§ Mr. Anthony Steen (South. Hams)We are fortunate to have such a full House to hear this important debate. I am blinded by the sight of the empty Opposition Benches; it is obviously a foretaste of things to come.
We are very fortunate to have the Minister responsible for the inner cities here to answer the debate. He is well known for his interest, knowledge and balanced judgment, and we are grateful to the Government for ensuring that he is here on this beautiful sunny day. We hope that that will mean that we shall get a more forthright and informed response to the question that I have been posing for the past 10 years: why have the Government not ordered the public sector to get rid of its vacant, surplus, underutilised, derelict, dormant land? Every time I ask that question I am cheered by my hon. Friends, who all say, "Wonderful. That is just what we want to do." Minister after Minister says, "You are absolutely right. You are spot on. That is just the thing we should do." But nothing happens; no one does anything. I hope to explain some of the problems that the Government face, and why they need to do more.
I speak as a former inner city Member—I was a Member for nine years in Liverpool—and as a youth worker in east London—a community worker in most of the principal cities in Britain—for 14 years. In addition to being chairman of the urban and inner city committee of the Conservative party, I should perhaps declare an interest as part of the caucus of the new SANE planning group, well known for its good sense, good timing and sane approach to planning.
There are 100,000 acres of public land on the Government's vacant land register, which has been in existence since 1981 when my right hon. Friend the Member for Henley (Mr. Heseltine) prudently set it up to identify public vacant land, to highlight the problem and to shame public authorities into doing something about it. The amount varies. It increases when the planning process, which is like a sausage machine, turns out more public land.
The planning system itself creates public vacant, dormant, derelict, underutilised land. Like a sausage machine, the process will go on churning out more land as long as it is organised in the present way. The figure decreases when the Government privatise a nationalised industry. When a nationalised industry goes off into private orbit, it takes its public land with it. Therefore, the figure on the register decreases every time we privatise. It may decrease by a few thousand or increase by a km thousand, but, as the Minister will no doubt tell the House, unfortunately there is still a sizeable amount of public vacant land—probably about 100,000 acres for the past seven years. It may have increased to 110,000 or decreased to 98,000, but it has not altered much. But because the sausage-making machine will continue to produce more derelict vacant land, even if we sold 10,000 acres a year, we would still not get rid of it all by the turn of the century. It is an intractable problem that successive Governments have failed to remedy.
In 1978, the Secretary of State for the Environment in the Labour Administration said that he was writing to all public authority chairmen to ask them to review their land holdings. They may have done so, but nothing was clone about it. In 1981, my right hon. Friend the Member for 663 Henley set up the land register to try to pinpoint vacant land. We know where the land is, but that has not helped very much. The Government keep saying, rightly, that they are committed to revitalising the cities, especially the inner cities. Vacant and derelict land is dotted all over the inner cities and on their fringes. It is the canker in the revitalisation process because it destroys the confidence that businesses and new firms need. Dereliction has a spin-off effect on neighbouring areas.
The legislation that covers the land register is cumbersome, time-consuming and open to abuse. The Government must push for derelict land to be sold. At present they have to go through a tortuous timetable.
In answer to a written question on 24 May, my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister said:
Following the announcement by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for the Environment on 7 March that public bodies would themselves publish information about unused and underused land they own, similar publication of information by Government Departments is under consideration."—[Official Report, 24 May 1988; Vol. 134, c. 102.]Does the House realise that no Department need publish how much vacant derelict and underused land it has? It is extraordinary that the Government should say that local authorities must disclose their land holding but that Government Departments need not disclose how much land they hold. Some Departments tell us how much land they have, but they are not obliged to do so.A couple of weeks ago, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for the Environment said that he wanted 494,000 new houses to be built during the next 12 years and that he will use 53,700 acreas of land to do so. That is on the basis of an average of 9.1 houses to an acre. He said that where development is needed, developers will be able to buy private land, obtain planning permission and get on with building. If those houses can be built on 53,700 acres of private land, they could equally well be built on 53,700 acres of public land,—that is, if the Government and the developers are prepared to insist that the public authorities release such land for building.
Even after those 494,000 houses have been built on public land, there will be some 50,000 acres of public vacant land left on the register. That presumes that the sausage machine will not pump more land on to the register while those houses are being built.
