HC Deb 18 June 1984 vol 62 cc116-24

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

10 pm

Mr. John Heddle (Mid-Staffordshire)

I am most grateful to you, Mr. Speaker, for having selected, as the subject of tonight's Adjournment, Britain's wasted acres and the case for a national land use survey, particularly on an evening when the House will be allowed to adjourn at a relatively early hour. I am also grateful to my hon. Friend the Minister for having taken the time and the trouble, after a very busy day, to come here and respond to the debate.

The timing is particularly fortuitous for two other reasons. The first is that five days ago, as the House will recall, the Select Committee on Environment under the able chairmanship of my hon. Friend the Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Sir H. Rossi), published its report on green belt and land for housing. My hon. Friend the Chairman of the Select Committee very much regrets that constituency business prevents him from being able to be in the Chamber this evening.

The timing is fortuitous, secondly, because, four days ago, as you will recall, Mr. Speaker, the House debated — and the reply was given by my hon. Friend the Minister—the subject of the arts and the heritage. I was unable to be here on that day, but I read the Official Report over the weekend, and not once did any hon. Member, on either side of the Chamber, refer to our land as being part of our heritage.

I submit that Mark Twain got it half right when he said: Purchase land. They ain't making it any more. If he had been here in this Chamber in the latter half of the 20th century, I think he would have said: "Preserve land. Not only ain't they making it any more, it's our most valuable natural national resource." Yet, despite that, we as a nation seem to take land for granted. We cause it to become derelict and we despoil it. We ignore it and its maximum use at our peril.

I yield to no one in my admiration for what my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and his ministerial colleagues in this Parliament and in the last have done to alert the nation's attention to the fact that there are many thousands of acres which, before our very eyes, are left derelict, despoiled, neglected and unwanted.

I yield to no one in my admiration for what the Government have done in bringing that land forward—as far as they are able to do so—for development, in encouraging that development with urban development grants and derelict land grants, ensuring that the owners of public land do not take that land for granted, as perhaps we, as pedestrians or drivers, have done, and compiling land registers.

If time permits, I propose to make one or two criticisms of the implementation of the vacant land registers. But I ask my hon. Friend whether, perhaps, as a nation, we may be guilty of squandering land as though we lived in the middle of some vast undeveloped continent instead of on a small and crowded island. Is not much of our countryside becoming destroyed and fragmented? Are not the hearts of our cities in part becoming rotten and decayed? Has there not been a chain reaction of destruction, not so much because we are wicked and destructive, but rather because as a nation we have become neglectful and wasteful?

The tragedy is that we have only incomplete and incompatible records of what is happening before our very eyes, of how much land is being used and of how those uses have changed over the years, whether or not in the context of industrial change that has taken place with them. I cite as an example the M25 motorway box, which was no doubt assembled by stealth with ministerial consent to provide easy access for traffic wanting to skirt the metropolis. Is there anyone within the Department of the Environment who is able to assess the demand for industrial development, factory and warehouse space, distribution space, for housing and the attendant facilities such as schools, shops or offices within the motorway box, based on the information, statistics and data that are at his fingertips?

The motorway is the responsibility of the Department of the Environment and the adjacent development is the responsibility of the adjacent county planning authorities which devolve their powers to some extent to adjacent local planning authorities. I wonder whether we can have an overall picture as a result. I submit that, in the age of the computer, there can be no excuse for not having such information available at the touch of a button, or at the flick of a finger.

Let me give the House one or two statistics to show how prodigal we have been in the recent past. In the five years between 1975 and 1980 our nation lost about 500,000 acres of grade I or II productive agricultural land to some use or other. That area is equivalent to the county of Gloucestershire.

Wasteland that lies idle, derelict, dormant or despoiled in our cities and towns, and even in our villages, is still increasing. By the end of the 1970s we had enough wasteland on which to rebuild, if we had wanted to, all of the 34 new towns that the House, in its wisdom, has created in times past, with space left to spare.

