Planning and Regeneration

Roberta Blackman-Woods Excerpts

Tuesday 26th February 2013 Westminster Hall

[Roberta Blackman-Woods (City of Durham) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship again, Mr Dobbin. I begin by congratulating the hon. Member for Weston-super-Mare (John Penrose) on securing the debate. It is an extremely important debate, and because the Minister and I serve beautiful city constituencies—in his case Bath and in my case Durham—it is relevant to both of us. The hon. Member for Weston-super-Mare made two important points that I agreed with and want to emphasise. First, change is coming to the high street and we need to think better how to prepare for and manage it to ensure that the cityscapes that we treasure are not damaged. Secondly, we must recognise that planning is important in shaping places and that it can be positively used for the benefit of our communities. We do not hear that very often; we usually hear that planning is a brake on growth and that it is damaging. I was glad that the hon. Gentleman used Milton Keynes as an example of what positive planning can achieve. We might not see the outcome of planning decisions for several years, but 30 years on we can see that Milton Keynes has benefited from careful planning.

Several hon. Members made important points about their communities and protecting their high streets. I will, rather cheekily, pick up a point that the hon. Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers) made strongly. He said that localism was important, and he was worried that some of the changes that the Government are making might damage localism and take decisions away from local planning authorities. The Opposition objected to the changes contained in the Growth and Infrastructure Bill, which will transfer many decisions to the Planning Inspectorate. It is a pity that the hon. Gentleman’s colleagues did not join us when we opposed the Government’s plans.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) and the hon. Member for Leeds North West (Greg Mulholland) made powerful speeches about use class orders, which picked up on the point made by the hon. Member for Weston-super-Mare. They made important points about the need for local people and local authorities to have more control over use class orders, which I will discuss in more detail later. The Government have just produced a school food review report that suggests that fast food outlets should not be available near schools. It will be interesting to know whether the Minister has had any conversations with his colleagues in the Department for Education about how that could be implemented.

More generally, we heard a plea for more flexibility to be given to local authorities on how use class orders are used, which I have been advocating for a long time. I see no reason why use class orders cannot simply be given to local authorities to use as they want. Local authorities represent their communities and know about what use classes should be available, how they should be used and how to rescind one and to put another in its place. If the Minister wants to extend his localism credentials, this is something I could give him on a plate: take use class orders away, look at them and give them to local authorities. That would be a much more sensible way forward.

To return to the comments made by the hon. Gentleman, he referred to how local councils can already protect views through conservation areas, under the Civic Amenities Act 1967, which established the right of local authorities to designate a conservation area. The policy has been fairly successful, because we now have 8,000 conservation areas throughout England. Under the Act, conservation areas are defined as

“areas of special architectural or historic interest, the character or appearance of which it is desirable to preserve or enhance”.

That can and often does in practice include views, so although I agree with the hon. Gentleman entirely, I am not exactly sure what additional protection he thinks is needed for particular views.

[John Penrose]

I was thinking either of the much larger example of an entire skyline, which would be hard to preserve, protect or allow to alter in a particular way through the conservation area designation, or of the very narrow, specific example of a particular line of sight, perhaps on a small scale, down a particular street with something that happens to be framed at the end of it, which would be a criminal waste to allow to be got rid of but which is too small and too specific for the conservation area legislation to work.

--- Later in debate ---

[Roberta Blackman-Woods]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that helpful clarification. Local authorities can already designate and protect views through their local plans, however, which leads me to wonder whether we need additional regulations.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham talked about what is already happening in London; the Greater London authority plan includes some good examples of whole views being protected, in particular urban landscapes that are thought to define London. The plan not only protects the views but gives more detailed guidance about what should happen to protect them. That facility is available to all local authorities through their local plans, but I suspect that they are not all using it as well as they might be. Perhaps this afternoon we should be putting a big plea out to local authorities to ask them, when they are putting their local plans together, really to think about views—outside a particular street or part of it—that might be important to the local community or area and that need to be protected. They should outline what the views are and put additional guidance in place. They could all learn easily from the London experience, where that seems to have been done rather well.

The hon. Member for Weston-super-Mare mentioned that UNESCO also protects views, to and from world heritage sites, one of which I have in my constituency. He made a strong point and a lot more could be done by local authorities to ensure that such views are protected. From time to time councils have to be reminded, when a development application appears before them, that they have to think about the world heritage site. Those three elements already in existence go a long way to giving the protection that the hon. Gentleman was discussing.

I want to pick up on one other point made by the hon. Gentleman, which was about using additional regulations to pre-empt where developers might want to develop. That is an extremely difficult thing to do: always being one stage ahead of developers is probably impossible. Each case is best dealt with on its merits, bearing in mind the protections that can already be drawn down by local authorities. I am absolutely not convinced that more regulation is needed in this instance.

A lot of hon. Members this afternoon have raised issues about the high street, and it is worth picking up on a few points. Some of the figures about use of the high street are interesting: high streets with strong conservation areas are doing better. For example, Cambridge is doing well in protecting its high street and the volume of commerce taking place in retail there. That tells us something about how communities are starting to think about their own high streets and how tourists are thinking about them, because a high street is a lot more than simply a retail experience. The hon. Gentleman brought out this point well: we sometimes get bogged down in thinking about our high streets only in terms of retail. It is tempting to do that because we get regular figures about what is happening to the retail sector, which is important because it is an indicator of the health of our high streets, so we need to take the figures seriously. But what they tell us is that we need to diversify the high street and to think a lot more about community and housing use. This strays on to the point made by the hon. Member for Leeds North West about the importance of pubs. They are part of the leisure offer that is important on our high streets, but which we are very much in danger of losing.

Again, use class orders are important, because we need councils to have the flexibility to decide whether the retail space that might not be fully occupied can instead be office, leisure or housing use, and to be able to change it back. One of the problems with use class orders is that it is sometimes difficult constantly to change use, but we need that degree of flexibility. I will be interested to hear what the Minister says.

No one mentioned how complicated it is at the moment for local authorities to draw down money to support regeneration of the high street, outside of Portas. On that Portas money, even if local authorities got £100,000, we know that only about 12% of the money has been drawn down so far. There are lots of different tiny funding pots, and we perhaps need to bring them together into a more coherent regeneration framework, so that local authorities can find a straightforward way to develop their high streets in line with the local community opinion of what should be provided. I am probably telling the Minister that Portas is good as far as it goes, but it is not the whole answer.

The hon. Member for Weston-super-Mare has done us a great service in bringing forward this subject for debate this afternoon. We need to think about how to protect what we value in the high streets, how to encourage them to develop and, in the current climate and from now on, to diversify. We need additional tools to do that, but I am not sure that they include additional planning regulation.