Localism Bill

Earl of Lytton Excerpts

Tuesday 5th July 2011 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Lytton]

My Lords, I need to declare my interest which I have not previously declared—there has been no need to do so until this part of the Bill—as a landowner and a practising chartered surveyor as well as my interest in local councils.

I need to bring a technical aspect to bear here. However, before I do so, I should like to comment on something said by the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, in her introductory remarks. The provisions of the Bill go well beyond what might be described as the recovery of assets that were in, but have passed out of, community use. As regards some of the things about which the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, is concerned, a much wider aspect seems to be appearing.

In my professional life I have prepared lots of lists of property assets. I worked for nearly seven years in the public sector and during that time dealt with a lot of things for local authorities, health trusts and government departments, so I know something about preparing lists. I suggest that the proposed list is very far from being a free bet. The process would involve drawing up, managing, publishing, and possibly providing free of charge, a list of indeterminate size and complexity. Why is that the case? It is because regulation cannot foretell what propositions will come forward as a result of the Bill’s provisions.

The obligation is subject to what the Secretary of State may decide following consultation. It is perhaps a pity that the Government have not yet published their response to the results of the consultation on their paper entitled, Proposals to Introduce a Community Right to Buy—Assets of Community Value. In due deference to the noble Baroness on the opposition Benches, the right to buy was not a term that she coined, it was in the consultation document, as I perceive it. I look forward to that response informing the Report stage of the Bill. I hope that I will receive a reassurance from the Minister that it will be forthcoming before that stage so that we all have time to consider it.

I go back to the list. There will be rules about content, additions, deletions and modifications. The list will have to delve into issues of ownership, some of them quite detailed and probably some that are commercially sensitive and may even be confidential. The list will have to be maintained alongside another “not in” list of failed nominations. All I would say at this juncture is that even on a conservative basis this will be a resource-hungry exercise for local authorities.

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

My Lords, like my noble friend Lord Hodgson, this is my maiden speech on the Bill. I intend it to be generic rather than go into detail and I hope, therefore, to be brief. I regret the hour at which we are holding this debate, although my noble friend the Minister showed admirable initiative in opening it with the statement that she did. It is a pity that the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, did not have the opportunity to paint the larger landscape before we started getting into the detail.

I am speaking in particular to Amendment 136ZD, in the names of my noble friends Lord Gardiner of Kimble and Lord Cathcart, to which the former spoke a little while ago. I express my admiration for their exercise in clarification. The instincts that underlie generosity to one’s community are the big society writ early. I was a London inner-city Member of Parliament for nearly a quarter of a century, and London is nothing if it is not a collection of villages where the instincts of the big society apply. I have in a recent debate identified in my own constituency Pimlico and Soho as model inner-city communities, if in different modes. I have, however, had an address in Wiltshire for half my life and these characteristics of the big society or, as Burke might put it, the small platoon society, are perhaps evidenced even more vividly in the countryside because of the way everyone knows everyone else and where the roots of families are at least as deep as those of parallel families in the cities, if not more so.

I pay warm tribute to those who give of their substance in rural areas and demonstrate their recognition of local need and to the imaginativeness of their responses. My one plea to my noble friend the Minister is that that generosity of spirit should not be unduly curtailed by the letter of the law, which can turn the landscape into briars and brambles which deter rather than welcome sensible development. I, in turn, have welcomed the amendment as being an insurance policy to support one’s desire to be helpful to the community rather than to ring one’s assets around with defences against hazard.

I end with the amendment of my noble friend Lord Hodgson and support his Amendment 136, though by placing it in line 19 of page 61, it means it offers late rather than early assistance in illuminating the first four lines of that page. It is the opposite of the example once set by a Polish Bishop who was visiting a parish in his diocese, an episode that could be helpful to many a parliamentarian. When greeted by the curate, the Bishop said, “When I visit parishes in my diocese, I am accustomed to be greeted by the sound of bells, and that has not happened today”. The curate said, “My lord, there are three reasons. The first is there are no bells”. “Pray go no further,” said the Bishop. Although my noble friend Lord Hodgson has placed his amendment quite far down on page 61, I still think it is an extremely valuable contribution to the Bill.