Hansard

I congratulate Bill Bowman on giving his first speech in the chamber and welcome him to Parliament.

I welcome this debate on planning, a subject that is often regarded as dry and technical but which—as a number of speakers have already made clear—plays a vital role in allocating land, balancing competing demands, providing public infrastructure, protecting the environment and mitigating climate change. Indeed, we think that the planning bill should incorporate such aims, in particular on climate change, as key purposes of planning.

At the third reading of the Town and Country Planning Act 1947, Lewis Silkin, Attlee’s Minister of Town and Country Planning, noted that

“planning is concerned to secure that our limited land resources are used to the best advantage of the nation as a whole, and it provides for resolving the often conflicting claims upon any particular piece of land.”—[Official Report, House of Commons, 20 May 1947; Vol 437, c 2196.]

Much has changed since 1947, but Silkin’s observation remains as valid today as it was 70 years ago. Among the complaints and frustrations of the current planning system is the fact that the original vision of a plan-led system has ended up becoming stressed to the point of failure, in many cases, by the vested interests of developers.

Alex Rowley has already mentioned the Royal Town Planning Institute Scotland briefing, which makes it clear that between 2010 and 2015, 20 per cent of planning posts were lost and that the budget for planning is now covered substantially by fees.

In the welcome move towards better up-front planning, resources need to be allocated from general taxation to provide the skills and the time that are necessary to plan the high-quality environments that will improve the quality of people’s lives—an investment that the former chief medical officer for Scotland, Sir Harry Burns, frequently stressed was critical and would amply repay itself in improved health outcomes.

Nowhere is that more relevant than in the challenge of housing Scotland’s population in affordable, warm, long-lasting and sustainable homes. The current system of delivery of housing is dysfunctional and unsustainable in the private sector. To create affordable and high-quality housing for all, we need to radically transform how we plan places. In our view, that starts right at the beginning of the construction process.

Put simply, the hegemony of the speculative, volume house-building industry has failed—it carries too much risk, it fails to respond to the challenge of creating high-quality places, and its lobbying power has corrupted the planning process right across Scotland. In our view, it has no future.

The Greens want a return to a public-led development planning process in which communities are in charge, master-planning is detailed and comprehensive and those who wish to invest in new development appear at the end of the process. We want to end, for example, the call for sites element of planning, which hands all the initiative to landowners and commercial interests, putting communities on the back foot and obliging them to act defensively. We welcome the emphasis on up-front planning, zoning and local place plans, as long as they give communities a stronger voice and guarantee that they will be full participants.

Our amendment, which was not selected today, focused on two vital reforms that we believe could transform the planning system. The first is a return to the roots of planning, in section 48 of the 1947 act, to allow public authorities to acquire land at its existing use value. That measure was in line with the recommendations of the Uthwatt committee on compensation and betterment, which met during the war and led to the 1947 act.

Three observations were often made of the Uthwatt committee’s report—there were those who agreed with it; there were those who disagreed with it; and, finally, there were those who had actually read it. The provision was repealed in 1959 but retained for the development of new towns. We propose its reintroduction.

To understand the concept, it was precisely the means by which Edinburgh new town was constructed. Land was acquired by the common good fund; master-planning was undertaken; and individual plots were sold for self-build or to developers under contract to town councils.

Put simply, planning consents increase the value of land a hundredfold or more. That value belongs to society as a whole, but today that value is captured by landowners. Ending that windfall would mean that houses could be built for two thirds of current prices and the balance invested in higher-quality and/or more homes.

The second reform is to the system of appeals. The Greens support a third-party right of appeal in order to equalise the power relationship in the planning process. Consultation on the review noted widespread calls for an equal right of appeal, but the proposal was rejected by the review and by the Government. I commend Planning Democracy’s continuing campaign for a stronger public voice in the planning system.

I have been discussing the matter with a wide range of interests over the past few months and I am aware of an alternative way forward that would equalise appeal rights, which is simply to abolish completely the existing right of appeal on behalf of applicants. The very existence of any right of appeal is an anachronism and a hangover from the Town and Country Planning (Scotland) Act 1947, as was recently noted in evidence to the Local Government and Communities Committee, when John McNairney, the chief planner for the Scottish Government, said:

“The 1947 situation is essentially that the landowner was no longer free to dispose of his property as he saw fit; he had to seek permission. That is the context for being able to appeal against the decision that he was aggrieved about.”—[Official Report, Local Government and Communities Committee, 7 September 2016; c 45.]

The right to appeal was a concession to landowners as a result of their development rights being nationalised. However, it will be 70 years this August since the act became law, and there is no longer any principled justification for such a right of appeal; many European countries do not operate any such appeals process. I commend that suggestion to Parliament.

Greens look forward to constructive engagement on the topic of planning in the months ahead, and we recognise that planning plays a critical role in building, developing and sustaining communities throughout Scotland. We commend the motion and all the amendments, and we will support them at decision time.