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Retail Development Bill [HL]

My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Cotter, for explaining his Bill to us this morning and, more importantly, giving us an opportunity to debate the whole subject of town centres, retail and community, which is of fundamental interest to all of us. It is a very complex matter, to which there are no simple solutions. I am also grateful to his noble friend Lord McNally for introducing an element of reality into what I would call the noises on my right. We have to deal with society as it is and not, however much we wish to do so, as we would like it to be. The whole matter is of fundamental importance to medium and small communities as you move further away from metropolitan areas. The presence of supermarkets is universal throughout the south-east and they are things that we all live with and use. Historically, we have all watched this development. There is nothing new in the problem. In my early days as an elected member in county hall, it was a regular problem when I met people who asked, ““What are we going to do about the shops that are closing down?””. When I suggested that they might start using them, what happened? They went to a supermarket eight miles away, because sadly but realistically, as the local grocer said—he ran a very attractive business with a very good delicatessen—““They can go there and buy goods at the price that I have to buy them at from my wholesaler””. We have to face that reality. There was another problem then, which is also still around—the closure of rural schools. I shall not tell the House what I suggested as the solution to that, but noble Lords can imagine. It would have worked, but people were not prepared to take it up. The truth is that society moves on. We may be able to regulate planning, and we may be able to regulate retail development but, as the noble Lord, Lord Graham, said, we cannot, must not and should not regulate customers. That is one of the realities of this situation. We have to live in the world as it is. We in this country benefit and have benefited enormously from the change that has taken place over the past 30 years. The average household spending on food is a lower proportion of income than it has ever been. That may change in the future, but it is very good and it is very much in everyone’s interests. The way in which we organise our lives, with a far higher proportion of housewives working today, is enormously beneficial as well. They have less time to shop. I cannot remember who talked about spending two hours wandering up and down the high street from shop to shop, whereas now you can go and do the whole shop in 30 minutes in one place and load it into the boot of your car. Those are the realities of modern life. I do not share the adulation of the noble Lord, Lord Dykes, for France, although I also have a house there. There are wonderful things about French society, and I would not have a house there if there were not. The reality in France is that the unemployment rate is well beyond double the unemployment rate here. There are huge social problems, and there is huge concern among thinking French people about the way in which French society is developing. They have considerable problems. Although they have been very successful as a semi-regulated society, one of the reasons that the system works is that they have four times as much land per head of population as we do in this country. Although I am an admirer of France, that does not go to the point that the noble Lord, Lord Dykes, was suggesting. With my long experience in local government, I have considerable concerns about the proposed Office for Retail Planning. It seems to be suggested that we can regulate this problem away and stop the supermarkets going out of town, and local authorities will have to have retail development plans and so on. Life is not like that. Local authorities and district planning authorities already do everything that they can to try to preserve their town centres and to try to keep the competition levels as they see it in their communities at a reasonable base. They are as frustrated as the tone of this debate is about the reality that, all too often, the supermarkets can go to planning appeal and get what they were asking for via that route. The solution is not further regulation and more and more dense and expensive regulation. It would be expensive; if we were to have this system in place it would be horrendously expensive. The solution would be a change of approach from the Minister and the relevant government department to planning appeals of this nature. There may be a good legal reason why that has not arisen so far, but I have never particularly heard one. In matters such as this, colleagues who serve with me in local government and colleagues who have long since left local government all too often are not masters in their own house. There are good reasons for that too. One of the problems with this Bill is that it does nothing to change that situation anyway. The powers of the Minister and the powers of planning appeals are written into the system for very good reason, and there would be great difficulty in trying to change that. Much as I sympathise with the ambition that the noble Lord, Lord Cotter, has expressed, on balance, my conclusion is that, great and good though his intentions are, what he is proposing would not achieve the results that he hopes. On that basis, I do not support the Bill, but none the less I am very grateful to him for enabling us to have this debate on an important subject that involves all of us. Even I have to go shopping occasionally for my dear wife, and it was quite a shock to the system when I began having to do so. As she said, ““It will teach you the facts of life, dear””. The facts of life are what this extremely useful debate is really about.