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Open Public Services White Paper

The right hon. Gentleman is too much of an expert to need me to tell him this, but I will tell him because he asks for it. We have, of course, established a two-level system. For most planning decisions, we hope that the neighbourhood will take charge by engaging in neighbourhood planning. We believe that the incentives that we have built into the financial system—including the ability to get a meaningful proportion of the community infrastructure levy paid to the neighbourhood if it has more housing and development in its area—will lead neighbourhoods on the whole to prefer development. The presumption of sustainable development means that their neighbourhood plans will have to include development of an appropriate kind in order to pass muster. There will be an assessment of local housing need that contributes to that, which plans will have to observe. However, nobody is going to pretend in our Government, any more than in the right hon. Gentleman's Government, that any neighbourhood will welcome a nuclear power station just next to it or a railway line running straight through it. Of course there will be objections in those cases, which is why we have maintained and democratised the very system that he and his colleagues set up—because they, too, operated a two-level system—in order to accelerate planning applications for major pieces of national infrastructure. There is no disagreement between us and the right hon. Gentleman on that, and there is no reason for him to invent one.