Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Meston Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 3rd November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

First, my Lords, I note with unrestrained delight from the annunciator that Parliament is being presented with the opportunity to spend another £10 million on a new door, and I look forward to the announcement shortly.

My amendments concern the advertising requirements in the Bill and indeed elsewhere in legislation. The purpose of the advertisements is to tell people what is happening, and there are two main routes through which that information has to flow. One should be a central database of all such announcements run by the Government so that all the professionals can immediately go where they need to in order to look at it every day, see what is happening and be completely up to date without having to faff around.

The other is that they ought to go in publications that ordinary members of the public read so that they can say, “Oi! What’s going on? I need to take an interest in this”. It is that second section that particularly concerns me because the rules as to where these advertisements can be put were set down in 1881 and need updating. The Minister has kindly promised me a meeting—which has yet to be arranged—with her department and DCMS; I look forward to that very much, but this needs doing.

There are a number of other amendments in this group, the presentations of which I will listen to with interest. The only one that I have a particular interest in is Amendment 250, which seems an undesirable bit of retrospective legislation designed to enable the All England Lawn Tennis Club not to have to negotiate fairly with the people it is disadvantaging as a result of its plans. I hope the Government will reject it, but I declare in saying so my interest, in that I am a resident of Eastbourne, which has been disadvantaged by the All England Lawn Tennis Club’s plans, and I have numerous friends and relations who are Wombles. I beg to move.

[Lord Meston (CB)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 238A in this group, which is in the same terms as an amendment that I tabled and withdrew in Committee, reserving the right to return to it later. I have decided to bring it back for further consideration and will seek to reinforce the arguments for it.

This takes us into the largely unexplored Part 5 of the Bill and concerns the scope of exceptions to home-loss payments in what is now Clause 105. The compulsory acquisition of property, particularly a dwelling, is a drastic step for which clear and proper justification should be required. Normally the person displaced from a property that is his or her dwelling receives the market value of the property, together with compensation by a statutory home loss payment, which provides some modest recognition that the person concerned is being compelled to leave his or her home.

However, in Clause 105, a proposed new section of the 1973 Act stipulates exceptions to the right to a home loss payment when the property has been allowed to get into disrepair or there have been other failures to comply with notices or orders which have been served. Homeowners caught by those exceptions will be denied any home loss payment. Of course, the assessed amount which the individual receives on compulsory purchase will always already reflect the lack of repair. Deprivation of the home loss payment would be therefore in addition to the reduced price reflecting a poor state of repair.

Repairs or improvements to a home may not always get done, for a variety of reasons. There may well be situations in which denial of home loss payments would be justified when there has been a significant, culpable failure to comply with statutory obligations to maintain, repair or safeguard a property wholly or in part. But the proposed list of unqualified exceptions in the Bill as drafted could operate unduly harshly and punitively, taking no account of individual circumstances or any underlying reason for non-compliance with the notice or order, which would automatically trigger forfeiture of the home loss payment.

The Bill does not allow for the exercise of any discretion in depriving the homeowner of that payment. In her helpful response to the amendment in Committee, the Minister said that it would be for individual local authorities to determine whether it is appropriate to serve an improvement notice or order under the provisions listed in the 1973 Act, taking into account the personal circumstances of the owner. I am sure that is correct, but the situation contemplated by my amendment is that arising at a later stage, after the order or notice has been served, when the homeowner to be displaced may reasonably want to show why personal circumstances do not then allow him or her to comply with the notice or order.

I wish to stress as quickly as I can three points. First, the amendment would not place any obligation on the local authority to investigate the reasons for non-compliance in any way, unless and until the person concerned tried to show that the omissions were not deliberate and that the cause of non-compliance was either that the required work could not have been carried out because of that person’s ill health or infirmity or that it could not have been afforded because of financial difficulty, such as an inability to obtain or afford funding. The burden of proving any of that would remain on the person to be displaced and would require credible evidence. The only obligation on the local authority at that stage would be to look at the realities of the cause for non-compliance.

Secondly, in these cases the property being compulsorily acquired is a home, and the displaced homeowner will almost certainly need the home loss payment to help find a replacement home. All this amendment seeks to do is obtain some modification of the blanket application of exclusions from such payments in an attempt to make the proposed new clause fairer and more reasonable when there has been what might be called no-fault non-compliance.

Thirdly, of course it is important to consider the financial implications for local authorities, but compulsory acquisition of homes in disrepair where notices have not been complied with is rare and, if the amendment is accepted, the number of cases in which the claimant could show genuine inability to comply with the required work because of ill health or lack of finance will be rarer still. This amendment would allow those people some opportunity to show those reasons and receive the payment which the Bill would otherwise take away from them. If the Government are not minded to look at this again and reconsider the amendment or something like it, I at least hope there would be an indication that guidance would allow such circumstances to be considered. If it were possible for that to happen, I suggest that unnecessary appeals could be avoided.

[Lord Roborough (Con)]

My Lords, Amendments 242 and 243 are in my name. The purpose of these amendments is simply to eliminate the ability of the Government to ignore hope value when assessing value on compulsory purchase orders. The Minister has kindly laid out in writing that this will happen only in limited circumstances and, by implication, that it is of little concern. That is wrong. In Committee, the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, put it far more simply and elegantly than I when he said that hope value is actually market value. He is right. Other government departments accept this. When land is valued for inheritance tax or capital gains tax on non-financial transfers, hope value is explicit. Tax is paid on that hope value, so why should another government department be entitled to disregard it?

Under this Government’s family farm death tax, greater inheritance tax will be paid based on this hope value of land that might lift it, in certain circumstances, from around £10,000 per acre to as much as £50,000 per acre. What happens if the Government then turn around two years later and compulsorily purchase that land at £10,000 per acre because they want to disregard hope value? This is surely absurd; that hope value has not disappeared. The Government should pay for it.

This is a power of confiscation and, as my noble friend Lord Sandhurst is probing with Amendment 251, and as I raised at Second Reading and again in Committee, it is in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights. The Minister’s previous responses that the ECHR allows for CPOs is right, but it does not allow them at less than market value. His Majesty’s Government appear to put the ECHR on a pedestal; I am curious whether that is only when it suits them. CPO powers are, of course, essential to a modern Government carrying out their duties, but this cannot be a tyranny of the majority. The rights of the individual have to be respected.

Can the Minister assure us that, should she reject my amendments, CPO valuations will include all elements of market value attributed to that land under historic valuation parameters, as I believe the Red Book valuations already incorporate? I refer the House to my declaration of interests as a landowner, among other things.