The Government sometimes argue that land is not suitable for housing and give the example of the one-in-three railway embankment. Railway embankments have been built on in Hong Kong and other places, but we are not that desperate for land, so we should rule out that example. We can rule out land that is heavily polluted because formerly it was the site of a gasworks. Even if such land is ruled out, there are still 60,000 or 70,000 acres on the register which could be used. That land is lying idle because there is almost no incentive for a local authority to sell it. I think that a local authority receives 30 per cent., and the other 70 per cent. goes into a sinking fund that it can use from time to time. There is so little incentive or return that local authorities are not motivated.
Professor Alice Coleman of King's College, London says that the 100,000 acres of land on the register represent only about one third of the public vacant land in this country. She said that there are 300,000 acres of vacant land, but that the Government have restricted the criteria 664 for land going on to the register. I hope that when my hon. Friend the Minister replies—we are already looking forward to his speech—he will say something about the criteria used. If the criteria were opened up, the figure would swell to 200,000 if not 300,000 acres. That is borne out in a book that I shall be publishing in early July, which highlights the public scandal of a wasting public asset.
If the Government fail to recognise the assets that are wasting away in the public sector and insist on using greenfield private sector land, there will be a growth in our market towns, especially in the south, on a scale that we cannot contemplate. It must be against the public interest to build on private greenfield sites when there is so much public land going to waste.
I speak from personal experience of what is happening in the small market town of Ivybridge, south Devon on the edge of the Dartmoor national park. There were 1,500 souls living there 10 years ago. I am told that Devon's planners became aware of the threat to one of the most beautiful parts of Britain and decided to spoil only one area to prevent the other small hamlets and villages from being damaged by overbuilding. They have failed because Ivybridge is growing and there is constant building in the other villages. Some 6,000 souls now live in Ivybridge, and the figure will be 14,000 by 1995. Private greenfield sites have been gobbled up by bulldozers and developers, but the infrastructure cannot cope. Sewers, drains, gas, telephones and the fire and health services cannot cope. I led a delegation to the Secretary of State for Education 10 days ago because we are running out of school space. There will be too many schoolchildren in Ivybridge, but the builders continue to build. It will become a nightmare. The Secretary of State admitted that the 235 houses being built in Ivybridge every year is greater than the yearly figure for his constituency of Mole Valley. Ivybridge's population is growing at the rate of 60.5 per cent. a year. The number of pupils in primary education has grown by 28.7 per cent. since 1983. The county council's forecast for the number of people who will be living in Ivybridge in 1991 was 8,272 people, but already 8,245 people are living there. Those increases are taking place while Plymouth sits on acres of vacant land in public ownership. The Ministry of Defence, with its bases at the dockyards and the outskirts, is one of the culprits.
Why are the Government behaving like the carpenter? On the one hand, they are bewailing the acres of public land, saying "If only something could be done" and dabbing their eyes with a handkerchief, saying "Is this not dreadful?", but on the other they are responding to the developer-led and inspired demands for more private land to be built upon. Is that to make good the income of farmers, who have been hit by the declining output of agricultural land? Do they regard this as a device to make good farmers' incomes by allowing them to sell greenfield sites for more houses to be built on, thus saving the public purse having to make good their income shortfall?
I have initiated the debate to get some sense from my hon. Friend the Minister, who is well known for his good sense.
§ Mr. Nicholas Baker (Dorset, North)rose——
§ Mr. David Nicholson (Taunton)rose——
§ Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Harold Walker)Order. Do the hon. Members have the consent of the hon. Member for South Hams (Mr. Steen) and the Minister to take part in the debate?
§ The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Environment (Mr. David Trippier)indicated assent.
§ Mr. Nicholas BakerI am grateful to have a brief opportunity to take part in the debate and to congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for South Hams (Mr. Steen). I agree with every word that he said and laud his experience in inner cities and rural areas because he speaks from his knowledge. In the proposals in my pamphlet "This Pleasant Land", issued last September, I supported some of my hon. Friend's proposals, and I support those that he will make in his excellent book in July.
My hon. Friend said that Government land was being sat on. How much land is the NHS sitting on in inner city areas? We should know the answer and should have no hesitation in ensuring that that land is put to good use. I am delighted to see here my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Security—the hon. Member for Derbyshire, South (Mrs. Currie)—who I am sure will take note of that point.
