Localism Bill needs to give local communities 'real power'

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As the Localism Bill is subject to its first debate in Parliament, the Campaign to Protect Rural England questions whether the Bill will do enough to empower local communities.

CPRE believes the Bill, which is central to the government's decentralising agenda, leaves too much power in the hands of developers, making neighbourhoods vulnerable to unwanted and damaging projects being forced upon them with no mechanism available to appeal.

Neil Sinden, director of Policy and Campaigns at CPRE, says: "We want local communities to have real influence over what happens in their neighbourhoods. There are some welcome proposals in the Bill on neighbourhood plans, but overall it falls short of fulfilling ambitious and exciting pre-election commitments by both coalition partners to introduce a community right of appeal."

"This omission means that powerful supermarkets and other developers will be able to continue to bully and bludgeon local communities until they get the planning permissions they want."

The playwright Alan Bennett put the problem succinctly in a recent diary entry (16 December 2010) published in the London Review of Books: "The planning process is and always has been weighted against objectors who, even if they succeed in postponing a development, have to muster their forces afresh when the developer and the architect come up with a slightly modified scheme. And so on and so on, until the developer wins by a process of attrition."

A number of organisations, including CPRE, have long called for appeal powers in the planning system to be rebalanced, as a counter to the bullying tactics often used by developers. The vast majority of planning applications would be unaffected by the introduction of a limited community right of appeal, but it would provide an important safeguard to ensure communities can resist damaging development proposals. A full briefing on the case for a community right of appeal can be downloaded here.

Example: Tesco supermarket proposals, Sheringham, Norfolk

Planning applications by Tesco in Sheringham have attracted widespread local opposition, and were rejected twice by local authority councillors (in 2007 and 2010) as well as at appeal following a public inquiry in 2008, due to contravening both local and national planning policies. In October 2010 a further application was granted planning permission by North Norfolk District Council, by a margin of one vote. A community right of appeal could be a useful check and balance against councillors losing their resolve in the face of such pressure tactics by supermarkets. This is not an isolated case. In December 2010, BBC Panorama uncovered the huge total of 480 supermarket developments approved in England in the last two years.

Further examples of how a limited community right of appeal could have stopped bad development are available here.

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