High Streets (Designation, Review and Improvement Plan) Bill

Lord Horam Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 17th May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Horam (Con)]

My Lords, this Bill is about high streets. In my early life, I had the enjoyment of a great high street. Although I was born in the small Lancashire village of Grimsargh, from which I take my title, when I was seven my parents moved to the seaside resort of Southport. My local high street was therefore Lord Street, Southport. Lord Street was developed in the early part of the 19th century, and has all the merits of that vigorous Victorian age. It is straight and wide, it has covered arcades each side, and it is tree-lined throughout. One feature of Lord Street is the Westminster Tea Rooms. If you ever go to Southport, I thoroughly recommend it; everyone in the House would feel very much at home there. The story goes that the young Louis Napoleon, when in exile in England, took a flat off Lord Street. When he became the emperor of France in the 1850s, he remembered Lord Street, and called his architect Georges-Eugène Haussmann to say, “Remodel Paris. I want a central boulevard like Lord Street, Southport—only bigger”. Thus was born the Champs-Élysées—arguably the greatest high street in the world—all based on Lord Street, in Southport.

It is difficult to verify the truth of this story, but it does show the importance of high streets. We all love a good high street: it cheers us up, gives us pleasure and enhances local pride, as well as being good for business. A recent survey by the Nationwide Building Society showed that 72% of people judge the vitality of an area by its high street. I therefore welcome my colleague Jack Brereton’s Private Member’s Bill to help high streets. Jack was the cabinet member for regeneration, heritage and transport on Stoke-on-Trent Council before becoming the MP for Stoke-on-Trent South, and therefore has a great grasp of all these issues. The Bill is sponsored in the Lords by my noble friend Lord Whitby, who of course was a great leader of Birmingham City Council and is still a very successful businessman, as well as having a continuing interest in these matters.

The object of the Bill is to preserve and enhance high streets as places of economic benefit and growth. I particularly like that it has all-party support, and I congratulate my colleague Jack Brereton on achieving that—he has done better than most Prime Ministers in recent times. It brings all local people together, including local businesses. It develops an action plan. There is the possibility of some government funding. It gives local authorities fresh responsibilities, but it is not too heavy-handed. It is, by design, flexible and light.

The Local Government Association, I am disappointed to say, believes the scheme is unnecessary. I think that is a bit of “not invented here”. The fact is that it is necessary to emphasise the importance of local businesses to high streets, and I think their views should be taken into account more than they have been in the past.

I said that I spent my teenage years in Southport. I now live in south Fulham, and a perfect test case for the Bill will be the Wandsworth Bridge Road, which goes through south Fulham and is a vital artery. It is perfect for the sort of action area specified in the Bill. It is a great Bill, and I hope it is adopted throughout the country.

Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Lord Horam Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 17th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Horam (Con)]

My Lords, I am delighted, as we all are, that my noble friend Lord Heseltine decided to speak in this debate; and he did not disappoint. I can tell him that in Liverpool he does not have quite the stature of Bill Shankly—who could?—but he is none the less warmly regarded in that great city for what he did for it, as well as many other places in our country.

I was a Member of Parliament for a northern constituency for 13 years and a Member of Parliament for a London constituency for 18 years. From both points of view, levelling up is absolutely necessary—in the north because there is too little activity and in London because there is in many ways too much overcrowding and too much centralised activity.

We need to back up this levelling up agenda, which I fully support in this Bill, with pounds, shillings and pence, to speak in old money. I, in many ways, envy Germany, which, after it was united, took in the eastern Länder, the six Länder of the former East Germany, which had gone through the German Democratic Republic after the Second World War, and imposed a solidarity tax, which raised £35 billion a year over 30 years. The tax has just finished, and the result is that you can go to Dresden, Leipzig, Weimar or any of those great towns in the north of Germany and see the incredible results of all that expenditure by those six Länder in a decentralised way. It is a triumph. I do not expect we will have either the money or the will to do that here. I know we are doing a great deal through the towns fund and so forth, but we need to back the plans in this Bill with proper expenditure. Plans without money really have no chance.

The other point I want to make in this brief debate is about housing, to follow up some of the points that the noble Lord, Lord Best, made in his characteristically eloquent speech. We need to be more radical about housing. The fact is that we are not building enough houses that ordinary people can afford to rent or to buy, and we are building too many houses that they simply cannot afford to rent or buy. That is very evident in London. The reason is the price of land. Land takes up approximately 50% of the cost of a new house. In London, it is 70% of the cost of a new house. So, you will not do anything to reduce the price of housing to an ordinary person until you do something about the price of land.

