English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Earl of Clancarty Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 13th April 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 247. My noble friend Lady Bennett supported the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, on this amendment. I will speak also to Amendments 255 and 257. I am grateful to the Minister for the time she took to meet me following Committee; that was very generous. However, I am much less grateful about the fact that what I asked for is still missing from the Government’s Bill. I had hoped that that discussion might lead to some movement on the issue of environmental interests, but they are still missing from the legal definition of assets of community value.

In Committee and again at our meeting, the Minister expressed a concern that including environmental assets could turn this scheme into something of a proxy part of the planning system. I want to address that directly, because it reflects a complete misunderstanding of what these amendments would do. Assets of community value give communities a fair chance to come together and buy a valued asset if it comes up for sale. They are not a backdoor planning system, they do not grant a right to veto development and they do not override local plans. That is already true for social and economic interests. No one suggests that allowing a community to buy a pub, shop or community centre turns this scheme into a proxy for regulating the economy or blocking development, so why is the environment treated differently?

This is where the Government’s position gets very difficult to follow. On the one hand, Ministers say that environmental assets—woodlands, allotments, green spaces—can already be nominated where they further social or economic well-being; on the other hand, they stop allowing communities to refer explicitly to environmental interests in the same way. I do not think that communities think like that. They do not say, “We value this woodland only for its social benefit”, or, “We want to retrofit this community building only for economic reasons”. In practice, we pursue social, economic and environmental goals together, just as every part of our planning system already recognises. However, as the Bill stands, a community could nominate a woodland but would not be able to properly articulate the environmental outcomes that they want to protect or enhance; they could seek to acquire a community centre but could not refer to plans to improve energy efficiency or biodiversity as part of their case. That weakens their chance to make a credible case.

The Government’s answer remains that this may be addressed in statutory guidance, but guidance is not law: it can be changed and it carries less weight. As the Committee debate showed, this risks embedding the very confusion that we are trying to resolve—the confusion between the asset itself and the interests it serves.

Finally, I return to the broader principle. Everywhere else in policy—planning law, national frameworks and sustainable development—we recognise that social, economic and environmental goals belong together. The Bill, in many respects, seeks to devolve power and to trust communities, but in this one area it holds back. Leaving environmental interests out of statute is not being neutral; it is a signal that they matter less, which does not surprise me coming from this Government, because that is what we have seen again and again on environmental issues. It risks missed opportunities and poorer outcomes for communities.

I thank my colleagues on the other Benches, the noble Baroness, Lady Freeman of Steventon, and the noble Lord, Lord Freyburg, for supporting these two amendments. I hope that they will say something in support. I reserve the right to ask the House to vote on this, because, quite honestly, it is a principle that the Government have missed completely. As a Green, that distresses me hugely.

[The Earl of Clancarty (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly to my amendments in this group, concerned with cultural assets of community value—the same amendments I tabled in Committee. I am grateful for the support of my noble friend Lord Freyberg for these amendments. I have done so primarily to allow me to thank the Minister for the encouraging reply she gave in Committee that such assets will be explicitly recognised in statutory guidelines. The Minister has kindly invited feedback on that guidance, and my noble friend Lord Freyberg and I have drawn up a more comprehensive list of categories of possible cultural assets than we have discussed, in the hope that this may be of practical use. I have forwarded this in a letter to the Minister over the weekend, so she may not yet have had time to have a look at it. It is a longer list than the examples contained in my Amendment 262, which then would be cited in the Bill. In the interest of completeness, it contains perhaps some unusual examples, but it may be the unusual that a local community wishes to maintain.

One outstanding concern which occurred to us in drawing up this list is about potentially moveable cultural assets, such as archives or furnishings, or even a single object of cultural value; of course, this will be a particular concern for heritage sites. It may be a question of whether or not such assets are integral to the property in which they are housed. This is not something we have previously discussed, but I hope nevertheless that this dimension might be acknowledged within the guidance, so I ask the Minister to consider that specific point. Of course, with historic buildings of national significance, one would hope that other measures come into play, and the conscious inclusion of cultural assets within the scheme should not negate responsibility to others, particularly that which local councils ought to have with regard to many of our cultural assets. However, the great thing about the scheme as it stands is that it is about people power. The local people are often the first to recognise an asset’s importance. In that sense, the scheme is not a replacement for, but an important additional part of, the armoury.

The rest of my amendments raise the status of cultural assets within the legislation; they are not less important. I still protest against cultural being treated as a subset of social and being less important rather than equal to sporting assets within the legislation as it stands, but I am not going to press this at this stage. Rather, I will congratulate the Minister and her team on the clear progress that has been made, ensuring that cultural assets will be much more widely recognised as potential candidates for this scheme.

[Baroness Hoey (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly to my Amendments 263A and 263B. I also support Amendment 263ZB on the consultation with Sport England, which I think is very important. We must not remove Sport England as a consultee. I declare an interest as the honorary president of the London Playing Fields Foundation, the charity that was founded way back in 1890 to protect, promote and provide playing fields at a time when the pressure to build on open green spaces was intense. Very little has changed since then. However, the activities that can take place on well-managed playing fields, I think we all know, can improve lives, especially when we know how the situation is with young children and obesity.

