Localism Bill

Lord Fellowes of West Stafford Excerpts

Thursday 7th July 2011 Lords Chamber

If that piece of land was situated in a rich suburban village, the community may have been able to renovate it, but having a system tht is useful only in richer areas full of retired professional people who can devote their time to such projects is no good. A system must apply across the country in the inner cities, suburbs and former textile towns such as the one where I live. This proposal has very little to offer to the kind of areas in which I live and represent on the council.

[Lord Fellowes of West Stafford]

My Lords, I would like to make a brief observation about this business of declaring private assets to be of community value by referring to something that occurred many years ago when there was a great scandal about ruthless landlords, such as Rachman and various others, and there was a public outcry. The result was a mass of legislation protecting the tenant. Of course, that was perfectly right and proper, but during this nobody thought to ask the question: why would anyone be a landlord? The result was a tremendous shortage of rental accommodation, which eventually had to be addressed by new legislation protecting a landlord’s rights.

Nobody seems to have asked why a landlord would volunteer to allow any of his assets, either buildings or open ground for sports activities, to be used if it immediately compromised his property rights. Some whose assets are already used by the public will find themselves in this spot, but many landlords will either withdraw the assets or simply refuse to allow them to be used in future. We must ask ourselves why owners would let their property be used if that immediately compromised their ownership, and somehow address that before the Bill becomes law.

[Lord True]

My Lords, I will briefly extend the remarks that I made on Tuesday—before I had to leave—on the potential costs of this measure. The noble Lord, Lord Greaves, also commented on that. The financial memorandum to the Bill says that the total cost of the measures in the Bill, on the heads of all local authorities in this country, will be £21 million, if I remember rightly. I am afraid that that is a grotesque underestimate. I referred to the burden that I believe that the compilation of a register might impose on my authority—two officers might translate, with overheads, into about £100,000. However, that is only for the routine management of a list.

I very much welcome the fact that my noble friends have placed a discussion document in the Library. I also welcome what my noble friend Lady Hanham said about restricting the ambit of the legislation and excluding some of the potential properties which some people are already beginning to think might be included. As has been pointed out, the discussion document relates to buildings which might improve social and environmental well-being and cultural activity. We have 8,200 buildings of townscape merit in our borough. Not all of these are residential premises—some of them are—but I can certainly envisage circumstances where communities might say, “We might want to have a bit of that if it ever comes up on the market”. You have only to think of that number to envisage the time that might be devoted to this matter while this worthy legislation beds down.

I hear what my noble friend has said about looking at how the measure works in the first two years, but in the first two years there is potentially a very considerable burden. We have an appeals system. Private property owners would be able to appeal to the local authority. Beyond the local authority, there would then be an appeal to an independent tribunal. Thereafter, if there is a compensation matter, private owners will have a right to appeal, and then there will be a right to appeal to an independent tribunal on a point of law against that review decision. I make no complaint about private owners having the right to appeal. Noble Lords will not be surprised to hear that I feel as uneasy as some of my noble friends who have spoken about the potential invasion of private property rights. Given the fact that this will end up on a point of law, case law will evolve, the measure will ultimately go to the courts and local authorities will have to set up open procedures. Regulatory committees will have to consider all these measures in the open and a substantial process of quasi-judicial activity will emerge. This will cost a lot of money, involve a great deal of time and officer time will be diverted away from neighbourhood planning, to which I would like to see it being devoted, into the mere compilation of lists. However, we have plenty of lists.

I hear what my noble friend Lord Shipley said about local authorities and I acknowledge that they have a responsibility in this area but we are already supposed to have asset management plans and asset management registers, and how bureaucratic they were. I was grateful to my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for reducing some of the bureaucracy in that regard. The fundamental problem here is that this is really emergency legislation. It provides for an emergency position. It all started with people being about to lose their post office or small shop, although serious potential problems of blight are involved, as the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, said. A giant register is being sought of all potential assets of community value across every local authority in the land. As a result, like so much else in this excellent Bill, which as I said at Second Reading I believe could be a historic Bill, the measure will become sclerotic and have unintended consequences.

This is part of a tendency, begun under the previous Government but sadly continuing under this Government, of introducing Bills which are too large, take too long to progress and contain too many important measures. This issue of trying to preserve assets of community value, which is testing your Lordships’ ingenuity and potentially interfering with private rights, could have been well dealt with in a narrowly defined piece of legislation. It could have been dealt with in Grand Committee and we could have teased out the question. However, we are here; but I hope that my noble friends—not those on the Front Bench, but the people who manage the Government’s programme—will perhaps think again about some of theses massive and wide-ranging pieces of legislation that we face.

It is obvious that the Government will want some legislation along these lines, but we should not try to include everything. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, about railway land. We have a lot of it but putting it on a register will not actually release it for excellent community use, as my noble friend Lord Greaves said. If we want to deal with railway land—and, my goodness, we should—let us go after it with a specific piece of legislation rather than try to include it in this wide piece of legislation. I should like there to be a narrow definition; a lot of thought about how the administration of this legislation will go forward; and quite an eye to the costs of time, effort and potential division in the communities. I hope that between now and Report we can think further. My noble friend has been generous in the information she gave to the House and the time she has spent listening.

As to the compensation scheme, which I also have not mentioned, it is assumed that local authorities will simply pick up its cost. No one mentioned that. We are asked by our communities to list all these private assets, and then we have to pay for it. There is no help there.

My final comment is that I very much agree with what my noble friend Lord Hodgson said on Tuesday. He said that there are issues about the loss of community assets that do not relate to privately owned assets. A second Tesco is opening in my small ward. I mention Tesco because the noble Lord mentioned it. That opening will do more harm to the small shops in my ward than anything else envisaged in this Bill. Where are the planning powers of local authorities to deal with such matters? I do not find them in the pages of this legislation. Some of the things that we are trying to target in this chapter could be dealt with in better and improved planning provisions. Then we might be able to pursue some of the problems that my noble friend Lord Hodgson mentioned.

Rather, as I said at Second Reading, I should like the Bill to be thinner, less sclerotic, better targeted, and respectful of the rights and interests that noble Lords on all sides have mentioned.