HC Deb 22 March 1962 vol 656 cc705-16

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Whitelaw.]

10.26 p.m.

Mr. Edward du Cann (Taunton)

I am grateful for the opportunity to discuss tonight a matter which is not only of deep concern to a growing number of my constituents, but which must be of interest to everyone who is concerned at the growing power of the Executive and anxious that that power should not in any way be abused.

The history of the matter is this. In August, 1960, officials of the Home Office approached the Somerset County Council with a proposal that an approved school be established in the County of Somerset. In October, 1960, the county council agreed in principle. This was an entirely voluntary action on its part. The children's committee of the Somerset County Council therefore looked for a site of about 30 acres in the county, sited within 12 miles of the county town of Taunton. It decided that it would not purchase agricultural land for the purpose, nor use a compulsory purchase order.

As a matter of law, the county council could give itself planning permission for the construction of the approved school, although there are limitations upon this power. But some years ago the county council—in my opinion, quite rightly—decided that the usual procedures would be adopted in planning matters as if any of its plans were a purely private matter.

On 2nd September, 1961, towards the end of the holiday season, a small advertisement was inserted by the county council in a local newspaper announcing the proposal to build an approved school in the parish of West Hatch, and stating that objections to this proposal should be lodged within fourteen days. As I understand it, no other notice was given to any local parish council, nor, indeed, to its Member for Parliament, though I should have supposed that anybody would have realised at once that the building of an approved school was bound to be a matter which would give rise to substantial local concern.

In West Hatch they were alert. The chairman of the parish council noticed the advertisement and the parish council lodged an immediate protest. In Stoke St. Mary, a neighbouring parish, the advertisement was not noticed, and no protest was lodged at that time.

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for coming to reply to this debate. The first question I ask him is whether he thinks that this is the appropriate way to deal with a matter of this sort, merely to insert in a newspaper a notice which may or may not be observed by the local inhabitants.

At any rate, the local inhabitants, rightly or wrongly, got the impression that the matter was being put forward with great haste and in some secrecy. A parish meeting was called in West Hatch which county council representatives were good enough to attend, and I give them every credit for that. There was much discussion of the matter. Among other things, at that meeting it was plainly stated by one county council representative at least that if the West Central Planning Committee of the county council refused planning permission the county council would look for another site.

The position subsequently was this. Both the local parish councils had lodged an objection. The rural district council had refused planning permission. As their Member of Parliament, the matter being brought to my notice, I considered it with all the care I could, and I made my view plain to the county council that the site of West Hatch was not suitable. The application then was referred in the normal course to the West Central Planning Committee. It was, so so to speak, sub judice. However, the Minister at that time then announced that there was to be a public inquiry. This was on 1st November. I immediately wrote to the Minister of Housing and Local Government to inquire his reasons for holding that inquiry and to complain.

I have had substantial correspondence with my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary, which I admit has been written on my side in very strong terms indeed. I should like to quote from some of the letters. When I wrote on 10th November, I asked the Minister why he thought that an inquiry was necessary. I asked him, more particularly, why an inquiry was called for before the West Central Planning Committee had considered this proposal for the building of the approved school. I wrote: The position put bluntly, is that your decision was announced at a most unfortunate moment. A strong impression has been created locally that the Minister is interfering in an unfair way to over-ride local opinion. The Parliamentary Secretary, in a very courteous latter on 5th December, replied, stating among other things: The reason why the application was called in by the Minister on 1st November was that it was plain… that there was no chance of this proposal being approved without a local inquiry.… We were not aware of any suggestion that the County Council would drop their proposal whatever the views of the West Central Planning Committee. I took strong objection to that first sentence and wrote again to the Minister as follows: You say 'there was no chance of this proposal being approved without a local inquiry'. I do really think this is a most unfortunate phrase because local opinion will no doubt take the view (indeed I have already heard it expressed) that the Ministry is assisting the County Council to push this scheme through irrespective of the wishes of the local inhabitants". The Parliamentary Secretary replied at much greater length and in a very clear letter set out the procedure to be adopted in cases of this kind, as set down in Statutory Instrument 2,069/1951 with accompanying Memorandum. He said: The circular states: 'Development carried out by a local planning authority within their own area will, in future, be deemed to have permission, subject to the understanding that they will themselves bring important and controversial proposals to the Minister's attention'. The accompanying memorandum advises local planning authorities that before doing so they should consult with certain interested bodies, and take an early opportunity for early consultation with the Ministry in various classes of case, which include those 'which, for one reason or another, excite public interest and controversy and for which the Minister is therefore likely to be asked to answer in Parliament'. As you know, the local planning authority undertook consultations"— I do not believe that that is fully true— and advertised the proposal, and concluded rightly that this was a case to which that advice applied The Minister in such cases has absolute discretion, and he decided to call it in. Hence the reason for the inquiry. The Parliamentary Secretary has assured me in continued correspondence that it was not the intention of the Ministry to force the proposal through.

