PROBLEMS OF THE COUNTRYSIDE

HL Deb 18 May 1966 vol 274 cc969-95

2.52 p.m.

VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS rose to call attention to the problems of the countryside; and to move for Papers. The noble Viscount said: My Lords, I would preface my opening of this debate by two remarks. First, although I am speaking from this Dispatch Box, the views which I shall express are my own and do not necessarily represent those of the Party to which I belong, although I trust that they will not diverge too far. Secondly, in view of the large number of noble Lords who have done me the honour of proposing to join in this debate, I think it is my duty to be fairly brief.

No one will doubt that the countryside has problems for many people who make their livelihood, their business and their pleasure in it; by farming it, managing it or running boats on a river, or other similar undertaking. To those who live in the countryside, and like to look at it in the state in which it is now in many places, and into which it has grown through many centuries of not too intensive or intrusive agriculture, to meet the needs of rural communities, the threats and their implementation are all too obvious, and by many deplored. The threats are caused, as your Lordships will be able to instance for yourselves, by such things as high-voltage electricity lines; new towns; the unholy halo of new and raw housing around so many beautiful villages; by people from afar, and from the adjoining estates, who are no longer content with minor incursions but, I am afraid, really are beginning to lose their sense of the difference between private and public property; by cars and all that they entail.

However, except perhaps for the intrusion of people where they should not be, these problems mostly represent the other side of the coin for those whose activities some might bewail, though in fact they are of the greatest public importance. I do not wish this afternoon to moan about these things but to attempt, briefly I trust, as I say, to rationalise a little on what seems to me the three-fold clash between the need for development, the need for conservation and for the proper industries that exist in the country and the need for people to use the country for recreation.

My Lords, it might perhaps be worth while, at the beginning, to ask why we want to conserve the countryside. Quite clearly, we are vitally tied up with the future of agriculture and forestry, and clearly there must be areas where outside recreation can take place in all the recognised forms, and perhaps in others still unthought of. Tourism, upon which so much of our economy depends, is immensely concerned with conservation of the countryside, but I believe that we are interested in it primarily because we still have the sense to know that, for those who live most of their lives in towns, a drive or a picnic in the country does them good and keeps them sane.

I was interested to find that there is, at any rate a little scientific evidence for this in one of the basic propositions that emerged from the Keele Conference on education in the countryside, which perhaps could be stated like this: While it is impossible in the present state of knowledge to trace a causal relationship between mental health and an educated awareness of a satisfying environment, the possibility that such a relationship exists are continually to be borne in mind.

Fine words, my Lords, and I think they mean that the countryside keeps us sane. And of course it is also a commonplace which all the literature on this subject emphasises in many forms that the conflict which I have mentioned between the seekers of peace and quiet and of beauty and the destruction of those very qualities where the seekers find them is the basic problem we have to face, let alone the intrusion by those influxes of people on the legitimate activities of countrymen.

Perhaps one more basic question to set the pattern for this debate. What is it that we wish to conserve, and for whom? I have for long been a little worried about the official policy on Green Belts, in that there has been perhaps an undue stressing of the fact that they exist for the recreation of people from the urban areas which those Green Belts surround, and that this has led, a little more than it should have done, first of all to that idea in the public mind that people can in fact go anywhere they want in a Green Belt, and secondly that the Green Belt may become something of a museum piece. On the contrary, I think that the countryside, in order to give its full value, must be a living countryside.

This matter, of course, has so many aspects that I cannot deal with very many of them, but the kind of problem which arises is the question: how many commuters can a village absorb before it loses its village spirit and becomes merely a number of people and surburban houses, where people just wash their cars and weed their gardens at the weekend and take very little part in the communal spirit of the village itself? I do not mean by any means that people who work in towns should not live in villages, but intangible though this aspect is, I believe that it is a very delicate balance and one which people would do well to keep very much in mind.

Another problem which crops up is the conflict between the view out and the view in to a site. Do we allow houses to be built beside a beach or overlooking a fine river so that those who live in them can enjoy the view from their windows, or do we in fact concern ourselves more with the view on to those houses for those on the beach or sailing up and down the river? Of course, so far as this debate is concerned (and I think this may be the principal topic of conversation), are we not vitally concerned to decide where we are to have recreational facilities which are so necessary; where these are to predominate and be all-important, and where we should try to emphasise the importance of the farming, forestry and other rural industries, and try, if possible, to keep the people seeking recreation out of them? It is a balance which requires judgment and sensitivity and in the end, when the plans have been made, I believe, firmness.

We have plenty of advice on it now. There have been two conferences on "The Countryside in 1970"; the Scottish Landowners' Federation have produced a booklet, Access without Tears; there was the Keele Conference, which I have already mentioned, where a study was made of the educational aspect of the countryside and the way in which the two can be combined for the good of the country. There was the Nuffield Inquiry into Common Land, which led to the Act passed in the last Parliament. Now we have the White Paper.

I would say at this stage that it seems to me that the provisions in the White Paper are almost all wholly admirable, but I do not propose to follow up many of them this afternoon, for a reason which I hope will be considered valid. It is really the implementation of the advice that we have in its myriad forms which we must try to achieve, either by new bodies and new laws, or perhaps, even now, by using what we have. The paradox about the White Paper, and the reason why I am going to confine myself to a quite narrow aspect this afternoon, is that, although the proposed Countryside Commission, the new powers, the extra finance, the increased vigour, are almost all, as I say, wholly admirable, these proposals have not found a place in the legislative programme for this Session of Parliament; and I should not be surprised if it was at least two years before any of these powers became law and could be implemented in practice.