Let me put it another way. The wasteland that has been identified in vacant land registers is about 250,000 acres. I am sure that the amount of vacant land is substantially more than that because land registers deal only with land of more than one acre in size. I am certain that most of the local authorities that contribute the information to land registers have incomplete records of what they own. Those 250,000 acres are sufficient to cater for 5 million families, and to provide homes for 15 million people.

I must ask my right hon. Friend whether we are reinstating the land that county planning authorities designate for mineral extraction purposes. I believe that a condition is imposed by local planning authorities on granting licences to mine for whatever purpose, to the effect that the licence holder, the freeholder or leaseholder must reinstate the land after it has been worked. But how many mineral operators leave those areas almost completely mined, but not quite and so avoid the necessity of reinstating the land to its former use as agricultural land, or to leisure or recreation purposes or for housing?

I understand that the Department of the Environment has identified about 350,000 acres that has been mined but not yet put back into an unspoiled and non-derelict state. Other estimates put the acreage of wasteland due to mineral operations at about 700,000 acres, or the equivalent of the whole of the curtilage of my county of Staffordshire. There is a great difference between 350,000 and 700,000 acres. There are two different views, neither one nor the other being necessarily correct. In the absence of a national land use survey, it is impossible to quantify the amount of land that is so despoiled.

We have what we might call "bufferland": the sterile interface land between industry and other urban or rural activities. It is blighted, underused or vacant because of its former industrial use, its close proximity to an airport or motorway or because it is close to land with an existing industrial use and is perhaps subject to fumes or toxic waste. Estimates of such blighted wasteland vary from 750,000 acres to well over 1 million acres. However, in total we are talking about the staggering figure of 2.5 million acres, for which we have no national record as to its past, present or future use. I am talking about 5 per cent. of our total land surfaces, or an area equivalent to the combined counties of Gloucestershire, Wiltshire and Hampshire that is lying derelict, despoiled, underused and idle.

I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will acknowledge that there is widespread and growing concern about that huge loss and its social and economic consequences. Of course, there are many organisations concerned with parts of the total problem, and with conservation of particular areas at risk, with the loss of a hedgerow or of a species of butterfly. They do a marvellous job, but we and they must never lose sight of the total picture of national land loss. There is a danger that that will be overlooked because of purely local worries.

One organisation that persuaded me to accept its fine of argument and provided me with a number of the statistics that I produce for the House tonight was the Land Council, which has made a submission to my hon. Friend the Minister and to the Select Committee, which reported last week. My hon. Friend is as aware as I am of the Town and Country Planning Act 1947, although he will be much better acquainted with the details of it. It sought to implement a rational use of land. It is the envy of many other countries, particularly in Europe, but it has not helped to implement that rational use of land. There is still no agreed knowledge as to how we currently use our land nation-wide. Neither that Act nor any subsequent Town and Country Planning Act has provided the resources to enable us to find out.

Is nothing, then, being done? My hon. Friend will be aware of the commission, recently announced, to ask the Ordnance Survey to undertake what will amount to reporting land use change. But I submit that the enterprise will be hampered by two particular drawbacks. First, it will have no ability to measure changes in land use, as there is no common, agreed baseline or classification system from which to measure. Secondly, the surveys will be partial and random, and accurate results from the whole country cannot be extrapolated from such sample surveys. There is, too, a project being run by the Countryside Commission and the Nature Conservancy Council to monitor some aspects —but only some — of landscape change.

Random surveys that are based on arbitrary classifications will not fit the national bill, however useful they may be to individual organisations locally. My hon. Friend may argue that derelict land registers will surely provide the answer that I seek. As I have said, I welcome the registers, and if we had them earlier we might have headed off some of the inner city problems, because private capital might have been prepared to invest. However, it has not done so, because it was not aware that the land was lying, derelict, despoiled and neglected before our very eyes.

