English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Baroness Grey-Thompson Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 13th April 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hoey (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly to my Amendments 263A and 263B. I also support Amendment 263ZB on the consultation with Sport England, which I think is very important. We must not remove Sport England as a consultee. I declare an interest as the honorary president of the London Playing Fields Foundation, the charity that was founded way back in 1890 to protect, promote and provide playing fields at a time when the pressure to build on open green spaces was intense. Very little has changed since then. However, the activities that can take place on well-managed playing fields, I think we all know, can improve lives, especially when we know how the situation is with young children and obesity.

Sport can provide the motivation to be more active and encourage confidence and social skills. Of course, none of this would be possible without a pitch to play on in the first place, and it is therefore vital that we protect playing fields so that they remain accessible, affordable and attractive to current and future generations. Getting rid of our fields is a false economy. Research commissioned by the London Playing Fields Foundation showed just how much money could be saved. An impact study on the activities at the Douglas Eyre Sports Centre in Walthamstow over a 12-month period found that the minimum saving to the public purse was £4.8 million, mostly in reducing crime and anti-social behaviour. Let us not forget: once a playing field is lost, it is lost for ever.

I turn to my amendments. First, I say to the Minister that I support government Amendment 252, which is very important, and also the new category of indefinite sporting ACVs in the Bill, which is most welcome. It makes it clear that once a playing field, always a playing field. Thousands of playing fields have been lost to speculators, and the Bill’s right to buy for sporting assets of community value has the potential to ensure that our remaining playing fields become community-owned assets in perpetuity. The right-to-buy mechanism could be a game-changer in saving playing fields, but there is a flaw in the Bill. It is silent on hope value, which, if left unaddressed, means that communities will always fail to compete with speculators.

The Minister said in Committee:

“We want to ensure that communities have the best opportunity to purchase valued assets and are not priced out by inflated sale prices based on redevelopment potential”.—[Official Report, 5/3/26; col. GC 517.]


She was so right; “inflated sale prices” is the lay definition of hope value that Amendments 263A and 263B seek to remove from assets of community value valuations. The principle of removing inflated sale prices based on redevelopment potential is accepted by the Government; “inflated sale price” is a non-legal term or definition for what we all call hope value. You could also say that it is the key definition. Hope value is the amount of inflated sale prices based on redevelopment potential. Hope value is so big in playing fields because the valuation of a playing field is low, because a playing field run by community sports clubs is usually dependent on volunteers, and that is a break-even social asset. Of course, the same acreage with planning for housing is worth many millions.

In Committee, the Minister dismissed amendments very similar to these on the grounds of “striking the right balance” between communities and asset owners. I agree with that, and I think we all agree with that, but there are two scenarios where a speculator owns a sporting asset of community value with the intent of change of use for abnormal profit. A speculator who owns a playing field that is subsequently determined by the local authority as an ACV has a right to appeal the designation of ACV. A speculator can also afford a judicial review of the council decision. Moreover, a speculator who buys a playing field that is already a sporting ACV does so at their own financial risk, speculating that they can remove the ACV designation to enable change of use for profit. My amendments do not disrupt the right balance. The historic loss of playing fields has proven what we all know: it still favours the speculator. The speculator has more funds and more specialist knowledge to pursue their aims than the community has to protect sporting ACVs at risk.

My Amendment 263A presumes that the new right-to-buy process is working and removes the inflated sale prices based on redevelopment potential from the valuation process, and so gives a community charity a chance to buy a playing field at a valuation based on its use as a sports ground. Amendment 263B is the back-up if the right-to-buy process fails as the speculative owner is unwilling to sell an ACV to a charity. The Crichel Down rules for compulsory purchase already provide a path to CPO to tackle obstructive owners, but this amendment makes sure that inflated sales prices based on redevelopment potential—hope value—are removed from CPO valuation for sporting ACVs.

Why do so many groups working to protect playing fields feel so strongly and support these amendments? Let me lay out starkly why these amendments are needed. I use Udney Park in Richmond as a reference case. It was opened in 1922 as a war memorial sports ground by Old Merchant Taylors’ Football Club and was re-donated under covenant in 1937 to St Mary’s Hospital Medical School, which then merged with Imperial College London in 1988. In 2014, Imperial decided that Udney Park was surplus and put it on the market. In 2015, Imperial sold it to a UK speculator who gazumped the £2 million community bid with a £6 million winning bid—so £4 million of hope value, or inflated sale price based on redevelopment potential, probably about £30 million. The UK speculator took five years then to get their planning application to a public inquiry, spending a further £4 million on professional fees. Udney Park became an asset of community value in 2016, thanks to all the campaigners. In 2020, the planning inspector refused the change of use and the UK developer then put Udney Park back on the market in 2021.