I should like, therefore, to see what we can do with our existing legislation and our existing organisations and powers. I recognise that noble Lords who follow after me may wish to take advantage of what the White Paper says in Paragraph 62: that reconnaissance, planning and research are needed both locally and nationally so that when legislation has been enacted work can begin on well thought out schemes without delay. I will touch on those later. But it seems to me that our task at the moment must be to try to prepare the way for the time when the legislation will come: because in the end, although Parliament may legislate and Government Departments may declare national policies, and countrywide bodies may advise and exhort, it is really strong local determination that is going to achieve something. I think that, in addition to the advice we have had as to what we should do, we might with advantage (I do not know whether the noble Lord, Lord Kennet, has had time, in the short period of the notice I have been able to give him of some of these questions, to find out the answers) do something by way of learning from the authorities and Governments who have already more advanced powers than are nationally available in England, Wales and Scotland.

For instance, I do not know whether any of your Lordships have read the Amenity Lands Act 1965, passed by the Northern Ireland Parliament. It contains many of the proposals which are now in the White Paper for this country, and I think it would be extremely interesting if the Northern Ireland Parliament and the Departments concerned could keep us closely informed about the progress they make and the snags they encounter in putting into effect the powers they now possess. Can we not learn a little, also, from the Cumberland County Council (and I am glad to see that my noble friend Lord Inglewood is to speak later in this debate), because in Part II of a private Act of 1964, they took unto themselves, with the approval of Parliament, some useful powers which are not universally available. I should like to know what use they have made of these powers and what success they have met.

The emphasis, as I understand it, in all informed opinion on this subject centres on the powers of local authorities, very largely under the Planning Acts. But there is an equal stress upon the failure to deal with this subject on larger bases than the individual county or county borough, and on the need for a much more regional outlook, and for the combination of the urban authorities, who export people into the countryside, and the county authorities, who are on the receiving end. I must confess that I appreciate the feeling of the county council that, if they are to use even the powers they have to spend their ratepayers' money on the provision of facilities, amusements and attractions for those who come from adjoining urban areas, they may well be accused of doing something that is quite unnecessary and very low down in the priorities of the actual needs of the county. Equally, I suppose, the county borough or the urban authority might well say that where their citizens go for weekends and on holidays has nothing to do with them. All the same, I feel that this is a short-term view, and a mistaken one.

It is true that at the moment the grants structure is not properly designed to bring about the right degree of co-ordination; and this is one of the things the White Paper proposes. However, we have not yet got it. Nor, indeed, are what are to my mind some vital concomitant provisions yet available which will go towards compensating people who live in the country areas. I am attracted by the idea, subject to a reservation which I will produce in a moment, that there should be considered public liability for compensation to individuals who have land, large acres or small, in the country. I am attracted by the idea of greater penalties for vandalism, and a much more intense drive against trespass. I am very attracted by the importance of educating people from their earliest ages in the proper use of the countryside; and I know that this, to some degree, has already been done.

But such protections for country people cannot reasonably be implemented until there is somewhere to which the people who seek the open country can go. How often has one said, as one drives along, that people must be insane to have a picnic in some small lay-by! But where else can they go for a picnic? This is a difficult problem, and I do not see how the legitimate interests in the countryside can be protected from those who drive out into it unless there is some proper destination for these people to seek. In any event, I hope that the new powers and the new grants will be available soon. But the object at the moment—and this is what I should like to confine myself to this afternoon, mainly for the sake of brevity—is to see whether we cannot prepare, or go towards the preparation of, sonic sort of viable scheme in order to meet this three-fold problem.

At the moment, with the powers we possess, I think there are three partners in the project. The first is the Government. Yesterday's announcement in another place by the right honourable gentleman the Prime Minister, about the reorganisation of the Ministry of Land and Natural Resources, may be extraordinarily opportune for the purposes of this debate. At the moment, the responsibility for looking after the countryside, recreation, sport, and all these cognate matters, is spread over a colossal number of Departments. The large bulk of the responsibility falls on the Ministry of Housing and Local Government, but the Ministry of Land and Natural Resources also have a good deal of responsibility. The Department for Education and Science is also closely involved, as are the Board of Trade, with its interests in tourism and the British Travel Association, the Ministry of Public Building and Works, with their responsibility for Royal Parks, and, of course, the Department for Economic Affairs, with their regional ideas and responsibilities.

As this reorganisation has not, I think, yet been finalised, might this not be the moment to see whether, under one Ministry or another, some rather more coordinated department could be evolved with the specific aim of bringing together the various interests which at the moment are spread about in a rather disparate way among the different departments? I believe that a single department or sub-department (I am not for the moment suggesting a new Ministry) would find it much easier to keep in touch with the various statutory and private bodies—the National Parks Commission, the National Trust, the Nature Conservancy, and all the rest of them—than does the present spread of interests over so many parts of the Government machine.

