Neighbourhood Planning Bill

Debate between Rob Marris and Graham P Jones

3rd reading: House of Commons & Legislative Grand Committee: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Tuesday 13th December 2016 Commons Chamber

[Rob Marris]

I support my hon. Friend’s excellent proposal. He, like me, will be aware that for some people gambling is an addiction. This House has repeatedly passed measures in relation to addiction to alcohol and tobacco to restrict the availability of those legal products. Surely, that is all he is seeking to do here: place restrictions, through guidance, on the availability of a legal product, to cut down on its availability and lessen its attraction to addicts.

[Graham Jones]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I could add that we also have planning frameworks and guidance in place for things such as supermarkets, so why not do the same for betting shops? It seems remarkable that we can pick on supermarkets—

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[Graham Jones]

The issue is not whether the number of betting shops is going up or down, but whether ordinary people are affected by the consequences of this product. If there are 1 million smokers now but 999,999 tomorrow, the number is going down, but still, as Philip Morris said this week, this is a disease. No matter whether the number is going down or up, the people who are affected should be our primary concern.

[Rob Marris]

We are discussing a planning issue, and no doubt my hon. Friend will be aware that the density is decreasing in some neighbourhoods, whereas it is increasing in others. That is precisely the sort of thing that the new clause and the pursuant guidance would address.

[Graham Jones]

Absolutely. The new clause asks the Government to provide clarity. It is not a prescriptive. It does not say that the number should be x, y or z. It asks the Government to produce clear guidance for local authorities.

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[Graham Jones]

My hon. Friend mentions that the Minister has said that a Bill is coming down the track, so I would like to draw attention to new clause 1. There is a Bill coming down the track, and we have an opportunity to include new clause 1 in it.

[Rob Marris]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend, because that segues me nicely into the next and final section of my speech, which is about new clause 1. I hope that the Government will accept it, but if not, it looks as if we will have a Division tonight. I believe that new clause 1 is quite mildly worded, and the Minister may say that he accepts its spirit. As for the possible restriction on the rest of the Bill coming into force—that this provision might be a block, which was raised by the right hon. Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin)—if the Minister says to my hon. Friend that he agrees with the spirit of the provision and wants the guidance, but fears that it will act as a block, that would be great. In that case, I suspect that we will not have a Division. The Minister will guide us on that.

The content of new clause 1 seeks to have the Secretary of State “issue guidance”, not to make detailed rules about whether a betting shop or payday loan shop should be open in a given high street. If the hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) visited his salad days again, having been to school in the west midlands, and went back to Dudley borough, he would see the transformation there as in other black country boroughs in respect of clusters of payday loan shops and betting shops. Those clusters are not helpful to community cohesion, or to some of the most disadvantaged people in our society.

My hon. Friend and I have made it clear that, in asking the Government to issue guidance, we are not seeking to ban payday loan shops or betting shops, but to restrict the density of them. What seems to be happening—this is anecdotal; I have no statistical evidence to present—is that we are getting a clustering of such outlets in different areas, which is often, but not always, deleterious to those areas. We have an over-concentration of them. The same thing was happening, until the law was changed, with off-licences. Older Members might remember when getting a licence to sell alcohol was quite difficult because there was an unofficial density system operated by planning authorities. That went out the window, and every place—including petrol stations, for goodness’ sake—seemed to get licences to sell alcohol. We saw the same over-concentration with attendant social problems in some places, and we are rightly rowing back from that.

My hon. Friend wants guidance—I fully support him—so that we can row back from over-concentration of payday loan shops and betting shops. Part of this problem comes from a mistake made by the Labour Government, and some Back Benchers pointed out to them at the time that fixed odds betting terminals were bad news and should not be encouraged. I have to say, to my chagrin, that my own Government did not listen, just as they only partially listened—some longer-standing Members and you, Mr Speaker, will remember this—when there were proposals for 16 super-casinos. There was a lot of to do on the Labour Back Benches at the time, and we got it down to two super-casinos. On fixed-odds betting terminals, we made a mistake.

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[Graham Jones]

I take my hon. Friend’s point that the Labour Government were responsible for bringing in the Gambling Act 2005. In trying to be responsible about the problem we face, does he agree that the Government should accept that their own 2011 Portas review talked about clustering and density as being a problem? We are now five years on from that; time has passed and mistakes have been made. We need to tackle those mistakes today, not tomorrow, next week or next year.

[Rob Marris]

I agree with my hon. Friend. We need to learn from our mistakes, just as I hope any Labour Members who were on the Front Bench in 2005 when they were pushing fixed odds betting terminals have now done their mea culpas and recognised that they made a mistake then, because it is still rebounding on many urban constituencies around the country, including mine. We need to row back from that, but part of the mechanism, which is being reviewed, for doing so is not, and cannot be, the subject of this Bill. We can address another part of it, however: the over-concentration and the guidance which this Government ought responsibly to be issuing. They ought to have the statutory authority to do so within primary legislation, which is the very reasonable measure put forward by my hon. Friend in new clause 1. I hope that the Minister can support the spirit of it, if not the exact wording.