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1.41 pm
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions (Ms Glenda Jackson): I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough, South and Cleveland, East (Dr. Kumar) on his helpful and perceptive contribution to this very important and continuing debate on brown-field land regeneration. He spoke not only in general, but in particular, and concentrated most of his arguments on Teesside, which he represents.
I am aware that English Partnerships, in consultation with local authorities and major landowners on Teesside, has decided that a strategic view of regeneration needs to be taken towards the under-used and derelict land along the Tees. That has resulted in several comprehensive studies in order to provide a programme of action to achieve regeneration, ranging from environmental improvements to providing employment opportunities for the region. My hon. Friend is right to point out that, despite the progress in the past decade in derelict land clearance and the return of sites to productive use, there is still much to do.
When my right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister launched our policy document "Planning for the Communities of the Future", he made it clear that one of our most testing challenges as we approach the millennium is how to create a more sustainable environment and more sustainable communities. In so doing, we must ensure that the best use is made of the many thousands of previously developed--brown-field--sites.
An urban task force was established in April, under the chairmanship of Lord Rogers of Riverside, to identify strategies that will encourage the regeneration of our towns and cities through the redevelopment of previously used land. One of its responsibilities is to look at practical means of ensuring the delivery of development on brown-field sites. It will consider, for example, whether any improvements should be made to the system of public land acquisition. It will examine whether there is a strong enough presumption in favour of acquisition, and whether the process could be simplified. It will address other mechanisms for achieving the goal of assembled land, including lessons from abroad.
The urban task force will also be looking at the possibility of speeding up site preparation by, for example, improved measures for the remediation of contaminated land, and the potential use of fiscal measures and the removal of financial disincentives. Lord Rogers's urban task force will produce its report in the spring.
We are also assembling data for the first stage of the national land-use database, which will provide crucial data on the amount of previously developed land in England. That is a vital step in the process of maximising
the redevelopment of sites. We are, of course, actively working on the new planning policy guidance note--PPG3--on housing.
My hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough, South and Cleveland, East discussed the mechanism of compulsory purchase and, like many others who wish to encourage urban regeneration and the provision of better housing, highlighted perceived deficiencies in the system. It is often said that the way in which the compulsory system operates is not the equal of 21st century conditions. Indeed, last year the interdepartmental working group on blight concluded, among other things, that compulsory purchase and blight are inseparable bedfellows.
I am told that local authorities that wish to clear life-expired housing stock are frustrated that their powers seem insufficient to the task; or that the compensation code seems to reward delinquent landlords; or that people in negative equity are put in an impossible position if their properties are compulsorily acquired. In other circumstances, such as those described by my hon. Friend, authorities report that they have inadequate powers to acquire sites for regeneration. Several authoritative reports have demonstrated that the system can be very slow.
In the face of such overwhelming evidence of a reported mismatch between the tasks that we expect local authorities to perform and the tools given to them to enable them so to do, it was plainly essential that we should take the system to pieces--so to speak--and subject it to detailed scrutiny. Therefore, in June my hon. Friend the Minister for the Regions, Regeneration and Planning announced the institution of a fundamental review of compulsory purchase and compensation. The review--the interim report of which we are considering--is indisputably the most thorough examination of this complex law for a generation.
The House will know that my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has made clear his determination that policy making should be a far more inclusive process. For that reason, and in recognition of the magnitude of the task, we have secured an eminent advisory group to assist us in the review. With top lawyers, planners, surveyors, academics, representatives of local authorities, the farming community and other property interests represented on the group, we can be confident that no stone will be left unturned and no argument left unvoiced. If there is an answer to the problems with which we are apparently faced, I have no doubt that the group will find it.
I am sure that my hon. Friend will forgive me if I do not divert into a paragraph-by-paragraph consideration of the interim report. It is detailed and exhaustive, and warrants close consideration before publication. However, I am equally sure that he will be interested--I hope encouraged--by some of the group's earliest findings. They were sufficiently important, and advocated by the group with sufficient confidence, for us to take its advice and act without waiting for it to submit its interim report.
