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1.17 pm
Dr. Alan Whitehead (Southampton, Test): I congratulate the hon. Member for Totnes (Mr. Steen) on introducing this subject in a private Member's Bill. Many of us know of his sincerity and of his deep thought about the matter; he has demonstrated that today. Indeed, over many years, he has shown almost stakhanovite devotion to the issue--even during the period when his Government were producing opposite policies on cities, urban development and the planning process. If we were to base our decisions on the Bill on the person who is promoting it and on the sincerity and thinking that had gone into it and then apply those principles to all legislation, the statute book would look different. None the less, we are dealing with a Bill and that is what we must address.
It is no accident that the title of the Bill conflates the aims of urban regeneration and countryside protection. They represent the centre of the debate on land use; in urban regeneration, we bring about the protection of the countryside through the repopulation of the city. By building houses and amenities in urban areas, we roll back the trend for development in areas outside the urban zone. That is the context in which the great greenfield- brownfield debate has sprung up. If we can develop mostly on brownfield, previously used land, greenfield land can be saved from the development and the countryside will be safe.
There are two versions of that straightforward argument: one is simple, the other is complex. Both make similar claims on the surface; they agree on some headline actions, but their eventual aims are different. The simple version is as follows. Put everything on brownfield sites in cities--indeed, require development to take place only on brownfield sites except in exceptional circumstances. Then little development will take place outside cities and those who live in the country can continue to live their present pleasant lives, untroubled by further development or problems on their doorstep.
The complex version holds that the debate is actually about sustainability--the extent to which the ecosystem can continue to carry, provide a good standard of living for, and house in reasonable conditions, the population of the country as a whole, without in the process destroying or compromising the environment or the climate, bringing about irreversible and detrimental changes.
Those two versions look a bit like each other, but one is a general principle--what would a sustainable planning system that accommodated all of us look like?--and the other is a particular principle: how can the particular living conditions of some people be protected at the expense of others? My suggestion is that the Bill fits the latter description. That was not fully reflected by the way in which the hon. Member for Totnes presented it. The Bill provides particular solutions and is not capable of universalisation.
I shall argue that, ironically, such an approach is ultimately unsustainable, and the horrors from which it seeks to protect its particular constituency will, if its advice is followed, be visited upon that constituency, in the end, to a greater degree than if it had originally pursued a less particularistic strategy.
Some Labour Members have argued--I suspect that others will as well--that the Bill should not proceed, simply because it is unnecessary, as most of the things that it suggests should be done are already in train. That is a seductive argument, but not a sufficient argument in its own right. One might ask--indeed, it has been asked frequently in the debate--"If that were so, what is the harm in proceeding with the Bill? It would simply stand alongside, and possibly reinforce, what is there already." That is not a good reason for legislating, and it is, or would be, a waste of a valuable opportunity to place some good legislation on the statute book, but it is an arguable point.
I shall argue that there is a greater problem with this proposed legislation than the fact that it duplicates existing arrangements. When its promoter defends what is proposed, it should be incumbent on him to explain why he wants to place on the statute book something that has already been done. He claims that particular elements--we have heard this morning about one particular element--would be additional, but we need more explanation than that.
We have heard this morning some analysis, especially from my hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough (Mr. Stinchcombe), of the duplication in the Bill. It is indeed striking. I shall not list every element of the Bill that duplicates existing planning policy guidance, but I shall point out that planning policy guidance requires local authorities and planning authorities to do things. Planning policy guidance documents are not simply good advice that may or may not be looked at. In every clause, there is a striking parallel with either PPG3 or, in some instances, PPG12.
The national land use database was mentioned. The criticisms levelled against that database, which is still at an early stage of its development, are not justified. The first Government statistical service information bulletin to be issued on the subject says that this is the first attempt to create such a database. Information has been produced, quite remarkably and co-operatively, by the vast majority of local planning authorities, but further information will be sought, developed and published on the database. It is estimated that the database has already received information about almost 16,000 hectares of previously developed land in England now lying vacant, and also--this is germane to arguments that hon. Members have made about remediation--about more than 17,000 hectares of derelict land that require some form of remediation.
Therefore the exercise has been a success, and the information is there. An important point that has emerged from the debate is that development of that national land use database, possibly to make it available at filling stations for 25p, would be a valuable way of ensuring that the information that is being collected is available at a local level so that decisions may be taken, but it would not require new primary legislation to allow that to happen. I hope that this debate will send the message that making such information available is possible and that it is a desirable way forward.
One of the most depressing factors in my dealings on the issue is that--despite the fact that all the material is there in planning policy guidance, the national land use database and changes in legislation--the concerns of people in the south-east about the direction and extent of housebuilding in that part of the world have been used by the Conservative party and other interests as a blunt instrument with which to bash the Government. To do that, those wielding the instrument have been forced to omit from their account most of the measures that have been taken or are being taken so that they can maintain the claim that a mad Government are hellbent on concreting over the whole of the south of England. Frankly, only if one completely ignores the existence of PPG3, the sequential test, the brownfield register, the targets for the use of previously built land, the capacity studies, the infrastructure tests and so on, can one really maintain that attack.
