Localism Bill - 17th January 2011

Clive Betts (Labour)

What will happen ultimately? The Government say that their policy is to build more homes than we were before the recession. They have obligations on renewable energy and ensuring that wind farms are developed to meet them, but what will happen if the sum total of all those local decisions is that fewer homes are built and not enough wind turbines are built to meet our renewables obligations? What is their fall-back position? Is it at that point that the Secretary of State will intervene, or is it that they will accept the sum total of local will across the country and fall down on their national house-building targets and their renewables obligations? What is the Government’s position? I have not heard a coherent explanation of it.

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17:50 Joan Walley

There are also issues about a community’s access to quality advice. Yes, neighbourhood planning sounds wonderful, but because of cuts organisations such as Urban Vision in Stoke-on-Trent are losing their funding. Communities must have access to legal planning law. Where will funding for these services come from? My right hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich and Woolwich referred to pre-legislative scrutiny, but the Backbench Business Committee is considering new ways of using the House’s procedures. For example, Select Committees, including the Communities and Local Government Committee and the Environmental Audit Committee, of which I am a member, can consider ways of influencing a Bill as it goes through the House. The Bill makes absolutely no reference to sustainable development, so how will its hotch-potch provisions link with and tackle concerns about the climate change agenda and the zero-carbon societies that we need to be building? Will the Minister set out the sustainable development issues? How can we ensure that opportunities for proper climate change policies are co-ordinated?

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19:58 Dr Whitehead

If we are really localists in what we are doing, it is essential to get the different levels of planning right. It is not just about a neighbourhood decision or a national decision, but about getting the decision right in terms of what it means. If we come back to this House in a few years’ time having not built the houses and not given ourselves sufficient capacity to deal with this new era of waste and resource management, and if we have found that some of the decisions that we have taken at very local level mean that we have moved away from our climate change targets instead of making the necessary concerted effort to move towards them, we will seriously live to regret that gap in the Bill.

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Andrea Leadsom (South Northamptonshire) (Con)

I will use my few minutes to focus on one aspect of the Bill: wind farms. They are dealt with in the Bill almost by default. I will focus on wind farms because they are causing great unhappiness in many communities across the country. I recognise that the Government are committed to solving the big problem of the energy gap that will open up in the last part of the next decade, thanks to the failure of the previous Government to deal with the need for new energy sources. I recognise that we will have to use renewable energy as a key part of providing for our energy needs in the late ’20s, but we must allow local communities a say over where the wind farms should be sited.

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21:40 Barbara Keeley

“hinder…economic recovery…addressing climate change and enhancing the environment”.

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