Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 22nd May 2023 Lords Chamber

Empty shops are much more frequently a symptom than a cause of the problem. It may be high street decay but turning around the root causes of high street or town centre decline requires a framework to stimulate investment and activity. The British Property Federation tells me it has a model for this, called town centre accelerators. I suggest that His Majesty’s Government work with the British Property Federation to develop these across the country, especially where there is strong local leadership to deliver them.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I apologise that I have not been in Committee in recent sessions; I had amendments on housing. I have discovered that, as a non-affiliated Peer, it is difficult to organise the division of labour when there are so many hefty Bills going through the House.

I have a particular interest in a couple of groups of amendments being discussed today. High streets and businesses are a core levelling-up issue for so many people outside of London. The decline of the high street can illustrate viscerally the feeling of being neglected and left behind. Boarded-up shops and closing community resources such as banks and pubs can be demoralising, making it feel like the heart of a community is being ripped out. Amendments 433 and 434 from the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, are important in this regard; she summed up in a compelling way why this is an important group.

A number of the amendments refer to consultations, which are very important. I was interested in the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Thurlow, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Etherton, and the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, regarding incentives. They show that we cannot simply declare a commitment to reviving the high street; it is a bit more complicated than that, to say the least.

I want to raise the dilemma that arises when government policies with different priorities, in completely different areas from this Bill, inadvertently make matters worse for high streets. I will reflect on and support Amendment 432, from the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Stevenage, on assessing the impact of pedestrianisation.

Pedestrianisation can intuitively seem like a good idea for high streets—a positive contributor to a community atmosphere, with increased footfall and increased likelihood of people popping into premises and so on. But stop and consider Naz Choudhury who, for many years, ran the successful Temple Bar, a halal Lebanese grill and Indian food restaurant in Oxford, which permanently closed recently. Why did it close? Mr Choudhury blames a certain form of enforced pedestrianisation in the council-imposed low-traffic neighbourhoods, specifically car restrictions in the Cowley Road area of east Oxford. Mr Choudhury says:

“The council’s decision to put these bollards up along Cowley Road was the main reason people don’t want to travel here anymore”.


Obviously, that is a subjective view, but there are a lot of controversies surrounding the Government’s active travel policies, which emphasise cycling and walking over driving. Businesses are saying that policies such as LTNs are having a negative impact on them. In Haringey, where I live, many shop owners say that LTNs are causing them to lose business.

The controversy around LTNs in Cowley Road in Oxford even hit the national newspaper headlines, largely because of opposition by Clinton Pugh, who is the father of the brilliant “Little Women” actress Florence Pugh. Clinton Pugh said:

“The council have literally strangled the life out of the Cowley Road and it is having a very negative effect on businesses.”


Mr Pugh, who is the owner of two or three cafés and restaurants on the road, even put up a banner accusing Oxford of censorship, quoting Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Rather than talking to or listening to him, the council’s response was to threaten to fine him for not getting planning consent for the banner.

Beyond the celebrity stories, a serious point for this group of amendments on the high street is to note that policies such as LTNs, which I am sure are very well intentioned, can create a type of pedestrianisation that is bad for business. Too often, councils just will not listen to the complaints or look at the evidence. Cowley Road traders became so exasperated that they produced their own business impact survey of the effects of traffic-reducing measures. It revealed that at least eight shops had closed where LTNs are located; that 153 shops had been directly or indirectly affected through a loss of customers and logistical problems with deliveries to businesses and customers; and that business owners reported a decrease in turnover of 30% in some instances, with some claiming 50%. A letting agent said that the tradespeople they use had increased their call-out fee from £45 to £65 due to the time it takes to get around in a van, the extra fuel used and so on. Hospitality businesses are particularly affected. A staff member at a specialist supermarket, which people travel a long way to get to, noted:

“We don’t sell many large bags of rice now because they’re too heavy to take on the bus”.


