Housing and Planning Bill

Duke of Somerset Excerpts

Monday 25th April 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cameron of Dillington]

My Lords, I rise to support the second amendment in this group, Amendment 128YAR, on the duty of care where compulsory purchase powers are involved. I do so from personal experience. Some 25 or 30 years ago, I had the Ilminster bypass through my farm. It was part of the improvements to the A303, which I strongly supported. I still strongly support more improvements to the A303 and hope we shall get them. As a supporter, I expected to be an equal partner in the process, the scheme and the negotiations, but I was left in no doubt that, it being a compulsory purchase, I had little or no say in the way the project was developed over my land. I am talking not about engineering schemes, although I disagreed with it being downgraded from a dual carriageway to a very dangerous three-lane single carriageway, but about things such as on-site planting and off-site planting, where, as a fairly knowledgeable forester, I was definitely considered inferior to their expert and largely ignored. There needs to be rebalancing with an obligation on the purchasing agents and the acquiring authority to treat their customers with care. There is a very real danger of property owners, who include householders, businessmen, farmers and others, being bullied and bulldozed by the acquiring authority. It is not necessarily always an agent of the state; it can be a privatised authority. In essence, as an owner, you are over a barrel. Everyone knows it and that whatever the acquiring authority wants, it can pretty well get, whatever the views of the owner or householder involved. To avoid the acquiring authority riding roughshod over those it should be treating as customers, we need this duty of care to be introduced.

[The Duke of Somerset (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, support these amendments in the name of my noble friend. I thank the Minister for making some good progress with the arguments I put forward in Committee. We are going to see that in the amendments that are about to be moved. On interest rates for late payments, it would be good if the Government could commit to monitoring the success of the penal rates of interest for securing payment of compensation before entry. That would be very helpful.

These concessions still leave two topics unresolved from the group that I spoke to in Committee. First, on NSIPs, which are covered by the first amendment in this group, the Government are arguing that the landowner will get only current use value rather than development value for up to 500 homes with no functional link to the project but situated within one mile of it. This is confiscatory. I again ask the Government: who will benefit from this largesse? Is it the house purchaser or, probably more likely, the infrastructure provider? If it is the latter, this surely demonstrates the unfairness of the idea. The principle of equivalence loses coherence when applied as I have just mentioned. A farmer or landowner may have several tens of acres removed from his holding by this means, leaving his business unsustainable as a result. Existing use values would be unlikely to allow him to purchase elsewhere to rebuild his business, especially after the considerable costs he is bound to incur. In effect, the acquirer is giving himself planning permission to take land at lower value, develop it and gain a large financial uplift at the expense of the original owner. At the same time, it would ignore local plans and local neighbourhood plans.

I turn to the second amendment in this group, relating to a duty of care. In Committee, the noble Viscount, Lord Younger, on behalf of the Government, said that,

“claimants should be treated with fairness … and kept up to date”,

and that,

“competent professionals should be advising their clients to act in this way”.—[Official Report, 23/3/16; col. 2451.]

The word “should” appears again and again. This is not the same as “must” or “shall”. Similarly, to my mind the word “urges” in this context is not strong enough.

I do not really understand why the Government should wish to deny Amendment 128YAR, which would merely strengthen and make mandatory the points that the Minister advocated in Committee. Clear guidance would not give those people subject to compulsory purchase orders the comfort that a compulsory duty of care, as incorporated in this amendment, would deliver. It would also provide a benchmark by which to judge whether an acquiring authority was behaving fairly and reasonably. I ask the Government to consider carefully accepting both these useful amendments.

[Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab)]

My Lords, I totally oppose Amendment 119B. I made a long contribution in Committee —I think it was 18 or 20 minutes—on the whole question of the compulsory purchase of land.

I want to ask the mover of this amendment and his supporters a very simple question. In Committee I drew attention to the value of agricultural land, and the value of that land when it is given full planning permission. If I go by memory, I quoted figures of £880,000 in west Cumberland, where my former constituency was; £4 million per hectare in Watford; and £7 million per hectare somewhere on the southern outskirts of London, although I cannot remember the place exactly. Why should a landowner have the value of his or her land transformed from between £15,000 and £20,000 a hectare to between £4 million and £7 million a hectare simply on the stroke of a pen designating a national infrastructure scheme somewhere in the UK? What right does he or she have to that increased value on land to which they have done absolutely nothing to secure that additional value apart from own it?

When our fathers went to war in the Second World War, they did not fight for a country where people could make vast fortunes simply by holding land. The cost of that land falls upon people all over the UK who now cannot afford to buy a home, particularly in our major cities. The price that they are paying for all that is to feed the landowners who own the land, who should be readily giving up that land to help to deal with the national housing crisis at the price of its worth to them in its existing use, but of course they do not want to do that.

If people outside reading Hansard think the amendment is complicated, it is actually quite simple: it would protect landowners and their wealth, and the people who would pay for that are the people who cannot afford to do so—young people throughout the country who cannot afford to buy a home.