HC Deb 29 June 2004 vol 423 cc57-64WH 3.30 pm
Alan Howarth (Newport, East) (Lab)

I want to put forward a case for retaining the provision, under clause 3.21 of the existing planning policy guidance note 7, which allows that: An isolated new house in the countryside may … exceptionally be justified if it is clearly of the highest quality, is truly outstanding in terms of architecture and landscape design, and would significantly enhance its immediate setting and wider surroundings. In their new draft planning policy statement 7, the Government have omitted this provision.

Why should the Government want to end the country house exception? Some have seen this as a flicker of the embers of the class war. Colour is lent to that suggestion by the splendid amendment tabled to my early-day motion 160 by my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Bennett), supported by five luminaries of old Labour. The amendment deserves to be sampled: this House … further believes that if the countryside is to be preserved by not building ordinary houses, it is even more important that is should not be polluted with big houses for the arrogant, vulgar and rich". I imagine my hon. Friends savouring their wording like a very old single malt whisky. Their tongues must have been in their cheeks. Certainly my right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister would not take such sentiments seriously. The 73 right hon. and hon. Members of all parties who have signed early-day motion 160 know that this is a serious issue. We are at risk of losing a tradition of inestimable value to the countryside as well as to architecture.

Presumably the real reason why the Government have proposed to end the exception is in the words of a spokesperson for the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, quoted in The Architects' Journal of 8 May 2003: We don't want loopholes in the law. We don't want to be in the position of having more housing in the countryside when we should be developing brownfield sites. While I will argue that that statement is misconceived, I want to emphasise that I applaud the Government's concern to protect the countryside and to channel developments to brownfield sites. There should be no confusion between the country house exception and abusive developments in rural areas, such as those currently so bitterly contested near Woking and Leominster, and at East Coker and Cottenham—let alone the building fantasies of Mr. Nicholas van Hoogstraten. Clause 3.21 is not a loophole, but a policy deliberately intended, in a context of tight control, to encourage high-quality architecture and landscape design in rural areas.

An appeal in The Architects' Journal to reprieve the country house exception has been signed by more than 300 distinguished architects, planners, academics, commentators and others, including the right hon. Member for Suffolk, Coastal (Mr Gummer), my hon. Friend the Member for City of Chester (Ms Russell) and the hon. Member for Chipping Barnet (Sir Sydney Chapman). None of them, surely, would demur from the aims expressed by the Government in their draft PPS7. The Royal Institute of British Architects, equally, like the Historic Houses Association, while making a powerful case for keeping the country house exception in its submission to the Government's consultation, has emphasised that it endorses the Government's key principles, which are: New development away from existing settlements, or outside areas allocate for development plans, should be strictly controlled; in particular isolated new houses in the countryside require special justification", and all development in rural areas should be well designed, in keeping and in scale with its location, and sensitive to the character of the countryside and local distinctiveness. There is no contention about the Government's objectives of protecting the countryside while offering everyone the opportunity of an affordable and decent home.

The Government state at paragraph 10.2 that local planning authorities should strictly control new house building (including single dwellings) in the countryside, away from established settlements or from areas allocated for housing in development plans. Paragraph 11 starts by saying: Isolated new houses in the countryside will require special justification for planning permission to be granted. So far so good. But then the rest of paragraph 11, taken with annexe A, makes it clear that the only instances where isolated new houses may be contemplated are where they provide accommodation for full-time workers—for example, in agriculture and forestry—who need to live near their place of work. These sections of the draft PPS can only be read by planners as banning new country houses other than on previously used sites. The removal of clause 3.21 inevitably reinforces that interpretation.

Why does this matter, and why would the new policy be a mistake? Last autumn RIBA mounted an excellent exhibition, "The New English Country House". The exhibition catalogue describes 26 country houses, 17 of which have received planning permission since 1997 on the basis of clause 3.21. The 26 designs fall, according to Neil Guy, the exhibition's curator, into four broad categories: classical; traditional houses with a vernacular dimension; modern; and organic. Mr. Guy notes that even the houses more "historicist" in style are modern in the commitment of their designers to sustainability and "green" features. He goes on to say: What unites all the schemes without exception is the greatest care and attention taken with the landscape designs. They are all highly imaginative, yet context sensitive, and demonstrate such a depth of experience and richness of talent within the English landscape architecture discipline. Each scheme appears right for the house and right within its wider landscape context. This seemingly effortless harnessing of house and landscape remains an English tradition that continues to surprise and delight.

