Growth and Infrastructure Bill

John Howell Excerpts

Monday 17th December 2012 Commons Chamber

[Roberta Blackman-Woods]

In Committee, we discussed at length the process of registering town and village greens, and the value of such spaces. My hon. Friend the Member for Rochdale (Simon Danczuk) reminded the Minister of the speech by a previous Conservative Prime Minister, who spoke about warm beer, swallows overhead and cricket on the village green. We were led to think how odd it was, and how much coalition must have changed the Conservative party, that Opposition Members were having to protect precious town and village greens. Clearly, hon. Members on both sides have open spaces in their constituencies that they and their communities want to preserve. Unfortunately, it was made clear to the Committee that there are instances of vexatious applications for town and village green registration that are intended to stymie development, rather than to protect open space. Although such instances are relatively few in the grand scheme of things, they do delay much-needed development. That is why the Local Government Association and other organisations that, like us, want to encourage sustainable development are in favour of placing some limits on the registration of town and village greens, but we think that schedule 4, in particular, goes much too far along that road.

The Open Spaces Society has helpfully provided us with a long list of cherished greens that would not have been registered had the Bill been in place. I urge Members to think about land that might be lost if the schedule is passed unamended, before they vote in support of it. Some of the triggers in schedule 4 are reasonable. For instance, trigger 6 states that, if a neighbourhood development plan identifies a piece of land for development, it cannot be registered. If a neighbourhood plan is in place, it will have been drawn up by residents, published, consulted on and agreed by local people, and land that they have democratically identified for development should be kept as such, but some of the triggers go too far, and it is these that the amendments would delete to ensure that local people can still protect land that is important to them.

[John Howell (Henley) (Con)]

The hon. Lady talked about warm beer, village greens and all that, but the sort of land we are talking about would not be wide enough even for a bowler to stand at one end.

[Roberta Blackman-Woods]

In the spirit of localism, I think it is up to local communities to decide what piece of land, no matter its size, is important to local people and not to take the hon. Gentleman’s word for it.

--- Later in debate ---

[John Howell]

It is a great pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Mr Raynsford), but it will come as no surprise to the House that I do not agree one jot with what he said.

I spoke on Second Reading, I participated in the Committee and it is a pleasure to speak on Third Reading. Before that, I was intimately involved in the production of the Localism Act 2011 and the national planning policy framework, so I can assure the right hon. Gentleman that planning was no whipping boy. In “Open Source Planning” I set out a vision of how the planning system should operate and the Government have more or less faithfully fulfilled it in their reforms. Planning was not a whipping boy; it was given proper status, as it was in my Second Reading speech when I pointed to surveys showing the overwhelming impression among business that planning was the great preventer of development.

Both the Opposition and the LGA entirely missed the point about localism. Localism was always a double devolution. The first devolution was down to local councils, whether they were district or borough councils. The second devolution, which was just as important, was down to local people, principally through their parish and town councils, but generally to the people at large to deal with.

It is not surprising that the LGA is interested only in the first of these. It is not interested in devolving power from itself down to community groups. It is interested in retaining that power. The purpose of the Bill is to deal with district or borough councils that cannot or will not let go and complete the devolution process. Clause 1 partly deals with that aspect of localism. It is an incentive for those councils to get it right and to get their act together.

I want briefly to discuss a couple of other points. In Committee and in the earlier debates today we heard a great deal about section 106 agreements, but nothing more powerful has been said about the proposal for section 106 than that a share of nothing is still nothing. It is to the credit of my hon. Friend the planning Minister that we have pushed forward the renegotiation of section 106 in order to ensure that a share of something is something.

Similarly, let us not forget that the reason we were discussing the clauses on village greens is that they are a direct result of the Penfold review. It is a treatment of a situation in which a non-planning regime for village greens rubs up against a planning regime in neighbourhood planning and, as the right hon. Member for Hazel Grove (Andrew Stunell) made clear, in assets of community value. It is instructive that the Opposition have tried to confuse the two and not kept them separate. The village greens legislation is separate from the planning legislation. It should not be used to confound planning proposals. It is right that we have split it as we have and that we should be given credit for doing that.

There are many other aspects of the Bill that I could trespass on to, but I will give other Members a chance to speak. The Bill is a perfectly formed example of its type. It could not be more different from the description given by the right hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich. It is a perfectly formed Bill that we should vote for with absolute confidence.