HC Deb 03 May 1965 vol 711 cc1066-78

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

10.42 p.m.

Mr. F. V. Corfield (Gloucestershire, South)

I am grateful for this opportunity to bring to the notice of the House certain aspects of the acquisition of land for the M.4 motorway in my constituency, and I wish to enlist the sympathy of the Parliamentary Secretary in regard to the way in which some aspects of this matter are being pursued on his behalf, to the detriment—and quite unjustified detriment, as I see it—of some of my constituents. I have been in correspondence with the hon. Gentleman on both the cases I am about to raise, and I think that he will be aware of them.

The first constituent I have in mind is Mr. Williams, who has a farm called Wick Wick Farm, near Downend. He suffers under two heads. He loses land for the construction of the M.4, but more important is the effect of the associated realignment of the A.432, as a result of which he loses a substantial part of his farm buildings. These comprise, to my recollection, two Dutch barns, one at least of which is used for self-feed silage and is, therefore, important to his summer farm economy.

Mr. Williams loses part of his cattle standing, which, also, is of considerable importance to him as a dairy farmer, but more important than that is the loss of an exceptionally well-built stone storage barn which is the basis of his economy. This storage barn enables him to buy feeding stuffs in the market and store them in the dry and free from vermin and, equally, to store his own produce and sell it to suit the market, not just putting it on the market in times of flush—which is also in accordance with the interests of the agricultural policy of the present Government, as of the last.

My correspondence on the subject of Mr. Williams's farm started with the hon. Gentleman's predecessor, my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, Hillhead (Mr. Galbraith), who, in his letter of 31st March, 1964, explained that the normal compensation in a case of this kind would be, first of all, the market value of the land actually taken and then compensation for injurious affection to other land remaining with Mr. Williams and previously held in the same holding. There is also, of course, possible "disturbance" in relation to the land lost. In this case I doubt whether disturbance is a major element as it is only the loss of certain fields.

Unfortunately, for some reason which is lost in history, the element of good will which is a normal part of disturbance has never been accepted in relation to a farm, so that we are faced with the compensation for the land taken, about which there is no argument, and compensation for injurious affection. This, I understand, will normally be the difference in value, so to speak, before and after—the difference between the value of the farm before it has had this severance and with the buildings intact and the value of the remaining land afterwards, bearing in mind that the buildings, or part of them, will have been destroyed and that it will have been severed to some extent from the rest of the land.

I suggest that this is perhaps not the most satisfactory method at the best of times and that it suffers in this case or in most agricultural cases where land is near large towns and is expensive, from the fact that the value of land is such that one cannot do a satisfactory "before-and-after" valuation that produces a difference which could begin to cover the cost of replacement of the buildings. This is particularly so in this case, because although this land is just in the green belt, it is very close to development, and over the years it has acquired what I believe valuers and the Inland Revenue refer to as "hope value".

In other words, it does not easily change hands at the mere agricultural value nor, indeed, does the Inland Revenue accept an agricultural valuation for death duty purposes. There is an element of expectation that one day the development will move out, and despite the protestations of successive Ministers of Housing and Local Government, the plain fact is that the market will not in such an area as this accept that development will never reach this land.

Unfortunately, this aspect has been aggravated in this area by the fact that on a number of occasions quite prominent members and officials of the county council have expressed the opinion that the M.4 motorway, which will go a little way into Mr. Williams's farm, is the natural edge of the development.

However that may be, it is a fact that there is a tendency for the quality and agricultural value of the buildings and land to be greatly undervalued when based on the difference between a before-and-after valuation. Mr. Williams wants to continue to farm, and it is absurd to face the proposition that compensation based on this method may well not cover the rebuilding of the essential farm buildings. This is what he very much fears will happen. Again, this case is complicated by the fact that part of Mr. Williams's land is rented and part is in his own ownership. Nevertheless, owing to the Agricultural Holdings Act, his security of tenure is pretty sound for the rented land, and it is strengthened by the green belt location, because the possibility of development seems to be the only reason for which the owner would wish to disturb Mr. Williams, and that is not likely to arise at any rate in the immediate future.

Because compensation is, of necessity, mainly related to the land in actual ownership, because of a curious fiction of English law that farmland is merely on an annual tenancy—although no farmer in his senses would make the necessary investment on such a basis—this will result in undervaluing the buildings because the loss will be related mainly to a much smaller parcel of land, which I suppose, presumably, could be farmed, if it were not for the rented land, with fewer buildings.

