Localism Bill

Lord Deben Excerpts

Wednesday 12th October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Judd]

My Lords, passion perhaps not, but I know that my noble friend's commitment is outstanding on these issues. I welcome his amendment because while I support all the arguments that he made about brownfield site priority, one other important point which is sometimes overlooked is that if we give priority to brownfield site development we have a chance to improve the character of our urban areas. There is a chance to do imaginative things with housing and the rest in the middle of our urban areas.

I should declare an interest as president of the Friends of the Lake District, which also represents the CPRE in the whole of Cumbria. I am also vice-president of the Campaign for National Parks, but they are not really central, as the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, explained, to our concerns tonight. The Government have made it pretty clear, which is very reassuring, that they have a commitment which they fully intend to honour to the national parks and the areas of outstanding natural beauty. That is a terrific undertaking from the Government and we look forward to seeing them fulfil it not only in the detail but in the spirit.

The noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, recaptured history very well. I was just entering my teens when the new planning legislation became operative. As the noble Lord, Lord Tope, knows very well, I was born in what was then Surrey on the edge of London and grew up in that area. I remember the concern among my family and many others as we saw many of the rich rural areas of Surrey near London being eroded by road building, ribbon development, new housing and the rest. It was a great sense of relief when this legislation came in. Some beautiful parts of the county of Surrey were preserved very near to London.

I know how important that was to me in my upbringing because as an active Boy Scout and keen walker I was always out in those areas, and so were many other people. Of course, these areas of beauty and of rich natural inheritance near to our urban centres are of special importance. It would be unforgivable if we were to let those slip and let further erosion develop.

We must remember something else. This idea about planning and the preservation of the countryside did not just come out of an elitist brain: it was something forged strongly in the context of the Second World War. We were fighting for the survival of Britain and we wanted Britain to be a decent place. We wanted it to be a better place and we could see that the countryside was central to that. If we are not careful we will lose that commitment, of which the noble Lord himself gave good evidence—passionate commitment in the best sense—to quality in our society.

The noble Lord kept stressing the inherent importance of the countryside—its inherent natural beauty being worth preserving in itself. Of course I go along with him 100 per cent on that argument, but it is not just about that. It is about our people. We had had the war and hard economic times before the war and people could see the importance of the countryside to those from urban areas as something to which we should all pay attention. Pressures may be different in character now but they are strong. People are under tremendous stress in urban existence. The economic pressures are increasingly acute, and therefore all those arguments about space and the opportunity to regenerate, to be recreative and to improve one's physique by enjoying and participating in the opportunities of the countryside remain at least as important as they have ever been. That is crucial and I was reassured to hear the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, saying what he said, because across the House and across the political divide I think there is a great deal of agreement about quality and not just quantity.

For these reasons, as the noble Lord spelled out so well, I hope we can get an absolute undertaking from the Minister tonight that the Government will preserve their commitment to the countryside as something very rich and relevant to the needs of the British people—something beautiful to preserve in itself, but also something that is indispensable in terms of the psychological and physical health of the British people.

I just hope we do not allow the arguments of growth in its economic dimension alone to squeeze out the thought of spiritual growth, spiritual development and a fuller life for the British people. I congratulate the noble Lord most warmly on his amendment. I am glad to be associated with it, and I am very glad indeed that my noble friend has put down his amendment as well.

[Lord Deben]

My Lords, I was for 30 years a Member of Parliament for a country constituency, and for part of that time I had the honour of representing the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, so I speak with some trepidation after he has put so valuable a contribution to your Lordships' House.

Over those 30 years, I think I have spoken more often and been more concerned with the rural scene than most politicians. Sadly, very few of our constituencies are now rural enough for one to be able to say truthfully that one represents a rural area. It is one of the mistakes, in my view, of the way in which constituencies have been drawn, and of course the changes in your Lordships’ House have meant that rural society is much less well represented than it once was.

I started out with a huge amount of sympathy for the campaigns. I did not like some of the people who were behind them. Some of the newspapers that were proposing them were not newspapers that I normally felt had the better interests of society at heart. But still they were making a great deal of fuss. I did notice, though, that some of the fuss happened before the Government had actually published their document, which suggests a certain predisposition to worry about the Government.

I am not as worried as some because the first thing to recognise is that if we are going to have localism then the local plan becomes absolutely crucial. One of the things that we in Suffolk have felt over the years—I can only speak for my own much loved county—is that we know more about our county than people outside. We wanted a situation in which our local plan could represent the way in which you keep a living, working countryside, and not merely preserve it like with taxidermy. It is one of the things your Lordships might remember, and I am sure many here will understand this. There are problems in our countryside about the livelihood of ordinary people. Increasingly, villages have become middle-aged and middle class. Even in the time during which I have lived where I live—35 years—the whole population make-up has changed. There are several reasons for that, but one is that we have tended to believe that any development, excepting those villages designated by somebody else as key villages, is unacceptable. We have argued that because the country council does not want to run a school bus to a small village, but wants people to be concentrated so they can deal with them more efficiently, these small villages should not be treated properly. Indeed, many are referred to by that offensive phrase “scattered settlement”. I am happy to say that I live in one. I have never heard anybody say, “I live in a scattered settlement”. They tend to say, “I live in a village”, because that is actually where they do live, and that is what they feel it is.