Something that looks like “Let’s get everyone walking or on the bus, and it will all be lovely and pedestrianised” is actually destroying businesses and having a bad effect on consumers, who cannot get what they want to buy. We can see parallels between pedestrianisation and the removal of free—or any—parking spaces in town. This is a double blow to both shoppers and SMEs alike, again in the name of anti-car, active travel policies.

Oxford traders say:

“We’ve been asking for an independent business impact assessment to be carried out but the council have ignored us, so we had to do our own”.


If we are to have a levelling-up discussion, Amendment 432 would be a sensible way to sort out the pros and cons of pedestrianisation in local areas. In other words, you cannot have top-down policies that undo any possibility of local residents or businesses having a proper say. LTNs illustrate that.

[Lord Etherton (CB)]

My Lords, I apologise to the Committee: I should have disclosed before I spoke that I have an interest as the owner of high street retail premises.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Northover (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak in support of Amendment 459, led by the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, to which I have attached my name. As noble Lords will know, this amendment has strong cross-party support, and countering smoking has long had cross-party support in this House. The amendment seeks to ensure that all pavement licences are smoke free. I hear what noble Lords have said about such licences, and this amendment would apply if a pavement licence is granted. It seeks to ensure that the rules inside a bar, restaurant or café apply equally to their outdoor area.

These outdoor areas were expanded in the pandemic so that there was more space between people; outdoors thus became an extension of indoors. The same smoke-free rules that apply inside should apply outside, for exactly the same reasons. As the noble Lord, Lord Young, pointed out, the Local Government Association agrees. That makes these areas more family friendly, and I point out to the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, that the LGA argues that it makes it easier to implement if this is applied nationally.

The Government have had several opportunities to make pavement licences 100% smoke free over the last three years and have opted not to do so. The noble Lord, Lord Young, has specified those instances. This is despite the clear evidence of the health harms of second-hand smoke, strong public support for smoke-free pavement licences and examples from various councils, including Manchester, of this measure being introduced successfully.

The public health case for this policy is very clear. The scientific evidence indicates that there is no risk-free level of exposure to second-hand smoke. Associated health effects include stroke, lung cancer and coronary heart disease. The noble Lord, Lord Moylan, who has just spoken, probably gave up to protect his health. We are seeking to protect others’ as well.

If we continue to allow smoking in pavement seating, passers-by, customers, staff and above all children will keep being exposed to significant amounts of tobacco smoke. The risk is particularly acute for staff, as the noble Lord, Lord Young, specified, who have no choice but to be exposed to people smoking when they work. Of course, children are particularly susceptible to harm from second-hand smoke; we all know that. In Canada, where most provinces have had laws to implement smoke-free patios outside hospitality venues for years, these laws have been popular, easy to enforce and had a positive impact on health. Where smoke-free patios were introduced, second-hand smoke exposure went down by almost a quarter.

Fortunately, the world is changing, as others have said, and smoking is no longer the norm. In the United Kingdom, this House over the last 20 years or so has led the way by helping to reduce smoking—for example, by banning smoking in public in settings, and the noble Earl played his part in that. In 2019, the Government set themselves the worthy ambition of seeking to reduce the number of smokers to below 5% of the population by 2030. While the Government have announced some measures to help deliver this ambition, we are still waiting for the comprehensive strategy needed. Expanding the number of outdoor spaces that are smoke free helps to deliver what the Government say they wish to do.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, raised some of the problems that mean that pavements cannot be pavements. My particular bugbear is cyclists on pavements; they drive me mad. The noble Lord, Lord Moylan, raised some of the tensions when deciding how we regulate public spaces, drawing attention to residents who live on streets where maybe there are pavement cafés.

Those things are worth considering but I want to return to the points made at the start of this group, so well explained by the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Stevenage, and to reference the earlier group on reviving the high street. One of the very few positive outcomes of the dreadful lockdown period was the emergence of imaginative ways of creating social engagement outdoors. When lockdown was such an antisocial action that kept us apart from each other, we found ways of connecting.