There must also be a number of smaller contributions which can be made under the existing law. When I was reading the voluminous literature on this subject my eye fell on a small measure called the Town and Country Planning (Landscape Areas Special Development) Order 1950, an Order which may or may not be familiar to your Lordships. What it does is to subject to special planning control agricultural and forestry development in four county districts in Caernarvon and Merioneth, ten county districts in Westmorland, Cumberland and the Furness area of Lancashire, three county districts in the Peak District of Derbyshire and one in Cheshire. The Ministry of Housing have extremely wide powers to make development orders of this nature. So far as I know, this is the only one which has been made with this specific subject in mind. I think they might see, with advantage, whether they could not do more under these extremely wide and generous powers. There are no doubt a number of other things of which I have not thought on this particular sphere, but that is the sort of line I think we could start on straight away.

Local authorities are, I think, at the core of this problem, and I attempted a few moments ago to set out their main difficulty, but in fact, although they may not be particularly minded to combine in seeking to solve this matter, they have at least powers to do so, as I understand it, both South and North of the Border because under (if your Lordships will forgive a technical reference) Part II of the Second Schedule to the Town and Country Planning Act 1962, and the Scottish equivalent, they can set up joint committees of a number of local planning committees to advise upon development plan preparation. Indeed, I think they can set up joint committees for almost any purpose under Local Government Acts.

This is a very familiar thing in Scotland, and goodness knows how many powers are now spread over a number of counties in order to provide a sufficient staff and a sufficient area to fulfil the functions efficiently. I do not think it is nearly so familiar, practical or popular in England, and I wonder why not. Indeed, what can be done in this way is exemplified by what I found to be a fascinating collection of instances of the sort of things that Country Parks might turn out to be. In one of the "Countryside in 1970" papers, dealing specifically with Scotland—and since this is a matter which, at any rate, when I began to consider this subject worried me, in that I could not envisage how these Country Parks could be anything but simply terrible—I was fascinated to look at the diversity of most attractive proposals which have already been thought out in Scotland.

With the rapid development of the ski-lifts and other commercial interests, the Cairngorms area has been subject to the usual conflicts of land use familiar in urban areas, but translated suddenly into an extremely remote (as it was in many places) rural countryside. It was a lonely and superbly beautiful area, but now there is this very heavy pressure of recreational pursuit, and a full-scale plan has been worked out so that the conflict may be solved. Your Lordships will not, I think, consider that there is anything very dreadful about the Cairngorms area as it is now with the new facilities.

Glencoe, an area of great landscape value, has been the subject of much conversation, and the view taken here has been that the provision of the normal type of tourist facilities for motorists and caravanners would be quite unsuitable and out of character. What was recommended was that facilities should be provided for a series of tourists' loop roads, off the main road, carefully designed to meet specific activities; a new forest park with different methods of afforestation to suit the very open landscape there; and an interesting proposal, the reclamation of the Ballachulish foreshore from the spoil and waste tips of the old slate quarries. The difficulty here is that the Argyll County Council has not the staff or the money to do it at the moment, but there is a good idea.

Something totally different is the idea for the reclamation in the middle Clyde area of four and a half square miles of completely derelict industrial land, to be developed as a regional recreation scheme, between Motherwell and Hamilton—a quite different idea altogether. There was to be a lake and water sports; management of a nature reserve; a service area; staging facilities for motorists; facilities for a quarter of a million people in the surrounding urban area, with a motorway going slap through the middle of it; but again a great improvement, I would think, on what is there now.

Another of these projects which have been examined concerns the Loch Lomond-Trossachs area. The study group came to the conclusion that the road widening, the tourist facilities and the private development are not up to the standard that might have been expected in that particularly beautiful area, despite the fact that all applications have to go to the Secretary of State for his approval. Then, again, there is a totally different concept for the North-West, a wilderness area, where the intrusion of man and man-made things would be at an absolute minimum: no vehicles, no entry beyond a certain point except for people on foot. The Glentrool Forest Park in the Stewartry has already provided, by the Forestry Commission, an excellent camp and caravan site, an area leased to the Nature Conservancy, with use permitted in part of the forest park for military and adventure training and sporting rights.

Then, in the context of what local authorities can do on their own, perhaps the most interesting of all are the East Lothian tourist development proposals—one of the very few sets of proposals that the counties in Scotland have made—prepared as a result of a circular issued by the Scottish Development Department. A most intelligent and diverse collection of activities has been proposed in that area, canalising the interest of those seeking recreation into a variety of different fields, but keeping them out of other areas by attracting them away. It seems to me that this sort of thing is well worth studying by local authorities all over the country, and perhaps it would greatly help in the acceptance of this idea if the public were to realise that we are not to have a rather dismal, small, municipal park, suddenly put down in the midst of Surrey, Cumberland or wherever you may like to think of. But there is scope for this enormous variety of ideas and most attractive proposals. But, of course, joint effort between local authorities, private landowners, and the other interests is emphasised throughout.

Local authorities also, I think, have considerable powers under the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949 which they have not used. People tend to concentrate on National Parks or footpaths, but what has been done about access agreements and access orders, which are clearly allowed under that Act? Has the duty, under Section 61, to carry out surveys for the purpose of providing access and recreational facilities, which was required under the Statute to be done by 1951, been carried out by county councils? I am delighted to see that the White Paper suggests a new survey. Have the powers to acquire land been used, and have any wardens been provided? There are powers for all these things. What about the by-laws? These are available now.

