My Lords, I thank the Minister for his Amendments 202A and 202B, which were partly a response to my comments in Committee. I am particularly grateful that he and his team have listened to the concerns that I expressed, not least those made by the CLA and the Historic Houses Association. I pay tribute to those two organisations for their quiet persistence. I certainly appreciated the opportunity to discuss this with the Minister and his officials.
I declare that I am a member of the CLA and was once a member of its heritage working group. I also own several listed buildings. I am glad to say that I have never been in receipt of a building preservation notice, which is the subject of these amendments, but I have had long professional involvement with heritage matters. I am particularly grateful for the support of colleagues in this House and others outside.
Clause 99 removes one of the few safeguards available to property owners faced with a building preservation notice, where the issue of the notice has been found to be ill-founded and, as a result, the owner suffers loss. It is easy to see how works in course of execution, whether groundworks internally or works to the roof, could be critically compromised, and the building with it, by the immediate and complete cessation of works that a building preservation notice demands, potentially for many months. If the notice is not well-founded, the owner can suffer serious and gratuitous loss.
Here I observe that local authorities often do not have in-house heritage expertise. It is often subcontracted to external contractors, who may provide so many days a month. That underlines why these amendments are so important, as the local authority would have to go to Historic England or to the commission to make sure that it was taking the correct approach.
Were it not for the fact that, to date, the existing listing of buildings under Historic England and DCMS oversight and the operation of the building preservation notice regime have functioned pretty well and achieved a good deal of confidence, this situation would be of significant concern. I am particularly glad that the Minister has made it clear that this should be in the Bill as a further safeguard. But the safeguards, such as they are, will now rest extremely heavily on this procedure, because the one other safeguard that would normally be present—compensation for a misconceived notice—is no longer there.
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This whole arrangement, to some extent, defies the normal rules-based approach of our western culture, namely that a person shall have a right to the reasonable enjoyment of their property and shall not be deprived of that by the state without good reason, and then only subject to a right to challenge, access to an impartial adjudication process and compensation for
the loss, where this rises out of the exercise of the administrative power. These are all embedded in human rights legislation.
Let me make it clear: listing on its own is fine. Creating this situation in which there could be serious consequential disruption, without compensation and without any recourse, is certainly not. Without some safeguards, the uncontrolled, arbitrary and potentially oppressive exercise of non-recourse powers beckons, with all the mistrust that that involves. Should the new arrangements not work as well as in the past—I certainly hope they will—it is on the cards that the courts will become involved, and then we will be back to square one. A great deal depends on collaboration, trust in the process and a deft hand being played by those wielding administrative powers.
It is axiomatic that the person with probably the greatest knowledge of the heritage value of a property may be the owner, who self-evidently cannot be consulted, for fear of tipping them off that a building preservation notice may be in prospect. This is a paradox we have to live with. We will need clear and consistently applied protocols, avoiding the temptation to rely on some spurious tip-off from a malicious third-party source, as well as a process for ensuring that the building subject to a notice is not thereby frozen in a vulnerable state or unsafe condition.
I understand that there was no external consultation with stakeholders on the measures first brought in by the Bill. But, going forward, I am particularly pleased by the Minister’s confirmation about guidance being brought forward, and I hope he will be able to reassure me that not only local authorities but organisations such as the CLA and the HHA will be part of that consultation process. We need to minimise avoidable risks to buildings themselves and the interruption of affected owners’ commitments. We have avoided this in the past, for the most part, and I hope we continue to do so.
I had considerable sympathy with the points by the noble Lord, Lord Northbrook. I have been appalled at some of the quite unconscionable alterations that have been carried out to buildings, often in conservation areas, where you cannot believe that somebody could have thought it appropriate, or indeed that it did anything other than degrade the whole area by putting in singularly unmatching materials. Some of these are done by bodies that should know better; I can think of a parish council or two that have done things to village halls that, frankly, destroyed a great deal of the ambience and appearance of the building.
With regard to materials for windows, the quality, for instance, of softwood, which might have customarily been used in Victorian times, is now nowhere near what it should be. You are on a rotational treadmill of having to replace things that rot prematurely. Why not use modern materials? I certainly agree with the noble Lord, Lord Bellingham, that with some of these you have to be an expert to know the difference in what you are looking at.
My final point relates to Amendment 204A; I will put in just a little word of warning here. I absolutely understand the point that is being made here: demolitions can and do create an awful degree of blight and are a
loss to the community. But planning, as far as I know, applies technically, subject to certain derogations, to any building, structure or engineering works, many of which are there by virtue of permitted development or may be small or transient in nature. I do not want to have absolutely everything caught; there would have to be at least some sieving process. One thinks of commonly used utilitarian buildings in farmyards; farms generally do not fall within planning. I would not want a farm to suddenly have to go through hoops in order to knock down some scruffy 1960s hoop-frame barn and replace it with a tidier-looking portal-frame structure of more use and value. One just needs to be very careful about that.
There is a lot of good in this group of amendments, and I am very glad that we have been able to discuss them this evening.