Deregulation Bill

Debate between Lord Plumb and Lord Greaves

Tuesday 28th October 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Plumb (Con)]

My Lords, I am a countryman, a farmer and someone who has much experience in the centre of England of the problems before us at the moment, which concern allowing people to move freely in various areas for enjoyment. The noble Lord, Lord Rooker, speaks of the area that is a natural walking area and he spoke as one who would never dream of passing through anyone’s garden and so on. I am sorry—I will not say he is alone but a lot of people would not see it that way. In fact, they might do the reverse. Speaking as one who comes from the Midlands—I farm between 10 miles from Coventry and 10 miles from Birmingham—there is a mass of people there and they do walk. However, things have changed and, while I agree in principle with both amendments that have been tabled and with the thrust of the proposal that has been made, we must realise that we are deregulating and not creating yet more legislation. Therefore, I hope we are simplifying this so that not only the people who live in the countryside can understand it but also the people who wish to come to the countryside.

The key is education. As many farmers do, I handed down a large portion of our property to my son many years ago and things began to change, as they do when things are moved from father to son. Not long ago, I met an old boy who lived not very far from the farm. I had not seen him for years. He said, “You know, guv’nor, what they say about you up here?”. I said I had no idea. He said, “They say when Henry farmed this farm, anybody who set foot on it got shot. His son brings them in by the busload”. In the past year, he has had 90 visits from schools. He has two people carriers to take the children around the farm, and that is real education. I have been with him on one or two of the trips around the holding and it is very encouraging to see the change in those children, the change in how they look at green grass and, certainly, the changed way they look at animals.

There is a lot to be done here. I only plead that we get it right and we do not make it so complicated that it is almost impossible for people to understand. It must be understood by the property owners and by country people, who are happy to receive people who come to the country as long as the rules are in place and are understood by both parties in the interests of facing a very important area for the future. It is no good doing what was suggested by that old man. I have never shot anybody and I would never stop anybody if I saw that they were reasonable. However, I believe that my son now has less damage done to his property than was the case in my day because he has freed up the footpaths and provided an opportunity for people to visit and walk more freely through the area.

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

My Lords, this is the first time that I have spoken in Grand Committee and I need to declare my interests in relation to this issue and to other aspects of this Grand Committee. I am a member and vice-president of the Open Spaces Society; I am a member and patron of, and am active in, the British Mountaineering Council; I am a member and the deputy leader of Pendle Borough Council; and I am a vice-president of the Local Government Association. There are probably others that I have forgotten but those will do for the moment.

I hope that the mover of this amendment will have listened very carefully to the last speaker, the noble Lord, Lord Plumb, who talked a lot of common sense. When you are dealing with footpath diversions and those footpaths go through or are adjacent to housing in the countryside, common sense is the most important thing that is required in solving the problem. I shall come back to that.

The noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, said that at the moment people have no right to make a claim. I do not understand that and perhaps he will explain what he means by it. I am a member of a local authority committee which deals with quite a few of the requests for footpath diversions and extinguishments in my area, which is the Colne area of Pendle. We do so on behalf of Lancashire County Council, which is the highways authority and it has devolved that to us at the moment. We deal with quite a lot of these requests.

Perhaps I may explain the context. We are talking about an area of the Pennines with a very intense network of public footpaths, which were originally used by people to go from one farm to another. That was their original use, although nowadays of course people get in their vehicles and take a much longer route. There is a very dense network of public footpaths across the fields and, because they originally went from one farm to the next—this is an area where the farms are scattered over the landscape—they inevitably went through farms and into the farmyards, because people went from door to door. In the modern age, the farms may still be working farms in some cases but, even if they are, the barns or the former farm workers’ cottages will be occupied by people who are not working farmers; they live there and commute into the towns. In such areas, there is no reason at all why the footpaths need to go along the front of people’s cottages, past their windows and to their front doors. The sensible thing is for them to be diverted around a little settlement of two or three houses that exist in the middle of the fields.

As I said, we get a lot of applications for footpath diversions and footpath extinguishments, although mainly diversions. They are all very sensible and we look at them from a common-sense point of view. This is where I come back to having problems with the amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale. If they were put on the face of the Bill and became legislation, they would make it very difficult to apply the kind of common-sense decisions that we make at the moment.

As I understand it, the legislation says that a footpath diversion should be convenient for people wanting to use the footpath. I think that “convenient” is the word that is used but, anyway, that is what it means. So, if you have a footpath going through a farmyard, or a courtyard that used to be a farmyard, and there is a proposed diversion, you look to see whether that diversion is sensible from the point of view of the people walking on the footpath and that the diversion is not too far or too difficult or perhaps goes through difficult terrain, as well as looking at the effect that the footpath has on the people whose houses it goes past. I remember one example where a footpath went through a group of three houses, which now would be quite expensive, and it literally went along the pavement in front of the windows of someone’s house. Quite reasonably, they said that this was an intrusion and was unreasonable. We went on a site visit to look at it and we walked that route and the proposed alternative, but the proposed alternative, which went around the back, gave us a very good view, through some huge glass windows, into the bedrooms and bathrooms of their neighbours. Under those circumstances we said, “No, we’re not diverting this because we are moving one problem and creating another for the neighbours who in fact had objected”.

You have to look for solutions. Our footpaths officer, who we employ, went out to talk to them all and tried to find an alternative diversion that solved it for everyone. That kind of common-sense practical work on the ground has to be done. In most cases it can be done perfectly acceptably and reasonably, and, where councils can do that, it works. In many cases, though, it does not work, and I will explain why in a minute.

I turn to the noble Lord’s amendment. He wants to suggest that there should be a presumption for a diversion or a stopping-up so long as the council and the Secretary of State are satisfied that privacy, safety or security are not adversely affected by the existence or the use of the path. Where I live, which I suppose is an urban street in a rural area, I could argue that we are adversely affected by the existence and use of our front street because people can go along it, our front garden is not very big and they can see in. It is a question of degree and looking at what is reasonable. Is someone unreasonably affected by the existence or use of the path in context? If you simply say “adversely affected”, full stop, that is a pretty draconian test. The wording talks about it being “possible” to divert a path, but at the moment the test is whether the diversion is reasonable for people wanting to use the path. It does not say that it cannot be any longer than the existing route but is it unreasonably much further, or is it reasonable that people should have to walk another 20 or 50 yards to remove the problem caused by the path? So all the checks and balances—and it is all a matter of balance—would be taken away by the wording of this amendment, which would put the balance far too much on one side, not the other. Maybe the present system is not perfect but I think that these amendments go far too far the other way.

I will not repeat the points that my noble friend Lady Parminter made, with which I completely agree, about the stakeholder working group and the fact that it has come up with an agreed package.

My final point is that at the moment there is a major problem with all these things, but in my view it is not about the legislation or the rules; it is about resources. In the present situation in local government, where most local authorities, certainly in the north of England, are in dire financial circumstances, desperately trying to keep resources going for old people’s care and that kind of thing, highway authorities simply do not regard this as being of a sufficiently high priority. There is indeed a great waiting list in many areas and it takes a long time. That is the real problem. If they are going to have to deal with these in four months in future, they will not be very pleased because they will have to put resources into what they regard as not being a top priority. For those of us who care about our footpaths, let us see whether that does the trick.