Coming to the subject of development plans, I will leave aside the subject of development control, but the positive side of planning is of crucial importance and has been much more successful than people realise. I will mention only a few individual matters. Looking at the Essex County Review, which has been submitted to the Minister and is at present under inquiry, I was interested to see that they had a provision for a regional recreational area—I dislike the term, but apparently that is what it has to be called. What about the idea for the classification of settlements: these areas outside the Green Belt where it is decided that one village is suitable to accept development whereas another must be carefully restricted in its growth? This selection obviously needs care, lest we kill the villages that are restricted. Nevertheless, the idea can make a most positive contribution towards seeing which parts of the countryside are to be conserved and where development can properly take place. If ever there was an example of a valuable piece of research on this subject, the Norfolk County Council's recent study into the tourists' recreational needs in that county, including, of course, the Broads, is one.

There is one more point which local authorities might like to consider. If we are to decide that in some parts of the countryside the existing state of affairs should be largely conserved, why should there not be a determined policy that in those areas there is no need to widen roads? What happens with the pressure of traffic is that this bank is cut down, and that hedge demolished, so that, bit by bit, the countryside that everybody enjoys disappears into a newly aligned and standard-width highway. Provided that there are proper roads available, why should not motorists accept the discipline of country lanes and enjoy them for what they are in their present state? I think that Professor Buchanan has written a paper on this subject. It is only a translation to the countryside of his Report, Traffic in Towns. There must be some areas where environment is more important than the traffic and other places where traffic is of paramount importance. It is only a matter of trying to work out which is which. In all this work the lack of qualified people, such as architects, surveyors, and so on, is a serious problem, but it does not need legislation to deal with that.

Finally, there is the question of private interests. I believe that a great deal of this work can be done by private people. Even if the ideas and the locations of the sites for a recreation may originally be suggested by local authorities and joint committees, it will often be a great deal easier, and cheaper, if the ideas can be implemented otherwise than through public funds. For instance, commerce will perfectly well cope with the development of the Broads to the full, provided that the task is put into the right hands. Surely the same will apply to a great number of organised, or even semi-organised, recreational areas. Provided it is perfectly clear, and the idea is accepted, that people will and must pay for their pleasures—and why should they not?—these ventures should be financially self-supporting. The lions of Longleat will spring to mind, but there must be many other examples of private enterprise which have already been started. But I would emphasise that in this matter compulsory purchase should be employed only as a very last resort.

My Lords, there are legions of other ideas, but I must stop. I will look forward very much to the contributions of other noble Lords, and particularly, if I may say so, to the two maiden speeches that we are to have this afternoon. We need discrimination, foresight, organisation; and, so far as organisation is concerned, I think that the need is the opposite to that in the case of justice: it should be done, but should never be seen to be done. I would adopt what was said by another of the study groups of "The countryside in 1970" conference: I am disturbed by the problem of the vulnerability of the British countryside to the pressures of population increase and to the great extension of mechanised mobility. All too easily grave damage could be done in many insidious ways, the cumulative effect of which would be noticed only when it was too late. I fear, like them, that the time will come, if we do not do something pretty soon, when the British public will wake up to the realisation that they have created an island which is scarcely worth living in. My Lords, I beg to move for Papers.

3.27 p.m.

LORD HENLEY

My Lords, judging by the number of us who have put our names down to speak in this debate, most of whom live and work in the countryside, we obviously owe very great thanks to the noble Viscount for introducing this Motion to-day, and I think he has done it extraordinarily well. I have not heard such a good dissertation on these problems for a very long time, although I sit on various committees connected with them. I think he put the three basic problems, of development, conservation and recreation, extremely well, and although he did not "plug" the point that "conservation" does not mean "preservation", his speech throughout emphasised that conservation is a wide concept and means very much more than just preserving the countryside; it means making the best use of it in all ways.

The noble Viscount has a wide knowledge of town and country planning, and what he said in this context was to me among the most interesting parts of his speech. He pointed out that there has been a plethora of various kinds of advice on these problems, and the central problem really is to know how to implement this, because one of the immediate problems facing the countryside is this confusion and uncertainty which has arisen in a way just because of this sudden mass of proposals and plans and the setting up of further bodies, for example the new Regional Planning Boards and Economic Development Councils. We have already, as the noble Viscount pointed out, innumerable aspects of local authority planning which already cover a good deal of this, and overlapping with them bodies like the planning boards, of which those of the Lake District and the Peak are examples, and now we have the Countryside Commission to replace the National Parks Commission. Lastly, on top of all these various bodies, are bodies which are not Government-controlled at all, like the National Trust and the Council for the Preservation of Rural England.

We already have a conflict of aim within these various bodies. I think that already the new Regional Council for the North does not think in exactly the same terms as, for instance, the Lake District Planning Board does, or indeed even the National Trust. For instance, Mr. Dan Smith, who is the Chairman of the new Regional Council for the North, thinks in terms that these amenities ought to be able to pay for themselves; countryside amenities can be made to pay, and this can be done by means of scenic railways over the mountains and chair-lifts to the top of the Lakeland hills and such things. But I cannot help feeling that that would destroy the amenities people come to enjoy.

What influence are all these different new bodies going to have on the whole of the rural economy? We are quite clearly moving away from what we have already, which is the existing local authority set-up, we are moving towards a kind of regional government with regional advisers, who are not exactly elected but appointed because they have the ear of the Government, and they are often served, it seems to me, by councils of no very great distinction. I say that with some diffidence because no doubt certain noble Lords sit upon these councils. I think that from these Benches we support regional government, but whether this is quite the right approach to it I do not know. Nevertheless, I do feel, so far as the countryside and its problems are concerned, that these particular regional bodies will have a good effect on conservation problems rather than a bad one.