Probably the most interesting of the early conclusions was that the lack of local authorities' use of compulsory purchase powers, or their lack of success in deploying them, was less a question of sufficiency of powers and more one of authorities' lack of expertise in and understanding of such powers. That is hardly surprising because if one does not use a skill, one loses it.
As the group rightly says, it would be nonsense if we were to allow so basic an impediment to efficiency, effectiveness and fairness as a lack of expertise in operating the system to persist. It has therefore recommended that a comprehensive CPO manual, combining procedural guidance and best-practice advice, should be drafted, to which we have already committed substantial funds. In case anyone should dismiss the idea of a guidance manual as trivial, I should say that initial responses from authorities and professionals have been uniformly enthusiastic. "We could have done with this years ago" was the opinion of one local authority planning officer--from a highly CPO-proficient authority.
Despite the group's conclusion that the erosion of the skills base was a significant factor in the low use made by authorities of their CPO powers, it nevertheless considered very carefully the issues that my hon. Friend has set out so succinctly. In particular, the group examined the proposition that local authorities could not achieve their regeneration objectives because they did not have the powers to do so.
It is true that urban development corporation powers are different from local authority powers, just as it is true that UDCs and local authorities are distinct creatures in statute. However, different powers do not mean less effective or less appropriate powers. As constitutional lawyers will remind us, powers are closely related to statutory functions: UDCs had very precise statutory functions, and powers were given to each UDC only after Parliament had been assured that a specific, geographically circumscribed need had been demonstrated.
As regards local authorities, Parliament does not, cannot and should not interest itself in the detail of individual schemes: those are matters for discussion, resolution and accountability at local level. Given that the nature of the two types of body is different, their powers are different, too, although equally appropriate and equally adequate.
I shall give two examples. In Leicester, the successful delivery of its city challenge regeneration strategy necessitated the acquisition of several acres of land which was under-utilised or, in the context of the overall scheme of regeneration, inappropriately utilised. The city council deployed the powers available to it under the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 and acquired the land. With good title to the land and vacant possession, the council attracted sufficient interest from developers to undertake a remarkable transformation of the area, in terms of both economics and aesthetics. More recently, a compulsory purchase order, using the same power, was successfully used by the then Rochester city council for the regeneration of part of its riverside area.
I urge my hon. Friend and his colleagues on Teesside metropolitan borough council to examine, with their professional advisers, those cases of the successful use of existing compulsory purchase powers for regeneration- linked purposes, to see whether the perceived impediments to their use are, in fact, real. If my hon. Friend and his colleagues remain convinced of the mismatch between task and tool, I will ask the working group to visit Teesside to explore with him and his colleagues why that may be so and what may need to be done to rectify matters.
I welcome my hon. Friend's interest in the role of ports in local economic regeneration. That is a key theme of our integrated transport strategy, and will be developed in a ports policy paper on which we hope to consult shortly.
I applaud the expansion that has taken place at the port of Tees and Hartlepool, which was undertaken by the port authority and involved studying market potential, making commercial judgments and backing those judgments with development plans. I would expect any further expansion at the port to follow the same process.
It is for the Tees and Hartlepool port authority to consider what future direction it wishes to take. Some ports might expand by offering added-value facilities, potentially improving logistical efficiency. In other cases or trades, ports may do better to focus on providing a seamless link between supplier and customer. Those are matters for commercial decision by the port authority.
Finally, my hon. Friend came up with what he called a controversial--I prefer to call it interesting--suggestion of a brown-field levy, as an incentive for people holding previously developed sites to develop them. That would encourage people who are just sitting on land to develop it or release it for others to develop. He will, of course, understand that tax issues are a matter for our right hon. Friend the Chancellor.
We are currently considering some of the options for taxes that would give the right signals to developers. If my hon Friend has any further details of his proposal for a brown-field tax, I would be happy to look at it.
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