However, the current asset of community value right-to-bid process failed. The community bid £1 million. The park was now dilapidated and the war memorial pavilion closed and vandalised, so there was a reduction in value as a sports ground since 2015. Unfortunately, an offshore speculator bought the park in 2022 for £3.5 million, so that was now £2.5 million of hope value or inflated sale price based on redevelopment. If hope value is removed, this offers a path to community ownership for Udney Park and other playing fields at risk.

As the Minister must know, local people in all cases of playing fields being threatened put huge voluntary effort into trying to save them. I pay tribute to the Udney Park Playing Fields Trust, led by Mark Jopling, who has also written to the Minister and the shadow Minister, and has been working closely with the Liberal Democrat MP for the area. The trust has been tireless in its efforts, but faced with the wealth of this developer, it has virtually no chance of saving the playing fields for their children’s children to play on if we do not even up the situation on hope value. That is why these two simple amendments are so important.

[Baroness Grey-Thompson (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 263ZA and 263ZB. I declare that I am chair of Sport Wales, I have recently been appointed to the board of Active Travel England and I am a patron of Fields in Trust. Sport England is notified only if there is loss or damage to sports fields. While I admire the Government’s ambition to increase housebuilding in an attempt to stimulate growth, it is important than people, especially children, have a place to play. The work of Sport England in safeguarding these areas is really important.

--- Later in debate ---

As I am leaving this House under the terms of the hereditary Peers legislation, I want to leave believing that I have tried to do the right thing for disabled people. I beg to move.

[Baroness Grey-Thompson (CB)]

My Lords, I have attached my name to both amendments. I cannot say that I have quite as long a history in accessible transport as the noble Lord, Lord Borwick, does, but in the mid-1990s, I sat on the National Disability Council with the noble Lord, Lord Shinkwin, which oversaw the implementation of the Disability Discrimination Act. Back in the 1990s, the promises that were made on accessible transport felt like they were a very long way away. To be honest, in my 20s, I did not think I was going to live that long.

Considering the challenges that we face in accessible transport, the small gains that have been made have been slow and quite hard-fought. When I look at the provision of taxis, there is very much a difference between what is available in a city and what is available elsewhere. Where I live, in the north-east of England, it is almost impossible to get an accessible taxi. A friend of mine, an electric wheelchair user, came to visit last year. It took many hours over several days to even find provision for her to be able to use.

The challenges that we face are wider than just accessibility. There have been many cases of overcharging disabled people. There is wider access for people with other impairments in terms of discrimination, but the reality is that we have far from equal access. The noble Lord, Lord Borwick, talks about the number of wheelchair users who are in the UK. It is hard to find the numbers, but what we do know is that changes and improvements to mobility aids mean that more people are probably using mobility aids to be able to travel than they have ever done before.

We have to think about how we can make travelling much easier for disabled people than it currently is, and how we join this up with other modes of transport. If I look at things such as rail replacement services, most of the buses are not accessible and disabled people have been stranded at railway stations because it has not been possible to get an accessible taxi. As yet, we do not know the impact that changes in Motability will have on quite a significant number of disabled people. Just for clarity, I am a recipient of PIP, but I do not have a Motability car; but I imagine that those changes that are coming and the significant decrease in the mileage allowance are going to make accessible transport and accessible taxis even more important for quite a large number of disabled people.

I think the answer is not just in taxis. We have to take a really long, hard look at transport for disabled people. So far, there is still a significant amount of discrimination. As I was adding my name to these amendments, a number of scooter users got in touch with me to raise issues that they have with using accessible taxis. Where they are available—quite often around school hours—they are used for accessible taxi trips to and from school, and even where they are available, there are large chunks of the day where disabled people are not able to access them. I look forward to the Minister’s response, because accessible taxis are a really important part of equal access for disabled people.

[Lord Shinkwin (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to speak in support of my noble friend’s Amendments 268 and 287. In doing so, I should say that, although I welcome them, the fact that we are considering them this evening makes me sad, because they should not be necessary. The fact that they are exposes how little progress has been made, as the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, has said, in the 31 years since she and I served on the National Disability Council, advising the then Government on the implementation of the Disability Discrimination Act. The case of continued taxi inaccessibility, which these amendments modestly seek to remedy, provides just one example of the lack of enforcement of a law and subsequent laws that promised equality and, crucially, sustained attitudinal change.

Therefore, it should surprise no one that the failure to enforce these laws is having the opposite effect to what was intended by the authors of the Disability Discrimination Act. Instead of positive attitudinal change and greater inclusion, a lack of enforcement of the law, together with a licence to vent the vile prejudice that is, sadly, the hallmark of social media, have together spawned a culture of renewed discrimination and impunity. Attitudinally, as we heard in the debate on government Amendment 334 to the Crime and Policing Bill—which, incidentally, I supported—we are going backwards as far as disabled people are concerned.