What about the Ministry of Land and Natural Resources in this same context? What is going to happen to it? There is a good deal of uncertainty as to its future and nobody really seems to know what the answer is. It was to have been abolished and absorbed in the Ministry of Housing and Local Government. Is this still so? Perhaps the noble Lord will be able to give us a lead; perhaps he will not. At any rate, it does seem that the Government themselves are having second thoughts about the Ministry of Land and Natural Resources, because if they do not have second thoughts about keeping it one wonders what they will do with all its functions. Where will responsibility for forestry, water resources, common land and national parks go? Will it all go to the Ministry of Housing? I think it will be a great pity if it does.

Housing is, after all, only one part, and not necessarily the most important part, of the whole complex of land and its conservation. It is in itself, after all, a despoiler of land, and the Minister of Housing must inevitably be tempted all the time to consider, not so much conservation, even in its widest sense, but the construction of the maximum number of houses at the cheapest possible price in the shortest possible time. This is what it must be tempted to do if it is not itself watched by some other Department. We may well wake up, if we put everything like this under the Ministry of Housing, to find that although we have solved our housing problem, we have no countryside left. To-day it was announced that historic buildings are going under the Ministry of Housing. In general that seems to have had a good reception, but again I wonder whether the Minister of Housing is the right man to look after historic buildings. I feel that his Ministry has too many other contrary problems for him to be the right Minister for this.

Then we have the new proposals under the Countryside Commission whose formation was announced in November, 1965. As the noble Viscount said, it was not mentioned in the Queen's Speech. I suppose it is going to take the place of the National Parks Commission which I take it will be wound up. That possibly is the right way to approach it. The National Parks Commission has obviously outlived its usefulness in the form in which it now is and its position should be reconsidered. It has itself for a number of years been pressing for a review of its financial set-up, and I think its financial set-up is probably the key to its difficulties—compensation, the whole difficulty of the conflict between what you might call the playground versus the workshop aspects of the countryside.

I thought that the noble Viscount had some very useful things to say about public liability for the sort of losses which those of us who use the countryside for recreation and as our workshop have sustained. I do not know whether the compensation provisions worked very well under the old National Parks Commission. Your Lordships will remember there was to be a five-year delay between making an access order on a piece of land and determining how much damage had been done to that land by opening it up to the public. But I rather suspect that it has not worked very well. Similarly, although there has been a 75 per cent. grant from the Exchequer towards the expenses of running the National Parks there is a feeling that, even so, a great deal more of the expense of this than is altogether fair has rested upon local inhabitants, who are not necessarily very rich people, by means of payments of rates.

What the noble Viscount said about the new concept of Countryside Parks was a very interesting part of his speech. I, too, when I first heard of the new idea, felt, "What does this mean?" There are already the National Parks which are going to go on, and there are the new kinds of parks like the Lea Valley authority's park which is going to come into being, which is really not so much a park in the National Park sense as an amusement park in the funfair sense. I wondered what on earth the new Country Parks were going to be, and I think his exposition, particularly his examples from the Highlands, were extraordinarily interesting.

Again there is no reference in the White Paper to a warden service. That is one of the most difficult aspects of the existing National Parks Commission. It is one of the things which so many are in need of. Nothing is said, again, about finding the money for the upkeep of these Parks. I thought the noble Viscount had some very useful things to say on that. I think we are getting somewhere near the stage in which agriculture and National Parks can no longer run together. That is particularly true of the Lake District. Within ten years it may become impossible to have agriculture at all in a place like the Lake District. That at any rate is the prevailing feeling among a lot of people in the North. The problem of the countryside is not only the problem of parks and holidays in the countryside; it is, as I have said, the problem of conservation in its widest sense, trying to make the best use of the countryside, which involves not only holidays and keeping it beautiful but also making the best possible use we can of it.

As a farmer and landowner myself, I think one must say that we, too, have not been without blame in this respect. I think we have put up buildings which are no ornament to the countryside. There is still no compulsion in planning permission for agricultural buildings. The same applies to tree-felling. I think that we often have a wrong conception of what tree-felling should be.

The problems of the countryside also involve proper town planning. In this respect, more effort should be made to try to use the large areas of derelict land which exist all over the country—land which has become derelict from industrial use and decay. In Lancashire there are something like 12,000 acres of land which could be used for building. I know it is much more expensive than taking other land, which may be good agricultural land or land which is beautiful. Nevertheless it is something that must be done. It involves the proper siting off main roads of things like caravan sites and picnic spots. It involves the prevention of industrial pollution of rivers, and of the air by motor cars. I thought what the noble Viscount had to say with regard to narrow roads in public parks was interesting and significant. So far as the Cumberland planning authority is concerned, the thinking goes even further, and suggests that a lot of these small roads should be closed altogether to cars, except for people who actually live there and who might have a licence to use them.

