Pubs (Planning Policy)

Jason McCartney Excerpts

Wednesday 16th February 2011 Westminster Hall

[Greg Mulholland]

I thank my hon. Friend and look forward to continuing to work with him on this issue. I know that our hon. Friend the Minister is listening to us. Let me be clear that no one is suggesting that those genuinely failed pubs—those pubs that cannot make a living and no longer have a community that wants them—should not change. No one is even suggesting that there should be significant barriers stopping their conversion or redevelopment. I want to make that absolutely clear to the Minister, and I hope to convince him that there are ways in which we can do that by, for example, putting halts in the planning process. My hon. Friend is right. There is only one way in which we can determine whether a community wants a pub and that is to ask the people who live in that community. Very few councils do that. As I will discuss later, the issue of viability is very often not established, or it is simply established because the current owner claims that the pub is unviable.

The Minister may say that pub campaigners can sometimes be a little over-sentimental. As a member of the save the pub group, I refute that charge. Why do we not say more about pubs also being small businesses that actually make an incredibly valuable contribution to the national economy, which is, of course, eroded every time a pub closes? The tax-take from those pubs is also eroded every time one closes. Pubs are small businesses, with an individual, a couple or a family earning a living and employing people in the local economy. The new economics foundation has suggested that twice as much as every pound spent in a pub goes directly to the local economy, compared with half of that for every pound spent in a supermarket. Often, as we have said before, supermarkets are replacing pubs.

[Jason McCartney (Colne Valley) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate. He hits on a very good point there. My local pub, The Coach and Horses, in Honley village has just reopened having been closed for three months. My hon. Friend was right to talk about the employment opportunities. The pub employs bar staff, the manager, the entertainment that it is bringing in on Friday and Saturday night, the cleaning staff and the catering staff. Whenever we hear about a small supermarket moving into an area, people always talk about the employment opportunities. We need to emphasise the employment opportunities that pubs can bring to rural villages and remote areas. I should like to congratulate my hon. Friend on making that point.

[Greg Mulholland]

I thank my hon. Friend and fellow Yorkshire MP for making that point. It is easy for people in planning applications—I have seen it as I am sure have other hon. Members—to present the pub as something that is of the past and that is no longer wanted by communities. They deliberately ignore points such as employment opportunities. They suggest that a business that has served a community for 50 years or even 100 years and contributed to the economy should be replaced by a set of flats that will make a one-off profit for a business, or a supermarket that will do things in a different way. It is so important that we do not lose sight of that point.

Let me outline the framework for pubs in planning law and why, sadly, pubs have so little protection. Planning policy statement 4, which applies to villages and local centres—already it is rather ambiguous because there are pubs that are in areas that do not qualify—replaced planning policy statement 7. That was a change made by the previous Government in December 2009 and was a cause for concern. PPS 7 was stronger and made direct reference to supporting the retention of local facilities such as public houses. The new policy simply refers to planning applications affecting shops and leisure uses, including public houses or services in local centres.

The Government are thinking of replacing that planning policy statement with a new framework. I urge the Minister, who is a genuine supporter of pubs, to ensure that when that statement comes out it includes a direct reference to the importance of public houses so that councils can take that into account. Without such a reference, councils will not do that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Williamson]

Thank you, Mrs Main. The reality is that we took action. On another point, we took the necessary steps to stop the economy going into a complete tailspin. I repeat the point that I have already made and make no apologies for doing so: people need income in their pockets from employment, and the measures that we took to keep unemployment lower than it would otherwise have been helped ensure that more pubs did not close. I regret to say that this Government’s measures have taken away the direct support by scrapping the community-owned pubs support programme. They are also introducing new powers that only relatively affluent communities will be able to utilise, and are taking economic decisions that will have a much bigger impact on the future viability of community pubs, because unemployment will certainly increase and many more pubs will close as a direct consequence.

I do not want to take up much more time, because that would eat into the time for the Minister’s wind-up speech.

[Jason McCartney]

I would be interested if the hon. Gentleman could name a single pub in Yorkshire that was saved by that scheme. Dozens of pubs closed in my constituency during his Government’s last five years.

[Chris Williamson]

I hope that the hon. Gentleman will forgive me for not knowing the names of pubs in Yorkshire. I am a Derby MP and, as I said at the outset of my contribution, I am teetotal and very rarely frequent pubs. Pub names are not one of my strong points. I could not even name too many pubs in Derby, but I recognise the central role that they play in the local community.

I will finish by addressing the comments made about the big society. The notion that, somehow, the nebulous concept of the big society will be the saviour of community pubs and that Ministers on the white charger of the big society will ride to the rescue is, in reality, a fantasy. In my view, the big society is nothing more than a 21st-century version of the Poor Law. If hon. Members view that as the way to protect community pubs, I am sorry but they will be sadly disappointed.