Neighbourhood Planning Bill

Lord Horam Excerpts

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 2nd February 2017 Grand Committee

Therefore, although I understand the sentiment around historic boundaries, I believe that a relatively simple process for review, particularly when development growth of one sort or another materially changes the nature of the settlement patterns and how they relate to the parishes, would be useful. I just wanted to take the opportunity to say that and to prompt the Minister to comment.

[Lord Horam (Con)]

What the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, said strikes a chord with me. I always represented very urban areas in the House of Commons. I remember rather similar problems, particularly from my time as the Member for Orpington, which was in the middle of the borough of Bromley in south London, not too far from Sutton. The idea of neighbourhood planning is, frankly, a serious joke. It simply does not exist. In fact, it is worse than the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, described it. He said that there was a vacuum and that essentially only a very small number of people, largely in rural areas, had neighbourhood councils, and that is true.

Planning for a neighbourhood in an urban area such as Bromley simply does not exist. In fact, it is worse than that. Orpington was historically a district council and had all the appurtenances of a district council. Indeed, the late Lord Avebury, who was the MP for Orpington, was a district councillor when there was a district council for Orpington, and the council was used to making plans for Orpington. Under the Heath local government changes, it then became part of the London Borough of Bromley. When councillors for Orpington put forward schemes for Orpington high street or whatever for the benefit of the local residents, inevitably when they went to the planning council in Bromley they were promptly overruled by the councillors for Bickley or Chislehurst, who had no knowledge whatever of the Orpington situation. That was to the fury of people in Orpington, who thus became convinced that Bromley was fundamentally an anti-Orpington organisation, and the sooner they got rid of it the better. They went back to Kent, where they had some power as a district council, but they had no power inside the London Borough of Bromley. Their fury was evident to me on many occasions.

It will please the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, to know that when briefly it was under Liberal Democrat/Labour control during the early part of the noughties, as they are called, when the Liberal Democrats were more of a power in the land than they are today, it attempted to meet this problem by forming ward committees—putting wards together and having committees which would consider planning issues on a level more local than the council level. It was a sensible initiative. Sadly, it did not attract much support from the local population. They thought it was another piece of bureaucracy which did not work, cost money and so on. It fizzled out but it was a brave idea, which I supported at the time. It would have given large boroughs such as Bromley—the largest borough in London, with areas such as Biggin Hill on the one hand and Orpington on the other, each with distinct personalities—some kind of local say in a way which the amorphous Bromley council, as such, has difficulty in giving it.

There is a real problem here. When one thinks of neighbourhood councils, one attaches to them an almost merry England kind of picture of lovely little parishes such as Grimsargh in Lancashire. I take my title of Lord Horam, of Grimsargh, because that is where I was born. It has a beautiful set-up, with a parish council and local church, and it works wonderfully. However, such a set-up has no meaning whatever in most urban areas, and yet it is in urban areas that we need it. I now live in Fulham close to the old Imperial Gas site, an area of pollution with a great deal of bad land, gasometers, gas works and miscellaneous offices. It is now Imperial Wharf, with Berkeley-built homes sold mainly to foreigners for a lot of money. You walk down there and find that there is no one on the electoral register because they are all foreigners and that all the languages are not English. It is a great tragedy that it has happened in that way. Obviously I am pleased that it has ceased to be a polluted site and is no longer used for the supply of gas—that is delivered by other means—but the way in which it has been developed has been of no benefit to the people of London or the people of Fulham. There was a need to look at that development from the local area point of view as well that of the overall Fulham and Hammersmith Council.

There is a problem here which I do not know how to solve. It is certainly the case that neighbourhood planning is lacking in most of our major urban areas, and I do not know how to deal with that problem.

[Lord Tope]

My Lords, to follow the noble Lord, Lord Horam, I should perhaps start by reassuring him that the London Borough of Sutton is still under Liberal Democrat control after 32 years and still has six area committees—and area committees are not the same as neighbourhood forums, let alone parish councils.

[Lord Horam]

I was referring to Bromley, which has no Liberal Democrat presence at all.

[Lord Tope]

I know there is a temporary cessation, but give it another year or two.

I strongly support what my noble friends have said in proposing the amendment. However, there is a particular problem, as my noble friend Lord Greaves said, in all larger urban areas—and Greater London is the largest urban area of them all. The problem is exacerbated because until comparatively recently Greater London was not allowed by law to have any parish councils. Since that became permissible under law—I think a little less than 10 years ago; I cannot remember exactly—there has been only one parish council formed in the whole of Greater London and no others. I do not know how many neighbourhood forums there are in London, and I do not suppose the Minister has this information at his fingertips, but, if it is available, I would be interested to know how many neighbourhood plans have been formed, or are in the course of being formed, in Greater London. Perhaps that will serve to illustrate—or, praise be, to deny—the point that the noble Lord, Lord Horam, and I are making. It is a difficult problem, and while I agree with my noble friends that parishing and parish councils are particularly useful and beneficial to neighbourhood plans, if we are to wait for the whole of Greater London to be parished then neighbourhood plans will be a very long time coming. Clearly, that is not the answer. It is a problem in other places too, but particularly in London.

In London, neighbourhoods are often named after former villages. So we know what a neighbourhood is, but it is a heck of a sight more difficult to decide where the boundaries of those neighbourhoods are. They are most certainly not the ward boundaries, because the wards, particularly in London, are based on arithmetic and not on community at all. For administrative convenience, a neighbourhood forum is likely to adopt ward boundaries, at least in part, but they are not necessarily the historic neighbourhoods. That is a particular problem in London.

I have supported parishing and parish councils all my political life, but while it may be desirable, it will not happen quickly enough for the purposes that we are debating today. Therefore, I would be very interested if the Minister is able to say something about the particular issues and problems in London, to which the noble Lord, Lord Horam, and I have referred.