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It might also be useful to have professional advisers, either directly employed by the regulatory body or employed on a consultancy basis. They would review the submission from any company registered to the accreditation organisation to ensure that any sales and marketing claims are credible. To ensure that that is accurate, independent assessment could be carried out on an accredited company’s sites in line with a planning and technical analysis provided by the accredited company to the professional advisers. That could include a statement of forecast detailing the type and time scale of promoting a site for re-allocation and an assessment of the financial viability and potential customer returns of the site.
Another suggestion would be for all accredited companies to pay a bond of, for example, £100,000. Should problems occur and a land banking company be unable to fulfil its obligations on promoting a site or gaining outline planning permission, the bond would be released to the accrediting board or organisation, to ensure that a credible planning application is submitted for the benefits of clients. Furthermore, each accredited company could be forced to submit, possibly on a semi-annual basis, an action plan—detailing actions that had been taken on its obligation to investors and those that it would be taking to do with the site over the following six or 12 months. If those were unacceptable, at the board’s discretion accreditation could be removed and the value of the bond released in order to proceed with a planning application.
I hope that those suggestions will push the debate forward, because the simple fact is that there is currently little or nothing to stop dishonest and unscrupulous organisations, partnerships and individuals swallowing up huge tracts of greenfield land in the middle of local communities and selling it on to unsuspecting investors on the basis of unsubstantiated and false promises, with little or no regard to the effect that those practices have on those involved.
Today, I am
tabling an early-day motion, which is co-sponsored by the hon. Members
for Stroud and for North-East Milton Keynes (Mr. Lancaster), which I
hope many hon. Members will sign. I ask the Minister and the Government
to take the issue seriously and to acknowledge that there is a problem
that needs to be tackled. The situation has been allowed to persist for
far too long, and urgent action is needed to stop companies,
partnerships and individuals ripping off their investors and damaging
our communities. I hope that the Minister and the Government will work
with
me, my parliamentary colleagues and the organisations involved to stop
the unacceptable mis-selling of greenfield
land.
Mr. Mike Hancock (in the Chair): Before I call the Minister, I should inform Members who have just come into the Chamber that the final Adjournment debate will start at 4.45 pm, or at the end of this debate. Fifteen minutes have been added on for the Division.
4.30 pm
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Meg Munn): I congratulate the hon. Member for Leeds, North-West (Greg Mulholland) on securing the debate and on raising an issue that is clearly important in his constituency and that affects his constituent. I am grateful to him for providing this opportunity to debate the practice of land banking.
The hon. Gentleman rightly drew attention to the sensitive nature of rural land and expressed his concern about the selling, usually on the internet, of small plots of land on which, in most cases, there is no realistic chance of development being allowed. The Government share the hon. Gentleman’s strong disapproval of plot sale enterprises that exploit people’s eagerness to build homes in open countryside, often at the expense of their limited knowledge of planning laws and policies.
The Government recognise the harm and adverse consequences of the subdivision of land in the countryside. Some of those consequences arise from open land being divided up with pegs, stakes, or fences, creating an eyesore that detracts from the appearance of the countryside. When plots are sold and are no longer in agricultural use, it can lead to neglect. That is especially difficult to put right if plot owners cannot be traced.
The mis-selling of land can be tackled in a variety of ways. Depending on the nature of the deceit, instances of mis-selling might be dealt with by the police, the Office of Fair Trading, local authority trading standards departments or the Department of Trade and Industry. The latter has powers under the Companies Act 1985, and can investigate companies if there is reason to suspect fraud, dishonesty or any other objectionable conduct, and can, in the public interest, take proceedings to wind up a company and/or disqualify its directors.
Greg Mulholland: Will the Minister comment on my point about the fact that the DTI does not have powers to deal with partnerships and individuals? People know that, and set themselves up as partnerships to ensure that they fall outside the framework. That is one of the loopholes that I identified.
Meg
Munn: I did hear the hon. Gentleman refer to that.
Obviously, I am a Minister for the Department for Communities and Local
Government, and therefore cannot reply on behalf of the DTI. I urge the
hon. Gentleman to talk to Ministers in that Department and to take the
issues up with them. As I said, there is more
than one way of dealing with the problems, and the provision relating to
companies is only one way. If the hon. Gentleman looks back at the
Hansard record of this debate, he will see that there are a
number of other ways,
too.