Having pursued this subject for some years, I do not believe that politicians generally understand the importance of the environment to people, whether they live in the cities or in the countryside. Quality matters. The Government understand that, but not nearly enough of our inner city local authorities do so yet. How we treat that land matters very much. If graffiti are left bedaubing inner city walls, people get the message that the inner city does not matter. If acres of corrugated iron are left for years, as Southwark borough council has done, people get the message that it is an unpleasant and undesirable place in which to live and work. If a city is rotten at the core, the rot spreads outwards.
I should like to make two substantive points, one general and one particular. On the general point, there is a direct and clear connection between what happens in our inner cities and what happens in rural areas. It matters to people in London that they have a green belt to be their lung. It matters to people who live in London that rural areas, even if they visit them perhaps only once in a lifetime for a holiday, are preserved. Likewise, it matters to people who live in Dorset or other rural areas that inner city areas such as in London are pleasant, habitable and safe. We forget that at our peril. I welcome the Government's inner city initiatives.
On the specific point, I regard with the greatest suspicion the figures produced on the demand for housing. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for the Environment has said that there is a demand for 610,000 houses in London and the south-east. That demand comes from developers and is nothing to do with the need for houses. It is part of our developer-led planning system. I urge my hon. Friend properly to consider the figures for real demand for housing and not to accept what he is told by the developers.
I have a letter from a lady who lives in London who read a speech that I made saying that I regretted the number of people who had to move from inner cities to 666 retire and live in rural areas. She said that she had lived in London all her life and worked there. Her one desire was to retire to a rural area because she hated London so much. The aim of our policies must be to ensure that ladies and gentlemen who live in London want to live, work and retire there. I never again want to receive a letter from a lady in such despair.
§ Mr. David Nicholson (Taunton)I am grateful for the opportunity to take part in the debate, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for South Hams (Mr. Steen). I agree with most of what he said. In so far as the debate will contribute to the revitalisation of our inner cities, I must emphasise that that will be one of the main tests by which the Government will be judged in three or four years' time.
I wonder whether there is much idle land in areas such as my constituency, which are subject to the greatest housing pressure. My hon. Friends the Members for South Hams and for Dorset, North (Mr. Baker) both mentioned Ministry of Defence and health authority land. In my constituency there are two health establishments for the mentally handicapped and the mentally disabled and they are located out in the country. There is also one defence establishment. I have great reservations about putting the inmates of institutions for the mentally handicapped into the community and I certainly do not want to part company with No. 40 Royal Marine Commando.
But, we have to ask questions about the planning potential for housing on the areas occupied by such institutions. We should raise wider questions about where Ministry of Defence personnel are concentrated nationally. I believe that 60 per cent. of service personnel are located in the south.
Such questions will be with us for some time. 'We cannot sweep them under the carpet and hope that they will rot like a carcass. I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will be able to respond positively on those points.
§ The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Environment (Mr. David Trippier)I am glad of the opportunity to pay warm tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for South Hams (Mr. Steen) for raising this subject and for the excellent work he does as chairman of the inner city and urban affairs Back Bench committee. I am grateful to my hon. Friends the Members for Dorset, North (Mr. Baker) and for Taunton (Mr. Nicholson) for their contributions.
I should comment on the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for South Hams about farmers. I am not sure whether he made that point tongue in cheek, but I believe that it is stretching credulity to breaking point. My hon. Friend also mentioned the book by himself and Professor Alice Coleman which is shortly to be published, entitled, "Public Vacant Land and National Wasting Asset". I look forward with great interest to reading that.
My hon. Friend said that he has raised the matter in the past. In fact, he raised it at the Department of the Environment's Question Time on Wednesday. I hope that he agrees that I was positive in my reply then I shall endeavour to be positive in my replies to all my hon. Friends today.
667 Publicly-owned and underutilised land is a matter central to the Government's efforts to regenerate our cities and conserve the best of our countryside. I can, therefore, agree with most of what my hon. Friend said on the importance of both those objectives. But it is also a subject which, in detail, is frequently subject to confusion and misunderstanding, as my hon. Friend suggested. So I must start by setting the record straight on some basic facts about the nature and performance of the registers of publicly owned, unused and underused land to which my hon. Friend has referred extensively.
The registers were established in response to evidence from various sources that too many public authorities were holding land for which they had no immediate use but which they were unwilling to release on to the market. Some of that was land owned by nationalised industries, rendered surplus through changes in the structure, output or technology of those industries. As well as that, there were the holdings of many local authorities which had acquired land and property, sometimes in pursuit of overambitious plans that had not materialised. Also, throughout the public sector, there was a lazy habit of retaining land without accounting for the cost of doing so. So public sector land ownership was undoubtedly a constraint on the recycling of urban land for new homes and businesses.
