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Localism Bill

My Lords, I shall be brief as we had an interesting debate on this issue in Committee. Amendment 232 relates to vexatious town and village green applications. There is a widespread view that, under the Commons Act 2006, the measure allowing areas that had been used for sporting, leisure and recreational use to be declared village greens and never to be built on, a status that would last in perpetuity, was being abused and being used as a pretext for stalling and blocking developments that in other terms would have succeeded. It is a very cheap way to stop anything happening. It costs those who do it very little. I quoted the example of the 50 acre site for which I was responsible on the edge of York, which was held up for a considerable period of time because someone was deemed to have walked their dog on the site for 20 years. I think that the dog was changed somewhere along the way. Even if the application fails, this can inflict a great deal of damage, delay matters and cause a lot of expense. As I understand it, the Government are seized of all this, for which I am very pleased, and consultation is under way to see what might be done. The problem is that this consultation exercise concludes that action should be taken to prevent vexatious applications of this kind. As my amendment suggests, local authorities should have the power to turn down applications that they deem to be frivolous or vexatious, but that the Government will come to that conclusion at the end of a consultation period after the Bill has completed its passage through Parliament. There will be no opportunity until the next legislation comes along—in I do not know how many years—to set this one straight. I ask the noble Earl on the Front Bench to let us know what the Government are expected to be able to do through regulations or other methods so that we do not find ourselves in the bind that without any legislative amendment nothing can happen, even though all are agreed that it should. I beg to move.