My Lords, I add my support, as I did in Committee, to Amendment 204A by the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, and, with a little more reluctance, to Amendment 204B, which is a compromise that is better than nothing but not as good as the original amendment.
We discussed this amendment considerably in Committee. I spoke on it then and do not intend to repeat what I said. However, it is important to remember that what we are talking about are not buildings and structures that are listed or currently protected but those that fall outside the normal protection system, though they nevertheless have streetscape value and are important, given their location and interaction with the buildings that surround them. They are also buildings that people feel emotionally attached to and which have a historic significance in the local community.
Why are those buildings under threat? Because if you are a developer and you buy a property that is going to be more valuable if you can rebuild it, the first thing you will do is to knock it down. You then have a vacant site—ideally, from the developer’s point of view, in an eyesore location—and you can then go to the planning department of a local authority and say, “I want to build this building that you do not like but which would replace an eyesore that I have created. Give me my planning permission, please”. Sadly, that happens all too often.
The noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, mentioned the Crooked House pub in the Black Country. Curiously enough, I know the Black Country rather well. That type of building is very common in the Black Country—there are a lot of them that look like that. A lot of those have been destroyed, but they have a local community value for the very closely structured communities in the Black Country that have been there for several hundred years.
As I understand it, the Crooked House pub was up for listing. It is quite clear that, if you are a developer and you buy a building that is up for listing, you are likely to get it cheaper than if it were not up for listing, because other potential purchasers will look at it and say, “I won’t be able to do what I want to do to maximise its economic value if it’s listed”. So you as a rogue developer buy the property; then, under permitted development, you knock it down so it cannot be listed. You have bought it cheap so, when you redevelop it, your profits are that much bigger. The current system actually encourages you to behave in an outrageous manner. That is the problem.
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Do not get me wrong. We are not talking just about rogue developers or people who have tried to make a fast buck; often, we are talking about people who do not understand better. However, we are also talking about people who do. Noble Lords may have seen reports of a church, St John’s, in Werneth, in Greater Manchester, which was knocked down by Oldham Council earlier this year. It was a church from 1844, by a known architect, Edwin Shellard. It was a rather fine building, although it was perhaps not listable, and it was certainly a redundant church. Oldham Council decided that perhaps it might be vandalised and that it would be responsible if people went into the church and hurt themselves. Rather than repurpose the building by converting it into flats, or at least keeping its community value, the council saw to it that a building that had been there since the middle of the 19th century was bulldozed overnight with no need for permission, consideration or consultation.
In case noble Lords think I am picking out examples that are unique, there was another church, St Anne’s, in Hastings. This was a completely different case. It was a redundant church that was built in the 1950s, and so the suggested cut-off date in the amendment of 1948 would not apply. This fine church, which had also been designed by very highly respected architects, the firm of Denman and Son, was bulldozed with no need for planning consent or consideration. It was lost to the community, when it could perfectly well have been repurposed.
We need change. I am not talking—and I do not think anyone is—about stopping buildings that should be knocked down being knocked down, such as farm buildings. What we are asking for, and what the amendment tries to do, is to make sure that, before a building is destroyed, someone has given it some thought and decided whether it should be destroyed. This could be done through the planning process or in any number of different ways, but it should not be up to one person, driven by economic benefit to themselves, to take the decision to destroy something that has a value in a community. That is what we are asking for: a decision should be taken, rather than there being no decision and letting chaos reign.