Water also needs a good deal more thinking about. Naturally, I was disappointed that Manchester should be going to take water from the lakes. Nevertheless, there is something we have to remember as well in the context of planning the countryside—namely, that we can easily destroy places like Ullswater much more quickly by wrong use of them from the point of view of recreation, motor boats and so on, than ever Manchester can do, with the present safeguards. That is a point that we must bear in mind. I strongly support all the things that the noble Viscount has said in his most interesting speech. I am sure all of us regard the White Paper as being, by and large, a most satisfactory document. We hope it will be implemented rather more quickly than at present looks possible.

3.43 p.m.

THE PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARY, MINISTRY OF HOUSING AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT (LORD KENNET)

My Lords, we owe a debt of gratitude to the noble Viscount, Lord Colville of Culross, for having initiated the debate this afternoon. In his speech he touched, I think, on most of the relevant parts of the topic. His speech in 1963 to the Annual General Meeting of the Council for the Preservation of Rural England is still remembered by all those concerned in this question and has made its contribution to what is now being developed through the Government's proposals. I look forward to all the speeches that we are to hear this afternoon, perhaps to none more than that of the noble Lord, Lord Hurcomb, who has been so closely involved with the Countryside in 1970 Conference, at which so many of the proposals later issued in the White Paper as Government policy were discussed and first brought together in an orderly form.

I will endeavour to answer as much as I can of what the noble Viscount, Lord Colville of Culross, said, but his questions were rather detailed, and, as he generously conceded, he did not give me much warning of the detailed points he was going to make. In an interesting passage about what we could do now, before the introduction of the Countryside Bill, he mentioned various existing measures and asked whether we were making full use of them—in particular the Cumberland County Council Act 1964. This Act gives Cumberland County Council powers to make the sort of provisions in Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty which can normally only be made in the National Parks themselves. Some use has been made of these powers, particularly in regard to preventing the wrong use of the coastline by tourists. In short, these powers have proved themselves useful, and we hope that they will prove to be more useful as time goes by.

He mentioned also the power which exists for local authorities, and typically urban local authorities and their rustic hinterland, to form joint planning advisory councils. The trouble is that these powers as they exist now provide only for advisory committees, and what seems to us to be more important than that is to get the right arrangement for planning authorities so that the planning authority itself, for a social unit of conurbation plus rustic hinterland, shall be the right size to handle the joint problems which arise between the two types of area. My right honourable friend the Minister is instigating at this moment a number of studies on a sub-regional basis, smaller than the big regions with which we are familiar in the Department of Economic Affairs context, covering an urban area with a surrounding rural area, in order to find out precisely what type of situation can be best met by what type of planning authority in the future.

The noble Viscount mentioned the Lands Amenity Act of Northern Ireland, which, we understand is something like our own National Parks Act, but with slightly more executive power reserved to the Minister than in the National Parks legislation, and with no Countryside Commission or equivalent commission, but a different structure. We keep in touch as much as possible with developments under this Northern Ireland legislation, and we know that the Northern Ireland Government has been in touch with our own National Parks Commission—in other words, the experience they are gaining is not lost to us, and we are not omitting to feed it into our consideration about our own countryside legislation.

He also suggested the possibility of a special department within the Government to deal with the countryside, although not, I think, a separate Ministry. I am glad he did not suggest a separate Ministry. How these things are handled in the bureaucracy is not a matter we usually discuss in too much detail in this House. There are, of course, specialists in this matter, and I think that the departmental structure which we have within the Ministry of Housing and Local Government and the Ministry of Land and Natural Resources and which is being sought at this moment, is probably adequate to the kind of needs we are talking about.

Turning to the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Henley, I want to take him up on a couple of points. The position about the reabsorption of the Ministry of Land and Natural Resources is not too obscure. The Prime Minister himself made a rather full statement about yesterday in another place. It is to be re-absorbed. The dovetailing of the machinery of the two Departments is already rather far advanced, but the formalisation of the arrangements requires legislation. The absorption of the two bureaucratic machines is not something that can be done overnight. It is in hand. There are no second thoughts or back-tracking on it.

The noble Lord made the point that perhaps the Minister of Housing and Local Government was not the right person to entrust with the primary executive responsibility for keeping a decent countryside. He painted an awful picture of a man concerned only with brute quantity, pouring out cheap and nasty houses in ribbon development all over the country. This is really far from the present situation. The Minister is the Minister not only of Housing, but also of Local Government and of Town and Country Planning. It is not in his title, but it is much in his functions; and I think we should be better advised to confine ourselves to discussing specific cases where he may be thought to have erred than in assuming that merely because he is called "Housing" he is against the countryside. He is not. Lastly, I would mention one tiny point. The noble Lord said that the White Paper did not mention the provision of warden services. It does in fact; it is to be found in paragraph 25, which proposes a warden service for the new Country Parks.

I do not know what could be a harder thing to plan than the countryside, unless indeed it is the cities whose development makes it so important that we should plan the countryside. We have to think, all at the same time, of next year's harvest, of next year's breeding grounds for the peregrine falcon, of the new towns or districts of towns which we shall need in 1975, of where the water is to come from in 1985, and where the timber is to come from in 2050. Then, with all these, we have to think of next week-end's motorists coming out of the city to enjoy themselves in the best of all possible ways:

by breathing the fresh air and getting some sun on them. It is this last problem which makes it all so urgent. Choked roads, cars parked everywhere so that no one can enjoy anything, noses filled with fumes, social and family communication choked because everyone loses their tempers.