It may be helpful if I set out the parts of planning law that govern the use of land in the countryside. The key concept—the trigger for planning control—is whether something is “development”, which is defined in the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 as
“the carrying out of building, engineering, mining or other operations in, on, over or under land, or the making of any material change in the use of any buildings or other land.”
Some rural land is designated green belt, and there is generally a presumption against inappropriate development on such land. National planning policy on green belt is set out in planning policy guidance note 2. It states that acceptable uses of green belt land are those that help to fulfil the following objectives: providing access to the open countryside; providing access to outdoor sport and recreation near urban areas; retaining attractive landscapes and enhancing landscapes near to where people live; improving damaged and derelict land around towns; securing nature conservation interests; and retaining land in agricultural, forestry and related uses. However, the most important attribute of green belt is openness, and that has to be the primary consideration when any different land use is proposed.
The planning system is not designed to supervise land ownership or to protect the unaware from ill-advised purchases. A primary concern of the planning system is the impact of development on amenity. It would be impractical to place an added burden on local government in respect of the oversight of the sale of rural land. However, planning has an important part to play in limiting harm to rural land.
In a written statement to the House on 19 April 2004, the then Minister of State for Housing and Planning, the right hon. Member for Streatham (Keith Hill), addressed the concern—expressed here and elsewhere—that farmland was being subdivided into small plots for sale over the internet. The statement referred to measures that the Government could bring forward to enable local planning authorities to take more immediate action as soon as evidence of abuse was suspected or emerged. At the same time, we issued a letter to remind local authorities of the powers already available to tackle planning problems associated with plot sales. That letter encouraged local planning authorities to advertise, or to use the internet, to give prospective plot purchasers a realistic idea of the likely development potential of their plots. The letter also listed enforcement powers available to local planning authorities to control unwanted development on rural land.
Some development
is given a permitted development right—that is, a general
planning permission—that removes the need to put in a planning
application. Any permitted development right can be withdrawn if there
are strong planning grounds, using powers in article 4 of the Town and
Country Planning (General Permitted Development) Order 1995. Such
directions may be used if there is a significant, specific and credible
threat to an important amenity. On farms and green belt, a direction
would be subject to confirmation by the
Secretary of State. Article 4 directions do not forbid development; they
merely require the submission of a planning application for works or
uses otherwise allowed by the order.
We are working on proposals to amend the procedures for making article 4 directions, in order to enable local authorities to bring into effect more quickly and efficiently a direction to prevent subdivision of rural land. We propose to increase the scope of local authorities’ powers to remove permitted development rights without having to wait for the Secretary of State’s approval. We also plan to allow local authorities to bring article 4 directions into force more quickly by serving the relevant notice on the land by site display in cases where one or more owners cannot be identified or located, or where the numbers of owners or occupiers makes it impractical to serve a notice on every individual. The planning system is concerned with land use and the impacts of development; it does not deal with how land is sold, the ethics of the vendor or even who owns the land and how they might behave. If there is no development involved, there are no controls to invoke.
In conclusion, we are committed to the protection of the countryside against inappropriate development and, in particular, to the protection of green belt.
Mr. Mike Hancock (in the Chair): I thank Mr. Mulholland and the Minister for their contributions.
As both the Minister and the Member involved in the next debate are here, we shall proceed straight away.
Open-cast Mining (Leicestershire)
4.39 pm
David Taylor (North-West Leicestershire) (Lab/Co-op): We move from Leeds, North-West, to North-West Leicestershire, Mr. Hancock. On a point of information, I understand that the debate may now last for 36 minutes; is that correct?
Mr. Mike Hancock (in the Chair): Yes.
David Taylor: I am pleased and relieved to have secured a debate on the future of open-cast mining in Leicestershire, having requested it for some time. Tenacity is a much underrated virtue in this place.
Rather like the ghost in Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol”, I shall look at open-cast coal mining past and present, before considering its future. In my part of Leicestershire, 25 May 2006 dawned as a cool, damp morning but rapidly turned into a bleak, black day for the north-west Leicestershire villages of Ravenstone, Packington, Normanton le Heath and my lifetime home, Heather. On that day, the Government announced that they were accepting the planning inquiry inspector’s recommendation to overturn a Leicestershire county council refusal of the Long Moor open-cast application to extract around 750,000 tonnes of coal from an attractive, greenfield site surrounded by the four places I mentioned.