I should stress that I am talking about a national survey that is specifically related to land use. No part of my proposal refers in any detail to the proposition put forward by Dr. Alice Coleman that there should be a national survey of land ownership. My hon. Friend will be aware of the first report of the Environment Committee, which was published last Wednesday. Indeed, I paid tribute to it earlier. It recommends that a pilot study should first be commissioned using a number of methods including that proposed by the Land Council and the results evaluated against the results of the Ordnance Survey-based project already commissioned by the Department". I hope that my hon. Friend will consider the cost of setting up a pilot study to provide the records that I believe that the Department will require to monitor the change of land use in future. I believe that it will cost about £250,000 to fund such a study.

Funds could be made available from two Euro-sources. What better time to dwell upon those than in the aftermath of last week's elections to the European Assembly. I refer to the ESPRIT fund, which is designed to explore information systems, and the DG fund which is specifically related to the environment and consumer protection.

As populations have risen so has the destruction of land. A population census every 10 years enables us to understand the forces acting upon it. What could be more logical and valuable than to institute a decennial land use survey to complete the national picture of our island, of its land—its most valuable national resource—and its people to enable us henceforth to use our land sensibly so that we are not profligate with such a vital and irreplaceable resource?

10.15 pm
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Environment (Mr. Neil Macfarlane)

I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Staffordshire (Mr. Heddle) for raising this important subject and for demonstrating that he has had a wide and varied interest in this important issue for a long time. He has identified the wider interest outside the House. My hon. Friend has described the versatility and importance of the whole subject.

The debate on a national land use survey is related closely to the concerns of the recently published report of the Select Committee on the Environment. I pay tribute to its work. It dealt with the need to protect green belts, to encourage urban regeneration and to make adequate land available for development.

The Government's commitment to these aims is enshrined in the circular advice which my Department gives to local authorities in the exercise of their planning functions. I agree that a new comprehensive land use survey, repeated at regular intervals, would be a most useful indicator of how far we are succeeding in our pursuit of these aims and in the preservation of the countryside in general. I endorse what my hon. Friend said about our priceless asset.

The Environment Committee's report on green belt and land for housing was received last week and is being studied. My hon. Friend will appreciate that I cannot make a fuller comment at present. The Government will respond to the report in due course.

The report includes comments on the draft green belt and land for housing circulars published for consultation in February. My right hon. Friend expects to publish these circulars shortly, having taken account of the Committee's comments on them.

Going out on the ground to complete such comprehensive surveys is labour-intensive and therefore costly, especially if they are to be completed in a short space of time and we need to be confident about their accuracy. My Department has therefore for some time been considering other possibilities ranging from ground sample methods to the employment of the new remote sensing devices carried by aircraft or satellite.

Some provide information which can be stored in digital form and processed automatically. Regrettably, in spite of the technical advances which have been made in recent years, I am advised that none of the remote sensing methods available at present offers images with a clarity of resolution sufficient to interpret changes in the extent of urban land use categories with acceptable accuracy. This is especially the case for the survey of the fringes of urban areas where they intermingle with the surrounding countryside.

My Department has also turned to other statistical means of gaining land use information. At present, for net changes out of farmland and into a broad urban use category, we rely on the data supplied by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food from questions asked of farmers in their annual June census. But the statistical reliability of this source is such that the data are made available only at the national level and as annual averages over five years.

Although they are limited in scope, these figures have provided useful measures of the success of our policies guarding against unnecessary loss of agricultural land. These losses should be placed in perspective. About 75 per cent. of English land, where the population pressures are greatest, is still in farming use and another 6 per cent. is under forestry or woodland. These percentages are even higher for Wales and the United Kingdom as a whole.

The Ministry of Agriculture's figures for transfers from agriculture to urban development go back to the 1920s. They show that the average loss to urban development, following the introduction of the town and country planning system, is substantially lower than it was pre-war. The downward trend is best illustrated by the estimates for England and Wales, where the figures are the most complete. They show that transfers from agriculture to a wide range of urban developments, including roads and quarries, averaged about 42,000 acres for each year between 1965 and 1970. But that is compared with yearly averages of 62,000 acres in the 1930s, when there was a boom in house-building. The latest figures available, up to 1981, show much lower averages of 19,000 acres.