The crux is that the district valuer— and he is the hon. Gentleman's agent in this matter—has told Mr. Williams in effect, "If you like to get some plans, we will consider whether the compensation should not be based on the cost of replacement; but what we will not do is to meet your expenses of preparing the plans". Mr. Williams is thus on the horns of a dilemma. He may incur the expense of an architect and drawings, and so on, and then be told, after all that, that is not a method which will be acceptable, and that will then be entirely abortive expenditure. I want to ask the Parliamentary Secretary whether he will look at this again and see whether he does not agree that in this case this is the proper way in which compensation should he paid.

I do not think that there is any question of law. If there were, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, you would rule me out of order. As I understood the letter of my hon. Friend the Member for Hillhead. from which, I am sure, the hon. Gentleman does not dissent, there is a discretion in the Ministry, because he went on to say that in certain circumstances the Ministry might consider financing certain works in lieu of making monetary compensation. He gave an example slightly inappropriate to my case, namely, financing a new access or something of that sort, but it seems to me that in this case the only sensible way of restoring the position is to finance the rebuilding of these farm buildings.

I have not refreshed my memory for a number of years, but I recollect that there was what used to be known as Rule 5 of the 1919 valuation rules which were re-enacted in the 1959 legislation and the 1961 compensation legislation. In effect, Rule 5 says that where a property in itself has no general market value, there is a discretion in the tribunal, the deciding body, to accept the cost of reasonable reinstatement, or the reasonable cost of reinstatement—I am not sure which, but I am sure that the Parliamentary Secretary understands my meaning—as the basis of compensation.

Farm buildings of themselves are not readily saleable objects, of course. Nobody wants a farm building just standing there and yet that is the position with which we are now faced. The Ministry is not buying the farm, but destroying farm buildings on the farm, and the actual purchase is simply the site of the farm buildings. This is on all fours with the generally accepted type of case which falls under the old Rule 5.

I do not think that he is in any way stretching the law if the Parliamentary Secretary tells his agents to behave in a commonsense way in dealing with this matter, and I hope that he will agree that in cases of this sort this is the only sensible way in which to redress the damage which has been done, on the basis that the underlying idea of all our compensation law has always been to reestablish the aggrieved person in, as far as possible, a financial position no better and no worse than he was before. This is the only way to do it in this case and I hope that the Parliamentary Secretary will look at it sympathetically.

The other case which I want briefly to mention—and I hope that I am not trespassing too much on the hon. Gentleman's time—refers to a Mr. Edwards, who owns what amounts to a small hamlet near Hambrook. He owns four houses, or cottages, three of which are occupied by himself and relations and the fourth of which is tenanted, although I believe that the tenant is a former employee.

The tenanted house is attached to one of the others and is to be knocked down to make way for this road. The end of that from which it is removed will have to be patched up, of course. I do not think that there is any great difference between us on this. Where we cross swords a little is on this curious phrase of injurious affection. Opposite the place where the house is to be demolished there is to be an embankment 20 ft. high. The Ministry say that on the land actually taken from Mr. Edwards the embankment reaches only 7 ft. and that anybody can put up a 7 ft. wall without getting planning permission. "Are you not lucky that someone did not do it before?" says the Ministry.

That is nonsense. These four little houses are out in the middle of the country—I think that it is green belt—where there is not a fear of anybody building a wall anywhere, let alone a house or anything next door. If the Parliamentary Secretary wants to know, I suggest that he goes and tries to get planning permission for a chicken house.

We have the ludricrous situation in which it is said that because Mr. Edwards would not be able to prevent anybody from putting up a 20-ft. high wall next door, he should not have any compensation for injurious affection, simply because it is just conceivable that the person next door might have been allowed to do so before the operation of the planning Acts. What is quite certain is that unless the whole policy of the Ministry of Housing and Local Government has been thrown to the winds, the planning authorities have always been adjured not to do silly things like that and to have regard for neighbourliness.

In this case, the hon. Gentleman has quoted to me a Court of Appeal case—curiously enough, also concerning somebody named Edwards—of Edwards v. Ministry of Transport. I accept that that may be the law. I accept that as a result of that, the law is that Mr. Edwards cannot claim more than the Minister says that he proposes to give him. I do not, however, accept that that means that the Minister cannot give him more, because there is a degree of discretion in these things.

Although I should not like to go into details at this hour, I assure the Parliamentary Secretary that there are a number of precedents in which Government Departments, despite the fact that an item of compensation comes under a recognised heading for which a statutory claim can be made, have, nevertheless, added an ex gratia payment in addition for one reason or another of this sort.