The first such planning decision taken in the newly created Department for Communities and Local Government perversely blighted the lives of numerous communities and flew directly in the face of all three tiers of local government, which are totally and vigorously united in their opposition to the plan. I shall try to explain why so many people in the locality are astonished and dismayed.
This is not a case of nimbyism. Our backyard has been actively worked for generations and north-west Leicestershire has been quarried and mined for minerals for centuries. The nation has looked to us for coal, road stone and clay. Mining gave us jobs, shaped our landscape, and produced and named tight-knit communities such as Coalfield, but it also created vistas as bleak and desolate as that encountered by Neil Armstrong on 21 July 1969. The American astronauts saw a lunar landscape of the sort that we had endured for many decades prior to their historic flight.
The worst environmental offender in the family of industries linked to the extraction of minerals is open-cast mining. In essence, it is quarrying relatively shallow seams of coal at depths such that colliers of the past had to use deep mine techniques or leave them unworked. In the 1940s, a great deal of outcrop coal was removed from land in the vicinity of the four villages to which I referred. The impact of those workings is still visible today despite attempts at restoration.
In the
early 1970s, the open-casters returned for two huge schemes which
removed many million tonnes of coal from the Coalfield farm site
between Ravenstone and Heather and operating within 120 yd of my home
for much of that time. The latter site was ultimately restored as the
Sence valley forest park and locals were
beginning to hope that the days of open-casting were over at long last.
However, like a half-forgotten comet on a 30-year orbit, the shadow of
planet open-cast returned in the new millennium. Its gloom engulfed the
mosaic of fields, hedges and trees running up to Normanton wood, under
which lie 8 million tonnes of
coal.
We tolerated such strip mining 60 years ago because our nation needed energy to rebuild an economy and a society stricken by war. We endured it under duress and with protest in the 1970s as a life support for a declining deep-mine industry which has, I am sad to say, virtually expired. However, enough was enough. The case against Long Moor was irrefutable and we thought that in our fight we had the support of the newly elected Labour Government, because in the long run-up to the 1997 general election my party—our party—had rightly identified open-casting as a key issue in numerous marginal constituencies in the English midlands and Yorkshire.
Our then environment spokesman, my right hon. Friend the Member for Holborn and St. Pancras (Frank Dobson), produced a new policy paper entitled “Open Cast Coal Mining—Too High a Price” in late 1996, which contained a bleak but accurate description of the effect of open-casting on the environment and local communities. That welcome document promised that, if elected, a Labour Government would revise the relevant planning framework for such applications—minerals planning guidance 3. That overdue manifesto on open-cast mining incorporated a 10-point plan for reducing its impact and promised that an incoming Labour Government would, inter alia, prohibit open-cast working, except when it was of benefit to the local community and local environment, allow rejection of open-cast applications which prejudiced efforts to attract local investment, restrict repeated applications for development of broadly similar sites or extensions of existing workings, require any future consents to set strict and more enforceable environmental standards and, finally and centrally, reduce the national reliance on open-cast as part of our overall energy policy. So far so good, although a few problems did start to emerge.
There was predictable hostility from sections of the now privatised mining industry. Some minerals planning authorities predicted difficulties with fashioning a new MPG3. Even the Prime Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Sedgefield (Mr. Blair), began to soft pedal on open-cast controversies in his own patch. Nevertheless, there was optimism in the heady early days after 1 May 1997 that the Dobson plan could be made to work. The newly fashioned Department of the Environment, Transport and Regions published its consultation paper on planning guidance for open-cast coal applications in late July. I shall fast forward over a long period of intense lobbying.
The revised version of MPG3 for
England was eventually published in March 1999. It was a dilution of
the 10-point programme promised to communities threatened by open-cast
proposals in Leicestershire, Derbyshire and elsewhere, but it tightened
controls and made concessions to long-term opponents of open-cast, such
as me. The key changes, to which I shall return shortly, were that the
need for sustainable
development was stressed, as was a presumption against development
unless the application satisfied a number of tests, the key one being:
is the proposal environmentally acceptable or can it be made so by
planning conditions or obligations and, if not, does it provide local
or community benefits that clearly outweigh the likely
impacts?
