We await with anticipation the forthcoming Decentralisation and Localism Bill, apparently due in November. The Bill will be critical for our sector, specifically in two areas: strategic planning and putting localism into practice.
We are wholly reliant on robust waste management plans as the foundation for investment in the infrastructure that the UK will need, both in relation to EU landfill diversion targets, and the UK's own renewable energy target. Unfortunately the UK is well behind on plan-making, and as a result planning has become the single most pressing issue hindering the timely delivery of these facilities.
Gev Eduljee is external affairs director at SITA UK How might the Bill help in this regard? Here are three observations DCLG might consider:
(1) In preparing for a waste core strategy with accompanying development plan documents, local authorities must ensure that the Statement of Community Interest provides for robust community representation and engagement, for community views to be adequately aired, communicated and exchanged, and for settled views explicitly to form the basis of the waste plan.
(2) DCLG must tighten the compliance of waste core strategies with PPS10 and its companion guide. Local authorities must adopt a “no surprises” policy. Specifically, waste plans must deal with all waste streams and must provide sufficient detail about the nature, number, location, and timing of proposed waste management facilities.
(3) Wherever possible, waste plans must stipulate the exact location of allocated sites (subject to community consultation) and only as an exception, refer to general locational criteria. The plan must fully justify allocated sites and/or areas of search, drawing on the outcome of prior community engagement. The waste plan must be subject to a separate sustainability appraisal, published as a public document accompanying the waste plan.
It is difficult to argue against the logic of a plan-led system built on public consultation – ie a plan made from the ground-up. In theory, moving public consultation up-front should relieve the painful process our industry goes through during the passage of our planning applications.
Third party appeals
However, this could well be undermined by the prospect of the Government allowing third party appeals against planning applications. Specifically, why should developers enjoy a right of appeal against a refusal but not a individual against a granting of planning permission?
In a plan-led system, developers put up homes or industrial/commercial facilities in accordance with the needs identified in the local plan, and if the plan is properly constructed, on a site specified in the plan.
Since the plan itself will have been the subject of intense community consultation – ie a democratically agreed outcome – it would seem perverse and indeed profoundly anti-democratic to then potentially allow an individual objector to derail a community need that has been accepted and identified in the plan.
Inevitably, those with the loudest voices will seek to impose their will on the rest of the community or neighbourhood, were there to be a third party right of appeal. An objector will of course have an opportunity to make his or her case to the planning committee when the application is being determined, and it is right that this objection is heard and considered in the wider context of other representations (both for and against the scheme) and in conjunction with the advice of planning officers.
Planning committee
Allowing stand-alone third party appeals would in effect be giving the objections of a single individual equal weight against an entire community's settled view, democratically arrived in the plan at through the process of consultation that localism wishes to foster, and in terms of the specific planning application, voted upon in the planning committee.
As to why appeals from developers should be allowed if third party appeals were disallowed, a developer puts in a plan-led application on the understanding that if compliant, there will be a presumption in favour of his development. Without this, of course, no developer would willingly put at risk substantial capital sums on a purely speculative venture. The developer is responding to a specific community need expressed through the plan.
If, despite being plan-compliant, the application is then refused, then in effect the “compact” (if not the “contract”) between the developer and the planner has been broken, hence the former's right to appeal against this decision.
If localism was allowed to operate outside of the checks and balances of a community-wide democratic framework, an already lumbering planning system will descend into gridlock.
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