primary legislation to sweep such matters away, which will be dealt with in a localism Bill that will be introduced to the House in this Session. However, we will also explore the possibility of using secondary legislation to remove the most difficult part of the Regional Strategies in advance of that. We are actively discussing with officials the means by which this may be done.”
He added that the next step was to issue more detailed guidance, following the letter from the Secretary of State.
He said: “Moreover, we will give local authorities the opportunity to revise partially those plans to reflect the abolition of the Regional Strategies and the imposed targets that went with them.”
He added that a ‘focused revision’ of the plan that concentrated on certain aspects, such as the housing aspects that are affected by the removal of strategies, ‘need not take a long time’.
Meanwhile, decentralisation minister Greg Clark has revealed that the promised Decentralisation and Localism Bill would include a statutory obligation for councils to co-operate across area boundaries.
He said the legislation would contain an ‘obligation on authorities to co-operate on those parts of their policies which cross borders and boundaries and in a way that cross boundaries were perhaps not recognised in the regional system’.
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