NEW PROVISION AS TO ENFORCEMENT NOTICES (Hansard, 23 October 1968)

§ The Joint Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Housing and Local Government (Mr. James MacColl)
I beg to move. That this House does agree with the Lords in the said Amendment.

§ Mr. Speaker
With this Amendment, I suggest that we take Lords Amendment No. 21.

§ Mr. MacColl
This is one of a series of Amendments which substitutes references to the beginning or the end of the year for a date in the middle of a month. Knowing the great capacity of the hon. Member for Crosby (Mr. Graham Page) for demagoguery, I hope that he will not start a campaign, "Give us back our eleven days", because the change will help the developer, who will have more time to prepare himself and adjust his affairs.

§ Mr. Graham Page
I assure the hon. Gentleman that I will not start any such campaign. I welcome the Amendment very much. It is far more convenient in practice to have things of this sort starting at the end or beginning of a year than trying to remember a date such as, for example, 20th December. I hope that on a later Amendment the hon. Gentleman will accept a similar principle. I shall remind him of it.

§ Mr. MacColl
I beg to move, That this House doth agree with the Lords in the said Amendment.

§ Mr. Speaker
I suggest that we take at the same time Lords Amendment No. 17.

§ Mr. MacColl
The Amendments together deal with the service of enforcement notices under Clause 14. Their effect is to put upon the local authority the duty to consider whether other people who are not directly involved in the enforcement notice but who have a substantial interest should have notice of the orders.

§ Mr. James Allason (Hemel Hempstead)
The Opposition have constantly pressed that there should be no danger that somebody who is affected by an enforcement notice should not hear about it. The wording is being distinctly improved in that it is now no longer at the option of the local planning authority to decide whether to serve a notice on a person who is materially affected.
1415 An effect of the two Amendments is that it is open to the local planning authority to have an opinion that a person is not affected and, therefore, fail to serve him with the notice. We are, however, grateful for this substantial improvement in the direction in which the Opposition have urged.

§ Mr. Clegg
I beg to move, as an Amendment to the proposed Amendment, at end add: 'and to the Minister's power to make an order as to the payment of costs, incurred before the withdrawal, in preparation of or for an appeal to the Minister'. The object of this Amendment is to provide for the payment of costs after the withdrawal of an enforcement notice. The Clause gives the local authority power at any time to withdraw an enforcement notice. The Amendment seeks to enable the local authority to do that without prejudice to instituting another enforcement notice at a later stage.
The situation will, however, undoubtedly arise where an enforcement order has been issued and a person on whom it has been served has incurred considerable costs in preparing, possibly, for an appeal and going into the background of the planning permission. This could mean the employment of solicitors and surveyors and considerable work.
It may well be that the local authority, when it issued the enforcement notice, did so without thorough investigation. We on this side think that if that is the case, the Minister should have power to award costs when an enforcement notice is withdrawn.

§ Mr. MacColl
I cannot recommend the House to accept this Amendment to the Lords Amendment. It is, I think, clear that under Section 64(1) of the principal Act the Minister has power to award costs in relation to any proceedings before him on an appeal. That would apply to an appeal against an enforcement notice as much as to any other appeal. The effect of this Amendment 1416 to the Lords Amendment would be to give him power to intervene by awarding costs in something which never reaches him at all, because this would be something going on between the developer and the local authority and it would be very difficult for the Minister to be called upon to interfere in a matter of that sort. There are so many things which can go wrong leading to the withdrawal of a notice and, possibly, the substitution of another. Knowledge of the facts may have been mistaken, something may have misled the authority as to what the position is, and it is not fair to the authority to think it is a matter in which it must necessarily be to blame. The whole business of trying to enforce planning decisions is bad enough without putting this extra burden of costs on the local authority, and I could not advise the House to do it.

§ Mr. Graham Page
That is a most disappointing answer. Surely the Minister is aware that the local authority has served an enforcement notice, and the person on whom it is served makes his preparations for defending himself against that notice and appealing, and the local authority withdraws the notice and serves another, so that there is a continuous application, as it were, by the local authority against the owner or developer. Surely, where the local authority is correcting its own enforcement notice by withdrawing one and issuing another, one should look upon the case as a continuous proceeding, and there should be a right to the person who is served with the notice to recover costs he has incurred.