LICENSED PREMISES (TENEMENT PROPERTY) (Hansard, 11 April 1974)

§ Mr. Robin F. Cook (Edinburgh, Central)

I am grateful for the opportunity provided by this Adjournment debate to raise an issue of very grave concern to many of my constituents. I represent an inner city constituency and the overwhelming majority of its residents live in traditional Scottish tenements—solid stone buildings four or five storeys high and containing a dozen to 20 flats opening off a common stair.

There is a lot to be said for the traditional Scottish tenement. It has undoubtedly helped to foster within our city centres a strong sense of local community spirit. This is partly because the building provides reasonable access to facilities near by. It is also a remarkably efficient way of combining reasonable privacy with a high building density. It provides convenient access to local facilities such as corner shops, post offices, cafés and newsagents which are the mortar of a successful society and community. It is, no doubt, largely because of these three advantages that my constituents have such a strong attachment to their area and have increasingly and rightly demanded that the corporation revise proposals for road and other developments which would otherwise involve the demolition of many sound tenement dwellings.

Unfortunately, in the commercial character which is common to the ground floor of many tenements there is always the danger that there will arise a new business which is not suitable within a building which is mainly residential. My constituents are particularly concerned by the growing pressure from the licensed trade to open new public houses on the ground floor of their tenements. It is now more common than not when a comparatively innocuous shop or warehouse falls available for sale that the local authority will be confronted with an application for planning permission for change of use to a public house.

It may give some idea of the scale of the problem if I tell the House that I understand that there were five such applications before the Edinburgh planning committee last week alone. Each of these 735 applications illustrates a serious weakness in our planning procedure, namely, that there is no obligation on the applicant to inform his neighbours of the impending doom of their property. If I want to erect a boundary wall, if I even wish to insert a new window in the gable end of my building, I am obliged by the building regulations to apply for permission to the Dean of Guild Court and first to serve notice on my neighbour. If, however, I propose to open a pub immediately below my neighbour's home there is no obligation on me to notify him that I have applied for planning permission. even though the consequences for him are far greater than the minor building works about which he has every right to be informed.

This is a serious anomaly in our procedure, and I would draw the attention of the Minister to a letter from the Scottish Development Department to all planning authorities in June 1971, which announced that the Secretary of State proposed "shortly" to give planning authorities the power to require applicants to inform those neighbours who were likely to be affected by any contentious proposal. This order was never made by the last Government, and I would strongly urge the Minister to bring it in at an early date and to end the situation where residents of a tenement do not even have the right to know that an application has been made to open a pub below them.

In any case, there can surely be no doubt that the development of new pubs is not suitable within the very same building as that in which ordinary families, often with young children, have made their home. I know from having spoken to many such residents the very bitter sense of betrayal and shock which they experience when such an application is granted. They face a very real loss of amenity. There will now be a continuous noise within the property, perhaps from the very floor below, and this will be at its worst in the evenings when the whole family is at home and seeking some peace.

Moreover, a modern pub where considerable expenditure has been made on providing music and possibly live entertainment, adds to the discomfort of its immediate neighbours. In addition, however quiet the pub, however localised its 736 noise, the whole street is liable to be shattered for half an hour late at night as the revellers disperse, say their goodnights and bang their car doors. Finally, no matter how good the management of the pub and no matter how hard they strive to maintain a respectable clientele, it is virtually certain that every morning when the neighbours come down to work they will regularly encounter a stair and a passage which was fouled the night before.

In saying this, I do not wish to imply any criticism of those who make their living out of running a pub. I should perhaps declare a personal interest in the subject. I myself live in a tenement at the foot of which there is a café whose owner has repeatedly applied for change of use to a public house. I have every confidence in the owner of the café, and I know that if she did receive permission to open a public house it would be a decent and respectable house. I concede also that the licensed trade involves hard work and very long hours for those who work in it, and it provides a service which is much appreciated. Nevertheless, I and my neighbours, and my constituents, have every right to demand that this trade be carried on in premises where it will not interfere with the privacy and peace of our homes.

I, therefore, seek a clear statement on how the Government stand on this issue. I do so in the hope that the Minister will take this opportunity to say that he intends to protect the amenity and privacy of residential property against this kind of intrusion. It is important that we have such a clear statement of policy at the start of this new administration.

