Housing and Regeneration Bill

Almost everything that could be said on this subject has been said, so one hesitates to get up at this stage in the debate. My contribution will be highly idiosyncratic. I do not know what the Minister is going to say: she may say that the qualifications in the noble Lord’s amendment and the amendments of those who supported him are unnecessary. It is the sort of phrase that I have heard from Ministers before, and I dare say that I have uttered it myself. Therefore, I want to add another argument. One virtue of the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, is that it acts as a form of amulet against the oscillation in the quality of Ministers in departments responsible for these matters. That is in no sense a reflection on the present Minister, but I have been in Parliament for 30 years and there have been Ministers responsible for the affairs of the relevant departments who were extraordinarily interested in architecture and could be relied on to make extremely good decisions and others who had no interest in architecture whatever. One virtue of the amendment is that it is a protection against the latter. I shall be straightforwardly personal. My late noble kinsman was Minister for Housing and Local Government. He was vilified for two decisions on buildings that he let through—one on grounds of bulk and one on grounds of height. On the other hand, he was widely praised for preventing a building from destroying the view of St Paul’s from a whole series of different angles, including the Whitestone Pond on Hampstead Heath. There is another building on Knightsbridge which everyone wanted to destroy; it was a listed building, but even the inspector wanted to demolish it. He alone insisted that it was retained, and everybody associated with Imperial College now takes the view that his decision was the right one. Some Ministers will have an interest and some will not—and fortunately his batting average was about even. By coincidence, yesterday I attended the memorial service of the sort of architect who gets the first obituary in the Times, in St Marylebone Parish Church. On the way out I met the architect civil servant who advised me when I was a Minister and who may well have advised the noble Lord, Lord Howarth. I was the eighth Minister whom he had advised. Our conversation went back to what was then a derelict tower block in Bethnal Green, whose design, to the credit of the local authority, had been entrusted to Denys Lasdun. It was for local authority use and, by the time it came to us, it was, in effect, gutted and in an appalling state. English Heritage wished to list it and everyone else wished to demolish it. The local authority could do nothing with it. The tenants did not wish to live in it. Efforts to put the building into other hands had failed because of the scale of the work that needed to be done. It was reasonably shortly after the creation of what was then the Department of National Heritage, which broke down the Chinese walls that had previously existed in the Ministry of Housing and Local Government, which meant that two departments were making two sets of decisions. The new department made the decision about listing and the old department made the decision about listed building consent or demolition. We had a meeting lasting three hours to discuss what should be done about it. We knew that we would be extremely unpopular if we listed the building, because we would be transferring it to the other department to make the unpopular decision among architects that the building should be demolished. But we also knew the quality of the Secretary of State to whom we would be transferring it. Since we had the new system where two departments could make the decisions, we took the decision to list it and, if that department still wanted to demolish it, it would have had to have gone to the other department. I tell that story in support of the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, because it is a moral story. The decision was taken by the other Secretary of State to resist the efforts to demolish the building. A highly imaginative developer came along. It is now an icon building, which people fight to get into. That is a demonstration that quality will out.