Eric Pickles told to 'urgently clarify' home extension plan 22 April 2013 Last updated at 16:34 The government needs to "urgently clarify" its plans to allow people to build bigger home extensions, committee chairman Clive Betts has said. Ministers have amended their plans to ease planning rules in England by giving neighbours the right to be consulted on building work. But Mr Betts, of the Communities and Local Government Committee, wants more details on how the new plan will work. The House of Lords is expected to debate the proposals later on Monday. Following opposition from coalition MPs - who fear the plans may result in unsightly developments, over which local communities have no say - Communities Secretary Eric Pickles set out a "light-touch neighbours' consultation scheme." Social and environmental impact Under the revised scheme, homeowners wishing to build extensions under the new powers would notify their council with the details and the local authority would then inform the adjoining neighbours. Mr Pickles said this would allow ward councillors to be involved. The application could also be considered by a planning committee - as is the case in the current planning process - if the council deemed it appropriate, he added. But Mr Betts, whose committee has already warned the plans could lead to "confusion" and more disputes between neighbours, says more clarification is needed on the revised plan. In a letter to Mr Pickles, the committee chairman said the new proposals did not appear to "allow a local planning authority to consider the wider social and environmental impact of a proposed extension but only the impact on immediate neighbours." He raised concerns about the increased costs for planning departments, with the additional work involved not expected to generate any fees. And he said the benefits of the new proposals would be even more marginal than the original plans, which had been expected to bring benefits of between £5m and £100m. Mr Betts asked: "As I understood it the original estimate was based on how many people were put off entirely from applying for planning permission who would now develop if there was no control. If some form of control is brought back, will not those people still be put off and are we back to quite marginal national benefits to be set against a loss of free income and loss of local control? When the Growth and Infrastructure Bill first came to the House of Lords, peers defeated the government and amended the bill to stipulate that individual councils should be given the right to opt out of the planning rules changes. This was rejected by MPs, but Labour's Lord McKenzie will attempt to get peers to back the change again when the Lords debates the planning proposals on Monday afternoon.