This echoes the point made recently by Shelter, Policy Exchange, the Adam Smith Institute and the Countryside Charity—a positive galère of think tanks—that you will get nowhere with housing until you reduce the price of land. That means altering and adjusting the compulsory purchase powers in the Land Compensation Act 1961 to give local authorities or development councils the power to buy land at less than its market value.

I do not propose that we should give landowners less than a reasonable return on the land they sell, but it should be of the order of a reasonable return—30% or whatever—rather than the 3,000% they get at the moment. The money saved should go into lowering the price of housing or increasing the quality of design. That is a bold policy but not a new one. We did it with the creation of the garden cities between the wars and with the creation of Milton Keynes since the Second World War. Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, recently made five points regarding what the Government should do in the next 18 months or so, which were criticised as being rather unambitious. If I were him, I would advocate adding a bold policy on the price of land and housing to those five points—then he really would have a programme to go to the country with.

Inequalities of Region and Place

Lord Horam Excerpts

Thursday 14th October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Horam (Con)]

My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate, on his maiden speech. It had all the fluency of his father, and that, as he may be aware, is the highest possible praise in terms of oratory.

It is a great pleasure to take part in a debate launched by my noble friend Lord Liddle—I can call him my noble friend—whose commitment to his Cumbrian roots is so manifest, including in being a councillor in Wigton. I too am a northerner: I was born in the village of Grimsargh, which is now part of the city of Preston, the administrative capital of Lancashire. Preston is known locally as “proud Preston”, and there are many proud industrial towns in that part of the world. There is Burnley, which at one stage had produced more cotton than any other town in the world, Blackburn, Nelson, Colne and Accrington. When I was growing up there in the 1940s and 1950s, there were textile mills, mines and steel and engineering works, and they were thriving. We believed in the north that essential goods such as textiles, steel and coal went south and, in return, we got trivial consumer goods such as pet foods. However, in the 1960s and the 1970s, all that changed as the mills and the mines disappeared, and Britain became a service economy based on a booming London and south-east.

Successive Governments, starting with Lord Hailsham with his rather risible flat cap, attempted to address this growing imbalance. Will the present effort fare any better? We do not know, but it certainly does not lack ambition. For a start, it has a good title. Despite some remarks we have heard during this debate, I think that “levelling up” has some flavour and guts about it, rather than “regional policy”, which had a rather dry-as-dust tone. More importantly, we have a Prime Minister who knows that his electoral fortune depends on delivering it because his 80-seat majority is composed of red wall constituencies in the north and Midlands. “Levelling up” is in the title of the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities and, as has been said, we have a junior Minister in Neil O’Brien who has long proselytised for central policies in this area. We also have my noble friend the Minister who will reply to the debate today. Although born in the south, he has a good north country name. I can tell him that there are many Greenhalghs in Lancashire, and he should be proud of that.

We have a levelling-up fund, a community renewal fund, a shared prosperity fund, and free port and towns funds. We have the beginnings of effective localism in the shape of city mayors. Here I disagree with the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, and agree with my noble friend Lord Liddle. Do not underestimate the power of a dynamic individual. Think Andy Street in the West Midlands, Ben Houchen in Teesside, and, going further back, what the Chamberlains did for Birmingham. All this can make a difference if properly handled. In my own area, we hope that Preston will combine with Chorley and South Ribble to make another city area.

I also think that levelling up will help the south. As the Prime Minister said when he was Mayor of London:

“Do we want the south-east of Britain, already the most densely populated major country in Europe, to resemble a giant suburbia?”


That is the way it is going and people do not like it. They are fed up with the endless housebuilding, the relentless congestion, the destruction of open country and the sense of overcrowding. Properly conducted, levelling up should help with this.

So should curbing the mass immigration that the Blair Labour Government instigated in recent years. Over 80% of our population growth has been down to immigration. I note that my noble friend is a Minister in both the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities and the Home Office. I therefore hope he will point out to his colleagues in the Home Office that they could make a major contribution to his problems as a Housing Minister by reducing the too-high level of immigration we have had in recent years. If we did that, we would not need to build 300,000 houses a year; the blue wall seats would be just as happy as the red wall seats. I hope he will pursue this point between the two departments with all the vigour and energy of his Lancashire forebears.