Localism Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Wednesday 12th October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Gardner of Parkes]

My Lords, I have listened to the debate and this is a very interesting amendment. I am speaking now because I can cover one of the later amendments, which I have tabled. It is relevant to this and will save a lot of time when we get to it.

This morning I went to a breakfast meeting in your Lordships’ House, where the point was made that the number of humans breathing now in the world is equal to the number of all the other humans who have ever existed. That is a stunning statement if it is true. It means that, whether we like or not, we must think about providing for more and more people all the time.

Coming from a country where land was unlimited, when I arrived in England some 50 or 60 years ago I could not get over the degree of urbanisation. Driving from one town, you were barely out of it before you got to the next. Having come from Australia, where it might be 100 miles to your nearest neighbour, it was a terrible shock to see this. However, over the years I have grown used to it.

I have tabled my amendment, which we shall come to later, because I think that there is a case for it. In this instance the planning guidance referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Deben, is very interesting. It has been very unclear recently on in-fill sites in the green belt. How do you define an in-fill site? At one time it was considered that an acre or two in the middle of what was technically green belt, but which already had houses all around it, was not a bad place to put a children’s home, a private dwelling or something else. All the infrastructure was there and you would not expand on to further land. In the past 10 years or so we have reached a point where people say that every little bit of such land is sacrosanct. There is a huge difference between the green belt and a tiny in-fill site that has been left somewhere.

My home in Oxfordshire is in a very vibrant village. We have an excellent school system and many people with young families want to move to the area but there is simply nowhere for them to live. The local planning people have looked at things and said that there are three possible sites near or in the village that could be used. None of them is available. The people who own the sites are unwilling to allow any building on them. Some people have bought these pieces of land simply to prevent anyone building on them. This is quite damaging to the community because the village is obviously getting older all the time. I listened to the noble Lord, Lord Judd. The idea of the life that he had, wandering around in open countryside, is lovely. However, it is hard to imagine our being able to go on doing that for ever if population growth continues at its current rate. What do we want to do—preserve it for a few people and prevent a lot of others having a suitable home? We have to look carefully at the pros and cons of all of this.

The amendment is good because it asks only for “due regard” to be paid. I am 100 per cent behind that because due regard and careful selection of how things are done are important. However, we must be aware of the need for more accommodation for people and that everyone should have the right to decent housing and somewhere to live. I should not want to see anything happen that would prevent that.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, my noble friend Lady Gardner should discount any figures that she heard at that meeting this morning. The number of people who are dead is of the order of 100 billion, and I think that we are some way short of that in terms of the living.

My noble friend Lord Deben harked back to the days when the urban were a minority in this House. I thought that he made a rather thin case for those days and the retention of the hereditary peerage. He made a much better case for the retention of Secretaries of State in this House, and I hope that we will be able to defeat the Government’s intention to remove them over the course of this Parliament. I entirely agree with what he said and he put it much more nicely than I am going to do.

I am greatly saddened that the National Trust should have chosen story over truth. I do not think that it will do it and its reputation good over the long term. I do not accuse my noble friend Lord Marlesford of any such thing. He and I just have an honest disagreement. However, I shall start with something on which I think we probably do agree: given 1,000 or 2,000 acres of rural Hampshire, neither of us would recreate Basingstoke in it.

I very much share the feeling of my noble friend Lord Deben that the countryside is a living place and that villages and other human habitations grace it. I agree that the way that the Bill sets about making possible the revival of the countryside, breathing into it not a vast mushroom growth but a steady rate of change and development to suit the requirements of the local population, providing a natural means of life and change, is something that we should welcome. Countryside with well designed, well placed houses and other buildings in it is a more beautiful thing than thousands of acres run by barley barons on a rotation, where the most delightful thing you are likely to see is rape every 10 years and where, if you visit it as a botanist, which I do, you see a few gross weeds such as nettles and docks, a few coarse grasses, and a few scrawny annuals and crops. In botanical and any natural terms, farmers have created a desert, much of it in countryside which has no great beauty—nothing on which to rest one’s eye. It would be vastly improved by a few well placed villages and other buildings, and I do not think that we should romanticise about all our countryside being of the quality of the greatest.

Therefore, my concern is that we should not be blown off course by the misleading adventures of the National Trust and others but should concentrate on the purpose of the Bill, which is to give discretion to local communities regarding how they develop. I trust them, as does my noble friend Lord Deben. Because no speech from me would be complete if I were entirely in favour of the Government, I say that I share the concerns of my noble friend Lord Deben about the interregnum. What happens when there is no local plan? I do not think that it is desirable that that should be a space for a free-for-all.

[Baroness Hanham]

My Lords, I am just about to cancel tomorrow’s debate—if it were in my hands, I probably would—because I think that we have had it. We have had extremely thoughtful speeches on very carefully thought through amendments.

I shall start with two things. The first is to support entirely what has been said about the mischief that has been stirred up over the launch of the planning policy framework. An awful lot of the comments arrived before anyone had had an opportunity to see what it was all about, and the matter has gone from there on a steamroller to something that the Government now clearly have to pick up and deal with because there is so much misconception and misperception around that it cannot be left.