Business and Planning Bill

Lord Wei Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 6th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wei (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I declare my interests on the register. Broadly, I add my voice to those of other noble Lords who have spoken in support of these measures, which are necessary given the need to get the economy rolling in the coming months. There is an opportunity this summer, as more will be staycationing in the UK, to ensure that our local traders take back some of the losses that we have seen over the spring—I will focus more on the retail side of things in my speech. In fact, one of the projects that I am engaging with at the moment is with a town in the Midlands—I will not name it just yet. We are actively exploring some of the more innovative things we can do to help the high street rebound, helping shops, restaurants, pubs, and so forth. These measures are welcome in light of enabling our citizens to come back and consume, drink and, essentially, socialise once more.

At the moment, the measures are quite limited to the responsibility of each individual pub or establishment to set out, for example, tables and chairs outside their area, and generally it is where permission has already been given or there is some kind of precedent. Some of the more innovative things we could do could involve councils doing things such as shutting down entire streets to traffic and opening up sections in the middle of streets, as we have seen in Scandinavia and elsewhere in the world, so that multiple restaurants can serve customers, who then take their food from the restaurants and eat it in the town square. Can the Minister say whether these rules intend to cover and make provision for those kinds of situations—shared eating spaces, if you like, perhaps even cordoned off so that people can meet in their support hubs? What provision is there for that within this thinking, or is this merely just for the case where there is space available outside for that establishment, which it then looks to take control over and open out into?

Another area we are seeing innovation in is drive-throughs—we are seeing an explosion of drive-through cinema. What provision is being made in any of this to enable drive-through facilities to fit in and be fast-tracked?

Finally, I will touch on the beginning of an idea, which is possibly not appropriate for this legislation but may be. It could be that what we do today, even though it is emergency and temporary, can set the scene for longer-term changes. Given that the high street was struggling massively already before Covid, one thought to be potentially explored is whether you could give free empty shop space or space that had previously been restaurant space and so on, but on the basis that the council, the landlord or whoever is facilitating that could share royalties with the pub owner or the retailer, not just for any physical sales that happened there but for any online sales when they receive whatever support they get. They would therefore start to work in partnership with the business concerned to help it, not just to sell physically in the street but online as well. I know that this is very much about this physical streetscape, but moving forward we need to craft laws and measures that support the increasingly blended nature of businesses, whether they are pubs or other businesses, given that we will all have to check who is coming in and make appointments using apps and the internet. Can the Minister say whether any ideas around that are being explored or whether this is purely just to address the immediate, short-term nature of things?