Café society is indeed a positive innovation, and regardless of the differences between the weather and climate in the UK and, for example, continental Europe, Brits have taken to this way of enjoying hospitality services. It is a great boost to that industry, which suffered so badly under lockdown.

One of the advantages of this spilling out of café society on to pavements is that it has allowed smokers and vapers to have a coffee or a drink alongside a cigarette, which I consider—shock, horror—to be all very civilised. It is certainly better than huddling outside in doorways in between sips of a drink.

I find it rather galling that Amendments 458, 459 and 461—all of which, one way or another, involve restricting smoking outdoors and making those restrictions a precondition of the licence—have been added to this group. Amendments 458 and 461 emphasise that where there is consumption of food or drink, the licence holder must ensure that smoking or vaping does not affect others. This seems an impossible duty. How could it ever be monitored? It is a degree of micromanagement of the life of communities. It seems the licensee is being threatened—they must prevent smoke drift affecting those in the vicinity, or they will not get a licence.

Tobacco smoke in outdoor areas is highly diluted and dissipates quickly in atmospheric conditions. I worry about moves towards such punitive restrictions on people smoking outside, when all they are doing is indulging in a legal, personal activity. Do we need to overregulate in such a fashion? Smokers, a minority no doubt, are perfectly respectable and considerate citizens and it would be wrong in any way to imply that in some or most cases they wilfully blow smoke into people’s faces or are not mindful of others in the vicinity.

As to involving vaping in this, targeting an anti-smoking device seems just wrong-headed. So many people I know who have stopped smoking did so by taking up vaping, and they improved their health in the process. If the proposers of the amendments are worried about any exposure to tobacco smoke outdoors, this would require that a proper scientific study be brought before the House, or at the very least a national consultation. Amendment 459 goes the full hog and states:

“Pavement licences may only be granted by a local authority subject to the condition that smoking is prohibited”.


It seems that an attempt is being made to use this Bill as a backdoor route to banning smoking in public places per se.

This Bill has been packaged as empowering local decision-making. Can we note that local authorities already have the powers at their discretion to regulate smoking in licensed premises and on pavements outside pubs, bars and restaurants with exterior tables and seating? It is up to them. How can we justify using this Bill to bring in central government legislation that threatens that if pubs and cafés do not ban smoking outside, no licence will be given to them? This seems wholly disproportionate.

We should note that such prescriptive rules could well lead to fewer customers, more high street closures and, certainly for many citizens who as adults choose to smoke, less freedom. It goes against the spirit of a levelling-up Bill when you have an imposition from the top of a kind of “we know best approach” to local matters and individual matters such as smoking, and it will grate with many people.

I appreciate that some people do not like people smoking. Some people find it loathsome. One noble Baroness has boasted about not tolerating smoke drift. There are a lot of things that I do not like and that I would rather not tolerate. I am not keen on people chewing gum or putting on make-up in public or eating with their mouth open or talking loudly or on babies crying when I want to sit quietly with my latte and read my book outside a café, but—my goodness—this is society. We tolerate each other; we rub along. There is something really positive about a café society. We should not use it as an excuse to bring in unnecessary regulations that set us at odds with one another as a means of policing and supervising personal, legal behaviour.

To finish, I do not know whether this will encourage or discourage, but I have noticed that smoking on the Terrace outside the Lords has been banned but somehow smoking on the Terrace of the other place is perfectly okay, and guess what? It is packed with people who work in the House of Lords or sit as Peers in the House of Lords because it is the only place to go—not to damage people but just to relax and have a cigarette with a coffee. They are not breaking the law.

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

Before my noble friend gets up to respond to this debate and at the risk of upsetting the mood of the Committee, I remind noble Lords that we have done three groups. We have another 19 to go and we are going to finish tonight, so unless anybody does not wish to have any sleep, I suggest we perhaps cut our speeches down just a little bit if we can.