We are fortunate, indeed, that there are so many remarkable contemporary British architects and landscape designers, and policy should encourage them to work in a field—country house design—which has historically attracted the greatest talents. We should, I would add, not be prescriptive about style. If we insist on quality—and one of the reasons why clause 3.21 is so important is because it does so—we need not fear a proliferation of pastiche. We should welcome modern interpretations of traditional styles as well as being confident to accept modernism in the countryside.

I do not know whether my hon. Friend the Minister saw another exhibition, at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1974, "The Destruction of the Country House". More than 1,500 English country houses have been destroyed in the last hundred years. John Harris, in a plangent essay in the catalogue, wrote of a dreadful series of demolitions and smash-ups that destroyed some of the greatest works of British art. RIBA now estimates that perhaps 600 country houses have been totally demolished since the second world war. The forces of destruction—originally agricultural depression; subsequently taxation policy, plus road-building and ill-controlled suburban and industrial development—were too powerful to be countered by good governmental intentions for conservation, such as the post-war Labour Government's planning legislation and the introduction of the listing system, and the commissioning by Sir Stafford Cripps of the Gowers report leading to the creation of the Historic Buildings Councils. The challenge for us now is not just to conserve what survives but to nurture the renewal of the country house.

Rightly the Government seek to protect our heritage of country houses, vulnerable as it is to social and economic change, by investing money and authority in English Heritage. The enormous growth in subscribing members of the National Trust, up 50 per cent. in the last 10 years, demonstrates the scale of public support for this heritage. Admirably the then Secretary of State for the Environment, the right hon. Member for Suffolk, Coastal, introduced the country house exception in 1997, precisely to enable our own generation to make its contribution to the continuing vitality of this tradition.

As politicians we should not underestimate the extent to which the public today care about both the built heritage and the design of contemporary buildings. Just as concern for the natural environment became a major political force in the 1960s, so now more and more people feel strongly about the quality of their built environment, about the need to preserve our heritage of good architecture and design and our responsibility to design and build well in our own time, to add to the heritage. We have now repudiated the heresies of the 1980s that market forces should be paramount in determining the character of new building and that it is not the responsibility of the planning system to concern itself with quality. Sensitive to this growing public mood, the Government have rightly included in the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 a requirement that applications for planning permission for development should be accompanied by a "design statement". In other ways too the Government have recognised this, for example with the publication of their policy document "Better Public Buildings" and the establishment of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment. As the Prime Minister said in his foreword to "Better Public Buildings": I have asked ministers and departments across government to work towards achieving a step change in the quality of building design in the public sector … I am determined that this additional money should be well spent, leaving behind a legacy of high quality buildings that can match the best of what we inherited from the Victorians and other past generations. And I am determined that good design should not be confined to high profile buildings in the big cities".

Only this last weekend, in The Observer, my right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister expounded his own personal commitment to the promotion of good design. It would be inconsistent with the Government's strategic support for good design if, in obviating from now on the possibility of building new country houses, they were to deprive rural areas of the benefit of outstanding contemporary architecture.

If we now bring to an end the centuries old tradition of building fine houses in the countryside, we will impoverish architecture for everyone. As Paul Finch, deputy chairman of CABE, said: The history and discourse of Western architecture for many centuries has taken the individual country house as the occasion for experiment, proposition, development and of course the continuation of certain traditions. From Palladio to Mies van der Rohe, with the notable examples of Lutyens and Norman Shaw as contributors to the story, the relationship of living space to social structure has been worked through in fascinating detail. For Britain to bring the shutters down on this long cultural narrative would be a sorry state of affairs, especially since the villa tradition in cities is alive and well. It is precisely because country houses are designed in isolation, rather than urban context, that they have presented a particular challenge and opportunity to architecture across the centuries; the lessons learned have often translated to popular housing forms. This mingling of architecture, history and living makes the question of the country house exception of more than simple planning interest. It is not an episode from 'Upstairs, Downstairs', but part of a richer, more complex aspect of architectural culture.

The country house is one of Britain's most important contributions to the arts and western culture. In the words again of John Harris: The unity of a great house with its furnished interior, collection of pictures and sculpture, its library and family and estate archives, tied within a garden and set in a landscaped park, is perhaps the supreme example of a collective work of art. Writers and painters whose patrons enabled them to practise their art in country houses include Sidney, Dryden, Pope, Turner, Swinburne and Millais. Landscape gardening has been regarded as one of the fine arts, and according to Lord Clark, English gardens were the most pervasive influence that England has ever had on the look of things in Europe.

