Neighbourhood Planning Bill

Debate between Lord Tope and Lord Horam

Committee: 4th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 8th February 2017 Grand Committee

[Lord Tope (LD)]

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lord Shipley’s amendment, which I think has the same purpose as that of the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy. I declare my registered interest as a vice-president of the Local Government Association. I am not sure whether a liking for real ale is a declarable interest, but I am happy to declare it.

I support the amendment because of a particular local interest. When I looked at the website for a Member of Parliament in a neighbouring constituency, I found his campaign to save one of his local pubs. It included the statement:

“I would be interested to hear your views. I do have real concerns about the loss of pubs, which are an important focal point for local communities”.


The constituency is Croydon Central; the Member of Parliament is one Gavin Barwell. To be fair, it was a year or two ago, but the quote is still there on the internet—it is there for ever. I wonder how much he still has that concern, because the situation for pubs has certainly not improved in the year or two since he put that statement on his website.

I am particularly motivated to speak because of an issue causing considerable community interest in the ward that I represented until three years ago. A pub in that ward for most of the time I was a councillor was known as The Cricketers but more recently it became known as The Prince Regent, because allegedly the Prince Regent used to pass it on his way to Brighton and there was a vogue for changing pub names. We are talking about an outer London suburb and a time before the railways had brought the population to outer London. This pub had its origin in cottages built in the 1790s. That may not be very old in many parts of rural England, but in suburban London, the 1790s is quite old—it is one of the oldest buildings in London. In the 1850s, the Sutton Cricket Club was formed as the suburb started to grow. It used to play on the green opposite the pub, hence the pub becoming known as The Cricketers for more than a hundred years. So it has considerable historic interest. Whether it has architectural or historical merit is for others to determine, but it certainly has considerable historic relevance for the people who live there.

There is now a proposal to demolish the pub and build instead a nine-storey block of flats, considerably larger than the 18th or 19th-century building. The local community is campaigning hard to prevent the demolition of this historic monument, one of the very few in the area. It has applied to register it as an asset of community value, which has been exempt from permitted development rights only since 2015, so not too long ago. That process is under way and will, I hope, be successful, because the pub is considerably valued by the local community not so much as a drinking establishment but more because it represents something historic in a London suburb before the railways came, and is therefore of considerable historic significance. I hope that it will achieve registration as an asset community value, but I understand that even the status of assets of community value have their drawbacks.

I have spoken to our planners about this issue. They are very much in favour of this amendment and point out that if permitted development rights were withdrawn for all pubs, it certainly would not mean that they would all be preserved for ever regardless of the circumstances. Of course that would not happen; it would be absurd. If a public house is not viable and has no other beneficial use, it does not deserve to be preserved. However, simply to knock down a pub because it might make more money if it was turned into nine-storey flats is not in itself a justification for doing so. The removal of permitted development rights would mean that any proposal for demolition or development would be subject to the normal planning regime and to consideration by the planning authority. A decision would be made on whether the pub was viable and should be retained as a pub, with marketing conditions and a planning policy if necessary, or whether it was not viable but the building should be retained as part of a street scene, which may well be appropriate in the circumstances I am describing, or whether a complete redevelopment of the site should take place.

Another drawback to assets of community value, which I think was one of the most valuable measures introduced by the coalition Government under the Localism Act, is that the registration is valid for only five years. After five years you can apply to have the asset registered again, provided somebody remembers to do that, but there is no guarantee that it will be registered again. Therefore, while the provision is extremely valuable, it is not necessarily long term and is not without risk. Given the value that is attributed to pubs in particular circumstances, we are losing them speedily. I am told that 16 of the 69 pubs that existed 10 years ago in my London borough have gone. That is two a year disappearing from a London suburb with a growing population. Therefore, I strongly support both these amendments. I hope that our Minister will share the views expressed by the Housing Minister before he was the Housing Minister. I hope he will recognise that this is an important issue, that there is a way properly to resolve the situation, and that these amendments provide that solution.

[Lord Horam (Con)]

My Lords, if my noble friend has ever studied the history of the most successful political party in Britain, as I am sure he has—I refer, of course, to the Conservative Party—he will know very well that for many periods in its long history it was supported financially by the brewers. The brewing industry played a very large part in supporting the Conservative Party in times gone by. They obtained some recompense for that support. My noble friend will recall that there was a period in history when the peerage was known as the “Beerage” because of the amount of compensation received by individuals who had supported the Conservative Party. Those people would turn in their grave if they thought that the Conservative Party of modern times was in any way against public houses which, as has been said eloquently by many noble Lords and noble Baronesses, perform an important role in not only our urban but our rural life.

I am familiar with a pub in the West End of London off the Edgware Road which dedicated itself to members of the Royal Air Force during the war and had pictures of all the great names from The Few, and so forth. The chap who ran the pub had a handlebar moustache; the pub was an object of great interest to tourists and others and was a great business. However, that pub has gone because the value of the property as a residential building was much greater than it was as a pub. Frankly, that is a tragedy for the tourist industry and for London. The closure of pubs affects the personality of our country not only in London but also in rural areas. I plead with my noble friend as a Conservative Peer to look at this issue most sympathetically. I hope that he will do so when it comes back on Report.

Neighbourhood Planning Bill

Debate between Lord Tope and Lord Horam

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

[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.