---

Local Government and Planning (Parkland and Windfall Development) Bill

I, too, congratulate the hon. Member for Solihull (Lorely Burt) on bringing these important issues before the House. I do not think I have ever been to Solihull, I have no intention of going there, and I am not even sure exactly where it is, except somewhere in the middle, but like the hon. Lady, we in my area suffer from a Conservative council, which is not as robust as it should be on a number of planning issues, to put it mildly. I welcome the broad thrust of the Bill. It aims to protect the green belt and tackle some of the problems of overdevelopment. It is wrong to say that people who care about their local environment and the character of their area are nimbys. They are not. They are people with genuine concerns. The task for Government—national Government or local government—is to find the right balance between protecting the character of an area and meeting the desperate housing need of people who live in the area and are not being provided for. That is a difficult balance to strike, whether at national strategic level, at city-wide level as we grapple with it through the Mayor of London’s pronouncements on what we should be doing about housing, or at local level. There are often tensions between the different levels of government in that respect. In my area we are extremely concerned about the extent of development that is likely to be undertaken. In my constituency, for example, over the next 10 years or so, I am expecting 10,000 to 15,000 extra households. That is in just one constituency. In the borough as a whole, we face the prospect of three to four times that—a huge amount of development. It is the fastest-growing part of London in terms of housing development, which impacts significantly on the character of the area and on the level of public services being provided. One of my main concerns about our local authority’s approach is that it does not seem to be coming to grips with the demand on public services that that additional growth will create, yet it sometimes seems to adopt a ““rabbit in the headlights”” approach to some of the applications coming its way. We need to think ahead about education, health—not only primary care, but acute care—roads and more mundane things like sewerage, water, electricity and gas supplies. The hon. Lady has done a real service in bringing these issues before the House. I referred to the huge problem in my constituency. However, density is not necessarily a bad thing. I am not sure whether this is apocryphal or not, but the most densely developed area in Britain is the Royal crescent in Bath. That shows that with good design, density does not have to look horrible or make the area an unpleasant place to live. The challenge is how we can create the mixed communities that we need, using good design and making better use of land. One of my main concerns with the Bill is that it appears to be facing two ways at once. It is somewhat dirigiste, centralising powers and taking them away from local authorities, yet other aspects of the Bill try to devolve powers down to the lowest possible level. As such, it may fall between two stools. I shall develop the point later. We must be careful not to interfere too much with the powers of local planning authorities. Indeed, we should give them more powers. I am one of the signatories to the early-day motion which suggests that local authorities should be able to impose stronger requirements, for example in relation to energy efficiency in buildings to tackle climate change, going beyond the existing building regulations, which they are not allowed to do at present. In fact, local authorities should be encouraged to do that, rather than discouraged as they are at present. I take issue with suggestions by the Opposition, as expressed by the right hon. Member for Suffolk, Coastal (Mr. Gummer), who is reported to have made proposals to his leader, under the ““quality of life”” heading, to scrap building regulations and abolish the need for planning permission for alterations to non-listed, non-conservation area housing built after 1945. That would be a disastrous policy. The policy area ““quality of life”” also provokes a wry smile from me, because that was the name of the policy adopted by Lady Porter and Westminster city council—most hon. Members will know that I was the leader of the Labour group on the council during her evil regime—to mask her abuse of the planning policies of the council to gerrymander the area for her own political ends. Part of the gerrymandering scheme was never actually brought to light because the district auditor drew stumps after examining the housing allocation policy and did not examine the wider policies adopted. In any case, it is interesting to note that the phrase ““quality of life”” has been resurrected in Tory party policy. Having said that I welcome the broad thrust of the hon. Lady’s intentions, I turn to the Bill itself. She has admitted, with reason, that the Bill is poorly drafted. Unfortunately, we have to address the Bill as it is before us today, not as she would like it to be. If the late Eric Forth had been here, he would have had little trouble in taking the Bill apart, and I shall seek to emulate him in expressing my concerns about it, as it is something of a curate’s egg. On introducing a private Member’s Bill, hon. Members should apply some basic principles if they wish it to make progress. It should be relatively modest, it should attract cross-party support, and it should cost nothing or very little. My concern is that although the Bill has a degree of cross-party support for its objectives it is not very modest, as the hon. Lady has tried to pack too many aims into it. Each of the separate clauses of the Bill could be a private Member’s Bill in its own right. Perhaps she has been a little ambitious. The more issues in a Bill, the more likely it is that someone will object to one of them, leading to the downfall of the Bill. I am also concerned that the Bill has no price tag. I raised that point in an intervention in the hon. Lady’s speech earlier, and it is incumbent on the House to have a rough idea of how much legislation will cost before passing it. We also need to know where the costs will fall, be it on the Government or local government, and on the respective taxpayers. People in my constituency are very concerned about the level of their local taxes, and the Bill contains no provision for the costs to be defrayed. My main concern crops up in the first line of the long title, which reads:"““To impose conditions on the sale of parkland””." I take exception to the word ““sale””, which means disposing of land permanently, in this case presumably to a developer. But how does that address the problem of the multifarious ways of developing land that may not involve sale? For example, in my constituency, the local authority is engaged in three major regeneration schemes of council estates—Spur Road/Stonegrove, West Hendon and Grahame Park—and it has come up with all sorts of complicated arrangements and partnership deals. It is arguable whether the land is being sold, leased or is still partly in the council’s ownership. One could argue that it had been sold for £1, but a case could also be made for the opposite view. By restricting the Bill to sale of land, the hon. Lady would create a series of loopholes for local authorities to use, if they were so minded. The Grahame Park estate is a major regeneration scheme designed to create a large number of additional homes in the area. I take grave exception to the scheme because it will provide no additional social housing. Indeed, it will result in the net loss of social housing units, which is bizarre. It is funded by a large growth of properties for sale, but part of the scheme involves building on a significant area of green land around the pond. It is a dense scheme and it will eat into the green land on the estate. One of the key issues is the way in which the local authority has consulted people, and it has not had a ballot of those living in the area affected, as the hon. Lady suggests should happen. It would have given the scheme more credibility if proper ballots had been held, focused on the area. I agree with the hon. Lady on that point, and it has certainly been a controversial issue on the estate and more widely. I am also concerned that the long title states that the Bill applies only to local authorities—an issue that I took up in an intervention in the speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Andrew Miller), who helpfully raised the issue of land owned by the Ministry of Defence. My constituency contains a lot of MOD land, much of which is called Inglis Barracks and will probably be sold off next year when the British Forces Post Office moves from the site to its brand new premises elsewhere in London. That will release an enormous site for housing development, most of which is green, but will probably be classed as brownfield land under any normal assessment. That disposal would not be covered by the Bill. My constituency also contains the old Hendon airfield, which was the first in the country and a major second world war airfield. It has been nibbled away and built on over the years, and the MOD disposed of the last big chunk about 10 years ago. It was called the RAF East Camp site and it is now a major housing development. Although it was technically a brownfield site, before construction started it certainly looked like a greenfield site. There are difficulties of definition of brownfield, greenfield and parkland, and the land in question would certainly have fallen within the scope of clause 1(1)(e). While it may have been a brownfield site, it had certainly contributed to biodiversity in the area. The Bill is broadly drawn, and would probably have caught that site. Large NHS sites are also disposed of, and that is not necessarily a bad thing. The new Edgware hospital, opened by my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister last spring, was in large part financed against the sale of land no longer required on the site. It was a brownfield site that will be redeveloped for housing, and that was a beneficial land disposal. In the not too distant future, the Colindale hospital site will be disposed of, after the elderly residential patients are moved out. The land around the hospital is mostly parkland.