It seemed to me then, as it does now, that the changes were adequate to allow local planning authorities, without fear of lost appeals, to refuse open-cast coal applications on greenfield sites, especially as decisions can reflect the cumulative effects of adverse consequences in areas like north-west Leicestershire, which has long endured surface coal extraction.
Let me summarise the history of the application that I plan to describe in a moment. British Coal had sought permission in 1990 for the whole of the enormous Coalfield West site with 8 million tonnes of open-cast coal lying between the post-war excavations near Packington and 1970s, 1980s and 1990s workings in Heather and Ravenstone, all of which were eventually restored in 1995. That proposal was seen off by a huge tidal wave of opposition, led magnificently by a local protest group, Fight Open Cast in Leicestershire—FOIL—to whose work I regularly and sincerely pay admiring tribute.
A later, smaller Thorntree application in the same area by RJB Mining for 5 million tonnes of coal over six years from 500 acres was also rejected after a long community campaign in 1998. In late 2003, along came UK Coal with an even smaller proposal, seductively entitled Long Moor. This was an application to take out in just three years a small amount of coal, 725,000 tonnes, from a site of only 175 acres. I am, of course, speaking ironically. It gave a commitment that when the site was finished and restored with extra woodland, wetland and grassland—who would not want to visit that?—UK Coal would go away and never return.
The county council refused the application in July 2004 as it said that it would have
“an unacceptable cumulative environmental impact which would adversely affect those who live, work and pursue leisure activities in the area”
“would not be outweighed by the benefits the proposals would bring”.
The final phrase was crucial. UK Coal appealed in that November and a public inquiry was held at Snibston discovery park, Coalfield last autumn. Time is not available this afternoon, nor is this the appropriate place, to cover in any detail the powerful case against Long Moor made by FOIL, Ravenstone open-cast opposition group, parish councils, villagers like myself and Leicestershire county council. However, I shall give a brief outline in an attempt to demonstrate that our Government's new criteria for refusal of open-cast coal applications were amply met.
Our four villages lie within
the 200 square miles of the National forest, which has for 10 years
been a major driver for environmental restoration and economic
regeneration in a large part of the east and west midlands. Much of the
land in and around the site is in active agricultural use and is
overlaid by a network of mature hedgerows, copses and dense woodland.
No
wonder so many local people value their recreation on those quiet rural
byways. This is not brownfield land crying out for restoration; it is
an area of green fields crying out to be left
alone.
There is a real fear that Long Moor will accelerate the return of the stigma linked to a century and more of mining and minerals working, which would slow and probably put into reverse the positive changes and improvements that we have recently experienced. There is anxiety about the health risks associated with the extra noise, dust and traffic. They will have a major impact on Ravenstone, and especially nearby Woodstone primary school, which opened just a few days ago and lies downwind of Long Moor. There is concern that the site will threaten important local businesses involved in horticultural production, as they are vulnerable to the dust cocktail that open-casting tends to generate. The headline in the Leicester Mercury just a day or two ago said “Opencast mine will ruin our businesses”.
There is no special need for such coal, which the inquiry heard was of a poor quality. It is clear that the tonnage projected is too small to be an important national benefit, significant to the coal-trade balance or essential to industry. A coal-fired power station would burn the four years’ production of that site in as many weeks. The site would be loss-making, and it would weaken the already imperilled UK Coal with major implications for operational performance, completion and final restoration.
I have thought about this issue a lot, and the only commercial motive for the site must be a covert expectation that planning attrition in 2010 or beyond will lead to successive phases of work, so that salami-slicing of the adjacent Coalfield West reserves to the south will generate profits to justify the substantial infrastructure costs that Long Moor cannot in any way fund. The site will not generate profits, and it will certainly not pay for overheads.
I am concerned about news that I received today. The July issue of Coal UK refers to a round table meeting organised by the Department for Trade and Industry for representatives of the open-cast coal industry. I hope that it is not part of a process to soften up the Government, especially in relation to MPG3. The journal seemed to take the line that the industry will have a chance to encourage local councils to be grown up about open-casting. Grown up about open-casting? I have grown up surrounded by open-casting. All my life there has been open-casting in my area, so I do not need any encouragement from the coal producers to be grown up about it.