In recent years, the planning committee of Edinburgh Corporation, of which I was privileged to be a member before my election, has taken a consistent line in refusing applications for change of use within tenement properties because of the considerations to which I have referred. In fact, we have refused 37 such applications within the past two years.

However, each applicant has a right of appeal to the Secretary of State, and I am sorry to say that, under the Tory Government, we found that some of these appeals were being upheld. Of the four most recent such appeals, two succeeded and two failed.

737 This half-hearted attitude to the amenity of residential property can only encourage licensees to appeal. Indeed, there are at present nine such appeals pending against decisions of the Edinburgh planning committee alone, including one very controversial application within my own constituency, at Montpelier, where any pub would be wholly out of character with the peaceful and entirely residential nature of the area.

Such appeals are very trying for the neighbours involved, for two reasons. First, an appeal means that they have to live for over a year with a serious threat hanging over their property. Second, they face the considerable trouble and expense of arranging to be represented at a public inquiry.

I strongly urge my hon. Friend, therefore, to give us an undertaking that he will consistently use his planning powers to protect the amenity of the homes of my constituents, both because such an undertaking would discourage the substantial rate of appeal which has been created by the inconsistent policies of his predecessor, and because it would compel the licensed trade to concentrate its search for new premises in buildings which are primarily commercial, where it would not detract from the amenity of citizens' homes.

The Minister of State, Scottish Office (Mr. Bruce Milan)

I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh, Central (Mr. Cook) for raising this matter. The location of licensed premises may not be a major planning issue in the sense that we commonly understand the matter, but it is one of great local interest and sometimes of considerable local concern. I know that it is a matter of particular concern in Edinburgh, where there have been a large number of applications of the kind which my hon. Friend described.

Perhaps I should start by setting the appeals which come to the Secretary of State in the context of our general planning procedures. As my hon. Friend knows, planning begins with the development plan prepared by the local planning authority, setting out the proposals and policies of the authority. At present, all development plans and all amendments to development plans must be approved by the Secretary of State. The situation 738 will change following local government reorganisation, but that is how the matter stands at the moment.

However, it is impracticable for any development plan to cover every detail. The plan sets out the land uses for each area, but in many cases these can be only predominating uses, not sole uses. Common sense and the needs of the situation dictate that uses other than the predominating one in any area will have to be allowed to intrude to some extent. It is a matter of judgment for the local planning authority whether any particular intrusion is so significant as to alter the character of the development plan and hence to breach the policy stated or implied by the plan.

This problem of predominating rather than sole use particularly affects residential areas in the inner areas of cities, as my hon. Friend has explained. It is inevitable that in these areas houses must to some extent be mixed up with shops, cafés, laundries, petrol filling stations, commercial garages, pubs and other commercial premises.

The development control system provides machinery for the submission, consideration, approval or, for that matter, rejection of planning applications as a means of implementing the development plan system and dealing with points of detail which cannot be included in the development plans themselves. Generally, local planning authorities have regarded pubs as matters which could not sensibly he covered in development plans and have relied on the development control system. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State sees no reason to dispute this view. Control of the location of pubs seems to be very much a local matter, and we should be chary of laying down principles about it from the centre unless a very clear need to do so emerged.

My right hon. Friend becomes involved in some individual planning applications including planning applications involving pubs. Anyone refused planning permission, has the right of appeal to my right hon. Friend and in effect his only responsibility in relation to the siting of pubs arises in the context of planning appeals. Although few, if any, local planning authorities have policies for pubs in their development plans, planning committees, as in Edinburgh, sometimes frame policies about the location of pubs for their own 739 guidance in handling planning applications.

Where a planning appeal concerning a pub comes before the Secretary of State the local planning authority's evidence will of course include a statement of this policy and the Secretary of State's decision letter will contain an indication whether or not he accepts the policy. Even when he accepts the policy, that does not mean that in every case he will agree with the planning authority about the matter of the appeal. Overall circumstances have to be taken into account, but the Secretary of State would not readily go against a strictly local policy in a matter of this kind. Nevertheless, he must take account of the evidence put before him on each appeal, as is his statutory duty, and that evidence includes among other things, the apparent degree of local objection to the policy.

