| Planning and Compulsory Purchase Bill
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Sir Sydney Chapman: I am delighted to follow my hon. Friend, who clearly is an expert on the problems of sewerage and the Severn. Mr. Clifton-Brown: The Thames. Sir Sydney Chapman: The Thames, then. He has shown us today that there are brains in the drains. The Minister will recall that earlier today we had a little spat on amendment No. 88. I tried to point out that there were precedents in the Bill for putting additional requirements on the local planning authority, the Secretary of State or whoever it may be. That has come up on some of the amendments that we have already discussed and will come up on others still to come. I do not wish to rehearse the argument on clause 15, apart from saying that we wanted to add to subsection (1) paragraphs that would pinpoint four considerations that should be included in the scheme for minerals and waste development. We are now debating clause 18(2):
and the Bill lists 10 specific items. I shall leave it at that—it rather proves my point—and go on to speak Column Number: 244 very briefly about the Conservative amendments. Our amendments are linked to amendment No. 232, tabled by the hon. Member for Ludlow. I comment with some hesitation on his purpose, because for very understandable reasons he cannot intervene or comment. However, it is unnecessary to add to subsection (2) that the local authority must have regard to ''all material considerations''. I made the point before that we must cut down the verbiage in the Bill as much as we reasonably can. Therefore, I would not accept amendment No. 232.The Bill lists 10 specific items. The Minister may say, with some effect, that we are trying to create a Christmas tree Bill by proposing in amendments Nos. 293, 125, 216 and 291 to add nine other specific categories. I hope that I have made the point—the amendments are important. I also very much support amendment No. 288. It is right to mention specifically the need for an economic development plan. I share the view of my hon. Friend the Member for Cotswold about the importance of including amendment No. 216. The issue is not only topical but important. My constituency is blessed with many things, if not its Member of Parliament, but it is generally on a hill. I should like to reassure my hon. Friend and the Committee that flood problems can arise on hills. He mentioned the backing up of sewerage systems or rainwater gully systems, which can come right down the hill. I have terrible flooding problems in certain areas of Chipping Barnet caused by water coming down the hills, not inadequate drainage or flash floods. In recognising the importance of flooding and the need for a strategy to deal with it, the Committee should accept that it does not affect only the flood plains near rivers or in some coastal areas.
4.45 pmMr. Clifton-Brown: I am sure that my hon. Friend with his specific knowledge is aware that the Ordnance Survey is drawing up plans to try to identify better boundaries of flood plains. Would he join me in urging the Minister to speed up the production of those plans so that they are available when local authorities are considering precisely that point? Sir Sydney Chapman: Yes, certainly. I always like to walk through a door that is opened in front of me. In return, I would ask my hon. Friend to support my contention that these matters affect not only the flood plain but other areas of the country. I hope that the Minister will give a fair wind to our amendments. Mr. Wilshire: Because of the hour, I will confine myself to comments on two of the amendments. The Minister may be tempted to think that amendment No. 203 is somewhat pedantic and that the matter is self-evident, but it is important at least to have the opportunity to press him on whether the Government have given any thought to making long-term statements about how they propose to fund the regions, whether artificial or not. It is all very well to ask the artificial region in the south-east to produce a strategic plan to make suggestions to draw up schemes for doing this, that and the other, but as he will know only too well, the Government are hell-bent on removing money from the south-east. Column Number: 245 Year on year, it gets worse and worse. We have no idea from one year to the next how much money will be available and what resources there will be in the south-east. We do not even know whether the Government have any intention of addressing the appalling situation in the south-east where, because of national pay scales, people can earn exactly the same for doing the same sort of job in Yorkshire or in the south-east, yet houses in Yorkshire cost less than half as much as houses in the south-east. There is no point in going through the exercise of drawing up plans if the Government will not make a long-term commitment about the national resources that will be made available and what they intend to do to address some of those difficulties. On amendment No. 216, my hon. Friend the Member for Cotswold made some pertinent points about new developments. It is important to make it clear that we want a strategy on flooding, not an ad hoc approach to problems. Maidenhead, Eton and Windsor had problems. Something was done about that. All the water that would have flooded Maidenhead in the past few weeks was neatly taken round the outside through the Jubilee river project. There is a well-held suspicion, which may be proved correct, that the water moved on from Maidenhead has simply been dumped in my constituency and those of my neighbouring colleagues. That is not a strategy. It is solving problems on an ad hoc basis and causing other problems. I have already rehearsed the argument about how flooding strategies often need to go beyond the artificial regions. I mentioned Lechlade and made the point that any strategy for the Thames must go well beyond the south-east. We have debated that, so I will just plead that the justification for providing for a flooding strategy needs to be exactly that. A flooding strategy involves more than solving