My Lords, I have two amendments in this group, which I tabled as new clauses in Committee. I am again very grateful to the Victorian
Society for helping us do this. I am also extremely grateful to the Minister for the amendments he introduced this afternoon; they are very welcome and very overdue. With a very ancient hat on, I remember that some of the best times I had at English Heritage was unveiling plaques—I unveiled a plaque when Yoko Ono and John Lennon had lived in Notting Hill for just the right amount of time to get a blue plaque. I think that William Hewitt will be very pleased, as will the new chair—I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Mendoza, on his appointment.
The new clauses were the subject of a very sympathetic meeting we had with the Minister before the Recess. I was very grateful to him, so I shall not reiterate much of what I said. We just need to hear what he has to say this evening.
For the record, I want to point out the anomalies that the new clauses in these amendments address. The gap in the law is affecting people and places, which is why it needs to be closed. Quite simply, permitted development means that unlisted buildings as a whole and buildings which are on the local heritage list but outside the protection of a conservation area are outside the protection of planning law. They can be demolished without challenge and without local people being able to defend them. The Minister said in Committee that Article 4 directions offer a protection: in principle they do, but they are rarely used. The way in which planning departments have been stripped out means that this already onerous business is hardly ever used, because there are not the people there to do it.
Amendment 204A would bring the demolition of all buildings within the scope of planning law. Amendment 204B sets out a more limited case for bringing all buildings which are on the local heritage list but outside a conservation area within the scope of planning law. This is an anomaly because, essentially, nationally listed buildings already have this protection, but it does not apply to other buildings, including locally listed buildings, as I said, which are not in a conservation area. There are other anomalies in this situation; one has to seek planning permission, for example, to “significantly amend” a building but not to knock it down. A third anomaly is that a building can be demolished while a decision is being taken. I will come back to that shortly.
I do not apologise for trying to find a simpler way by which all non-designated heritage assets can be listed and protected; frankly, we are just too casual about demolition and about reference to the local community or the impact on the local setting or character, or the environment as a whole. I argued in Committee that it was better to repurpose and reuse good and useful buildings, however idiosyncratic, than to demolish them and to involve the local community in the planning process.
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It is not an arcane argument. I am sure that at the top of the Minister’s mind at the moment is the furore over the Crooked House. That is how people feel about local buildings. The Crooked House was not nationally or locally listed, but the case has raised the game—it has raised a lot of precedents about how the planning system works. Clearly, local people thought
that there should have been more protection and that they should have been involved—but they were not. It was on the local list, nor on the national list. There is no protection for buildings that are simply caught up in the necessary procedures; it was under consideration for listing, but that did not help the situation. So this is a case in point. Put bluntly, were Amendment 204A to be in force now, the Crooked House could not have been demolished, but, since it was not locally listed, neither was it helped by local designation.
As I said in Committee, demolition is the nuclear option; it is just ironic that it is the one with the least involvement of the local community. Bringing demolition of all non-designated assets into the planning frame would ensure people get their rightful say in what happens in their local area. It would not prevent demolition but, critically, it enables demolition to be discussed in the context of local and master planning, which is exactly where it should be. That is within the spirit of the Bill, which is all about local engagement and involvement and better planning processes.
My second argument in favour of the catch-all amendment concerns climate change and the waste of embedded energy in the buildings that we knock down. I think that that case has been reinforced in recent weeks; it is clear that the Government are retreating from some of their convictions about net zero. I should also say, in response to the Minister in Committee, that, although national planning policy does support a transition to low carbon, the problem is that the policies in the NPPF do not apply to permitted development.
Amendment 204B is a more restricted amendment. We know of local buildings that may be humble or vernacular or even not very prepossessing but are well loved because for local people they have memory, meaning and character. Sometimes these are bleak places.
The local heritage list is still very much a work in progress and is very patchy. Few of us know which buildings are on the local list or even if our local authority has one. That is something that the Minister might want to address today. A local list has the unique ability to reveal the biography of a place—the buildings with particular character and history that show economic and social evolution. These buildings, which are special to the community, can be demolished without planning permission if they are not in a conservation area. Many of our post-industrial towns would not be in conservation areas—they would not have any protection—and yet these buildings have profound attachment when it comes to the way people feel about them, whether they are libraries, doctors’ surgeries, community halls or cinemas. They make up the character of a place.
My second amendment is a modest proposition. It attempts to make rational what is irrational and partial at the moment. It would remove all locally listed assets from permitted development and bring them within the protections of the planning system.
Finally, I ask the Minister and his colleagues to consider the need for an independent and public review of the way in which permitted development as a whole is working. My knowledge and experience of it is that it is creating many more contested situations and perverse consequences than was intended. I understand
that the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities may have an internal review taking place. Can the Minister tell me whether that is true and, if so, could we have a few more details? Or perhaps he and his colleagues would prefer to write to me.
I am very grateful for the close attention that the Minister has given these amendments, and I very much look forward to what he is going to say this evening.