One is tempted to say "All right, let there be no cars in the countryside." But then, when one looks at the cities they have come from and at the congestion there, one is tempted to say, "Let there be no cars in the cities either—let there be no cars." But we cannot do that. We welcome the extension of car ownership; it confers a new sort of freedom on more and more people, and it is the essence of good planning to contrive that this freedom shall not be self-cancelling; to contrive that the pleasant places which can now be easily reached shall not become unpleasant simply because they are easy to reach. Both in cities and in countryside it is a difficult task indeed. Just as one cannot preserve the nice places precisely as they are by keeping everyone out, so one cannot set oneself the aim of ensuring that everyone can always go everywhere, if by that one brings it about that there is nowhere anyone wants to go.

One might be tempted to say the task is so enormous that it can be met only by taking swingeing central powers; a 100 per cent. Power of compulsion, a 100 per cent. Exchequer finance. But we have a pretty thriving system of local government in this country, and there would be no surer way of causing it to languish than by successively taking more and more power to the centre. On the other hand, if one took no increased powers to the centre, although some local authorities would do as well and possibly better than the centre could, yet there will always be a variety in their performance, and there would be an obvious injustice in letting that happen, too.

So the Government have tried to strike a balance by the proposals in this year's White Paper which, broadly speaking, is based on an extension of the idea of the existing 75 per cent. Exchequer subsidy for the various new things it is intended shall be done. The White Paper accepts that everybody has a right to spend a part of his leisure in the countryside and to be able to reach it quickly and in comfort. This will influence, of course, the future planning and the location of houses, factories, roads and public utilities. But these matters are not within the scope of the Countryside White Paper. The White Paper seeks to reconcile general enjoyment of the countryside with the interests of those who live and work there, and with the need to prevent the destruction of the very amenities which draw people to it.

The answer, as the House knows, is the proposal to set up Country Parks and picnic sites which one can go to, and camping and caravan sites for those passing through on their way to somewhere else; to provide better access to water open country and to State forests; to review and streamline footpaths legislation and to facilitate the creation of more long distance walking routes.

The White Paper also proposes measures to enhance and preserve the natural beauty of the countryside itself: a substantial programme of tree planting by local authorities, with complementary powers to acquire amenity woodlands in certain circumstances; improvements in the legislation governing tree preservation orders (an enormous matter, with thousands of cases every year); a programme to get rid of eyesores from the most attractive places; a review of the policies of seaside local authorities in respect of development on the coastlines, and Government support to the tune of £250,000 for the National Trust's Enterprise Neptune Campaign: and also special powers to regulate motor traffic in certain areas in the interests of amenity. For a large proportion of these measures Exchequer grants will be paid at 75 per cent.

General oversight and co-ordination of all this is to be entrusted to a Countryside Commission which will in due course replace the National Parks Commission. Besides assuming the existing functions of the National Parks Commission in relation to National Parks themselves and to Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, to long-distance routes and to the preservation and enhancement of natural beauty in England and Wales, the new Commission would be responsible for promoting public enjoyment of the countryside generally—that is, outside these special places. Let me say here that there is no intention whatever to dilute the powers and functions of the existing National Parks Commission in relation to its own places in the National Parks and the Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The proposal is that these functions shall remain as they are, or better, and that new functions over wider areas should be added to them.

The new Commission will assume its new functions under the proposed Countryside Bill. I know that there is disappointment in the House, and indeed in the country, that it has not proved possible to introduce this Bill in the present Session. The noble Viscount, Lord Colville of Culross, voiced it; I share it. But it is due to no more dubious or deplorable a fact than that one cannot do everything at once. The Government have a fearfully heavy programme of legislation for this Session, largely of very urgent social reforms. This Parliament looks like lasting rather more than one year and we should not regard the fact that a given Bill is introduced in the second Session rather than in the first as a matter of grave concern. The time is not being lost; it is being used for preparation, and the Bill will be all the better, we believe, for a rather prolonged period of gestation—longer than we had hoped, I admit, but not longer than it should be. The Countryside Bill for Scotland is being introduced in this Session, for the simple reason that Scotland, unlike England and Wales, does not have the foundation of existing National Parks legislation to build on. Scottish needs therefore appeared to us to be more urgent, and this is reflected in the timetable of legislation.

The Countryside White Paper itself has met, on the whole, with a well-merited welcome from the organisations concerned with its contents. What effect will it have? I think that when its provisions are translated into law, when the detailed planning it requires has been done, and when the money has begun to flow towards the implementation of these plans, we may expect the following. At present our country shows, at week-ends and in the holiday season, solid lines of steel boxes, each filled with frustrated people, trying, and sometimes even failing, to get to a rather small number of all too familiar places: the seaside re sorts, Box Hill from London, the Lakes from the Northern cities. "It's a fine day; let's sit in the steel box and see if we can get somewhere." We plan, above all, greatly to increase the number of places people will want to get to, and will be able to get to. Why go 100 miles to a National Park? Not everyone needs to be able to walk for three days without seeing anything but sheep. Why not go 20 miles to a place where we can park the car somewhere where it will not spoil the view, where we can get out and roam around for an hour or so, in a wood, on a small piece of open downland, and sit down out of sight and sound of the city, but not all that far out of sight and sound?

So we propose the institution of Country Parks, some of them fairly near to cities. Local authorities are already beginning to think where these Country Parks might be set. But some of us do not even want to walk for a mile or two; older people and people with young children need only a smaller place still where they can simply get out of the car and sit in a pretty place and eat sandwiches. Why go 20 miles? Why not go an even shorter distance to an even smaller place properly safeguarded and designated? So we propose picnic places.

