Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Banner Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 3rd November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Roborough (Con)]

My Lords, Amendments 242 and 243 are in my name. The purpose of these amendments is simply to eliminate the ability of the Government to ignore hope value when assessing value on compulsory purchase orders. The Minister has kindly laid out in writing that this will happen only in limited circumstances and, by implication, that it is of little concern. That is wrong. In Committee, the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, put it far more simply and elegantly than I when he said that hope value is actually market value. He is right. Other government departments accept this. When land is valued for inheritance tax or capital gains tax on non-financial transfers, hope value is explicit. Tax is paid on that hope value, so why should another government department be entitled to disregard it?

Under this Government’s family farm death tax, greater inheritance tax will be paid based on this hope value of land that might lift it, in certain circumstances, from around £10,000 per acre to as much as £50,000 per acre. What happens if the Government then turn around two years later and compulsorily purchase that land at £10,000 per acre because they want to disregard hope value? This is surely absurd; that hope value has not disappeared. The Government should pay for it.

This is a power of confiscation and, as my noble friend Lord Sandhurst is probing with Amendment 251, and as I raised at Second Reading and again in Committee, it is in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights. The Minister’s previous responses that the ECHR allows for CPOs is right, but it does not allow them at less than market value. His Majesty’s Government appear to put the ECHR on a pedestal; I am curious whether that is only when it suits them. CPO powers are, of course, essential to a modern Government carrying out their duties, but this cannot be a tyranny of the majority. The rights of the individual have to be respected.

Can the Minister assure us that, should she reject my amendments, CPO valuations will include all elements of market value attributed to that land under historic valuation parameters, as I believe the Red Book valuations already incorporate? I refer the House to my declaration of interests as a landowner, among other things.

[Lord Banner (Con)]

My Lords, Amendment 250 is in my name and those of the noble Lords, Lord Pannick and Lord Grabiner, who are unable to be here this evening but who continue to support it, and the noble Lord, Lord O’Donnell. This amendment would address the wide-reaching consequences for persons who acquire former open-space land in light of a Supreme Court decision in 2023, R (on the application of Day) v Shropshire Council [2023] UKSC 8. Given that this amendment has been misunderstood by some and mischaracterised by others, I need to explain what it is and is not about.

Open spaces held by a local authority under the Public Health Act 1875 or the Open Spaces Act 1906 are subject to a statutory trust in favour of the public being given the right to go on to that land for the purpose of recreation. Section 123(2A) of the Local Government Act 1972 provides that the local authority may not dispose of

“any land consisting or forming part of an open space”

unless before it does so it advertises its intention in a local newspaper for two weeks and considers any objections received in response to that advertisement. Section 123(2B) provides that the sale of the land post advertisement then proceeds free of the statutory trust.

If a local resident or community group considers that the disposal of land is unlawful for any reason, including but not limited to a failure to comply with the requirement to advertise, they have a remedy: they can bring a claim for judicial review of the local authority’s decision in the High Court. If they have good reason for bringing the claim late—for example, if they were not aware of the decision at the time it was made—they can draw the court’s attention to that in support of an application for a discretionary extension of time.

In public law, the normal position is that, if a public body’s decision has not been successfully challenged by way of judicial review, that decision is treated as having all the effects in law of a valid decision. However, in Day, the Supreme Court held that, even when the decision to dispose of open-space land has not been challenged, and even if it was made many years or even decades in the past, a historic failure to comply with the advertising requirements means that the statutory trust continues to exist, and therefore continues to frustrate the beneficial repurposing or redevelopment of the land in question.

Crucially, that is the case even if the land was sold in good faith by the authority to a bona fide purchaser who was completely unaware of any procedural irregularity, and even if there remains no dispute that the land was surplus to requirements when it was sold.