Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Debate between Baroness Hodgson of Abinger and Lord Cromwell

Committee stage
Monday 15th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hodgson of Abinger (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 325 in this group but, first, I would like to support the remarks made by my noble friends Lord Roborough and Lord Sandhurst. I echo what has been said about compulsory purchase orders. We live in a country that is meant to have property rights. What can be worse than forcibly removing property that someone rightfully owns? Which one of us would like our property to be compulsorily removed?

Generally, in the past, this has been done only for huge infrastructure projects—not that that makes it better for those whose property it affects. It has been rarely done, although we have just heard of a very awful example from the noble Lord, Lord Sandhurst. However, I am sure that many of your Lordships will have read about the property removed to make way for HS2: the family farms that were taken and the homes that people had to leave. Do the general public really think this is a good thing? Surely, it is a human rights abuse. The Bill incentivises this approach by allowing acquiring agencies to buy the land at agricultural prices and then sell it on for development. We are meant to be making life easier and better for people, not causing utter misery.

I thank noble Lords who have allowed me to insert Amendment 325 into the group. Amendment 325 would insert new subsection (2A) into Clause 83 to ensure that fields used by people to graze their animals and high-quality agricultural land that could be used for food production cannot be compulsorily purchased by Natural England as part of its environmental delivery plans.

I spoke earlier in the debate about how one of the advantages of living in a democracy is that we have these property rights. In the Bill, there are provisions to make compulsory purchase easier and for local authorities to be able to seize land more cheaply, as I just said, where it is required for new development.

I spoke last week about how high-quality agricultural land should be used to produce food, which is in proposed new paragraph (b) of this amendment, so I will not repeat all that we talked about then. I would like to focus on proposed new paragraph (a), which concerns

“land … that is in personal use for the grazing of animals”.

People who have a few fields, for horses, donkeys or maybe llamas, goats, the odd pet sheep or anything else, need those fields to keep their livestock and pets. These fields are often on the outskirts of villages or towns. They therefore look rather attractive for development but, if this land were removed, what would happen to the animals and livestock?

A while ago, the Prime Minister himself purchased a field, so that his mother could care for neglected donkeys. Sadly, she has now died and the field has been sold, but what would have happened if this field had been taken while it was being used for the donkeys? In short, as I have said before, I believe that compulsory purchase—seizing someone’s property—is against human rights and should be used by a Government in only the most extreme of circumstances, and that land that is being utilised for family animals should never be considered.

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

My Lords, I start by declaring that I have shares in a family company that owns a farm in the Midlands. To avoid giving a Second Reading speech, and to save us all quite a lot of time, I will jump over what I was going to say on Amendment 210 and just say that I agree thoroughly with the speeches of the noble Lords, Lord Roborough and Lord Sandhurst, on those matters. After all, so-called hope value is just another term for what the market is prepared to pay—in other words, market value.

When we look at land, the owner may already have paid inheritance tax on it, invested in its maintenance and improvement, and spent substantial sums, time and effort seeking planning permission. For the state or local authority simply to swipe the increase in value that the owner has nurtured and invested in over the years is not only deeply unjust but a powerful disincentive to bring forward land for development, for EDPs or anything else.

There is a different perspective, at least in the case of land: the increase of value may be derived from societal need—for example, space for housing—rather than entirely from the efforts and investments of the owner of that land. As such, perhaps society should be entitled to at least a share of the uplift in value. But it already is. The state, without lifting a finger, receives at least 20% capital gains tax on the price achieved by all vendors and other very valuable benefits in exchange for granting planning permission—in the form of planning conditions, Section 106 agreements and so on.

We will be discussing the closely related matter of compulsory purchase shortly in subsequent amendments, but this is on hope value. In February 2025, the Compulsory Purchase Association, in its response to the consultation on the process and rules for compulsory purchase, had strong objections to the removal of hope value on the grounds that it would—I will try to list these briefly: make the development process slower and more complex; produce distortions in a two-tier market with some land taken from its owners subject to the removal of hope value via compulsory purchase and some land sold at true market price; discourage developers and owners from promoting land for allocation or development; encourage owners to fight attempts to compel them to part with their property; and have equalities impacts on the human rights of those affected—for example, through potential abuse by acquiring authorities and time pressure put on owners to accept terms. As one lawyer in a government department put it to me recently, compulsory purchase brings people to the table. I would argue that it brings them to their knees. Finally, it would damage the reputation of the compulsory purchase process as a fair and equal one.

There is a case for society to capture some of the value from development. As I have tried briefly to illustrate, society already does so in the form of significant tax and planning conditions. The real issue is not to confiscate hope value but to ensure that land, once given planning permission by the state, is actually developed. This requires, first, a review of how long a planning permission can run before being lost, and, secondly, an end to the practice of a planning permission being acquired with the expectation that, for example, affordable housing percentages will later be haggled downwards. Contractual obligations in this area need to be far tougher. Putting together the time limit and this contractual aspect with limited planning permissions would address issues such as land banking, which are the subject of other amendments. I support this amendment because such state confiscations would be an economic mistake and a deeply negative pressure on the possibility of land being brought forward voluntarily. I look forward, albeit with some scepticism, to hearing the Minister’s response to this amendment.