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Listing Buildings

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Stockport (Ann Coffey) on securing the debate. She has made some extremely important points. I do not want to detain the House for long. I was not planning to speak, but as we have a bit of time, I thought I would mention one or two things. It seems that when the listing notice comes through the letterbox, common sense goes out of the window. We need to get some common sense into the process, which is what my hon. Friend advocated. I suspect that we do not have to look any further than this building to see some of the problems that arise. Our staff struggle to maintain it in accordance with the requirements of English Heritage, which often fly in the face of common sense and what we need to do to make what is, in effect, a museum building suitable for a modern Parliament. That is frightening. No one is talking about messing around with the Chamber, but a bit of common sense needs to be applied to how some of the offices and rooms upstairs are maintained and improved, which is prevented by English Heritage. I want to mention two buildings in my constituency, one of which is not listed and one of which is. The one that is not listed perhaps ought to be, but everyone is frightened of the consequences of going down that route because of what it would mean for its development. The building in question is the officers' mess in Inglis barracks. The barracks have been the home of the Middlesex Regiment for some time. When the regiment moved out, it was replaced by British Forces Post Office. Indeed, Inglis barracks are named after Colonel Inglis, who was a hero of the Peninsula war and gave the Middlesex Regiment his nickname, ““The Diehards””, from the battle of Albuera—but I digress. The officers' mess is a wonderful old building. I am not sure whether it merits listing, but it certainly merits preservation. To its credit, the local authority has been fairly co-operative, but the Army has moved out and the whole site is to be redeveloped to provide at least 2,000, or perhaps 2,500, homes, The question is what is to happen to the wonderful old building at the top of the site. What will happen to the Middlesex war memorial and others nearby? As my hon. Friend implied, if it is listed no developer will be able to make anything of it. It will go to rack and ruin: either it will eventually fall down of its own accord, or it will simply be neglected. We are left with a wing and a prayer. We hope that when the site is developed, whoever buys that part of it will find a use for it—perhaps as a conference centre—and will be able to preserve it without its having to be listed. We also hope that the local authority and the local community will work together to ensure that it is preserved for functional purposes, but that adjustments may be possible that might not otherwise be possible, for reasons cited by my hon. Friend. My second example is of a building that has been listed. My constituency contains the site of the former Hendon aerodrome. I believe that it was the first aerodrome in the country; certainly it is the site of the first aircraft factory, operated by a chap called Claude Grahame-White. It is now the site of the RAF museum and a housing estate. There is also a new development on the last unoccupied part of the estate—formerly known as RAF East Camp, now known as Beaufort Park—and the developer is putting up a couple of thousand houses there as well. The original planning permission for part of the development meant that the then derelict Claude Grahame-White aircraft factory, dating from before the first world war, had to be relocated, lock, stock and barrel, to the RAF museum site. It cost a fortune, and it looks wonderful. The relocation was a magnificent operation. The first world war aircraft collection is housed there—but so is the former RAF watchtower, also a listed building of the highest category. The original plan was for it to remain in the middle of the development and be used as, for instance, a health centre. That idea has fallen through, and the current plan is to move the watchtower to the RAF museum site, which will involve a rather complicated land swap and a very complicated financial arrangement. The developer is putting in the cash. The watchtower is almost falling down. It will have to be taken down virtually brick by brick and rebuilt on the site, where it will be used as an education centre. That is a brilliant idea, but English Heritage, perhaps being less co-operative than it might be, is insisting that this derelict building—which will be erected in the middle of a new housing estate, surrounded by big buildings—must be marketed, and marketed in a particular way. The project will take months to complete, with the net result that a very complicated deal could well fall through, although I hope it will not. There is plenty of good will on the part of the museum, the developers and the local authority to ensure that the deal does not fall through, but it could fall through because of English Heritage's ridiculous requirement. No one in their right mind would buy a derelict watchtower in the middle of a new housing estate with which nothing can be done. There is a wonderful function planned for it where it belongs, in the middle of our RAF heritage only a couple of hundred yards away, and it would be restored as part of the process rather than being allowed to fall down. Yet we run the risk of the whole scheme falling to pieces—literally—because of the approach that has been adopted. Where has common sense gone? A wonderful historic building in my constituency may not be restored and used for a sensible purpose. Moreover, a site that could be used for significant housing development may not be used for that purpose either. I think that this is what my hon. Friend was getting at. The current process means that buildings that should be preserved may not be preserved as well as they could be because of developers' fears of what may happen, a point referred to by my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Mr. Drew). When a building is listed, all the attendant hassle can be counter-productive in preventing us from preserving our wonderful heritage, which is what we are trying to do. I think that both those constituency examples illustrate the need for a common-sense approach that, unfortunately, seems sometimes to be lacking in the existing process. I hope that my right hon. Friend the Minister will be able to assure us that the new system will allow for such an approach.