As we heard in the Chamber from the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry yesterday, we need secure, sustainable and clean energy in this country. Moreover, with the vast majority of dirty power generators being coal-fired power stations, local authorities and, by extension, planning inspectors and the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, ought to have particular regard for policy planning statement 1, 2005, which, in paragraph 13(ii) of its key principles, states:
“Regional planning bodies and local planning authorities should ensure that development plans contribute to global sustainability by addressing the causes and potential impacts of climate change”.
I look forward to hearing the Minister reply to that.
PPS1 should lead inexorably to the rejection of the vast majority of open-cast applications, as the democratic means of processing applications will ensure that any open-cast application offering immense economic and other benefits to the local community—that community being supportive—could still be given the green light. Paragraph 41 of PPS1 makes it abundantly clear that a key principle of sustainable development is to
“involve the community in developing the vision for its area.”
Returning to Long Moor, in the two years between published application and public inquiry, there was as remarkable a cross-party and cross-community display of unity, energy and determination to defeat the application as I have seen in more than 35 years of public life. Our collective vision for the area did not and could not embrace the reintroduction of such a damaging activity as open-cast coal mining, the effects of whose impacts are being overcome only now, many years later. If that is not cumulative and unacceptable adverse impacts, what on earth is?
Judy Mallaber (Amber Valley) (Lab): I understand my hon. Friend’s despair at the decision, which I shared, having heard about it just a week before the summing up of a similar application by UK Coal for the Lodge House site in my constituency. We still await the decision, and as nobody but UK Coal thinks it should go ahead, I still have hope.
Did my hon. Friend make the argument about the cumulative impacts on his area, and the despair and horror felt by people who have experienced them time and again? In one case in my area, they have been experienced for 50 years, on and off. Does he share my concern at what seems to be a misinterpretation by the inspector of paragraph 18 of MPG3 about the way in which cumulative impacts should be taken into account?
David Taylor: I certainly share my hon. Friend’s concerns. I regret to say that I reach my 60th birthday on 22 August. I have lived in the same village all my life, and in all that time, my village has had contact with active or fairly recent open-casting. We know what open-casting is about, and it is cumulative and unacceptable in every sense.
In light of the Long Moor effects that I have described, UK Coal’s proposal would have had to offer some extraordinary incentives to the local area to receive planning approval from the minerals planning authority or the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government on appeal. It manifestly did not, so within the revised guidelines, it had to be rejected. Incredibly, it was not, which brings me full circle to my opening remarks.
It is now 48 days since the
recommendations of the inquiry inspector and the Government’s
tame acceptance of them dropped on to local doormats and into e-mail
inboxes. I am still as baffled now as I was then how the chief
inspector should have so readily bought UK Coal’s specious
arguments, swallowed its flimsy case whole and so lightly set aside the
tightened framework for dealing with such applications which, as I have
tried to describe, was assembled with such care
in the run up to and after 1997. She set at naught local concerns. There
was no rhyme, reason or rationale in the inspector’s astonishing
decision. It was sloppy and it verged on the incompetent. It was
utterly detached from the clear environmental manifesto on which our
Labour Government were elected in 1997, and from the subsequent
planning and regulatory regimes that we have put in place to implement
those commitments and policies.
It is now 48 hours since I started to research this speech, and in that time I have reflected a great deal on the role of Ministers, who must of course take the final responsibility for what has happened. I hope that whoever lifted the application out of their red box fully understood the policy background to that complex and crucial planning decision and knew about the precedent being set. I hope that it does not influence the decision in Amber Valley, just a few miles to the north of my constituency. I hope also that the Minister concerned appreciated the importance of the matter to communities in English coal mining areas. In Wales and Scotland, it is a devolved matter.
If the decision was signed off in haste or without proper consideration the Department for Communities and Local Government must be held to account for a deeply depressing rejection of the views of rural communities and the apparently casual disregard of the local government system that represents them and exists to protect them. Communities and local government are the raison d’être of the new Department, and it seems as if that raison d’être has been forgotten.
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