Localism Bill

Earl of Caithness Excerpts

Tuesday 7th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Caithness]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to welcome the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, back into the Chamber. He is a fellow chartered surveyor and we missed him when the plague of 1999 took him out temporarily, but he has proved that there is still life after death. He will be a great asset once again to our debates on local government.

Listening to our debate today, I was reminded of when I was a Minister in the Department of the Environment and I was about to start on a housing Bill. My noble friend the late Lord Whitelaw said to me, “Legislate on local government at your peril”. I wonder whether my noble friend Lady Hanham would agree that those were wise words. I certainly thought they were after trying to take a Bill through this place.

There is a lot to welcome in this Bill. Clause 161 will get rid of Part 5 of the Housing Act 2004 and the dreaded home information packs—what a waste of time they were. It is so good that they have gone. However, having got rid of home information packs, why have we not got rid of the community infrastructure levy? That was another thing that we argued against and was one of the sillier bits of socialism. Hopefully that might be looked at again.

Localism is not a cheap and easy option. It is nice in theory and it is often very good in practice, but it is expensive and it is not going to be easy to put back what has been centralised. For example, referendums involve costs, which a number of noble Lords have commented on, and neighbourhood planning requires local neighbourhood plans, which are dynamic and change rapidly. That does not fit into the administratively convenient plan-making structures that we tend to put into Bills—the two do not coincide. The whole system has got to be made much more flexible and easy to update. At the same time, such plans have to blend in with the plans of the big national infrastructure programmes, such as airports or ports, which need certainty. Once decisions have been made on what to do within the national structure, people must not be messed about because these are important businesses.

I shall focus, as have several of my noble friends, on Part 4 of Chapter 4, which is concerned with community assets. My noble friend Lord Cathcart asked, “What is a community asset?”. We need to define it. The principle of this is good but it needs to be looked at in much more detail. There is confusion over whether there is a right to buy or a right to bid. The consultation paper said that there is a right to buy, but the Bill says that it is a right to bid. The two are very different. That needs to be clarified.

There are two aspects to this. There is the community-owned land and the local authority-owned land. Will my noble friend confirm that all public bodies should be required to publish details of their non-operational land, alongside a strategy for its disposal that actively identifies the land with potential community use or benefit? That would be helpful. Then there is the other aspect, which is privately owned land. I agree with much of what has been said about shops, pubs and post offices, but it is their use that is important, not necessarily the buildings themselves.

It is a fundamental mistake for the Bill to include land. When you include land, you bring a whole new ambit to this, as my noble friend Lord Gardiner of Kimble mentioned in the examples that he gave. If there was a wood next door to a village where people were allowed by the landlord to exercise their dogs, would that be classed as a community asset? If the landowner then wanted to dispose of that estate, he would find that bits of the land were subject to a community asset designation order, which would delay the sale of the estate. There is much here that is intentionally quite good but, in practice, will not work well. Will my noble friend also confirm that if a community asset is purchased, it must be by a community organisation and not one of the national voluntary bodies, such as the RSPB, which can use a local designation for its land-grabbing purposes?

It is interesting to look at what is happening in rural and urban areas. Rural areas are much better at community projects. There are almost 10,000 rural community-owned buildings, with an asset value of £3.1 billion. Most of those are run with no paid management at all. The average turnover of a rural community building is less than £9,000 as a result of volunteer input. However, the real problem is the cost of refurbishing or enlarging the building. If, under the Bill, public funds will now be given to a community organisation, why are they not given to the landlord in the first place? It seems totally ridiculous to take an asset away from a landlord, who would like to maintain it but cannot spend the money, to give it to a community group only for it to get the grant to do so.

We shall have lots of fun and spend a lot of time in Committee. I look forward to it as much as the rest of your Lordships.