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Mr. David Rendel (Newbury): I start by declaring an interest; I am a member of GLEAM--the Green Lanes Environmental Action Movement--an organisation that campaigns in favour of green lanes. I support the attempts of the hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mr. Hunter) to ensure that green lanes are not constantly destroyed by motorised vehicles, as has happened all too often in the past.
Like many other Members, the main thrust of my remarks is to support amendments Nos. 135 and 136. The first instance of this problem may have occurred in my constituency--at Bucklebury common. The common has been in the ownership of a well-known local landowner for a long time. However, back in 1929, his predecessors set up a special commons scheme, under which the management of the common and all the worry of looking
after it were transferred to the local council. Since then, the owner and his family have had no involvement with the common except ownership.Unfortunately, as the local council discovered, although the worry and problems of upkeep of the common were transferred to the council, the right to grant easements and access over it was not. Over the years, easements were granted by the current landowner's predecessors to those who own dwellings on or around the common. During the early years, the sums were in the tens or the low hundreds--only occasionally rising to about £1,000.
The current landowner inherited the property in 1993 and immediately changed the policy. Instead of charging comparatively small sums for the access required by those who own dwellings on the common, he asked for tens of thousands of pounds. The highest sum paid over so far is more than anything that has been mentioned in the debate: one owner was forced to pay as much as £50,000 for access to his property.
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As was mentioned in the Stratford-on-Avon case, these demands are usually made at the very last moment, when the dwelling owner is on the point of selling a property--perhaps under difficult circumstances, in which they simply cannot afford not to go ahead with the sale. That puts them in an extremely difficult position; in effect, they are being blackmailed by the landowner.
It will come as no surprise to some of those who know the case, and may be a disappointment to some hon. Members, that the landowner concerned was at the time a Conservative district councillor. However, to be fair to the Conservatives--I do not like being fair to the Conservatives, but on this occasion I will be--all the other Conservative district councillors involved were horrified at the actions of that gentleman. They very strongly supported the view of the whole council that what he was doing was thoroughly immoral and totally unexpected, and that if any action could be taken to stop what he was doing, it certainly should be taken--to the extent that the council unanimously, except for the one gentleman concerned, decided to take out a case against him and see whether, as a result of their management of the common, they could find a way of ensuring that these payments should no longer go ahead. Unfortunately, the district council lost the court case, in 1995. As a result, the payments are still being demanded.
As other hon. Members have said, this situation arises only because the land is common land. If we were looking for access over any other type of land, access would by now be permanent owing to the length of time for which it had been allowed. However, the value of the ransomed strips to the landowner is now enormous. I believe that that is unfair--indeed, immoral.
In some cases, as we have heard, there may be some legal difficulty with charging less than the maximum possible. In the case that I have described, there is certainly no legal difficulty; the landowner could, if he wished, choose to charge a much smaller sum for access, but he chooses to go for the maximum amount that is available to him.
I hope that the Government will use this opportunity to bring this situation to an end. They have a chance in the Bill to do so, and I hope that they use their opportunity.
Mr. Nick St. Aubyn (Guildford): I have listened to the debate with great interest because some of my
constituents have a slightly different problem, more similar to that described by my hon. Friend the Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Mr. Maples), in that the landlord of the common across which they seek access to their properties is Surrey county council. In correspondence, the Minister has referred to the good practice of Surrey county council, which has drawn up a table of charges for owners of houses, depending on how long they have lived in the house and on the assurances that they have received from the council in previous years.The difficulty in that situation arises from the Local Government Act 1972. I wrote to the Minister on this point as recently as 23 May, and no doubt it is in his mind, as we speak this afternoon, that while endorsing in his letter to my right hon. Friend the Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir G. Young) the practice of Surrey county council, he did not deal with the problem that it faces--as do parish councils and other councils--that when it is operating a reasonable system of discounts, charging a maximum of, say, only 5 per cent., it does so in the knowledge that it might have been able, if it had been a more rapacious landlord, to extract 10 per cent. or more; and under the current regime put in place by the Minister's predecessor in the present Government, the right hon. Member for North-West Durham (Ms Armstrong), the limit of its discretion to be reasonable is £10,000. If a property is worth more than £200,000, and the council's discretionary cut from 10 to 5 per cent. is therefore more than £10,000, the discretion comes to an end. The table that Surrey county council sent my right hon. Friend the Member for North-West Hampshire contains the following footnote:
- Subject to a maximum discount of £10,000 on the Council's valuation of the right of access.