a problem without thinking about what will be created further along the river. Strategies must be multi-agency. As my hon. Friend the Member for Cotswold said, it is all very well to solve the flooding problem. Along the Thames, the response has been to say, ''There's a lot of river water, what are we going to do about it?'', and I have made the case for a strategy that deals with the flooding, but we also have to consider what happens if we move that flood water around and dump it somewhere else that may not be on a suitable flood plain. In my constituency, for example, the result of having flooding in new places is that extra pressure is put on the sewerage pumps and sewage then backs up. Whole estates in my constituency have been awash with awful raw sewage, and there is now the problem of clearing it out of people's gardens and houses. That is because there was not a multi-agency approach to planning for potential flooding. The Environment Agency, bless it, has done a great deal, and I am grateful to it, but it does not seem to have liaised with Thames Water about what would happen to the sewage after the river flooding was solved. I could pursue those points, and more issues need ventilating, but I am conscious of the time. I have indicated to the Minister the general area of my argument and what we are seeking to achieve. I have Column Number: 246 pointed out why I believe that it is important to include a flooding strategy, why that strategy must be comprehensive rather than an ad hoc set of solutions, and how it must be multi-agency so that solving one problem does not create a different one. I look forward to hearing the Minister's comments.Mr. McNulty: All the matters that have been raised are serious and need to be dealt with, although many of them should perhaps not be deal with in a Bill that looks to the future planning system of this country. If the hon. Member for Ludlow were here, I would say in the nicest way possible that amendment No. 232 is just plain daft. It is clear in the current planning system and any subsequent planning system or legal framework what ''material consideration'' means, which is anything deemed material to a specific planning application or document. It is deliberately set out to be a sweep-up phrase under law, and to put that into the context of the preparation of local development documents would be plainly daft and—I will try to put this gently—the proposal is either a representation of a misinterpretation of what ''material consideration'' means in the lexicon of planning or an attempt to make the clause entirely unworkable. Given the hon. Gentleman's erudition, intellectual capacity and generous and overwhelmingly constructive spirit when he is with us, I am sure that the amendment is daft rather than malign or destructive. I will say that when he is present as well, but his amendment does not bear any discussion beyond that. It is not well thought out. I fully accept that the other amendments touch on serious points that matter to all our constituencies, but I assure Opposition Members that they are covered in the 10 items listed in clause 18. The notion of economic development and the RSS is more than covered, with regard needing to be given to the RSS and successive documents. I am sorry that the hon. Member for Cotswold was not present this morning, as he would have heard an interesting and lengthy debate about minerals and waste. They, too, will have to be taken account of in the context of the local development document. There is no need to add other matters. I am a little perplexed by amendment No. 293, which would repeat many of the elements already included, or perhaps it merely seeks to renumber them. I agree with the hon. Member for Chipping Barnet about a flooding strategy and flash flooding. The good fortune for the hon. Gentleman is that when the Environment Agency finishes its work in the Silk stream to prevent flooding in Hendon—the constituency between his and mine—that part of Harrow and Barnet might be drier and less susceptible to flooding. It is not appropriate to suggest that it is all about building houses in the wrong place. The Silk stream and the River Pinn, further to the west in Harrow, have had flooding problems that go back well beyond the last century and the century before that. The Environment Agency is not only doing a good job in carrying out flood alleviation works but it actually listens to local people and if they do not like what is going to be built it does not go ahead. Column Number: 247 However, a Bill that will renew the planning system is not the appropriate place for a detailed operational review of flooding strategy: the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Environment Agency are the appropriate agencies in that respect. The Bill is relevant within the context of precautionary guidance on subsequent new developments under planning and development control law. As I said, those precautions are set out in PPG 25, which needs to be taken fully into account in the preparation of local development documents.Yes, flooding is important and it must be taken into account in precautionary planning, especially in the context of new developments. I broadly accept that there will be significant housing growth in London and the south-east, which will need to be carefully planned, not least because there have been floods in places where there ain't been floods for a considerable time. In Northampton and places such as Shropshire, where they are used to it, the floods came with a vengeance and were far worse than before. DEFRA and the Environment Agency are responsible for dealing with the existing problems, and we are taking a precautionary approach, with guidance to prevent further problems in the future. I do not have time to rehearse the issue of minerals and waste, but the hon. Member for Cotswold, who missed the debate on that subject, can read the report in Hansard when it is available—I agree with him on that matter, too.
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| ©Parliamentary copyright 2003 | Prepared 16 January 2003 |
