UK Parliament / Open data

Localism Bill

I apologise. I am not good at drafting but I do want to press on and let the House make progress. When people were asked to respond as to what their neighbourhood area was, those areas often overlapped, not just horizontally but vertically. People in an urban area can very easily feel attached to two geographical concepts and at different levels—a community and a town. My Amendment 148ADE challenges what I think is, again, a rigid concept in the Bill that no neighbourhood area may overlap another one. It allows people to be members of and participate in more than one neighbourhood area, if they have said in a survey that they feel part of or influenced by events and developments in more than one area. In the previous group, my noble friend was moving towards that by saying that people outside the area could participate in a referendum. However, people's perceptions about planning may differ also within an area—two communities may have different views, say, about local parking standards but be united on back-garden development across the whole of the town, or on shops. The last thing I would contest is the guidance to the Bill, which says that there should be a strong assumption that existing ward boundaries will define the neighbourhood area. The noble Lord, Lord Shipley, also addressed this point. Anyone who has been involved in representations to the Local Government Boundary Commission will tell you that lines drawn by the commission are frequently strongly contested and often bear absolutely no relation to community realities. Take my own small town, which is covered by parts of three different wards. The neighbouring ward contains two communities that, in the survey I mentioned, self-defined as two separate communities—Mortlake and Barnes. They saw themselves as entirely different. Barnes is actually split between two wards, while Twickenham is covered by four wards. I do not see how you can address neighbourhood planning simply in an urban area without allowing flexibility to stray across these neighbourhood areas, both horizontally and vertically, as I have put it. The concepts in the Bill are therefore potentially too rigid and problems arise only because of that. I shall not press these amendments, but I ask my noble friend to reflect on this point: we should allow communities, where we can, to define their own place, coalesce and differ for different purposes as they wish, and not to be locked into one neighbourhood area for five years. They should be facilitated in doing that by a local authority, which has the flexibility to move the pieces around and bring people together for different purposes. That would be real, active localism and not the rather rigid approach set out in the Bill at this point.
Type
Proceeding contribution
Reference
729 c1226-7 
Session
2010-12
Chamber / Committee
House of Lords chamber
Legislation
Localism Bill 2010-12
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