My hon. Friend mentioned a number of cases in which the Edinburgh Corporation had refused planning permission for the change of use to licensed premises of former commercial premises situated below residential flats. Both the applicants in these cases exercised their right of appeal to the Secretary of State—in these cases the previous Secretary of State —and after a local public inquiry with an independent Reporter the Secretary of State decided to sustain the appeals and grant planning permission. My hon. Friend is aware that there were two subsequent cases where the appeals were turned down.

The decisions of the Secretary of State on planning appeals are by law final, subject only to any challenge which might be made at the court of session on points of law. That being so, it is improper for me to elaborate on the reasons why the Secretary of State allowed the two earlier successful appeals that I have mentioned. It would be improper for me also to go over the merits of the proposals. In these cases, a full range of evidence was given on traffic and amenity issues and in neither case did any objector come forward at the inquiry. In both cases the then Secretary of State's decision accorded with the recommendations of the Reporter.

The cases my hon. Friend referred to specifically came under the previous ad- 740 ministration and I do not seek to import any particular significance into that. However, I can assure my hon. Friend that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State shares the view that in modern conditions it is generally undesirable for licensed premises to be located immediately beneath residential property.

This, of course, was once common practice in Scotland. It dates from the days when towns were much more cramped than now, and perhaps from the days when the wish for privacy was less marked than it is now. But even now it cannot be altogether avoided, as in certain circumstances pubs may be located under tenement property. The situation in a particular area may make that an exception to the kind of general view that I have expressed.

I have to stress that my right hon. Friend is bound to found every planning appeal decision on the evidence taken at the inquiry, against the background of any policy affecting the issue. However, I do not wish to derogate in any way from what I have said about the general undesirability of having licensed premises located immediately under residential property, and I state that on behalf of the Secretary of State.

I come to the other subject raised by the hon. Member—the notification of neighbours. This is a familiar problem, affecting a wide range of planning applications, not just specifically applications for public houses. Over the years, there have been many attempts to argue that neighbours should be individually notified of planning applications as they are of applications under the building regulations.

However, there are differences in the character of these applications. Building regulations applications affect neighbours because the manner of building may affect the specific legal rights of a neighbour. It may cause flooding on his land, or deprive his structure of support, or have other deleterious effects on his existing interests. Further, these possibilities can affect only immediate neighbours.

However, planning applications raise different and wider issues. They may well affect far more than immediate neighbours. Indeed, there are some circumstances in which people rather further away from the proposed development are 741 affected more than those who are closer to it. There therefore arises considerable difficulty in defining the kind of people who should be individually notified on applications of that sort.

That being so, given the problems in this respect, it may be rather more profitable to consider the general advertising of planning applications likely to be controversial. Two problems arise: the first is to ensure that the right applications are advertised, that is, those likely to give rise to controversy ; the second is to ensure that the right people see the advertisements. On the first problem—local authorities may already advertise any applications that they think should be advertised, and by law certain kinds of applications have to be advertised by the applicants. I am glad to say that the Government intend to add licensed premises to that last category.

That will require a general development order. I am not yet able to say precisely when that will be available, but it will not be long delayed, and licensed premises will then be added to the category of compulsory advertising.

We shall be introducing proposals for posting on site notices of applications to ensure that the right people see the advertisement. It is difficult to work out 742 a satisfactory definition of the classes of case to be covered. I assure my hon. Friend, however, that licensed premises will be included and that notices will have to be posted on site. In the kind of cases about which he is concerned that is just as good as individual application because, obviously the tenants and neighbours will be able to see the advertisements. These changes will come about quite soon, I hope, although I cannot give a specific time.

I think my hon. Friend can accept that my right hon. Friend and I are in substantial agreement with what he has said. We are reluctant to prescribe a policy to local planning authorities in such a matter, but this is something we can keep under review. One of the considerations to be borne in mind is the number of applications and appeals that come in on such matters. As for giving people notice of what is happening and making rules about objection, and so on, much more effective, I hope that the changes I have said we are to introduce will bring about a considerable improvement.