Therefore, we start with huge sympathy for the Government’s view that we should have local plans. Many villages want to have a few homes, because they know that that is the only way in which they can keep their amenities and revise and revitalise the village community. It is the only way in which they can stop the community becoming an entirely one-class society. Therefore change is crucial for the life of our villages; we want a working countryside and not merely a Marie Antoinette kind of rural idyll. So I am concerned sometimes when I read descriptions of the countryside that do not understand the need for it to be workaday, and particularly do not understand that our landscape is as it is because of work. Our landscape in England is almost entirely artificial in the sense that it is created by man’s work. That is not true in the wilder parts of Wales and Scotland and some parts of northern England, but most of us live in that sort of countryside. What we love most about it is very often something that human beings have co-operated on with the Creator to make something particularly special.

Not only do we have to think about keeping the countryside workaday, or sometimes returning it to being able to be workaday, but we also have to remember that there is poverty in the countryside that is very often unnoticed. Poverty comes thatched in the countryside, and so people think that it is a bit twee. But I knew poverty in my constituency. Someone said something about that earlier on—how bad the housing was in some parts of the world, very different from East Anglia. I could take people to village housing in my former constituency where poverty was real and the housing conditions were appalling. We must not hide from ourselves the fact that we need economic development in our countryside if it is to be both real and to meet the needs of the poor and if it is not to allow the countryside to become a mere dormitory for the old and those about to retire.

In that sense, thinking about the need for growth is not inimical to the protection of the countryside. It is part of making sure that our countryside is alive. But I must say to my noble friend that she is not helped by the traditional view of the Treasury. Not to embarrass anybody, I hope I may quote the housing report by Kate Barker, who put forward the totally improper suggestion that the reason why we are short of houses is because we do not have enough land on which there is planning permission. This is absolute nonsense. Housing is entirely driven by the ability to sell the houses that you build. If it is difficult to borrow money to buy a house, builders do not build. What is more, builders are quite clever at making sure that they do not build any more than keeps the price at the sort of price that they want. I have to say that under the previous Government, builders did better than they have done under any previous Administration. The return on capital and the profits of the building companies were clearly extremely well organised. I fear that that is part of the reason why we have such very low numbers. I do not want to argue with the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, but the fact is that in most years of the previous Government the number of houses built were worse than at any time since the First World War. It was an appalling history. Some years it was 100,000, and we need 300,000 to meet the needs. The fact is that in no year of the previous Government’s administration did we build enough houses to meet the increased need for that year, leave alone get enough to make up for the 5 million that people pretended were not needed. The noble Lord, Lord Prescott, proceeded to suggest that we did not need it. Then, year by year, he, like everybody else, discovered that we did. So we have a very bad background to this, and I understand why the Government are very concerned about it.

I hope that my noble friend will not tell us that you get houses by having more planning. There are many planning permissions that are still not fulfilled, and the reason is that people do not think that they can sell the houses that are on it. So do not think that that is how we are going to get the extra houses that we need.

In this Bill it is quite clear that we have to build on brownfield sites, or at least those which are of least environmental value. The trouble is that there are some bug-filled brownfield sites which it would be a pity to build on. But we will build on those first. That is what the whole mix is supposed to do. Therefore the Minister may well say, “It’s all there”, and I agree with her. You do not need to change either the Bill or indeed the planning proposals to achieve what we want to achieve. But there is a problem in that an awful lot of people out there do think, “You need to change it”. In other words, we have a real problem of perception now, and it is therefore very important that we listen carefully to my noble friend Lord Marlesford. If he thinks that these dangers arise, then he is speaking for a wide range of people, and we have to make sure that people do not get this wrong. I personally have no concerns except the concerns that people out there have, and therefore I hope that my noble friend will be prepared to help in language, so that people really understand that the statements of the Government are carried out as the noble Lord, Lord Judd, said—in practice, clearly, and without peradventure.

The example for me is an earlier one. I used to talk about the planning guidance—PPGs—when I was the Minister responsible, and I was very keen on not building on greenfield sites. I was the first person to enforce the brownfield site concept, because I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, that builders like building on flat and green fields.

I notice that the previous Government changed planning guidance to planning statements. We were already moving to the position in which people were being told what they shall do, and I therefore also understand that many people really resent the fact that others outside are telling them. We have to get this balance right. I had hope that we had got it. It is probably true that my noble friend will have to ensure that everybody knows on the face of the Bill, or at least in the planning strategy, that what we have said as a Government is actually there, and no one can object to it.

The reason I say this is very simple. I am afraid that there are a lot of people in this world who put their own profits and interests before national and local interests. They say, “Oh, that bit of land there won’t really matter, because I own it and I can make some money out of it” or “I’m only filling over there. I can do a bit on the edge there”. We need to make sure that they recognise, right from the beginning, that we are not having that.

For me, the real problem with the present situation is that I have no fears at all, when the local plans are in place, because I think localities will make the right decision. There will be a few that do not, but that is the price you pay for real democracy. There will be the odd, but the generality will in fact make the right decisions. My problem is between now and then, and it is at that point that people have a real concern that until you have the local plans in place, the presumption of sustainable development sounds as if it would allow people to do things which they ought not to do.

The Government have to assure us that that will not be the case. I think they can do so, but I hope my noble friend will understand that this is not antagonism towards the Bill, but a response to a national campaign which has a good deal of fault in it, but which has left people concerned, and it is part of the duty of government to meet those concerns.