Non-Domestic Rating (Lists) (No. 2) Bill

Lord Greaves Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 18th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves (LD) [V]]

My Lords, coming last after so many people speaking, astonishingly, about public lavatories, which has delighted me, there is nothing substantially new that I can say. I will just talk about one or two things that have happened in my part of the world and about how things need remedying. Before doing so, I declare an interest as a member of Pendle Borough Council. I am not a vice-president of the Local Government Association; I used to be but I resigned in order not to have to declare an interest all the time—I am still sent the briefings. Like other speakers, I commend the National Association of Local Councils, which has provided so much good evidence and, in many ways, run this campaign. In a sense, I am not surprised that there have been so many speakers in this debate in the House of Lords. When you think about it, the demographic of the House suggests that more people here might be concerned about public lavatories than perhaps a younger generation might be.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, said, almost at the beginning, the important thing is that there is a need everywhere. There has to be a sufficient number of lavatories in the right places, and many, unfortunately, are not of a sufficient quality; they are what she described as “a disgrace”. The noble Baroness said that there is a need for a national strategy. What worries me is that, if is too much of a national strategy, when national finances get into trouble and there are big cuts, it will be too easy to cut something such as public lavatories. I remind everybody that it was the nationalised railways that closed down a third of the network. I believe that local care and resilience are vital in very local services such as this.

I want briefly to tell a tale of two towns: one is Colne, my own town, and the other is Barnoldswick, next door. Both are on the Yorkshire border. Back in Mrs Thatcher’s time, there was government pressure for what we thought then were massive cuts—little did we know. The council officers thought that public lavatories were an easy thing to cut. They did not have to provide them and thought they were an anachronism in the modern age: people had cars, it was an old-fashioned service and the lavatories were expensive to maintain. They put a lot of pressure on councillors to close them down. In Colne, where I was chairman of the Colne and District area committee, we resisted this as far as we possibly could. Then I took a council holiday and another party took over in Colne and closed down almost all the public lavatories.

Then came austerity, and the cuts to our budgets that we never dreamed would happen did happen. The council as a whole decided that it could not continue to provide a public lavatory service; it simply had to stop doing some things because its budget over 10 years had been cut by half in real terms—I am not exaggerating. So we offered the remaining public lavatories to town and parish councils. Some were taken over, in particular by the very local parish councils, which have looked after their public lavatories—sometimes with volunteers and sometimes using the local odd-job person—and they have been very successful. They have looked after them much better than Pendle council ever did.

Barnoldswick Town Council, on the other hand—I give the plug that it was under the control of my party, the Liberal Democrats—took over the three public toilets in Barnoldswick and significantly increased the council tax precept, because that was the only way we could get extra money. Since then, the public toilets have been looked after by a local contractor from the town, with local care and maintenance. The service has been well received and successful, despite the fact that people are paying more money locally for it.

In Colne, where we have been denuded of almost all our public lavatories, the town council set up a community toilet scheme, which people have been talking about. It got going quite well and had some success, but unfortunately another party then took over the town council and lost interest in the scheme. As I said, it was quite successful but we learned the problems: if you rely on private premises to provide public facilities, they are not open on half-day closing, and quite a few people, for various reasons, are not happy about going into town-centre pubs to go to the toilet or for any other reason. It is not a perfect solution at all. The perfect solution has to be new provision where there is not any. In order to provide that—I think Colne Town Council would be willing to do that and to run it—money is needed to invest in new facilities.

This comes back to one of my beefs: that there is no conventional, easy way for town and parish councils to get capital funding from the Government. Capital grants for town and parish councils are needed if we are really serious about them taking over and providing new facilities. Indeed, when they take over facilities from the principal councils, improving and upgrading them, they have to have sources of money over and above the council tax, because there is a limit to how far people will pay extra council tax for their town and parish councils.