Business and Planning Bill

Earl of Shrewsbury Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 6th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Shrewsbury (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I welcome this Bill, which paves the way towards economic recovery post Covid-19. I support the points on smoking made by the noble Baroness, Lady Northover; that is very important for the comfort of customers and others surrounding them.

The Bill provides the opportunity to modernise and enhance our high streets’ commercial activities, to lift many planning activities into the modern age, and to promote new job-creating construction schemes. Although the briefing notes state that the measures in the Bill to address these many issues will be temporary, I suggest to your Lordships that some should be looked at as providing a more permanent solution to the woes experienced on high streets currently.

Those woes cannot be blamed simply on the effects of the pandemic. Our high streets have been steadily declining for years, with the advent of out-of-town shopping facilities and the internet. How easy it is to sit at home and order something from eBay or Amazon or such like and have it delivered to your door the following day—and you do not have to go into town or try to find a parking space. How can the high street compete with that?

For a long while, many of us who live in rural communities have been concerned at the demise of the high street in our rural towns. I live near Ashbourne in Derbyshire. The town is described as the gateway to the Peak District, which indeed it is, and therefore the gateway to a most popular tourist destination of outstanding natural beauty. The traffic flow through the town is vast; it comprises not just tourists, visiting the peaks with their bikes and caravans, but, as a main route in and out of a major quarrying and mineral-producing region and a vibrant agricultural region, includes quantities of large lorries and agricultural machinery, and leaves the town gridlocked, especially in the spring and summer months.

Who suffers? The street cafes, the local traders and the public houses—all small businesses. Car parks are expensive and full to overflowing. Industry, whose trucks have to go through the town, suffers considerable financial loss through long delays. A bypass to the town has been talked about for many years, and the Bill might just provide an opportunity to get those plans going again. I really hope this happens.

The Derbyshire Dales District Council has done a great job in the past couple of weeks in Ashbourne in converting the streets and pavements to be social-distancing friendly. The measures which will be enabled by the Bill might just help rural towns such as Ashbourne, where tourism, local hospitality and quality small shops are key, to pick themselves up and move forward to a brighter future.

Finally, the bounce-back loan initiative has been extremely helpful to many small firms—it is a lifeline on which I congratulate my right honourable friend Mr Sunak. However, and to their great detriment, some of the big four banks have been absolutely abysmal in their handling of applications. For example, on 5 May, the small business of which I am a director applied to HSBC to open a feeder account, with a view to applying to the BBLS. Despite phone calls, the bank has yet to respond, and we are now heading towards the middle of July. In mid-June, the company applied to Clydesdale and Yorkshire Bank to open a new business account, and then applied for the loan. Within two weeks, the whole process was successfully concluded—Barclays Bank did not even answer the telephone. Will my noble friend tell me what percentage of BBLS applications have not been processed in time and what percentage have been declined?

I very much welcome the Bill and wish it a speedy passage.