My hon. Friend tells me that, and, of course, I accept it. But a number of important questions remain. I am advised that an inspector was specially brought back from retirement to hold this inquiry. In my experience, inquiries take a great deal of time to arrange. This one was held in very great haste, being taken out of the queue. I think it appropriate to ask my hon. Friend why the inquiry was held so quickly, what representations he received from the county council, and, more particularly, what representations he received from the Home Office in the matter.

In the meantime, the West Central Planning Committee had rejected this proposal, so the effect of the inquiry, therefore, was to circumvent the understanding reached between the people of West Hatch and the county council. It is not, therefore, surprising, that local opinion believes that there has been some sort of collusion between the county council, the Ministry of Housing and Local Government and the Home Office, for, however innocently the Ministry may have acted in setting up the inquiry, the effect of it has been to provide the county council with an appeal procedure, and certainly the inquiry could not have been designed in any way to protect local opinions, for they had already been made plain. Had it not been for the inquiry, they would presumably have been effective.

At all events, the inquiry was held in Taunton over a period of two days, and my hon. Friend was courteous enough to send me a copy of the inspector's report. The Minister concurred in that report, but I think I am entitled to ask whether it was the Minister himself, or the Parliamentary Secretary, or whether it was the decision of some unnamed civil servant who had agreed to what the inspector said, although the decision was made ostensibly in the Minister's name.

There are several points about the report. The inspector said that the site could be developed without impairing the visual amenities. This, incidentally, is an area defined as being of great landscape value. What would have been the reaction if somebody had tried to build houses or a factory on the site? I cannot believe that his statement is correct. The inspector also said the project was unlikely to be detrimental to the present rural character of the area. That is not true. In an area where only 400 people live, suddenly to impose a new community of about 150 people must alter the character of the area fundamentally.

I suggest that those points made by the inspector, which were absolutely accepted by the Minister, simply do not bear examination. During the course of the inquiry, the inspector—I am sure he is an able man who did his job—remarked that he was simply there to decide whether the site was suitable or not—as though this were an academic planning exercise and nothing to do with people's lives and how they are to spend their time in the area in which they live.

It is perhaps not surprising that, while he acknowledges some risk to the personal safety of the local inhabitants, he gives very little weight to the point. I am entitled to ask what weight the Minister gave to this in considering the matter. These are very scattered parishes. The houses are lonely, isolated. There are no lights, no village policemen. Most of the houses are not on the telephone, so the occupants could not call for help if needed.

If the approved school is situated there, all the houses will be subject to forcible entry by day or night, and it is not surprising that there is great anxiety for the physical safety of old and young. The children have to walk down a lane to school. An approved school is not a school at which there will be mere boys. It will have persons up to the age of 19½. I could quote examples of crimes which have been committed by inmates of approved schools in other neighbourhoods, but I will not do so.

Suffice it to say that I think that local anxiety of this kind is absolutely justified. As sure as HANSARD will record my words, it is certain, if we have this approved school, that there will be cases of assault and of breaking and entering. There will be cases of theft and other things, and the Home Office admits this. It is not simply an academic question of planning.

The inspector said also: Any area in rural Somerset would be open to the same kind of objection". Yet he heard no evidence on this point. I ask my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary: does he not agree that this is an impertinent observation to make? Surely, it must be right, in a matter like this, for the Ministry or the inspector to say to the county council, the Home Office, or whoever is sponsoring the scheme, "You jolly well find somewhere in Somerset which will not be open to the objections to which this site is open". Apparently, no inquiries have been made. The view is taken that this site is easy, it is all arranged—so "Pooh" to the views of the local inhabitants.

The inspector's report is even more remarkable for the things it does not say. It says nothing about depreciation of local property. It says nothing about the cost of the project. At a time when the Government are appealing for economy, it will cost about £300,000, with £16,000 more required to build new roads in this little part of the world. Additional money must be found for drainage schemes. If I come to the House to plead for £15,000 or £16,000 to straighten out the bad roads in Norton Fitzwarren or Bishops Lydeard, or if I ask for £2,000 to be spent in putting an old school in order in one of the villages in my constituency, I receive a negative answer. Yet £300,000 plus the other expenditure is accepted for this purpose. It is a most surprising state of affairs. I ask my hon. Friend: was the Minister satisfied, before he approved this proposal, that no cheaper scheme was possible? I refuse to believe it.

