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Brown-field Sites (Teesside)
1.28 pm
Dr. Ashok Kumar (Middlesbrough, South and Cleveland, East): I am grateful for the privilege of having this debate, in which I want to bring to the attention of the House the need to address issues affecting the ability to achieve brown-field land regeneration. Some of the points and suggestions that I shall make were raised recently in an excellent seminar organised by the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology at the Institution of Civil Engineers.
I represent a Teesside constituency in one of the largest industrial areas in the UK. I shall concentrate on issues that are central to the development needs of Teesside, but which are applicable to other industrial areas in the country. I shall begin by making historical remarks, and then consider the current issues on Teesside and suggest practical Government measures that could help our local economy.
The core industries of Teesside are of long standing. Iron making from the 1850s onwards made way for steel making and heavy engineering in the latter part of the 19th century. That industry was complemented by the growth of salt extraction, and heavy organic and non-organic chemicals at the beginning of this century. Those industries were both land hungry and polluting. They were symbols of what the social historian Lord Asa Briggs called the "carboniferous capitalism" of the Victorian age.
Teesside steel was made from iron mined in the nearby Eston hills and was smelted in furnaces fuelled by coal from the nearby Durham coalfields. At that time, pollution was seen as a symbol of prosperity. When Prince Albert came to Middlesbrough, he was told that he would see "many smoking chimneys" and that that was for the general good because smoking chimneys meant business and employment. Indeed, those smoking stacks dominated Teesside's industrial heartland until comparatively recently.
Technological and locational changes in industry, combined with the rising costs of energy and the decrease in customer demand as the recession of the 1980s bit, meant that many sites were abandoned by industry. The retreat of industry left a great legacy of polluted land, dereliction and visual decay.
Making full use of Government funding, the councils of the day and other regional bodies began the slow and complex job of making good the polluted land and bringing it back into productive use. This work was complemented by the creation of the Teesside development corporation in the late 1980s.
As the Minister knows only too well, I have often criticised the TDC and the autocratic and secretive way in which it conducted its affairs. However, its record in derelict land clearance and remediation has been good. At a cost of some £400 million, it cleared up to 500 hectares of derelict land in its lifetime and brought them back into productive use. Today, the visual outlook of much of Teesside has been changed for the better, as new leisure developments, new offices, new extensions for higher education and new houses have been built on former brown-field land.
The River Tees, once a waterway that ran between the high walls of factories and warehouses, has in many places once again come into the public domain.
Teesside is a greener, cleaner place, but there is still a lot to do. There are still more than 800 hectares of derelict land fronting the River Tees, and there are still vast areas of land that have been levelled by their industrial owners, but no beneficial after-use has been properly considered.
There are still large riverside areas which could again become valuable industrial assets for Teesside, but which are effectively left sterile by the seeming disinterest of the landowners. Such land is an underused asset in an area which, as well as being an ideal location for new capital-intensive industry, is a hub in bulk logistics.
The port of Teesside and Hartlepool is one of the top three ports in the United Kingdom in terms of tonnage handled, and is probably the nation's number one export-import facility for chemicals and bulk steel. There is a regional need to build on these strengths. I have an ambition to see the development of what could be a UK Euro-port.
I have been impressed by what I have seen and heard of port-related intermodal development centres. These are developed by port authorities on mainland Europe in, for example, Rotterdam, Antwerp and Wilhelmshaven. I would argue strongly for such a centre in Teesside--a centre where all forms of surface distribution and the infrastructure to service it, as well as safe storage, warehousing and Customs and Excise facilities, could be housed on a single secure large site. It would be a great project, and there is more than enough derelict land near the existing port terminals to allow it to go ahead.
Despite the contractions in and shocks to the industrial heart of Teesside in the 1980s, the area is still one of the heartlands of heavy manufacturing industry. The development agencies on Teesside, especially the highly successful Tees Valley development company, tell me that there is still a steady stream of inquiries from potential investors. These potential investors are anxious to build on the skills, talents and abilities of the people of Teesside. That is our strength.
An area once associated indelibly with one company--ICI--now has manufacturing plants owned and operated by some of the world's largest corporations, such asDu Pont, BASF, Union Carbide, Phillips Petroleum, Amoco and Enron. For many of them, their Teesside operations represent their largest stake in UK manufacturing. They are companies with international reach and vision. They are powered by global concerns and strategies, and they are shaping our modern world. There is, I would argue, a UK imperative to ensure that their presence in this country is cemented, and that they become key players in the building of the UK's national capability in chemicals. To underpin that, we need a huge portfolio of available sites on Teesside. The essential problem is that in order to do that quickly and effectively, we need more powers and more resources.
I greatly welcome the setting up of the new regional development agency for the north-east. This will go a long way to meeting the development needs of the northern region and Teesside, but the RDA is only part of the answer. It is not the complete solution to bringing vacant sites back to life. More powers need to be devolved from central Government in order to assemble land and to encourage--if necessary, to push--landowners into the development process.
We must look afresh at and review the practice of compulsory purchase arrangements and at possible fiscal measures. The compulsory purchase order process is long
winded. A recent research paper by Drivers Jonas showed that a CPO can often take up to two years to implement, with another two years to settle compensation. A development agency or local authority with a good inward investment prospect anxious to move on to a site cannot afford to wait that long.
I have heard that inflated values are often agreed for land to ensure speedy possession, which involves buyers paying through the nose for land that is often contaminated and which requires new accesses and services. If that does not happen, a job-creating project could go elsewhere.
The CPO process is also complicated. Again, Drivers Jonas tells us that there are no fewer than seven principal Acts, as well as a host of circulars and reams of case law, which have a bearing on the CPO process. There is a cast-iron case for some form of consolidation so that people know where they stand.
I referred to the work of the Teesside development corporation. One of the powers of that body, as of all the other urban development corporations, was the power of acquisition for
The other thing that the Government can do is to state forcefully that the scales are to be tilted in favour of active vacant brown-field land development. They should stress through a new planning policy guidance circular that there will be an active presumption in favour of the compulsory purchase of land that is substantially vacant or derelict. That needs to be backed by strong Government encouragement to large institutional landowners on Teesside, such as British Steel, the port authority and Railtrack, actively to review their land portfolio and market it actively.
I should like to make one final suggestion, which could be considered controversial, but which I hope my hon. Friend the Minister will study seriously. There has been much talk of a green-field levy to encourage developers to make greater use of brown-field land. That is one side of the coin, but we must look at the other side too. I would argue that there should be some fiscal stick to partner the carrot of a green-field levy. Why not consider a brown-field levy--say a percentage of the capital value of any site that has remained unused for a fixed time, and where there is no indication of any material progress towards a defined end use? I do not mind what time is fixed; that could be decided later.
"the overall regeneration of the area".
That phrase was enshrined in the Local Government, Planning and Land Act 1980, which gave special consideration and powers to the UDCs. They did not have to demonstrate any specific use for the land, and did not have to jump through all the hoops that local authorities and existing development agencies now have to negotiate. Why not reinstate that power for these bodies? I am sure that it could be done simply, either through a circular from the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions or by adding a single clause in any general local government or planning Bill.
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