I hope, therefore, that the hon. Gentleman will look again at these two cases, which illustrate, perhaps not in a major way, although it is a fairly major problem in the case of Mr. Williams, how a great public project, from which nobody, certainly not these two men, dissents, can gravely interfere with private rights, in the one case with the whole economy of a successful though small farm, whose owner does not have a great deal of capital resources, and in the other case with a small community whose loss no financial compensation can entirely make good. In these cases, the very small extra financial compensation which is involved, a minute proportion of the cost of the project, would be money well spent. It is something which the public owe and which they expect their representative, the Minister, to pay on their behalf.

I hope that the Minister will be sympathetic towards this appeal.

10.58 p.m.

The Joint Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Transport (Mr. Stephen Swingler)

In replying to the hon. Member for Gloucestershire, South (Mr. Corfield) in this Adjournment debate, I bear in mind the hon. Member's experience not only as a Member of the House, but as a member of the previous Government, and the fact that we in the present Government have inherited certain principles of the law relating to compensation in these respects for which we are not responsible and which we are bound to apply.

Mr. Corfield

It is right to remind the hon. Gentleman that when I introduced market value compensation, his party voted against it.

Mr. Swingler

I am not entering into that controversy. I only say that the hon. Gentleman put his case fairly high. When he put it to some of his hon. Friends at previous times, he got some rough replies. We shall see what kind of an answer he gets tonight.

Before I come to the cases which the hon. Gentleman has raised, of which he gave me notice, I should like to say a few words about the general background of the problem. It concerns the acquisition of land for the M.4 motorway. The fact is that we in the Ministry of Transport wish to press forward with the building of the M.4 motorway in Gloucestershire.

As the hon. Gentleman well knows, this will be a most important section of road, linking with the Severn Bridge and eventually providing a through route to London. Work on the motorway between the Bridge and Almondsbury is well advanced and between Almondsbury and Hambrook we have been building for about a year. Only today, work was due to begin on the 8-mile section between Hambrook and Tormarton. We are in a persistent state of conflicting pressures on this subject. On the one hand, we are continually being urged to build more roads more quickly, especially to build motorways more quickly; on the other hand, we are being urged to pay more careful attention and to give more protracted consideration to those whose property and possible livelihood are affected by the building of those roads.

In the case of this stretch of motorway progress towards completion of all the various land transactions involved has gone along quite normally without exceptional difficulties. Only three compulsory purchase orders have been necessary, and we have taken over all the land, except for five interests, to enable work to start. Of course, we do not expect final completion, including compensation payments, to be as advanced as that, but this is quite understandable. Very often, vendors want to wait till a roadway is complete so that the injurious affect to the land they retain can be assessed more easily. This is the basis of the problems to which the hon. Gentleman has drawn our attention, and I turn immediately to the case of Mr. Williams.

Mr. Williams, of Wick Wick Farm, was an objector to the original draft motorway scheme and sideroad order which was made as far back as 1961 and 1962. He was particularly keen to avoid any realignment of the Badminton Road, the A.432, which runs beside his farm. An inspector went down to an inquiry in 1962 and he reported that Mr. Williams preferred the variation which he recommended so long as no diversion of the A.432 was associated with it, but the inspector considered that even if an A.432 realignment was necessary his proposed variation would be justified in the interests of the residents of Downend. In the event the revised scheme did involve the realignment to which Mr. Williams objected on the ground that unnecessary demolition of certain outbuildings, and in particular the barn, would be required. Mr. Williams's solicitors were advised that his suggestion had been given very careful and prolonged consideration, but owing to the technical problem of realignment of this particular road it could not be adopted.

Now I come to the point after I had arrived in the Ministry of Transport, in November, 1964, after the hon. Gentleman had had considerable correspondence with my predecessor. He wrote again to us about the need to realigning the Badminton Road and about the demolition of Mr. Williams's stone barn. He asked that a senior official of the Department should visit Mr. Williams and discuss the problem with his advisers. We agreed to arrange for an official to have an informal meeting with Mr. Williams, and in a further letter of 3rd December gave a full explanation of the reasons for realigning the road and the unfortunate necessity for the demolition of the barn.

The hon. Gentleman again wrote to us in February concerning the payment of architects' fees, the basis of compensation, and the interim cropping of the land to be taken. In the reply which I made the basis on which compensation would be assessed was explained in some detail, and particular the basic point that the measure that the Compensation due is the present market value of the land taken—this is what is required by law—and the injurious effect to the land retained, and it is not, of course, determined by the cost of any replacement work which has to be undertaken by the owner, in this case for the purpose of replacing a barn, if he so wishes.