The land registers of publicly owned, unused and underused land were established to bring pressure to bear on those land hoarders. The scope of the registers is often misunderstood. They cover "unused and underused land", which is definitially broader than "derelict land", which is eligible for derelict land grant and is not necessarily the same thing as "vacant land" or "wasteland". Both terms were used today and are in popular usage. There is no official definition.
As was made clear at the Action for Cities presentation, given recently by my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister, we are committed, through our urban regeneration policies, to minimise the extent of vacant land in towns and cities, but we have the specific measures of derelict land grant and the land registers to attack derelict land and publicly owned, unused land in particular.
To date, some 159,000 acres of this latter form of vacant land has been entered on the registers—which is in my view a shameful statistic, and evidence of the rightness of the concern about the land management practices of public authorities. Since then, there have been regular additions to, and removals from, the register. The additions have arisen chiefly as additional land has become surplus to the requirements of the public authorities and unused. Effectively, it will go on to the register if it is not immediately sold. The removals have occurred as unused land has been brought into use by its public owner, sold or transferred out of the public sector following privatisation. The register is therefore rather like a bank account with credits and debits and, as with a bank account, it is most important to see which way the bottom line is moving. In this case, the trend is clearly downwards as the last few years have seen progressively more removals than additions.
The position at the end of April 1988 is that 88,400 acres of land are still on the register. I am pleased to say that the annual net reduction over recent years has been 668 rising. It was 1,500 acres in 1985; 5,900 acres in 1986; 7,800 acres in 1987; and 2,900 acres in the first four months of 1988, equivalent to about 8,700 acres in a full year. If that rising rate of reduction were maintained, it would take less than a decade to clear the registers. That is a shorter time scale than that suggested by my hon. Friend the Member for South Hams at Question Time, which was about 1,000 years.
My prognosis may be unrealistic. Of the 88,400 acres of land remaining on the registers, over half has low or negligible potential for development, and less than one fifth is regarded as suitable for residential development. This is another common misunderstanding. The register records, factually, that sites are unused or underused by the present owner. It does not judge whether they are usable by another owner. As a further illustration, about 3,000 acres of the land on the registers is in the green belt or other areas where development is not normally permitted. I am sure that all my hon. Friends would join me in not hoping to see these sites used for housing.
What we face in the future is dealing with this more intractable rump of the historical legacy of unused land and ensuring that better property management practices in public authorities prevent a major recurrence on the scale of problems that we inherited. In this context, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has reviewed the use of his land register powers and decided on two significant changes which were announced in the recent Action for Cities package.
First, in the exercise of my right hon. Friend's power to direct public authorities to dispose of unused land, we propose to pay close regard to any evidence that there is a willing purchaser facing an unwilling vendor. The land registers can thereby reinforce market pressure. I repeat the invitation issued by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State in the House on 20 January that if any developer, investor, housebuilder or housing association wishes to use unused land in the ownership of public authorities, all that he or it has to do is to apply to my Department and invite my right hon. Friend to consider the use of his power of direction. That is of particular relevance to the less obviously developable remaining land register sites for which there may not be much of a general demand.
Secondly, my right hon. Friend believes that it will encourage good property management if public authorities—not just local authorities—are responsible for maintaining and publishing records of the unused and underused land in their possession rather than merely providing such information to my Department. He is, therefore, preparing, in consultation with the local authority associations, a code of practice under part II of the Local Government, Planning and Land Act 1980 to require the publication of such information and, most importantly, it is proposed that a similar code of practice will be adopted by other public land owners, including the Government. That is the very point that I made to my hon. Friend in answer to his oral question last week. All public landowners will thereby have to expose to annual scrutiny an account of their own holdings of unused and underused land with its debits and credits and the current balance.
My hon. Friends will be aware that, in providing for necessary development, the Government have not encroached on the green belts or areas of outstanding natural beauty or other statutorily protected areas. I am 669 happy to repeat what my right hon. Friend has repeatedly made clear. The Government's commitment to the protection of green belt remains as strong as ever.
In comparison with Governments of previous decades, this Administration has had a great success in meeting the demands of people and businesses for new homes and work premises without undue loss of rural landscape or excessive densities of urban development. Both the 19th century nightmare of the overcrowded city and the 20th century nightmare of the overbuilt countryside can and will be avoided.