Pubs and Planning Legislation

Debate between Lindsay Hoyle and Charlotte Leslie

Thursday 12th February 2015 Commons Chamber

[Charlotte Leslie]

It was a terrible abuse of local knowledge, and I apologise to my hon. Friend for taking up his time in that way.

We heard some fantastic speeches today. The hon. Member for North East Derbyshire (Natascha Engel) summarised excellently the value of pubs beyond the immediately obvious, talking about their community value and all the other activities that take place in them, which include knitting, crèches, children’s tots groups and coffee mornings; some £120 million is also raised for charities each year.

My hon. Friend the Member for Castle Point (Rebecca Harris) powerfully illustrated the real-world consequences of the current situation, providing exactly the gritty detail that I hope will keep this issue in the Government’s mind through 2015 and beyond. The hon. Member for Easington (Grahame M. Morris) also touched on the enormous amount of work that I know he has done on the statutory code for pubcos, which has until recently been a pretty grim backdrop to the pub situation. I am pleased that the Government have moved on that, largely thanks to his efforts and those of the hon. Member for Leeds North West (Greg Mulholland).

The hon. Member for Leeds North West was, as ever, a powerful blast of reality. He illustrated excellently the practical realities of an ACV bid. For some communities it may be easy but for others it is not nearly so easy, depending on discrepancies between local authorities and between the nature of the communities affected by the potential loss of their pub. He also gave news of his Otley Pub Club collective bid. We wish him luck with that and we will be interested to see how he gets on.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill), who gave his apologies for not being able to be in his place now, gave a balanced assessment, using the benefit of his experience and expertise as a superb and first pubs Minister. He made some sensible suggestions and I very much hope we can progress them. The hon. Member for City of Durham (Roberta Blackman-Woods), who is also not able to be in her place now and has courteously given her apologies, made a statement that many of us perhaps agree with, especially given the time. She wished that this debate had not been necessary, and a lot of us would say “Hear, hear” to that.

Let me return to the Minister’s response. As I say, I look forward to discussing this further over a pint in The Lamplighters and perhaps any other pub he wishes to name. Importantly, he reminded us of the significant positive impact the Government have had on pubs, which is possibly easy to forget; in trying to get the best, we should not make an enemy of the good. There is concern that perhaps he had missed the point of the debate, which was not about commercial viability and protecting those things that are not commercially viable, but simply about allowing communities to have their say when there is a change, be it commercially viable or otherwise. His measures to close loopholes on ACV are welcome, as is the pledge that the way ACV is working out—that is separately from aspirations about how it might work out—will be reviewed as part of a formal review of the Localism Act. I am very pleased that we have received assurances that that element will be considered. It is also welcome that we now have a date, 6 April, for the moves that the Government have made to enhance the status of ACV. Most of us in this House would agree that on planning protection of pubs it is, “Time, gentleman and ladies, please. Time.”

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House notes New Economics Foundation research showing that local economies benefit twice as much from a pound spent in a pub rather than a supermarket; expresses concern that valued and viable pubs are being lost due to permitted development rights which allow pubs to be demolished or turned into supermarkets and other uses without planning permission, denying local people any say; notes that supermarket chains are deliberately targeting pubs and further notes CAMRA research that two pubs a week are converted into supermarkets; supports CAMRA’S Pub Matters campaign calling for an end to permitted development rights on pubs; notes that any change of use to a nightclub, laundrette or theatre requires planning permission, making it odd to refuse pubs the same status; notes plans to remove permitted development rights from pubs listed as Assets of Community Value (ACVs), and calls on the Government to announce how and when this will happen; notes, however, that pubs achieving ACV status is not as simple as Ministers have suggested, with the requirement for local communities to provide boundaries and plans and that every pub must be listed separately making it unrealistic for communities to protect all valued pubs; further notes that each ACV application costs local authorities over a thousand pounds, and listing all valued UK pubs as ACVs would cost millions of pounds and create significant bureaucracy; and therefore calls on the Government to make a simpler change and put pubs into the sui generis category so that communities can comment on a proposal to convert or demolish a pub.

Royal Assent

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

I have to notify the House, in accordance with the Royal Assent Act 1967, that Her Majesty has signified her Royal Assent to the following Acts and Measures:

Stamp Duty Land Tax Act 2015

Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015

Social Action, Responsibility and Heroism Act 2015

Insurance Act 2015

National Insurance Contributions Act 2015

Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015

Infrastructure Act 2015

Care of Churches and Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction (Amendment) Measure 2015

Ecclesiastical Property Measure 2015

Church of England (Pensions) (Amendment) Measure 2015.

Accountability and Transparency in the NHS

Debate between Lindsay Hoyle and Charlotte Leslie

Thursday 14th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Charlotte Leslie]

rose—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. Before the hon. Lady responds—[Interruption.] I am sorry, but does the Opposition Whip have something to say?

[Mr Deputy Speaker]

Thank goodness for that.

