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Parish Councils (Planning)

I thought that the hon. Gentleman was going to say that. I am trying to be helpful, and explain the process. I will try to be brief, as I appreciate that I have more time than usual. Applications can now be published immediately on an authority’s website, which means that we can consult parish councils and other bodies more quickly, as the hon. Gentleman hinted. The time scales can therefore be improved by the use of the new technology. As everyone agrees, parish councils play a key role in the planning process. There is disagreement in some instances between the case officer and a parish council but, as I have said, many councils still consider such cases in committee. It is entirely possible to reform the culture of the service at both member and officer level to reflect the need for speedy, good-quality and transparent decisions while retaining public confidence in the integrity of the decision-making process. In the past four years nearly 3,000 parishes have been working on parish plans. Based on extensive consultation, a parish plan identifies and prioritises a community’s needs, and sets out the way in which they might be tackled. The local planning authority should always take account of the existence of such parish plans and other village plans when designing the local development schemes that set out their programme of plan making in their areas. Parish plans and village plans provide useful evidence of rural issues and may suggest suitable options for rural areas when development plans are drawn up. Parishes can then request the local planning authority to publicise, consult on, and adopt those elements of parish plans that elaborate on development plan policy as supplementary planning documents. Considerable voluntary effort goes into making parish plans, as we all know. Naturally, local communities do not want to feel that their efforts have had no result. If adopted as a supplementary planning document, a parish’s vision of its future can take its place within the local development framework as a consideration to be given due weight whenever relevant development proposals are under discussion. It is important to emphasise that parish councils must involve themselves fully from the start in the preparation of their local authority’s development plan documents. As the hon. Gentleman will know, there are about 120 parishes in his district of South Somerset. I am afraid I cannot remember how many there are in Mendip, but there is a substantial number of parish councils. South Somerset district council is confident that those parish councils will continue to receive a good service from its development control team, including attendance by individual officers at parish council meetings where appropriate. Allowing parishes to become planning decision makers would, as I have suggested, be prohibitively expensive. The Government do not intend to take that route for that reason and the others that I have outlined. In our view, the present mechanisms—I acknowledge that they do not always work perfectly and to people’s satisfaction—form the right model, and give ample opportunity for a parish to reach a view and for that view to be taken into account. No one in local government should wish to antagonise their communities with unnecessary and insensitive development. It is unlikely that teething problems that may arise in particular delegation schemes cannot be sorted out by the relevant local authority under its own protocols within the existing framework of law and guidance. I know that some might feel that delegation to officers means that they lose the opportunity to see applications debated in public. They might take a similar line, however, when a proposal is passed to an area committee for determination instead of to the full planning committee. Nevertheless, it seems to me that the type of delegation schemes that I have described are transparent, with a clear audit trail, and there is still a discretion to send a proposal to the committee if appropriate—for instance, where a scheme is controversial. The only real change is loss of automatic referral to the committee where parish views conflict with those of the designated officer. In that regard, I think that the balance is right. I am genuinely grateful to the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome for giving us the opportunity to have this debate. I indicated that I would try to answer all his questions.