I support the amendment, but I accept that the Minister may have problems with the European Court of Human Rights and with the human rights legislation if a wider discretion is entrenched in law. Clause 123 is relevant in this context, and there is no constraint on the Minister's saying that, with regard to the Local Government Act 1972 and the county council, reasonable charges are the proper way to proceed; and that the discretion of the council should be unlimited, provided it is reasonable and does not charge extortionately and unreasonably. If he were to do that, he would deal with the problem raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Stratford-on-Avon about his parish council and with the problem of Surrey county council to which I alerted him again.
I would be grateful if the Minister made some progress on this issue. If he did, he would relieve some of the problems that many hon. Members have described.
Mr. Green: There are two equally important sets of amendments in this group. The first is amendment No. 304, which was moved by my hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mr. Hunter), and the consequential amendments to it. He will be aware that these issues were discussed in long and complex debates in Committee that covered the Grimsell lane case and in which Mr. Plumbe was quoted extensively. Many of us on both sides of the Committee said that the Government
needed to take action to clarify the position with regard to byways. However--to reduce their case to a short phrase--they said that that was unnecessary and that the Bill as it stood, along with existing legislation on transport, was sufficient to deal with the issue. I did not find the Government's explanation in Committee particularly convincing, so I look forward to hearing whether the Minister will take this opportunity to come up with a more convincing explanation. If he does not, the other place will wish to return to this issue.My right hon. Friend the Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir G. Young) spoke to amendments Nos. 135 and 136, and several important issues have been raised. The House will recognise the catalogue of manifest injustices that we have heard from hon. Members from across the country. I am surprised that I have not yet had similar cases in my constituency, but I like to think that that is because of the essential and universal reasonableness of landowners in Kent. I shall cling to that faith until it is proved misplaced.
One side issue of this urgent and important problem is compensation. Today's debate and the advice that the Minister gave my right hon. Friend have suggested that it would be improper, under the terms of the European convention on human rights, for landowners to receive no compensation if their right to charge people who cross their land were taken away. So why is the Minister so sure that it is against the convention to take away the rights without compensation in this case when he is equally sure that it is correct to do that for general access land? It appears on the surface that the Government are facing in diametrically opposite directions in the advice that they gave my right hon. Friend and in their advice that the Bill is consonant with the European convention on human rights. I hope that the Minister will deal with that point when he replies.
Several key issues need to be set in the wider context of the Bill, the Government's other environmental policies and, in particular, their consultation on the law relating to commons. Because the problem is so urgent--for the individuals involved, a delay of even a few months, let alone many years, will be a matter of difficulty--the essential message to the Minister is that it is entirely appropriate to use the Bill as a vehicle to resolve it.
There are several arguments to support that contention, the first of which is that the Bill already makes substantial changes to commons. It provides a right of access to rural commons and amends provisions on vehicles on commons. Its rights of way and nature conservation provisions will have a significant effect on commons management, which is clearly central to the areas that it covers. Many new issues on commons management and access have arisen which, presumably, is why the Government have issued a consultation paper.
Most importantly, however, those of us who have been involved with the Bill's progress know that wildlife protection and nature conservation Bills come along once every 20 years or so. Bills affecting commons are even less frequent. I think that I am right in saying that there were three Acts relating to commons throughout the twentieth century. So if the Minister says that the Government are holding a consultation and must delay, I suspect that there will be delay of many years and perhaps even decades before this urgent issue is resolved.
The Government have given no indication that there is a legislative slot for a commons Bill. They find slots for new, unnecessary Bills, but it would be cloud cuckoo land to think that there will be a commons Bill before the next election--and who knows what the priorities of the next Government will be?In short, the Minister is faced with an urgent problem and must find a legislative slot to solve that problem. I therefore join my right hon. and hon. Friends in urging him to take the opportunity to use the legislative powers available to him in the Bill to solve a deep, urgent problem for many people throughout the country.
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