We need short and concise interventions, because many Members wish to speak and I do not want to have to reduce the time limit further, but that is what will happen if we are not careful.

[Charlotte Leslie]

I congratulate the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Alan Johnson) on seeking to defend his Government’s record. I will address his point fully later in my speech.

Don Berwick’s report was commissioned by Ministers, led by Lord Darzi and with the support of David Nicholson, to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the NHS. It states:

“The NHS has developed a widespread culture more of fear and compliance… It’s not uncommon for managers and clinicians to hit the target and miss the point”.

It highlighted the inadequacy of quality-control mechanisms in the NHS, stating that the priorities that are emphasised by these assessments are

“seen as being motivated by political rather than health concerns”.

It also highlighted the anger felt by many conscientious medics at Government changes to their employment and at being pressurised to put targets ahead of patients:

“The GP and consultant contracts are de-professionalising... Far too many managers and policy leaders in the NHS are incompetent, unethical, or worse.”

The report warns that

“this… must be alleviated if improvement is to move forward more rapidly over the next five to ten years.”

But those warnings were ignored, and we know that the improvements never happened. The report’s conclusion on a decade of health care reform is that

“the sort of aim implied by Lord Darzi’s vision…is not likely to be realised by the 1998-2008 methods.”

Don Berwick’s report was not alone; let me reveal what the other two reports said. They referred to

“the pervasive culture of fear in the NHS and certain elements of the Department for Health”

and stated:

“The Department of Health’s current quality oversight mechanisms have certain significant flaws”.

Perhaps the most damning indictment of all is that the politicians are responsible:

“This culture appears to be embedded in and expanded upon by the new regulatory legislation now in the House of Commons.”

Instead of being acted on with urgency, this was all buried. We know of the existence of Don Berwick’s report and the other reports only because a medic was so concerned that Berwick’s warnings and solutions had been buried that he tipped off a think-tank, Policy Exchange, which had to use a freedom of information request to bring them to public light in 2010, two years later. They were not even available to the Health Committee.

Let us get one thing clear. The NHS is a huge, monolithic organisation with an exceptionally difficult and, some might say, almost impossible task. In reality, things will go wrong, sometimes very wrong. The crime is not so much that things were going wrong, bad as that is, but that instead of immediately focusing on tackling it, the priority was to cover up an awful truth that was uncomfortable for Ministers and chief executives. All too often, Dispatch Box appearance mattered more than the reality of patients’ lives, leaving whistleblowers and patient groups such as Julie Bailey’s, which was disgracefully dismissed by David Nicholson as a “lobby group”, screaming into a vacuum, often at great personal cost. The crime is the smothering of the truth which costs lives—the deadly silence.

What was the cost of suppressing Don Berwick’s urgent prescription for the NHS? The clinical director of NHS Scotland recently suggested that in following Don Berwick’s recommendations it has experienced an estimated 8,500 fewer deaths since January 2008. We may well ask what was the cost in lives for our NHS of the previous Government’s decision to bury the truth. Across the 14 trusts now being investigated as well as Mid Staffs, there were 2,800 excess deaths between the time that the reports by Don Berwick and others were presented to Ministers and their final revelation in 2010. If the previous Government had been urgently implementing Don Berwick’s recommendations for those five years, who knows how many of those lives might have been saved?

How was this allowed to happen? I have put in freedom of information requests asking what meetings took place to discuss the reports and who was present. Although David Nicholson was working closely with Lord Darzi on the next stage review, he said in front of the Health Committee that, incredibly, he

“knew nothing about the reports”.

That is the Select Committee, so we must take him at his word. The question that then remains is who did read and suppress these vital reports. Was it Ministers? Was it officials? If officials, how was this allowed to happen? If the Department of Health is to move away from a culture of cover-up, I expect a full and accurate response to my request to know who was responsible, and I ask the Secretary of State to assist me in that.

Former Labour Ministers will complacently say, as they already have, that these reports fed into Lord Darzi’s next stage review and informed the report, “High Quality Care For All”. I ask the House whether a document that starts with the then Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle, beamingly saying

“On its 60th anniversary the NHS is in good health”

reflects the content of the reports that we have just heard about. It certainly does not. Indeed, while the Department of Health claims that it “drew heavily” on the three reports in putting together “High Quality Care For All”, a source close to the authorship of those reports said that they found that claim to be “disingenuous at best”. David Flory, the deputy chief executive of the NHS, later told the Francis inquiry that he at least had some responsibility for what happened to the reports, as he had read them, but insisted that they were “caricatures”. That would help to explain why they were not acted on, but it makes the Department of Health’s insistence that it “drew heavily on them” rather odd.

Further indication that the documents were not acted on is the fact that they raise issues almost identical to those highlighted five years later in the Francis report. If Don Berwick’s warnings had been acted on five years ago, there would be no need to ask him to come back now to step in to sort things out and implement his recommendations.