Therefore, under the law there is no question of our being able to pay for architect's fees for the building of a new barn because these are costs of replacement work. We cannot pay them.

Mr. Corfield

I think that, if he is basing his reply on that argument, the hon. Gentleman must turn his mind to the discretion in Rule 5 of the 1919 Rules.

Mr. Swingler

Rule 5 of the 1919 Rules applies to such things as church halls, parish halls, and other places where different considerations apply, where it is not possible to assess the market value. Here, we are dealing with the industry of agriculture, and with the assessment of market value, and it is clear that the law puts on us the duty to determine the present market value and the injurious affection to the land retained, and we cannot make the cost of replacement a determining factor. That has been the situation for years. Therefore, in the light of the letters that we sent, I ask the hon. Gentleman to ask his constituent, Mr. Williams, to enter into positive negotiations with the district valuer as soon as possible so that he can consider the practical details of this case.

A protracted argument has been going on with my predecessors and myself about this. I think that far more progress would be made if practical details could be considered, but this cannot happen until Mr. Williams enters into positive negotiations with the district valuer. It is not reasonable to expect the district valuer to make a firm or final offer until the claim for compensation has been properly formulated by the vendor himself. Therefore, since this is the state of the law at the moment, and this is what we are statutorily bound to do, I hope that Mr. Williams will enter into practical negotiations to see whether we can make progress.

I turn now to the case of Mr. Edwards, of Rock House, Hambrook. The Ministry of Transport has had an equally lengthy and detailed correspondence with the hon. Gentleman about this case. I have to be careful about what I say regarding this case, so as not to infringe the rules of an Adjournment debate in dealing with legislation.

The fact is that Rock House is tenanted by Mr. Edwards's son, and we are acquiring only a portion of the garden. The land taken will form part of the embankment to the motorway, rising to a height of 8½ feet on the land being taken from Mr. Edwards, but eventually reaching 20 feet on the adjoining land.

The compensation for injurious affection which Mr. Edwards is entitled to can only be based on the injurious affection caused by the works being carried out on the land taken from him, in this case the erection of an embankment overlooking the property to a height of 8½ feet. That is the law. It has been the law for a very long time. It has been the law for the time during which the hon. Gentleman has been a Member of this House, and a not undistinguished member of the former Government. That is the position, and the fact that the embankment rises to a height of 20 feet near this point can have no bearing on the compensation which is paid.

The hon. Gentleman indicated that this was confirmed as being the law by the decision recently given judicially in the Court of Appeal in the case that happens to be of the same name, that of Edwards v. the Ministry of Transport. Therefore, Mr. Edwards is not entitled to compensation for injurious affection arising from the presence of the motorway adjacent to his property, or for disturbance from noise, flashing lights of motor cars, and other things of that kind. We should be going very wide if we started to consider factors of that sort.

The hon. Gentleman has argued that under the Town and Country Planning Act no private individual would get planning permission to erect any form of structure approaching 20 feet in height, or even 8 feet, on the boundary of neighbouring residential property. In these circumstances he has contended that my right hon. Friend, who is not subject to the Planning Acts, should at least compensate vendors fully for the loss of amenity caused when the public interest requires structures of this nature, like embankments for motorways, to be constructed.

In my reply of 9th April, I pointed out that the basis of the hon. Gentleman's argument was unsound. Planning permission would not necessarily be refused for a structure with a long face of 8 feet or more in height, which is what is happening near the land being taken from Mr. Edwards. The importance of it, of course, would be taken into account but in any case there is no obvious reason why an owner should be entitled to claim more in compensation from a public authority which is carrying out a statutory function of acquiring land in order to build new roads, which the people of that country are demanding than he would be able to get if he attempted to sue his neighbour for things done on that land of that neighbour.

Therefore, what the hon. Gentleman is asking for in this case quite plainly goes beyond what the law of the land provides in relation to compensation to those whose property is acquired for purposes like the construction of motorways and other forms of development.

The hon. Gentleman really knows this because he has carried some responsi- bility for the state of this law, and he knows what it quite clearly provides and what has been upheld in the courts as to its provisions for some time. It is plain that hon. Gentlemen opposite have very great expectations from a new Labour Government, but as we have had to say before we are not able to do all things at once, to change all these laws, revise all these processes, immediately. In regard to this question, which, of course, involves public expenditure—

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 twelve minutes past Eleven o'clock.