Following evidence being taken by Communities and Local Government Parliamentary Committee on Planning Housing and Growth, on 15 October, with Mark Prisk MP and Nick Noles MP, the uncorrected transcript has been released, revealing more insights in current thinking.
Matters discussed include:
– discouraging Articles 4s and Conservation Areas, as people learn to ‘live with it after all’
– reduced pressure on enforcement, as ‘most… extensions… will now be permitted’
– Non-planning controls can be used to regulate the ‘permitted development’ rights for broadband boxes, with details to be confirmed by Nick Boles.
The uncorrected transcript reads as follows:
Q93 Bob Blackman: Can I cover Article 4, then, at this point? One of the issues that occurred, certainly under the previous Government, was an encouragement of reducing the number of conservation areas and keeping them to be proper conservation areas, where there was an architectural reason to do so, and of reducing Article 4 areas as well, for the simple reason of saying that there was to be no discouragement of development. Are you now suggesting that local authorities should enhance the number of Article 4 areas and enhance the number of conservation areas to protect against unreasonable development?
Nick Boles: I do not want them to. Personally, I would like every local authority to embrace this very reasonable liberalisation in the interests of their residents. I think that they should, but they have a right, under the law, to go through a process of Article 4. That right will remain, but I am certainly not encouraging anyone to go down that route, because I would hope that they would, if nothing else, try this for six months or a year, see how it operates-does the world come to an end, to which the answer, I suspect, would be that it will not-and then probably decide that they can live with it after all.
Q94 Bob Blackman: Finally from me, at the moment, people who carry out work under permitted development are encouraged to get a certificate of lawful development following that work. That, of course, safeguards them in terms of selling the property and, indeed, makes sure that the local authority properly registers the development that has taken place. Is there any change in policy to that?
Nick Boles: There is no intention to change that.
Q95 Bob Blackman: Are there any proposals about charging for those certificates and for the impact that the local authority will then have on the work that they may have to do?
Nick Boles: We are not proposing any changes to that at all. It is something that is sensible, as you say, so that the householder or the propertyowner has protected themselves for the future, and that will remain the case.
Q96 Heidi Alexander: I have found this exchange quite fascinating, to be honest. Are you honestly saying that you think that people are put off from building extensions and conservatories because of the cost of the planning fee, and not the cost of the £2,000 conservatory or the £5,000 extension? Do you think that the reason why people are not doing this at the moment is because of the planning fee?
Nick Boles: No. I think, Ms Alexander, you will note what I said, which was that it is, of course, not just the planning fee, because the planning fee is an amount but it is not an enormous amount; it is the fact that, if you are going through a planning application process, you then feel that you need to get a whole lot of technical, architectural and design advice, and maybe even a planning consultant, to help you get it through, because you know that you have to tick various boxes and jump through various hoops. The estimate is that the total cost of the advice that people get when they are submitting these applications averages out at around £2,000, which, as a proportion of the cost of your extension, is quite a lot. Therefore, if it is a reasonable thing to do, I think certainly some people have been held back by the fact that they are going to have to spend £2,000 on a process that does not pay for a pane of glass.
Q97 Heidi Alexander: Personally, I think it is the cost of doing the work itself that is prohibitive, and not the planning process and fee, but we probably disagree there. I just wonder what impact you think this is going to have on the amount of enforcement work that local authorities are going to have to do retrospectively after all these conservatories and extensions have sprung up?
Nick Boles: I think there will be dramatically less enforcement work because, of course, most of the reasonable extensions that most reasonable people want to make will now be permitted, so there will be no need for enforcement work. Because there was a very tight constraint on permitted development and extensions previously, enforcement work was required to enforce against extensions that I think most people would feel were perfectly reasonable. We are trying to bring the law into line with common sense, and that should mean that there is less enforcement work.
Q98 Heidi Alexander: How is anyone going to know? I have quite a small terraced house and I certainly have a small garden in my terraced house in London. If I were to extend it six metres, it would cover the whole garden.
Nick Boles: You could not, because the law is very clear that it will be six metres or 50% of your garden-no more than 50%.
Q99 Heidi Alexander: Who is going to know that I have not-
Nick Boles: You have neighbours, presumably. If you do not have neighbours, to some extent why are we worrying? The whole point is that I thought that we were going to be blighting your neighbours. You cannot have it both ways. If your neighbours are not going to notice, then probably it has not been that bad.
Q100 Heidi Alexander: My point is: who, from the local authority, then goes round to look at what the problem is?
Nick Boles: Neighbours, presumably, will call, if they feel that there is a problem.
Q101 Heidi Alexander: In respect of enforcement, there is more retrospective enforcement.
Nick Boles: No, I disagree, because much more will be permitted. I think one of the interesting political differences is in this presumption that, generally, most people are reasonable and try to do the right thing, and do not try to go war with their neighbours, and then some very few people, unfortunately, do try to go to war with all of their neighbours. Most people will find that a six-metre or 50%-of-garden permitted development right will be ample for all of their needs and, therefore, there will be no question of an enforcement notice being required. At the moment, because the regime is quite constrictive, many more people push it to the limit, and that is what creates an industry for the enforcement people…..
Q133 Chair: Finally, on a slightly lower scale, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport announced that, where broadband street cabinets and other infrastructure are installed currently and need some prior approval from councils, in the future they will not need it, except in Sites of Special Scientific Interest. My understanding is that currently councils cannot refuse permission for these cabinets simply on aesthetic grounds or because they think there are too many in an area; they can only do so where they cause an obstruction or where there is a health and safety issue involved. Why are we taking away the power from councils to refuse something for which there is a health and safety risk in putting them in a particular location?
Nick Boles: There are two levels of answer. There is the philosophical level, which is, ‘Does one think that the only legitimate decisions are the decisions that are taken by elected authorities, or do you sometimes think that some decisions can be left up to businesses and local people to take for themselves?’ The truth is that there is a balance and a dividing line. We already have some things. We already have permitted development rights for many things, and that is because we think that, by and large, actors will behave responsibly and the impact on their neighbours will be sufficiently slim. There are others for which we do require a process.
What we are saying is that, given that there is an urgent need-no aspect of infrastructure would have a greater transformative effect on growth potential, particularly in rural areas than a wide roll-out of broadband-it is right to shift the boundary a little in favour of this. We are doing it, again, for five years, so it is something that we can look at in five years’ time as to whether we want to continue it, but at the moment it is only for five years. It does, however, seem to me to be a reasonable moving of the balance.
Q134 Chair: If one of these cabinets causes a health and safety problem or causes an obstruction; the local authority is going to have no power to deal with it.
Nick Boles: There are powers that they have outside the planning system. There are regulations that exist outside the planning system. They will not require planning permission but that does not mean that you can put them anywhere. They will not require planning permission, but if you do something that is clearly a danger to the public, the enforcement authorities will come down on you.
Q135 Chair: What powers of enforcement will the authority have?
Nick Boles: There are rules that exist beyond the planning system. They will not require planning permission is the point.
Q136 Chair: It would be helpful to just drop a note to us about what those rules might be, because I think, without any planning enforcement powers, I am just not sure what they are.
Nick Boles: I would be happy to do that.
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