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Local Government and Planning (Parkland and Windfall Development) Bill

I am grateful to the hon. Lady and endorse what she says. As many Members know, building on gardens is a recent, not a long-standing, problem. Such garden developments are a blight on many villages: not only do they overlook people’s property, they change the nature of villages in which people have lived for many years. Few people would think of a nice green stretch of garden as a brownfield site. For people in the country, a brownfield site would be land that was derelict or had been used industrially. It is essential that the Government do something about the problem and I wholeheartedly endorse the Bill introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark) to deal with it. At the time, the Government said that they would draw up their own proposals, so I hope that the Minister will enlighten us about how they plan to deal with the problem. The point that the hon. Member for Ealing, Acton and Shepherd’s Bush did not make is that many Labour Members signed my hon. Friend’s early-day motion on the subject, yet when there was an Opposition debate on a motion with exactly the same wording, they voted against it. Labour Members should have realised that they were voting against what they had signed; some of them certainly showed a degree of inconsistency. In the villages of Baildon and Eldwick in my constituency in particular, the building of houses on gardens is a disturbing, major trend that is blighting large parts of those villages and others. I know that the local residents in Eldwick and Baildon in particular expect action. If the Government will not support this Bill or that introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells, I urge them to do something to curb this blight on many of our communities, because it is a big problem. I would much prefer that such issues were decided by the local council, free from the threat of being taken to a planning inspector or the Secretary of State. One big disadvantage of our system generally is that local authorities often do not make the decision that they want to make but make a decision with the threat of an appeal to a planning inspector permanently hanging over them. They often approve planning applications unwillingly because they feel that they have no choice because of all the centralised planning guidance and the threat of the huge cost of an appeal hanging over them. I would much prefer that, particularly on residential developments, local authorities were given the freedom to make such decisions on the basis of what was best for their local area rather than according to the reams of planning guidance handed down to them, along with the threat of an appeal. I find some aspects of the Bill worrying, because in many respects that threat of appeal would still be hanging over them.