The PPG7 exception has been attacked on a number of fallacious grounds. It is alleged that the countryside will be ruined by a proliferation of new country houses. The truth is that the history of our countryside is one of intervention, whether through enclosure, agricultural change or the encroachment of industry and suburbia. Too often the altering of the character of the countryside has been an unhappy story, but the great landscape designers—Bridgeman, Kent, Brown, Repton—and the owners of estates have shaped landscapes which we regard as quintessentially English in their beauty and which we cherish as our heritage. As the Historic Houses Association has noted in its submission, for hundreds of years country houses have provided an essential element of the rural landscape in Britain: most of them are surrounded by deliberately created parkland and gardens, and are as much a feature of the landscape as parish churches, hedgerows and the rest of the man-made tapestry that is the countryside in Britain. Of course especially strict care should be taken of the green belt and other special areas and sites, but the real threat to the green belt has come from large and poorly designed housing estates. We need a countryside that is cared for, and among the people who will care for it, with an outstanding commitment of knowledge and resources, are the owners of country houses.

It is also wrong to suggest that a choice has to be made between affordable homes and country houses. We certainly need more affordable homes, but we can have both. Indeed, I believe the Government should insist that, as a condition of planning permission, those who build new country houses should be required to provide some additional affordable homes, and do so to a high standard of design and construction.

Clearly, new country houses are not going to be centres of oligarchic economic and political power as country houses were; we do not want social history to go into reverse. However, we can realistically expect that new country houses will bring more investment and jobs to rural areas, at a time when we need to find acceptable land uses other than intensive agricultural production. Tourists come from all over the world to see our country houses. HHA member properties open to the public employ around 10,000 people. So long as policy is supportive of this part of our heritage there is every reason to think that tourists will continue in the future to come and view country houses old and new, to the benefit of rural employment and the rural economy.

Without the continuation of the country house building tradition it will be harder to perpetuate craft and woodland skills. The parkland of country houses also provides sanctuary for archaeological remains, as well as for plant, insect and bird life, and rare breeds of animals.

It is not easy, of course, for local planning authorities to deal with applications for country houses. They are, however, a type of scheme that already falls under the criteria for local authorities to consult CABE, which, in its formal response to the Government's consultation, has made it clear that it strongly opposes the ending of the country house exception. CABE has said that it would be happy, as now, to provide advice on the quality of country house applications under any future equivalent of clause 3.21. With access to CABE's expertise, it is manageable for local authorities to handle such applications, which in any case will never be numerous. The RIBA exhibition showed indeed how successfully local planning authorities have been able to recognise "truly outstanding" design.

I very much hope, therefore, that my right hon. and hon. Friends will reconsider their position on the country house exception. I know that my hon. Friend the Minister fully appreciates the importance of this issue and has been thinking carefully about it. I can see no good arguments for discontinuing the exception; on the contrary, I believe that it would be a tragedy if we were to bring to an end our great history of country house building.

3.46 pm
The Minister for Housing and Planning (Keith Hill)

I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Newport, East (Alan Howarth) on securing the debate, and on a very good speech. I am grateful to him for providing this opportunity to debate two important issues: the protection of the countryside and the encouragement of top-quality design.

Turning to the first of those issues, there is a well established national planning policy that new housing development in the open countryside, away from existing settlements, should be strictly controlled. Planning policy guidance note 7, on the countryside, states that isolated new houses require special justification, although what might constitute "special justification" in any particular case is left open. However, one significant example given in PPG7 is when it is essential for a farm worker to live at their place of work.

The Conservatives' last Secretary of State for the Environment, the right hon. Member for Suffolk, Coastal (Mr. Gummer), decided, when PPG7 was being prepared, that it would be appropriate to insert a further specific example of an exception to the general policy requiring special justification for isolated new houses. That, of course, was the exception for traditional, high-quality country houses.

Although the right hon. Gentleman is clearly proud of that addition—indeed, it is commonly referred to as the "clause" in his name—it was not welcomed in the round. Many local planning authorities and, I believe, other rural interests were disappointed and concerned about that proposal. They felt, and have continued to feel, that it was an unnecessary addition which went against the sustainable development principles underpinning PPG7. Nevertheless, despite the concerns expressed, the right hon. Gentleman was determined to proceed with his commitment to opening up a new era of traditional country house building, and the exception duly appeared in PPG7 when it was published in February 1997.

I fear that the effect of the exception has been to invite a mixture of speculative proposals of little or no architectural or planning merit, and—with perhaps one or two exceptions—designs that represent a pastiche of traditional, classical styles, with little evidence of real innovation. Those houses would, no doubt, enable a privileged few to live out their dreams of past grandeur, and a few specialist architects to enhance their reputations. However, such developments have little relevance to the majority of people, who are looking for well designed, affordable homes for themselves and their families; nor do such developments improve standards or push forward the frontiers of design.

