Town and Country Planning (General Permitted Development) (England) (Amendment) Order 2016

Graham Allen Excerpts

Wednesday 15th June 2016 General Committees

[Mr Graham Allen (Nottingham North) (Lab)]

It is very nice to be here, Mr Nuttall. I think this is the first time I have served under your chairmanship. I know you are very busy campaigning on a number of issues, so we are even more grateful that you are in the Chair today—but not wearing a badge of course, in your impartial role in the Chair.

I should declare an interest immediately and say that I am honoured to be on Lord Heseltine’s panel on estate regeneration, which is looking at a number of the matters touched on in the statutory instrument. I would have been very happy not to attend this Committee, but I was informed by my Whips that my attendance was absolutely essential. Clearly they were keen to hear a serious contribution from me, and they are going to get one for having had the good grace to invite me to sit on the Committee, which of course I have been looking forward to for a long time.

Coming to the Committee and listening to what has been said, I am struck that this would probably not even appear on a council agenda in a place like Sweden, Denmark, Germany or Italy. There are some who would like to leave those countries behind, but in many ways, they can show us the way to operate subsidiarity, which is taking decisions at the right level. I listened to the Minister very carefully. He and the Secretary of State are strong advocates of devolution, yet here we are, fulfilling not a political but an administrative function. This order is the Department, business and industry—an elite, in a way, beyond politics—deciding what should happen in technical terms on general development matters. We are here considering what in virtually every other western democracy is a devolved matter. The Congress of the United States would no more discuss these issues than anything else that should be done at state, local or neighbourhood level. That highlights for me a very serious matter: that the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 settlement is no longer relevant to what our modern democracy needs to deal with issues such as housing.

I fully understand why the Government and Labour Front Benchers should look at housing issues. Of course it is important to get better housing provision, but everything is done at what I dare call the federal level—in the Westminster Parliament of the United Kingdom—and what we tend to get with this degree of minutiae is a whitewash view across the whole of England, in this case, about what should happen on often very small and trivial issues. That flies in the face of the flexibility that we need if we are to develop balanced and healthy communities. I take second place to no one in the Opposition in my respect for the Minister’s work. I have had the chance to work closely with him on a number of issues, so I know his quality and what is in his heart—but this measure does not help get to where we both, and I suspect the whole House, want to get to.

The last thing we need in my constituency is housing, because my constituency is made up of nine enormous former council housing estates. Because we have lost our big-hitting manufacturing industries, on what little land becomes available, in what little space there is, we desperately need variety to help us rebuild and regenerate balanced communities,. We need to keep our laundrettes, as my hon. Friend the Member for Brentford and Isleworth alluded to, and we need to keep our pubs, as many colleagues have been lobbied on even in this last week, as variety in the community. Even more significant than that, we need to keep our skills base. We need to keep our jobs, our office space, our commercial and industrial spaces, from heavy industry—if it is still to be with us—through medium-sized plants right down to starter units and incubators.

Looking across my patch from one end to the other, I see a sea of council housing receding into the distance, and people who need jobs in one of the areas with the highest level of unemployment in the UK. The broad brush approach to what is needed on housing numbers does not apply. It is not relevant. In fact, it aggravates and makes worse the imbalance in some outer estate communities. We could use Dagenham or Skelmersdale as examples—everyone knows an area a little bit like mine somewhere near where they live.

More broadly across the city of Nottingham, I can see why there should be more houses and places where they might be built. However, whenever an offer of land comes up, it is looked first at as a housing possibility rather than as a longer term regeneration possibility. I fully understand the pressures on the Government and on my local council. When an order such as this is introduced, what will happen is that people in Nottingham City Council will think, “If we can sell this bit of land, we can get a capital receipt for it. If the council can get a capital receipt, we might be able to keep a couple of social workers or a director of public health going in a job. Therefore we have to have that money.” They are not encouraged, and the national system does not encourage them, to think in terms of what the regeneration possibilities might be. Once a council has a capital receipt, that is it: the family silver has gone, and it does not get an income stream forever that it would have had had it built something that was rented out and which had a long-term regeneration impact on a community like mine.

In addition, we have Government targets. Any council, whatever its political description, will feel pushed along to try to meet those targets come what may. By my reading of the order, it will aggravate that inflexibility and aggravate the problems in areas like mine.

The Minister asked what the alternatives are. As I always do—sometimes to his regret, I suspect—I will try to come up with some alternatives. When it is said that the market makes the development of certain properties and bits of land not viable, are there not ways that the Government can consider, not least through their devolution proposals, to offer incentives to bring such properties into use? Article 7 relates to changing light industrial units into housing. Are there not ways in which we can maintain them as light industrial units and increase the likelihood of their being brought back into use?