I do not need to remind your Lordships that none of this will make it any harder for those who wish to get right away from all trace of civilisation and tameness. The aim is to provide a continuous spectrum, running from the grand and watery wilderness of Scotland to the clean and natural wood on the very verge of the great city; everything from Ben Hope and Ben Loyal to Epping Forest. The more places there are to go to, the fewer people there will be going to each, and the more each visitor will enjoy his escape from urban life.

But what of the farmer? Is his livelihood to take second place to the weekend enjoyment of the townsman? Not at all. The local authorities, we hope, in agreement with their own agricultural interests, will settle these Country Parks and picnic sites to the mutual convenience of farmer and townsman. The towns-man does not by preference sit down in the middle of a cornfield, or try to run races with a bull: he much prefers to sit on a bit of open down or under some trees. His pleasure is, in fact, in precisely the same direction as the farmer's economic interest, provided he can find the right place. It is for this reason that the Rural Development Boards, which are proposed in the Agriculture Bill that will shortly be coming before the House, are to consult the National Parks authorities now and the Countryside Commission, when that is set up. This is a mutual safeguard built into the scheme of things.

In addition to the Countryside White Paper, a further Government White Paper, Local Government Finance, England and Wales, proposes the introduction of a new country-wide grant for the reclamation of derelict land. Together with the countryside provisions themselves, and with the co-operation beween the Defence establishments and my right honourable friend's Department which is now being pursued, this grant should make a big difference to the fight against the outrageous blot.

A word about overhead power lines. This is a straight conflict between amenity and convenience, and there is no solution but continuous pragmatic compromise. We cannot bury everything everywhere—we cannot afford it. It costs £1 million to bury one mile of 400 kW line and £54,000 to run it aloft. Equally, we cannot allow everything everywhere. We just have to keep on inquiring, appealing if necessary, and deciding. Even this has its dangers. The House will remember that when the current failed over a part of South-East England last winter the Chairman of the Central Electricity Generating Board said that if he was to have enough circuits to be sure it would never happen again, we should have to stop spending such a long time discussing where each new line was to go. But as an earnest of continued determination to take amenity into account, I have here a list, and can show it to any noble Lord who is interested, of half a dozen recent occasions when my right honourable friend refused to allow overhead lines to take the easy route across pretty places.

Another continuing conflict between the needs of modern life and industry and the beauty of the countryside lies in water. I would ask noble Lords not to think in this debate, and in general, too narrowly of this or that particular case. It is Manchester to-day; it will be another place tomorrow. The Manchester solution is, I think, by common consent a remarkably ingenious and careful one. Ingenuity and care are needed all the time, and will continue to be needed. But we all know that it is time now for long-term inquiries and solutions. I cannot say that the longterm solution was too well considered until recently. But we now have the Water Resources Board, and the first results of their labours are nearly to hand. For example, they expect to receive soon the result of the preliminary study they have commissioned on whether or not it will be worth conducting a full-scale feasibility study of the Morecambe Barrage, to the North. They have also been at work on an interim report on the whole future of water supplies for the South-East.

Beyond this, again, lies the whole question of desalination. I think no one can doubt that in 100 years we shall be relying in part on seawater with the salt taken out. If that is so, then it is simply a question of deciding when, where and on what economic terms we shall take the plunge and start to do it. Two techniques are at present contesting the field: flash distillation and reverse osmosis. The latter needs no heat. Both are very new and at the moment fearfully expensive. But research is continuing in this country and an attentive eye is being kept on research in others. It will be a great day indeed when the ever-growing thirst of our cities can be slaked from the sea around and we shall no longer need to continue multiplying reservoirs and tapping lakes and rivers.

These are remote frontiers. Let me end with something much homelier and much closer in time. All planning in the countryside depends, in the end, on what Government has the power to do and what it has not. The noble Viscount, Lord Colville of Culross, mentioned the landscape Areas (Special Development), Order of, I think, 1950. The procedures under this Order have some value, but their effect is rather limited because, in practice, they allow the planning authority to control only the design and external appearance of buildings. In the kind of place we all have in mind, what one needs is not simply control over appearance but also control over the siting of the building and indeed, above all, over whether or not there shall be a building at all. For this there is a mechanism known as an Article Four Direction, which seems to us to be preferable to the 1950 provisions.

I will not trouble the House with the details but, broadly speaking, one of the things it can do is to withdraw from a given area the general permission to erect farm buildings of less than 5,000 ft. ground area, and to subject proposals to erect such buildings to the need to obtain planning permission. Local authority associations have for some time been pressing my right honourable friend to make a more liberal use of his power to approve such directions in National Parks and other such places, where agricultural building threatens to spoil the view. I am now in a position to say that my right honourable friend will be prepared to make a more liberal use than heretofore of this procedure where there is reason to fear that unsightly buildings will be erected in National Parks, and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty or high landscape value, or close to unspoiled stretches of coastline.

This is an interim measure which we hope will hold the fort to a certain extent until the full Countryside provisions come into play. By these measures and others, and by the good will and common sense of everyone, we hope to keep the British countryside what it is—one of the loveliest and most diverse in Europe—and to enable all of the British people to know it and to enjoy it by means which do not harm it or those who live on it.