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Listing Buildings

I am delighted that my hon. Friend the Member for Stockport (Ann Coffey) has secured this debate. I am even more delighted that we finished the main business a bit early. I am not going to go on at great length, because I do not need to, but I want to take the opportunity to say a few things about the listing process. The word ““listing”” is seared on my brain. Anyone who knows anything about Stroud will know that we take a special joy in the process of listing buildings. The obverse of that is that I have also talked to people who are close to suicide as a result of some of the implications of what happens when the listing process develops a life of its own. It can have all sorts of repercussions. My right hon. Friend the Minister of State, Department for Culture, Media and Sport knows that I take a particular joy in the current proposal for C block of Standish hospital, and I hope that she will do the decent thing and not list it. The idea to list it is, to use a parliamentary term, nuts. It is the wrong sort of building for that. It would stop a perfectly good development on that site, which hopefully will be led by the NHS. To show that I am not a philistine, I also ask my right hon. Friend to look at the proposal to list the Purton hulks on the River Severn. Those include some wonderful old barges, which were driven into the side of the river to stop its banks eroding. The hulks are of particular interest. I know that we cannot get protection for them at the moment, but hopefully the Bill, which I also welcome, will give us an opportunity to consider something that is of universal importance in the marine world and which we should be doing something about. At one level, the process of listing is incredibly democratic. Anyone can put a building forward for listing. That is laudable. It is important that we look at the process in its totality, because it is of great importance, as I said. My hon. Friend said that the process was one of apparent transparency. I am a great fan of English Heritage, because it has saved buildings that were in a dire state of repair and in need of proactive intervention. For example, it has paid an awful lot of money to repair the roof of Stanley Mill in my constituency. It is to be congratulated on that. My only criticism of English Heritage is that it sometimes takes rather a long time to respond to applications, which can lead to difficulties because a building is, of course, deteriorating over that time. Uncertainty can be the worst outcome of all. I ask my right hon. Friend to say something about how, in the new legislative world that we are coming into, we can speed up the process of listing a building. There are occasions when a silly proposal is made—perhaps even a vexatious one to delay the inevitable development of a site—and we need to deal with that more expeditiously. In terms of my special interest, the system is fraught with problems if a building has been listed but, over the course of history, some of the reasons for that are not clear and people are left with the problem of how to respond when there is a quite heavy-handed approach. I do not want to cast aspersions on my local authority, but again, anyone who knows anything about Stroud will know that listing is something that we do as a particular joy of life. We take a long time over it and look at applications in considerable detail. However, where those processes take that course, it can be difficult for people who are trying to take forward permitted development. The listing process makes things incredibly complicated and expensive. I hope that the Bill has something to say about that, particularly in view of the joyous phrase ““development in the curtilage”” of a listed building. Again, that is seared on my brain because it just means, ““Look out, chaps. You are going to take an awful long time to get through this, and everybody is going to have an opinion on it, and it is going to take a long time, therefore, to reach some conclusion.”” That is not fair to someone who is desperately keen to do something with a particular property. Much as I see the process as democratic, and one that should be transparent, I hope that we can sometimes speed things along. It is not much good if we find that the process has resulted in the eventual destruction of a building either because it was too expensive to go through the process or, dare I say, because the building was in such a poor state of repair at the end of the process that all we have done is use the process in an adverse way and failed to foresee how we could have dealt with it differently. I hope that my right hon. Friend will say some interesting things about what the Bill might do to expedite the process of listing, how we might get the process to be even more transparent—it is, as I said, democratic—and, in particular, how we can list what we should be listing and not list what we should not be listing. We need to tell people quickly that we want to get rid of that system because it is not helpful if the process hangs over everyone's head.