I have in my constituency a most fantastic further education building, which I fought hard to stop being demolished and being made into—believe it or not—another housing estate. Just what we need. We have had it rebuilt, and out of that further education college there are lots of young boys and young girls who are qualifying as plasterers, bricklayers and surveyors—construction sector skills. They do not have a pathway to progress so that they can stay in my constituency, perhaps start work with a unit and a white van and, if they do well for themselves, go on next year or the year after to a bigger unit. That trail is not there.

Much of what I have said the Minister and I have shared before. I ask him whether in those places where there is solid evidence from counting the numbers and looking at the vista that 95% of the land area is already covered by houses, there can be flexibility so that people can invest in other important things to bring variety and the healthy community we need, whether that is work spaces, commercial properties or offices. The order provides a one-club policy for housing. I acknowledge that we need that club, but we also need another 10 in the bag if we are to have a healthy and balanced community.

Article 3 of the order refers to land, which is probably the most important issue. I urge the Minister to do something quite radical and ensure that those who work in their local communities—Members of Parliament, councillors, community organisations, tenants associations or charities—are always given prior notice of land that becomes available, so that they have an opportunity to present a sensible proposal for regenerating their area. They should not find out after a good old-fashioned 1947 consultation process, like two men and a dog, or in this case 23 respondents, for something this important. None of this is secret if you know the way to find out about these things, but the process is not inclusive. Not one person in this room can honestly say that we really involve people in such decisions. Let it be out there so that local people can make a bid and an offer to do something with that piece of land. Perhaps it may be a small unit, perhaps it is about maintaining a laundrette or just turning something into a green space and playing fields in a sea of concrete.

[Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)]

Before coming here, I was cabinet member with responsibilities for assets on West Oxfordshire District Council for seven years. I would be surprised if the hon. Gentleman did not know that any local authority seeking to dispose of an asset it holds has to secure best value. That is what we always have to try to find. We must sweat our assets to try to fill a black hole, often in central Government funding. Local government is not in a position to give hand-outs willy-nilly to any fanciful community group idea when it is trying to get money in the coffers to spend on vital public services.

[Mr Allen]

I am well aware of that, but I think we can either say, “It’s there and we have to deal with it,” or we can rail against it, as I do. Best value immediately may be to secure a capital receipt for a piece of land, but in reality a local authority should be allowed to go for not only best value but long-term value, to think strategically and to think about what people in the community need.

The hon. Gentleman talks a little dismissively, if I may chide him gently, about people in the community. Barratt is also people in the community. It seems to get to know pretty damn quick about these opportunities, and a housing estate goes up rapidly, before the average community group—run on a shoestring, probably not even with a full-time person in it—even gets a smell of those opportunities. All that group then gets involved in is the protest when bricks are going on bricks. We can work on best value, but we can also work with the community and indeed allow people in the locality to make decisions. They may well have a view about best value that is about better value, so that their children can get a job, so that they can have a health centre in their community and so that—in line with the Government’s policy on shopping parades and revitalising shopping in areas—we have the balanced and mixed community that many people talk about.

The hon. Gentleman, thankfully, prompts another thought that I will share with the Committee, which is about devolution. No one could seriously suggest that this order is in the mainstream of the Government’s thinking, or possibly even the Opposition’s thinking, on how power is devolved. We look in vain at articles 7 and 8 for things that say how the order ties in with, for example, the devolution deals happening at the moment. Do we want people out there to take more control of their lives or do we want to specify whether they can or cannot have laundrettes, what happens to local pubs or how use should be changed in their areas, through a one- size-fits-all view from Whitehall and the Department?

The Minister has to do his job this afternoon. He is probably very bored with it and wants to get to the Chamber to listen to the debate on Europe and put his point of view to colleagues in the Lobby. However, he is stuck here because this is performing part of the administrative role of Whitehall. If he were allowed out to make a speech on the stump on devolution—I have heard his speeches—he could rouse a crowd to run with their pitchforks flailing down Whitehall, and so could the Secretary of State, but they will not do it by reading articles 3 to 5 of this statutory instrument, because that is not what it is about. The order is not about devolving power and authority or about building diverse and healthy communities. It is just part of the administrative process of the Town and Country Planning Acts.

We all need a bit more imagination. Many of us do not get the nod from the Whips to appear on these very important statutory instrument Committees. As a renowned parliamentarian, Mr Nuttall, you will know that the opportunities are not always there for Back Benchers. That is why I take this opportunity to say that there is a great vision from the Government—I have said this on the Floor of the House—on devolving power to the localities. They are not going as fast as I want—they probably never could—but they have taken a series of significant steps. Opposition Members should not only welcome that but go further, because that is the way things will go in the very near future. I think that means that this sort of statutory instrument needs to sit in that broad context. Unfortunately, the only thing that I can do to get that on the record and to make my little heckle against the steamroller, as Austin Mitchell, the former Member for Hull used to say, is sadly to vote against the order.

[The Chair]

Or even Great Grimsby.