Localism Bill

Lord Best Excerpts

Thursday 14th July 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas]

My amendment seeks to remedy this difficulty by allowing neighbourhood plans to rule out the creation of village greens that the neighbourhood plan does not recognise.

[Lord Best]

My Amendment 170CK, which comes later in the Bill, is not quite as imaginative as the approach of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. It is a more pedestrian way of dealing with the matter by amending the Commons Act 2006, which is essential. At nominal cost to the applicant, frivolous and vexatious applications can add so much cost and delay to a scheme as to deter the developer or housing association from proceeding. I have personal experience of this, being familiar with a development in York. We were attempting to create a significant new mixed-tenure community of some 540 homes and, despite the council being fully in support of that, havoc was wreaked by a village green application to incorporate the whole of a 53-acre site. It was made on the basis that a local resident had been walking their dog on the site for the past 20 years, thereby meeting the criteria of lawful sport or pastimes. Since the tolerant owner had taken no legal action against them, the case could be made that this large site could possibly be England’s largest village green. Although the proposition was in due course thrown out, it involved my charity in considerable frustration, the potential loss of public and private funding, considerable expense and delay of more than a year. A less tenacious developer might well have given up, depriving the city of York of what will be a huge asset for generations to come.

Perhaps I may quote from one landowner in Norfolk, whose perspective has been sent as an illustration by the Hastoe Housing Association. They state:

“I believe that affordable homes are vital in sustaining rural communities. As a result, when Hastoe with the backing of the parish council approached me about selling them some land, I agreed. Many people retiring from the south-east have moved to this area of Norfolk, raising prices beyond the local people’s means and threatening the future of the [village] school … Unfortunately, this decision to help has resulted in me becoming involved in an extraordinary process that will last several years and cost me many thousands of pounds. What is so frustrating is I have detailed crop records for the past 20 years and an acknowledgement from those claiming the arable field as a village green, that they never walk on it when it is in crop. On top of that, those making the claim have taken more than two years putting in their village green application, are funded by somebody whose main home is not in the village and have refused to reveal themselves to the rest of the village. However, it appears that the law is so badly drafted and open to so much interpretation, that the County Council admits that it is extremely unlikely to throw out the claim until it has gone to Public Inquiry as they do not want to run the risk of having to pay for any legal challenge to their initial decision”.

Naturally, this example of big society action by the landowner means that he and no doubt dozens of others are unlikely to part with any land until this overindulgent legislation is reined in.

My amendment looks at the nitty-gritty of the situation and proposes ways in which the law could be amended. I will briefly outline what it says. Amendment 170CK would stop retrospective application for town and village green status after planning consent has been granted, which is currently possible. It would prevent efforts to overwhelm the authority with excessive paperwork, allow authorities to reject vexatious or frivolous applications and allow the recouping of costs in such cases. It would make deregistration possible where a review showed that the village green status had, some time later, become obsolete. I hope that the amendment commends itself to your Lordships and the Minister.

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, I remind the House of the interest that I declared at the beginning of the Committee stage. I am vice-president of the Open Spaces Society, which is the expert voluntary organisation on village and town greens and spends a lot of its time advising people who wish to register greens. It strongly advises people not to do so purely to resist development and not to proceed if the evidence appears to be poor. Not everyone takes that advice, unfortunately.

The amendments attempt to tackle this perceived problem—it is indeed a problem in some areas—by amending this legislation and thereby amending the Commons Act 2006. I suggest that this is probably the wrong time and the wrong legislation to do that. Town and village green legislation, as noble Lords who took part in the discussions of the Commons Act in 2006 will know, is extremely complex and somewhat difficult. Section 15 of that Act laid down a new system for the registration of greens, but that was based upon much older commons legislation, going back to the past, describing what is and is not a green.

I have some questions. Is there an identified problem? Yes. Is it hugely widespread? No, but it is serious where people are abusing the system. Some instances of that have been identified here today and I could provide some more. Does it need sorting out? Yes. Does it need new primary legislation and is this the right Bill to do it? No. As the noble Baroness, Lady Byford, has identified, what is required is an overhaul of the Commons Registration (England) Regulations 2008, which result in a system of greens registration that, in my view and that of the Open Spaces Society, is overly bureaucratic, takes far too long and can be far too costly.

I was involved on the other side, as it were, in an application for a green in Lancashire where Lancashire County Council wanted to build a new secondary school, which I was in support of, and a group of people tried to suggest that the land on which it was being built was a green. I met them, advised them and told them that it was not, but fortunately Lancashire County Council, perhaps because it was a project of its own that was potentially being blocked, was very expeditious in sorting it out. Quite correctly, it rejected the application.

We have a 10-point programme that would greatly improve the green registration system. It could be done simply by secondary legislation by amending the 2008 regulations. I am not suggesting that that is the whole answer and I am not going to tell your Lordships today what all the 10 points are, but we are happy to discuss this with Ministers. They will be Defra Ministers, though, as this is not a CLG matter. Defra is already looking into the problem; it has commissioned research, it is having discussions and it is considering its responses. I hope that on that basis we can let the department get on with it.

There is an understanding on all sides that this is urgent. It is important not to throw the baby out with the bathwater and not destroy the system of registration of town and village greens, which is a very useful process, but to stop people abusing it.