I come now to the suitability of West Hatch as a site. There are thick woods nearby where escapers can lie up. I know this country. These things are so. There is no community life such as I am told is necessary to a school of this kind. However one examines it—and I have no time to go into the matter in further detail—it is plain that this site is not the most suitable which could be found.

The feature which I find most objectionable of all is this. Local opinion is unanimously against the proposal. That is incontrovertible, yet the bureaucrats propose to by-pass the elected representatives of the people and to ignore their clearly expressed view. They say, in effect, "We know best. Our high and mighty plans must stand." What kind of attitude is that in modern democratic England? Shakespeare knew people of this kind well when he talked about the" insolence of office." This, apparently, is a situation at which a Conservative Administration connives, but it is a situation which we in the West Country are not willing to tolerate. I say frankly to my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary—for whom, as he knows, I have every respect and affection—that I was not elected to the House of Commons in order to agree that it is the gentlemen in Whitehall who know best. Civil servants, like Members of Parliament, are the servants of the people, not dictators, yet in this case they are acting like dictators—"You shall have this school, come what may."

I will quote some of the language used by the county council. In paragraph 50 of the report, it is said: The objections raised against this proposal were not planning objections. What does that mean? It means that these ideas suit people in office, and personal views which are put in are of no account. In paragraph 52 it is said: The Home Office expert, the county council's children's officer and the planning officers are convinced of the appropriateness of the site. Only the uninformed opinion of local residents found fault with it. That is not only untrue, but, in my opinion, it is damned impertinent. It is the sort of language one would expect to read in a report issued by a member of the Communist Party dealing with recalcitrant people in an area in which he was interested, not the sort of thing one expects to read in modern England. What a way to talk about the village Hampden that with dauntless breast The little tyrants of his fields withstood". My sympathies are all with the local inhabitants.

All this is history. The matter is past. The Minister has made his decision. It is final. Whether it is a good decision or a bad one—I think it is a bad one—it is final. There is no appeal. What remains as a possibility? I suggest either that the Home Office should withdraw this proposal or that the county council should say to the Home Office, "You cannot now go ahead, for we recognise that there is a mistake and we want to keep our hands clean." I hope very much that my hon. Friend the Joint Parliamentary Secretary will be able to confess tonight that he has made a mistake and will at the very least say that he will look into the matter with the Home Office with a vew to changing the plans, because I believe that this is a fundamentally bad decision which should never have been made.

10.45 p.m.

The Joint Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Housing and Local Government (Mr. Geoffrey Rippon)

I fully appreciate that my hon. Friend the Member for Taunton (Mr. du Cann) feels very strongly on this subject. He has expressed himself in very forcible language on more than one occasion. I would have hoped that after our long correspondence he would have been satisfied that the procedure followed in this case was entirely correct. He is less than fair to the Somerset County Council, which has treated its own development as an application for private development. It put in its suggestions to the rural district council and originally got a favourable reaction. It advertised. As a result of its advertisements it received objections.

As I explained in three letters, the procedure followed that laid down in the Town and Country Planning (Development by Local Planning Authorities) Regulations, 1951, and a circular which accompanied those regulations, which my hon. Friend has quoted accurately. In this case the Somerset County Council, as local planning authority, rightly concluded that this was exactly the sort of case to which the circular applied.

In such cases the Minister has absolute discretion whether or not he calls in a proposal. I think that my hon. Friend has misunderstood the purpose of calling in an application. It is not designed to stifle local opposition. Far from it. It is one way of ensuring that local opposition is fully expressed at a pubic inquiry. What the Minister was deciding in calling in the application was that approval could not be given without a public inquiry. The chairman of the West Hatch Parish Council had already requested in a letter to the county council that a public inquiry should be held. This procedure does not, and has not in this case, prevented anyone from raising objections to the proposal. On the contrary, it has been made clear all along that there can be no approval until everyone has had a chance of expressing their point of view. None of this has prejudiced the Taunton Rural District Council, which, as it was fully entitled to do, changed its mind and eventually came out against the proposal after as it said, it had got fuller information about it.

It is true that the Somerset West Central Area Committee, which is, after all, a committee of the local planning authority, not knowing about the "call-in", recommended refusal. There is no reason to suppose that the county council would have taken a different view as a result of the recommendations of its area committee. It could at any time have taken notice of that. This is the county council's proposal for development, and it was perfectly entitled to abandon it at any stage. As I explained to my hon. Friend in a letter I sent to him on 22nd December, there was nothing to stop the council doing that.

