TOWN AND COUNTRY PLANNING (AMENDMENT) BILL (Hansard, 15 January 1974)

I beg to move, That leave be given to bring in a Bill to amend the Town and Country Planning Acts.

In seeking leave to introduce my Bill, I wish to mention that the nation owes an immense debt of gratitude to the late Lewis Silkin—Lord Silkin—who, by introducing his Town and Country Planning Acts, did so much to protect our countryside, towns and people from the ravages of ill-considered development and at the same time introduced a vital element of civilised behaviour in planning matters.

The Bill will cover three essential features. Ever since 1968 it has been accepted by successive Governments that planning control, to be effective, requires the active participation of those who live in the area affected by the planning decision. Legislation by both Labour and Conservative Governments in planning matters has made for greater participation—and indirectly the Local Government Act 1972, by increasing the publicity given to the proceedings of local authorities, has also assisted in this aim. Nevertheless, while participation continues to be regarded as desirable, and I would say vital, in the making of local authority planning decisions, participation—particularly in working-class and lower-middle-class areas—has all too often been defeated by the sheer volume and technicalities involved in the consideration of applications. The purpose of the proposed Bill is not to affect the principles of planning law but to strengthen the element of participation in the procedures which now exist.

In general there are three major areas in our planning procedures which need to be dealt with before we can begin to have a universally effective participation These involve questions of information expertise and timing.

As to information, the position at the moment is that where a planning application has been received a local authority may—and many, though not all. do—attempt to bring it to the notice of local residents by advertisement in the local Press and by putting a notice upon the 369 site itself. However, in many cases these notices are in technical language and are virtually meaningless to those most affected by them. Even the likelihood of such notices being seen is all too remote.

My Bill would make it obligatory for a local authority to notify every household which would be affected by a planning application that the application had been received. In addition, a short explanation would have to be made of what the effect would be if such an application were granted.

Again, information is more likely to be widespread if associations of householders as well as individual householders are aware of the situation. In many areas, but mainly in upper-middle-class areas, residents' associations or amenity associations have been created which play a commendable part in acting as the community's watchdog against undesirable planning applications. The growth of such associations should be encouraged.

My Bill would make provision for information to be made available to all residents' associations provided that their existence had been notified to the local authority.

Here a word should be said about residents' associations. As I have said, they tend to flourish in middle-class areas. The reason for this is that among their numbers such associations invariably have solicitors, architects, town planners and so on who readily give their services and who have at least a comparable expertise with the officials of the local authority. This expertise is lacking in working-class areas, as are the resources needed to acquire such expertise.

My Bill would enable grants to be made to resident's associations to enable them to act on behalf of the local community 370 in all planning applications which they wished to oppose.

The third change that the Bill would make concerns the question of timing. As I have said, one of the major difficulties about participation is the volume of planning applications and therefore the speed with which such decisions are made by the local authority. All too often an application has been approved even before residents are aware of its existence.

The Bill would ensure that residents' associations had the right within 28 days of an application being approved by the local authority to appeal to the Minister against the decision of the local authority and for the costs to the association to be met out of public funds.

By these three means, local residents would be brought more actively within the scope of those planning applications that affected them, and they would have the knowledge, time and expertise with which to put their case as strongly as it could be put.

I contend that my Bill would widen the frontiers of our democracy, humanise an element of our administration and benefit all our people.