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New clause 51
Chief planning officer
Brought up, and read the First time.
Mr. Clifton-Brown: I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time. The new clause concerns the employment and role of chief planning officers, which it will be useful to spend a few minutes discussing. The Town and Country Planning Association has given us a briefing, and I am grateful to it for helping us to draw up the new clause. It tells us:
''Chief Education Officers, Directors of Social Services, Chief Treasurers and Chief Solicitors (described as 'Proper' officers) all benefit from statutory recognition''.
The wording of the new clause is based on the part of the Education Act 1996 that deals with the statutory recognition of chief education officers.
We would all agree that chief planning officers need to be of the highest calibre and sensitivity to deliver the future vision of their authority and local community. The Town and Country Planning Association continues:
''Their delegated authority can also be great; for example the granting or refusing of planning permission can create or remove millions of pounds of land value at the stroke of a pen.''
Agricultural land worth a few thousand pounds an acre can often be turned into development land worth many hundreds of thousands of pounds, so the decisions of planning officers and their recommendations to their committees can be hugely important, not only to the people developing the land but to the community and surrounding area. One big development can shape the whole future of a town or city.
The new clause would give the officer responsible for planning statutory recognition similar to that of other local authority chief officers. It would not prevent local authorities from combining the post with others, nor would it prevent them from using a variety of job titles to suit local wishes. The Town and Country Planning Association comments:
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''Unless planners are given the status and ambition they need candidates of calibre will not come forward.''
That is a serious and worrying problem, given the changes that the Government are making. If I were currently a planning officer in a county council, whose strategic role was being diminished by the Bill, and I received an offer from the private sector, I would be very tempted to move, particularly as my future would be so uncertain.
That is a problem at the moment. There are not enough trained planning officers in this country. The competition from the private sector for good ones is huge. Some are paid vast sums. I was with some big developers yesterday, and some of their principal planners are paid a very great deal of money indeed.
This is not only about money, it is about statutory status: status in the council and among councillors, and status with the general public. We need to ensure that planning officers are given that status, that they are paid properly, that we have more trained planning officers, and that there is proper career progression and development. All those are lacking at present. I hope that the Minister will give the matter serious consideration. My concern is not only with chief planning officers, but with the number of planning officers in general. Most authorities are struggling even now to carry out all their planning functions. With all the additional functions that the Bill gives them, I do not see how they will be able to do that unless a large number of extra people are recruited.
Dr. Alan Whitehead (Southampton, Test): I am not entirely sure whether the new clause exactly fits the Bill, but I support the important principle that planning authorities should recognise the status and role of planning officers. Substantial changes have occurred in recent years in how local authorities and planning authorities see their roles. They have removed the silos of professional status within local authorities.
A few years ago there used to be a chief planning officer, a valuer, a chief education officer, an officer with responsibility for social services, a chief legal officer and so on. Even in a district authority, there would be 13 or 14 chief officers sitting round the table with their different professional hats on. As the function of local authorities changed, those chief officers' roles were, quite rightly in my view, often subsumed in super-departments Officers in local authorities were grouped around the table as officers in charge of an area of concern rather than on the basis of their professional qualifications or backgrounds, which led to a great improvement in how they worked.
However, in that development, the sense that there were particular areas that needed a focus of concern within local authorities was lost. At the same time, local authorities changed from taking a reactive role to adopting a proactive role on many planning matters. That is particularly important because clause 38 enjoins planning authorities to concern themselves with sustainable development, which requires a proactive concern for the whole body of activity in a local authority rather than simply ticking off
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particular planning applications as they come through. Indeed, the widely welcomed Government communities plan reflects the imperative for proactive planning on the part of local authorities across the country.
The movement towards more proactive planning is happening at the same time as the continuing reorganisation of arrangements for executive authorities—and, possibly, elected mayors—in local government. The role of chief officers has been further thrown into generality. Those two forces are moving in opposite directions.
Mr. Clifton-Brown: I am sorry to interrupt the hon. Gentleman, because his case is intelligent and cogent. Does he agree that there is consensus in Committee not only on the proactive approach, which is welcome, but on greater community involvement in the planning process? Community involvement is good, but it will inevitably take up the time of planning officers, which will put further pressure on their work loads.
Dr. Whitehead: The hon. Gentleman makes a good point. The proactive planning process involves more than making various connections in the local authority planning process that may not have been made previously. Connections must also be made with a variety of stakeholders in the planning process, who are outside the authority, within the community. That was not the common sense of planning in years gone by.
Planning now plays a number of roles in local government and planning authorities, although there is also a decreased focus on that activity. That is the reason why the principle of recognising the role of chief planning officer—whether or not that person goes by that exact title—is important. As the hon. Member for Cotswold has pointed out, there is such recognition in a number of other areas, where specific posts form the statutory basis on which other officers work.
I ask my right hon. Friend the Minister to consider accepting the new clause, and to take on board the notion that this recognition of status in local authorities is increasingly important, especially given the admirable changes to the planning process made by the Bill and the rolling changes that he has just explained to the Committee. If he does so, that will underline the importance of planning officers in that process and in the wider process of ensuring that planning becomes part of the fabric of local authorities, not the part of the silo, as it was for some people in years past.
Matthew Green: I offer general support, although I am worried by the general implications of doing so. I hope that my comments will help the situation, rather than create a dogmatic position. I have great sympathy for the idea of ensuring that there is no decline in the status of planning departments. However, I am concerned about the financial effect on authorities of making it a statutory requirement to have a chief planning officer. I know, for example, that the Government are publishing a children's Green Paper, which means that there will have to be a director for children's services.
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The trend is to keep telling councils that they must have one of these and one of those. The danger is that a council's ability to manage its staffing arrangements, especially at the highest paid levels, becomes very difficult. Each of the five borough and district councils in Shropshire, for example, has a different system. Some have a director of planning, while others have a head of development control who works for a director of operational services, because they have needed to group several areas together for financial reasons. My concern is that this may force some councils into having a director of planning again. A few years ago, South Shropshire had to take that step for financial reasons.
Mr. Turner: The hon. Gentleman makes a cogent point. Obviously, it is best to leave such decisions to local authorities—but does he believe that a local authority would be wiser to share the appointment of a director of planning with an adjoining local authority, to obtain a higher calibre of advice than it might have if it subordinated him to someone with the ghastly title of ''director of operational services''?
Matthew Green: I have some sympathy for that idea. South Shropshire was slightly fortunate because when it abolished the post of director of planning, the director of planning applied for the lower, and lower paid, post of head of development control. He is still there, so the council still has in post a very experienced person, who did not want to move from the delights of south Shropshire—for which I do not blame him. However, it could have ended up having to recruit someone with less experience.
The solution lies almost in the other direction. If the Government were to allow us to have local government change in Shropshire so that we could get rid of the districts and boroughs and have a unitary Shropshire, for which there is cross-party support, we could get round the financial constraints. Shropshire would then have one director of planning, who would have very high status. However, I am concerned that the new clause could impose financial constraints on district councils, especially small ones, while we still have them. None the less, I broadly support its aims, because there has been a tendency to downgrade planning in some areas. One could argue that that had happened in South Shropshire.
Fortunately, the director of operational services gives a free-ranging role to the head of development control in South Shropshire, and that works well, but I can see that such an arrangement might not always work. Therefore, although I support the principle, I think that we need to look through the practicalities to see whether it is achievable, or whether other changes to local government are needed to make it achievable. Perhaps when, in the Government's utopian vision of local government, there are unitary authorities throughout the country, the financial constraints will not be there—but in the interim, it might cause some problems.
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