My hon. Friend dealt also with the haste in fixing the inquiry and asked if there were representations from anybody to us to hurry it on. I assure him that there were none. There were no representations from the Home Office and none from the county council. The date of the inquiry has no bearing on the issue. We arranged the inquiry as soon as possible in view of the desirability of reaching an early decision one way or another, as I explained to my hon. Friend in my letter of 22nd December. The search for the site had taken a long time. My hon. Friend has explained that the search started in August, 1960. The need was urgent and the county and the Home Office had to face the possibility that, if they lost at the inquiry, they would have to search for another site somewhere else. No one complained that he did not have time to prepare his case. No one asked for an adjournment. No one has been prejudiced by the date of the inquiry.

Now I come to the merits of the proposals and the objections to them. These were fully canvassed in a local inquiry which took two days. The whole issue is quite clearly and objectively set out in the inspector's report. I cannot accept my hon. Friend's strictures about the tone of the report. When we discussed the Franks proposals it was stated that if the inspector's report were to be published this would inhibit him in the advice he gave to the Minister. I think the inspector did a good job. He put his views quite clearly, as he ought, and after that the decision rests wholly on the Minister.

It is no use blaming the inspector for the use of the term "uninformed". That was the term used by the county council, as is made clear in paragraph 52. My hon. Friend said that the inspector gave very little weight to the questions of security. I should have thought that paragraph 80 is clear: In my opinion the only objection which can be raised with any justification against the proposal arises from the effect which the proposed open school is likely to have on living conditions in this, at present, quiet and peaceful rural area. It is not possible to avoid the conclusion that fears as to what conditions the school is likely to bring to the area are very real and generally held and objection to the proposal is widespread as a result. It is evident that although the risk of unpleasant or frightening incidents at lonely dwellings or in the lanes of the area might be slight, the risk is present and must affect the peace of mind of local residents. He put that very fairly and clearly. Naturally regard was had to that when the time came to make a decision, but against those fears was the evidence of the Home Office. It gave a great deal of information arising from past experience in regard to approved schools. For example, it was pointed out that there was no incident that could be recalled of an absconder committing a sexual offence. It was pointed out that mental defectives were put in hospital. The general conclusion was that a slight risk could not be denied, but there was no factor that would make an approved school more objectionable at West Hatch than at any other place that could be imagined in the surroundings of Taunton.

It is a little unfair to say that it was impudent to say that there were no other possibilities. The inspector gave the best view he could of the evidence. I can only say that no one mentioned any alternative site within the vicinity of Taunton. It was always accepted that there was a need for an approved school in Somerset and that it should be within a radius of ten or twelve miles of Taunton, although preferably within four or five miles.

Mr. du Cann

Not by the local people.

Mr. Rippon

I think the nearest approach to the suggestion of an alternative site was made by the parish council, which said that compulsory purchase should not be ruled out and the radius should be extended to ten miles from Taunton. The working party had been considering sites within a radius of ten or twelve miles. It searched for a year and had the assistance of fifty estate agents.

There were also objections on the ground of amenity. This was fully considered by the inspector in his report, at paragraph 79. He found that given proper screening and treatment, this would not be detrimental to the visual amenities of the area. Of course, these things are matters of opinion, but that at least was his view. He also dealt with technical objections, drainage and transport, fully and fairly.

Concerning cost, the figure of £300,000 is given in the report at paragraph 45. The other costs of road access and drainage are comparatively small in relation to a project of this kind.

In the last resort, all these things are matters of opinion and judgment. I can only assure my hon. Friend that we have done our best in what is, admittedly, a difficult case to weigh the evidence and come to a decision. That has been done after carefully weighing all the arguments put forward by the objectors at what, I think, was a full and adequate inquiry.

Mr. du Cann

I wonder whether my hon. Friend will comment on this fact. When talking about offences, he referred only to sexual offences. What about other offences? There will certainly be those, as was made clear in the Home Office evidence. Is my hon. Friend really saying that there is no cheaper site than this in the whole of Somerset? That cannot be true.

Mr. Rippon

There was plenty of opportunity to argue whether there should be a cheaper site, but that was not a factor in the planning application. If my hon. Friend wants to raise the question of cost, he should address that matter to the Home Office.

Concerning the evidence of the Home Office, I quoted only a small part of it, but there are several paragraphs of the inspector's report dealing with this aspect and pointing out that pupils who abscond from approved schools are usually only too anxious to get to their homes and if they commit crimes, they commit them when they get home. If my hon. Friend considers the evidence as a whole, he must accept that past experience shows that the—

The Question having been proposed after Ten o'clock and the debate having continued for half an hour, Mr. DEPUTY-SPEAKER adjourned the House without Question put, pursuant to the Standing Order.

Adjourned at four minutes to Eleven o'clock.