Newcastle Upon Tyne Town Moor Bill [Lords] (Hansard, 10 November 1988)

§ Mr. Nicholas Brown (Newcastle upon Tyne, East)
I hope that the House will allow the Bill to carry over into the next Session. The Bill, as modified, has the support of hon. Members who represent constituencies in the city of Newcastle upon Tyne. It also has the undivided support of the freemen's association which owns the leasehold on the Town moor in the city of Newcastle.

§ Mr. Dennis Skinner (Bolsover)
Did my hon. Friend say freemen or "freemasons"?

§ Mr. Brown
It is important to get that right. I assure my hon. Friend that I said "freemen," not "freemasons", although it would not be unusual if they had something to do with it. As far as I can tell, they are not specifically interested in the matter. Of course, as my hon. Friend would be the first to point out, one cannot always tell whether they are involved. However, that is irrelevant to the matter in hand.
Newcastle upon Tyne city council has unanimously agreed to promote the Bill, which is supported by the Labour majority, the Conservative minority and the much larger Liberal minority on the council. Incidentally, the Liberal representation on the city council is now twice the size of the Conservative representation, which shows how things are going in the north of England.
The Bill has been delayed, and it has been delayed for a good reason. It was being blocked by my hon. Friends the Members for Tyne Bridge (Mr. Clelland), for Newcastle upon Tyne, North (Mr. Henderson), for South Shields (Dr. Clark) and myself. I take careful note of the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish (Mr. Bennett) about the reasonableness or otherwise of carrying a Bill over from one Session to the next, but with this Bill we have a good reason. My hon. Friends and I, who have the honour and privilege to 565 represent communities on Tyneside, objected to the Bill because we did not believe that it contained sufficient safeguards to protect two principles which we believed to be encapsulated in existing legislation and which were highly desirable for our communities.
First, we thought that the Bill ought to protect the right of public access to the town moor—not just for the freemen of Newcastle but for all the citizens of Newcastle and for all those who come to visit the city. That has hitherto been the practice, although it has not been the law. We understand that such free access was intended in previous Acts, although it was not specifically stated.
We had a second objection. The Bill consolidates all previous legislation relating to our town moor which goes back 300 years and comprises a number of different Acts of Parliament. We suspected that it might enable the leader of the city council—the city council owns the freehold, although the freemen hold the lease in perpetuity—to bring pressure to bear on the freemen's association, which is not well funded, to sell part of the town moor for a car park or for a property development. The citizens of Newcastle feel very strongly that the town moor should be there for them to enjoy and that it should not be sold to property speculators. To prevent the leader of the council or anyone else from selling the town moor to property speculators we blocked the Bill and opened negotiations with the freemen, who wished to ensure its passage through the House.
Those negotiations have been entirely successful and we have inserted clauses that wholly protect the public right of access and prevent—as solidly as anything could—the alienation of the moor from the people of Newcastle. Because we argued and fought to secure those concessions, it was reasonable to delay the Bill, and it is now reasonable to carry it over into the next Session.

§ Mr. Andrew F. Bennett (Denton and Reddish)
I congratulate my hon. Friend on getting such a good deal out of the promoters. However, that is no reason why Bills should be carried over in future. If the promoters know that it is difficult to obtain a carry-over, their minds will be concentrated and they will negotiate before the Bill reaches Parliament or early in its parliamentary proceedings. Because carry-over motions are now so commonplace, there is a temptation for everyone concerned in the negotiations to spin out the proceedings. I hope that in future promoters will come to the negotiating table much more quickly.

§ Mr. Brown
I wholeheartedly agree with my hon. Friend. If our perfectly justifiable requests to safeguard the moor from property developers and to safeguard public right of access to it had not been conceded, we should have held the Bill up indefinitely.

§ Mr. Skinner
My hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish (Mr. Bennett) has made a very good point and we are right to thank him for it. I agree that he is right to hold out for safeguards and protections, but there is an additional point to be made. Not only do the promoters know that Bills can be carried over—especially under the Tory Government, for whom carry-over motions are becoming the order of the day—but they can milk the ratepayers of Newcastle and elsewhere. In the knowledge that they can get a carry-over motion at will, the 566 promoters can say, "Let us carry over the Bill for a year, or even two, and all the time we can put in bills for big fat fees." The people of Newcastle will have to foot the bill. A carry-over motion will benefit the promoters, their agents, the lawyers and all the rest who can make a fat killing by carrying-over a Bill. They might have dragged my hon. Friend to the point at which he gave way—in this case he refused—and they would have lined their pockets as a result.

§ Mr. Brown
I have great sympathy with that intervention. I greatly resent the amount of public money that is spent on lawyers—unnecessarily in my view. My hon. Friend the Member for Bolsover (Mr. Skinner) touched on an apposite point. At one stage in our negotiations the city council was using its power of funding as a weapon in its negotiations with the freemen of the city. In my view, that was wrong. In all our dealings with the freemen of the city of Newcastle, they have behaved perfectly properly and, like us, have sought to protect the town moor in its existing form and prevent the encroachment of property developers. My hon. Friend the Member for Bolsover rightly hinted that others involved in public life would not have been unhappy for the Bill to have been passed in its earlier form, conceivably their enabling the alienation of open lands in Newcastle to property developers. I stand strongly against that, as do my hon. Friends who represent the city.
My hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish referred to the abuse in the House of private business in an attempt to get round planning constraints. I wholeheartedly agree with him, although this Bill does not deal with planning matters. It is an attempt to consolidate 300 years of legislation into one Bill. Where matters such as rights of herbiage do not translate easily into modern legislation, the Bill clarifies them in as fair-minded a way as possible and the draftsmen have sought to resolve any ambiguities that exist.
My hon. Friends and I are satisfied that the Bill protects the interests of the citizens of Newcastle and that it will prove a strong safeguard to preserve the town moor in its present form, so that it cannot be encroached upon by property developers. I hope that the House will allow the Bill to be carried over into the next Session and proceed to the statute book thereafter.