The incoming Labour Government of 1997 inherited PPG7 with its country house exception. We had many other priorities and problems to tackle after the years of Conservative rule, but in due course we reached PPG7. In April 2001, just prior to the general election, my right hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Beverley Hughes), who was then an Under-Secretary at the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, said, in response to a parliamentary question: The Government believe that there is a need for more affordable housing in rural areas, and do not see the current planning exception for isolated large dwellings which may be built in unsustainable locations as consistent with that priority, or with its objectives for the countryside more generally. We therefore intend to consult on amendments to PPG7 to remove the exceptions policy which allows such large dwellings to be built."—[Official Report, 23 April 2001; Vol. 367, c. 82W.]

That proposed consultation had to wait for our re-election in the spring of 2001, but following our return. the Government announced that they were to embark on a major reform of the planning system. That would include the review of planning policy guidance notes, and their eventual replacement with shorter, sharper planning policy statements. PPG7 was subject to early review, and that led to a public consultation draft of a new PPS7 on "Sustainable Development in Rural Areas" being issued last September.

PPS7 reflects the Government's key priorities for rural areas: delivering inclusive, sustainable country towns and villages that have a high-quality environment; supporting strong, diverse economic activity, with support for our farmers to enable them to remain competitive in changing markets; continuing protection for the quality and character of the countryside, and enabling all to enjoy it. PPS7 also recognises the importance of planning when it comes to providing housing, particularly affordable housing, to meet local needs in rural areas. However, in line with the April 2001 announcement, draft PPS7 did not include the country house exception.

The Office of the Deputy Prime Minister has received nearly 600 responses to the consultation draft of PPS7 from local planning authorities and a range of other interests. Overall, there has been a positive response to the broad policy proposals in the draft, although there have been many varied views on specific policies. Not all commented on the omission of the country house exception, but of those who did, the majority welcomed our proposal.

However, I recognise that contrary views have been expressed, both through the PPS7 consultation and more generally; for example, through the appeal launched by The Architects' Journal. I understand and have been listening to those counter-arguments, including those put forward by my right hon. Friend. I very much agree with him that rural areas, as well as their urban counterparts, should benefit from high-quality design, including the best of contemporary British architecture.

My right hon. Friend has generously acknowledged the passion for good design felt by the Government, and in particular by the Deputy Prime Minister. The emphasis on good design is recognised as a key way of ensuring that the planning system delivers a quality outcome. That is why, as my right hon. Friend for Newport, East noted in his speech, we introduced the concept of design statements in the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004, and it is why the consultation draft of new PPS1 on "Creating Sustainable Communities" makes it clear that high-quality design, promoted through planning policies, is a key element of achieving sustainable development.

Good design is essential for achieving inclusive, successful and vibrant communities. PPS1 advises that design policies and guidance should focus on encouraging good, inclusive design and avoid stifling innovation, originality and initiative. Such polices and guidance recognise that the qualities of an outstanding scheme may exceptionally justify departing from those policies. That is a strong message that I want to see applied equally to rural and urban areas.

We have included as one of the key principles of draft PPS7 that all development in rural areas should be well designed, in keeping and in scale with its location and sensitive to the character of the countryside and local distinctiveness. The draft also encourages planning authorities to take a positive approach to innovative, modern designs.

My concern is to drive up the design standards of all housing in rural areas, not just that of big private houses, in terms of visual interest and impact, the innovative use of materials and construction, and a reduced impact on environmental resources. I believe that our best architects and architectural practices have an important role to play in that respect. However, I recognise that innovative, cutting-edge design can sometimes be helped along by private commissions. In that way, higher risk design solutions can be trialled and proven before being taken up more widely.

I have given careful thought to these matters in the context of PPS7 to see whether there is scope in the final version to provide further encouragement for top-quality housing design in rural areas. I have given careful consideration, too, to the many other views expressed on the consultation draft.

I hope that my right hon. Friend will understand that I cannot anticipate the outcome either in terms of the proposed withdrawal of the country house exception, or of the other policy proposals. However, we are nearing completion of the final text and, with the agreement of my ministerial colleagues, I hope to be able to publish the final version of PPS7 shortly.

Mr. Deputy Speaker

I thank the Minister for his reply. I think that the Minister responsible for fisheries has arrived in the nick of time and we can proceed with the next debate straight away.

The hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Mr. Salmond) has sought the permission of the hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr. Carmichael), who initiated the debate, the Minister and the Chair to participate in the debate and I am delighted that he should do so.