On the basis of my analysis, one can come to one of two conclusions about the Bill. The first is that its promoter did not know that such measures had been taken. We have heard an interesting explanation that the Government spotted the Bill and quickly put PPG3 into place. That is a conceivable, if not likely, explanation. The alternative conclusion is that the people who suggested the Bill to the promoter knew that such action had been taken, but wished to make out that the Bill is the only bulwark against a beastly Government who are determined to do terrible things to southern England. As has been made clear in the debate, that is not true.
However, can we leave it at that? Can we simply say that the Bill duplicates what the Government have already done? I do not think that we can, because the Bill's main fault lies in the mechanisms that it leaves out, and we have heard mention of them. To summarise, the Bill's approach to how we do things nationally might be described as the view from South Hams. It requires action from local planning authorities, and only local planning authorities. It lives in a world where all that is required is that a brownfield register is set up in each area, and only in each area. When a planning application comes in, the register is compared to the application rather like a swatch of curtain material against a paint sample and--hey presto--the greenfield site is saved. Reality does not work like that and if it did, the consequences would, as I have suggested, eventually be the opposite of what the Bill's promoter affects to intend.
A simple initial point is that the supply of brownfield land is by no means equal in all points of the country. Regrettably, it is by no means equal to the pressure for housing in those parts of the country where such pressure exists. It is instructive to learn from the national land use database that, although nearly 48 per cent. of all previously developed vacant and derelict land was in the north-west, north-east and Yorkshire and the Humber,
only 22 per cent. was in the west midlands and the east midlands. In the remaining regions, only 7 per cent. was in the east of England, 10 per cent. in the south-west, 10 per cent. in the south-east and in London, only 4 per cent. There is an enormous disparity between where the brownfield land is situated and where the pressure for housing exists.
Urban areas are not coterminous with local authority boundaries. If one is serious about planning housing so that it is mainly developed in urban areas, one has to start from a proper understanding of what an urban area is. We can say what is urban when it comes to the inner areas of large conurbations, such as London, Manchester or Birmingham, but I am not sure that we can say the same about smaller free-standing cities such as Southampton, Plymouth, Leicester, Nottingham. In those and many other areas, the real urban zone--the organic city--extends beyond the boundaries of the city council.
Southampton, the city that I represent, has a dense urban core, and the real city has perhaps twice the population and several times the area of that core. The suburbs, which are associated with the city and dependent on it for jobs, entertainment, shopping and other activities, are under the jurisdiction of another local authority. The Bill does not take that into account.
Each local authority, such as Southampton, Eastleigh and the New Forest in my part of the world, will conduct the study and look up the site register. What will happen then? Will it reject a proposal because there is no site? Will it go ahead with it when it might be better to take into account land in the city zone as a whole? That is why we need an element of regional and structural planning, which is apparently missing from this mechanism. A major fault of the Bill is that it uses the word "urban" without defining it or what role urban zones are to play, and says that all housing can, in some general undefined way, be built in those zones.
Furthermore, the Bill seems to envisage each local authority wrestling with these problems in isolation from all the others. That echoes what seems increasingly to be the Conservative line that every local authority decides on development in splendid isolation and seeks to send it elsewhere, regardless of the consequences.
I am reminded of an epiphany that occurred at a meeting that I spoke at in Southwater near Horsham. Various campaigning groups had banded together and proudly announced at the end of the evening that they would stop all development. The chairman was substantially on their side, but had to remind them that, logically, they could not all win. That is the central flaw in the Bill.
The urban regeneration to which the Bill's title refers requires much more care in its progress than is entailed by simple urban cramming. That may look good to rural or semi-rural dwellers for a while but, if the city is crammed and there are no amenities, no sites for jobs, no open space and no reasons to stay, eventually it will surely spill over into its rural surroundings, to the detriment of all. We need sustainable urban regeneration, which requires much more care than is apparent from the mechanisms in the Bill. The report by Lord Rogers's task force, many of whose recommendations have already found their way into planning policy guidance, admirably underlines that fact.
In locating new developments in free-standing cities, we should try as far as possible to develop land that has already been used, but what will happen? Some previously used land is in the middle of nowhere. Do we use that land? We have already had a debate today about whether brownfield means urban sites. The hon. Member for Totnes said that a simple amendment to the Bill could include brownfield sites in non-urban areas. However, that would cause a separate problem.
If the eternal sequential tests suggested by the Bill are applied to local authorities in rural areas, we may well develop brownfield sites that are unsustainable. A number of former airfields, mental hospitals and Ministry of Defence sites are in the middle of nowhere, have no links with any urban zone and are not urban extensions. If we put housing on those sites, they would simply become dormitories with long transport extensions that people would use to drive into the city in an unsustainable way. The Bill appears to suggest that in some circumstances we might do worse than we would if we tried to develop in urban zones under existing provisions.
Serious, sustainable urban planning should consist of planned urban extensions, close to existing amenities and with short, sustainable transport patterns. However, those may occupy greenfield sites, while the unsustainable communities in the middle of nowhere would occupy brownfield sites, and the Bill logically suggests that we choose the latter.
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