Cabinet 11 January 2011

11/01

The Localism Bill

ST thanked Cabinet members for taking time to attend this additional meeting to specifically discuss the drafting of the Society's formal response to the Bill.

Cabinet agreed it was important that the Society's views were published as soon as possible and that these views should be separated into two sections: 

• a) comments about the wording of the Bill itself
• b) proposals for the wording of the detailed regulation changes.

ST reported that he had now contacted the Law Society with a view to obtaining legal assistance if required and had received a favourable response. 

It was agreed that there were no major discrepancies between the views of the Society and those of the LGA and the strong lobbying potential of the LGA was also noted. 

ST had already prepared an initial paper "Keylines of Enquiry" which had been handed to the Minister at their meeting last week.  It was agreed that this document should be reviewed by the meeting and that individual members of Cabinet should then be tasked with expanding the individual sections and outlining potential regulation changes.  The revised document could then be provided to all those attending the POS Conference on "Planning and the Localism Bill" on 24 January. 

Each section of the document was then discussed and the task of updating individual sections was agreed as follows: 

• a) Preamble (including references to referendum issues and that POS may wish to comment on probity proposals later in the process 
• b) Strategic planning and duty to co-operate 
• c) Neighbourhood planning (incl neighbourhood development orders and provision of costs) 
• d) Community Right to Build 
• e) Enforcement 
• f) CIL 
• g) Pre-application engagement 

Cabinet agreed that responses should be co-ordinated via LD because JS was unavailable and the following timetable was agreed to ensure that the document would be available for 24 January: 

a)ST,b) CR, c) AW with NL/DS/ST,

d) MS, e) MK

f) GJ, g) GC

 Cabinet/LD