Sport can provide the motivation to be more active and encourage confidence and social skills. Of course, none of this would be possible without a pitch to play on in the first place, and it is therefore vital that we protect playing fields so that they remain accessible, affordable and attractive to current and future generations. Getting rid of our fields is a false economy. Research commissioned by the London Playing Fields Foundation showed just how much money could be saved. An impact study on the activities at the Douglas Eyre Sports Centre in Walthamstow over a 12-month period found that the minimum saving to the public purse was £4.8 million, mostly in reducing crime and anti-social behaviour. Let us not forget: once a playing field is lost, it is lost for ever.

I turn to my amendments. First, I say to the Minister that I support government Amendment 252, which is very important, and also the new category of indefinite sporting ACVs in the Bill, which is most welcome. It makes it clear that once a playing field, always a playing field. Thousands of playing fields have been lost to speculators, and the Bill’s right to buy for sporting assets of community value has the potential to ensure that our remaining playing fields become community-owned assets in perpetuity. The right-to-buy mechanism could be a game-changer in saving playing fields, but there is a flaw in the Bill. It is silent on hope value, which, if left unaddressed, means that communities will always fail to compete with speculators.

The Minister said in Committee:

“We want to ensure that communities have the best opportunity to purchase valued assets and are not priced out by inflated sale prices based on redevelopment potential”.—[Official Report, 5/3/26; col. GC 517.]


She was so right; “inflated sale prices” is the lay definition of hope value that Amendments 263A and 263B seek to remove from assets of community value valuations. The principle of removing inflated sale prices based on redevelopment potential is accepted by the Government; “inflated sale price” is a non-legal term or definition for what we all call hope value. You could also say that it is the key definition. Hope value is the amount of inflated sale prices based on redevelopment potential. Hope value is so big in playing fields because the valuation of a playing field is low, because a playing field run by community sports clubs is usually dependent on volunteers, and that is a break-even social asset. Of course, the same acreage with planning for housing is worth many millions.

In Committee, the Minister dismissed amendments very similar to these on the grounds of “striking the right balance” between communities and asset owners. I agree with that, and I think we all agree with that, but there are two scenarios where a speculator owns a sporting asset of community value with the intent of change of use for abnormal profit. A speculator who owns a playing field that is subsequently determined by the local authority as an ACV has a right to appeal the designation of ACV. A speculator can also afford a judicial review of the council decision. Moreover, a speculator who buys a playing field that is already a sporting ACV does so at their own financial risk, speculating that they can remove the ACV designation to enable change of use for profit. My amendments do not disrupt the right balance. The historic loss of playing fields has proven what we all know: it still favours the speculator. The speculator has more funds and more specialist knowledge to pursue their aims than the community has to protect sporting ACVs at risk.

My Amendment 263A presumes that the new right-to-buy process is working and removes the inflated sale prices based on redevelopment potential from the valuation process, and so gives a community charity a chance to buy a playing field at a valuation based on its use as a sports ground. Amendment 263B is the back-up if the right-to-buy process fails as the speculative owner is unwilling to sell an ACV to a charity. The Crichel Down rules for compulsory purchase already provide a path to CPO to tackle obstructive owners, but this amendment makes sure that inflated sales prices based on redevelopment potential—hope value—are removed from CPO valuation for sporting ACVs.

Why do so many groups working to protect playing fields feel so strongly and support these amendments? Let me lay out starkly why these amendments are needed. I use Udney Park in Richmond as a reference case. It was opened in 1922 as a war memorial sports ground by Old Merchant Taylors’ Football Club and was re-donated under covenant in 1937 to St Mary’s Hospital Medical School, which then merged with Imperial College London in 1988. In 2014, Imperial decided that Udney Park was surplus and put it on the market. In 2015, Imperial sold it to a UK speculator who gazumped the £2 million community bid with a £6 million winning bid—so £4 million of hope value, or inflated sale price based on redevelopment potential, probably about £30 million. The UK speculator took five years then to get their planning application to a public inquiry, spending a further £4 million on professional fees. Udney Park became an asset of community value in 2016, thanks to all the campaigners. In 2020, the planning inspector refused the change of use and the UK developer then put Udney Park back on the market in 2021.

However, the current asset of community value right-to-bid process failed. The community bid £1 million. The park was now dilapidated and the war memorial pavilion closed and vandalised, so there was a reduction in value as a sports ground since 2015. Unfortunately, an offshore speculator bought the park in 2022 for £3.5 million, so that was now £2.5 million of hope value or inflated sale price based on redevelopment. If hope value is removed, this offers a path to community ownership for Udney Park and other playing fields at risk.

As the Minister must know, local people in all cases of playing fields being threatened put huge voluntary effort into trying to save them. I pay tribute to the Udney Park Playing Fields Trust, led by Mark Jopling, who has also written to the Minister and the shadow Minister, and has been working closely with the Liberal Democrat MP for the area. The trust has been tireless in its efforts, but faced with the wealth of this developer, it has virtually no chance of saving the playing fields for their children’s children to play on if we do not even up the situation on hope value. That is why these two simple amendments are so important.