I wish to show no complacency. The recession of two or three years ago may well have lowered the figures. Our policies must continue to ensure that only the minimum of agricultural land, preferably of the lowest qualities, is taken for development and that no land is so damaged that it cannot be used, eventually, either for development or farming.

My hon. Friend has been a diligent questioner about the success of the land register initiative in securing the release of unused public land. I share his view entirely. It is true that there is no room for complacency. Some 112,000 acres of idle land are on the registers, and nearly half of it appears to be suitable for development. We cannot afford to let assets lie fallow in this way. But I must beg to differ slightly from my hon. Friend when he says that land registers are not working as they should. Since the scheme began, 9,315 acres of registered land have been sold and a further 4,276 acres have been removed from the registers because the land has been brought into use in the public sector. The six-monthly return for 1 January showed in fact a marked acceleration in this turnover. Moreover, over a third of the land which remains on the registers is available for disposal. The power to direct the disposal of a particular land register site has not been used yet, but my right hon. Friend is ready to use it when he is satisfied that it would be justifiable to do so in relation to a particular site.

In the past, for the three years from 1975 to 1978, statistical information on land use changes was sought from local authorities. It looked to be a promising approach, but most authorities proved unable to supply the information required. On taking office, we reached the conclusion that the results were inadequate in relation to the effort involved and we asked officials to investigate improvements urgently.

My Department has been fortunate in having free access to complete air-photo cover of the country flown by the Royal Air Force in 1969. During the 1970s this was analysed in land use terms by consultants and the results were published in 1978. Unfortunately, such are the limitations on the interpretation of aerial photographs for small areas of development, that the results, although comprehensive in national coverage and giving a very good idea of the broad extent of urban development some 15 years ago, provide use categories which are not relatable in any direct sense to the other sources of land use, stock or change data.

So far, I have referred to the past efforts made by my Department in this direction because it is important to understand them. I am also aware of the considerable work by notable academics in achieving surveys and estimates of urban and rural land use. A first effort at a survey of the whole country was undertaken by Professor Stamp in the 1930s, but that concentrated on rural land utilisation. Estimates of the total urban area, at that time, were derived from it. I am also aware of the work done by Miss Alice Coleman of King's college, London, which my hon. Friend mentioned, in directing a survey on a roughly comparable basis during the 1960s. Inevitably, that also took a long time to complete.

Currently, the Land Decade Educational Council, a private body, has as one of its aims the promotion of further land utilisation surveys at regular intervals. It would like the first one to be completed in 1986—the 900th anniversary of Domesday. But in this connection perhaps I can emphasise the point that neither we nor the council as far as I know, is interested in registers of property holdings on the lines of the original Domesday Book.

The current interest is in what is happening to the broad patterns of the use of our land—for example, its use for housing or industry or agriculture, the scenic patterns of the landscape, and its coverage of fields, woodlands and natural features — all of which my hon. Friend mentioned — to provide policy indications for the Government, its agencies, such as the Countryside Commission and the Nature Conservancy Council, and the local authorities of how far planning and conservation policies are guiding change.

With this aim very much in our minds, and taking note of constructive comments from outside bodies, the Department has recently undertaken some further initiatives in the development of methods for monitoring change and periodic survey. For the past two or three years, departmental efforts in this direction have been devoted mainly to the possibilities of gaining up-to-date information about change in urban land use, especially developments on agricultural land, and about changes to rural landscape features. We have taken the view that a better understanding of the rate and pattern of change appears to offer the most effective means of providing early results for evaluating our policies rather than seeking the full picture of our stock of land uses or landscape coverage.

Those two main initiatives on land use and landscape change are related but are seeking to measure different things. From studies of alternative methods of getting statistics on changes to urban land use initiated by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Employment, when he was Minister for Local Government and Environmental Services, it emerged that the most economical approach would be to build upon the map revision work of the ordnance survey. I am not sure that I carry my hon. Friend entirely with me on this subject, but the revision is being undertaken consistently and continuously and, naturally, it is done in a most professional way. The survey programmes are devised on the basis of intelligence received from several sources, including local authorities, about change on the ground. Some areas and some kinds of change—mainly the urban extensions—are surveyed more frequently and therefore kept more up to date than others. But over time the whole country is covered

Pilot studies have been completed, and I am proposing to seek a contract with the ordnance survey for it to record and supply land use change information on a regular basis for an initial period of three years starting in January 1985. The costs of the raw data will be small, as the ordnance survey will be charging only the marginal cost of noting, on our special form, locational references and changes to parcels of land use as they are being surveyed for map revision.

Information on some 19 categories of urban and rural land use will be collected from those data. We would expect within two years of the starting date to have a good demonstration of the broad patterns of changing land use at national and regional level. Later, when we have received more observations, we would expect to give fuller details, possibly down to county level and for special areas such as green belts and national parks, of changes between the most important individual categories of land use.

Our other initiative has been to examine ways of improving information on rural landscape change in conjunction with the Countryside Commission. This type of monitoring is important because there is no ready-made surveying process like that of the ordnance survey.

Proposals were invited from survey firms, research centres and Government agencies to establish the current, past and future distribution and extent of important landscape features. A methodology is now being developed by the chosen contractor with advice from other interested agencies and Government Departments. It uses a sampling frame based on previous work done by the Forestry Commission. Within the sample areas, the coverage of landscape features will be determined using a mixture of aerial photography, satellite imagery and ground survey.

By "features" I mean land, cultivated or under grass, woodlands, trees, walls, hedges, and so on. The sampling method is expected to provide statistics on the stock of such features at national, regional and possibly county levels, for 1981, 1971 and 1961, so that change can be assessed at a known level of statistical reliability.

Perhaps I should mention that we are also looking to the Nature Conservancy Council for information regarding the change in extent of habitats of nature conservation importance. My officials are in close contact with the NCC survey, which will provide complementary information to the landscape study. The two departmental monitoring initiatives will be to a great degree complementary. One deals with aspects of change to the coverage of countryside features and the other is primarily concerned with current changes to urban land use—that is, "development".

However, such change data, despite their immediate value for policy purposes, can provide only year-by-year comparisons of how land is changing use. They provide no sign of what percentage of land in a use has changed. To achieve that, data on the present stock of land are needed and my Department is also at present considering ways of achieving this.

I have mentioned that the Land Decade Education Council has for some time been promoting its ideas for a national land utilisation survey. It has been in touch with my Department, and, I understand, with the European Commission, which may provide financial support.

Full ground surveys are expensive. I note that the recent report of the Select Committee on the Environment quoted a sum of £7 million for a wide survey. It also recommends that a study of alternative methods should be undertaken. I am happy to say that we are already considering such a study as the next step.

What seems to be required first is an examination of all the latest developments. The study should cover ground surveys, remote sensing, which is already under consideration for the landscape monitoring project, and the interpretation of ordnance survey maps. It should consider the possibilities of both full and sample surveys. The prime aim would be to produce a stock survey compatible in terms of definitions and areas with the land use change monitoring exercise. It may become apparent through the study that there are fruitful was of merging data from various sources which could be tested in field trials.

I am therefore commissioning such a study. Among other things it will, I hope, give us a better idea of the likely cost so that we can then decide whether what we get—with whatever data limitations are involved — would represent good value for money.

In conclusion, the case of a national land use survey is under urgent consideration by the Government. My hon. Friend's contribution this evening will be of great benefit to us, and I hope that we can maintain close contract so that we can use his advice and experience, and that of other sources. The contribution of improved land use information to policy-making is already recognised, but to technical problems are complex and the costs could therefore be prohibitive. However, we have taken some tentative but constructive first steps to explore ways of overcoming the major problems that have dogged past attempts to establish comprehensive and reliable statistics on urban land use and landscape coverage.

The debate has been constructive, and I am most grateful to my hon. Friend.

Question put and agreed to.

Adjourned accordingly at half-past Ten o'clock.

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