Lord Lansley
Main Page: Lord Lansley (Conservative - Life peer)Housing and Planning Bill
Lord Lansley Excerpts
Baroness Whitaker (Lab)
My Lords, I declare an interest as president of Friends, Families and Travellers. I am proud to attach my name to Amendment 82H, not only because of the breadth and distinction of its support from the highest levels in this House—I know that the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Williams of Oystermouth, very much regrets that he cannot be here. I also speak in memory of my friend Lord Avebury, whose amendment to the Housing Act 2004 the Government’s proposal in Clause 115 seeks to destroy. He was throughout his life a campaigner for justice and fairness and, when the Government of the day repealed his Caravan Sites Act 1968, which resulted in a few hundred more sites, he sought tirelessly to bring in replacement provisions, culminating in those in the 2004 legislation, in which I was honoured to join him.
Why is it necessary to oblige local authorities specifically to include Gypsies and Travellers in their housing needs assessments? It is because without this, as has been said, local authorities have an excuse to shirk even more their responsibility to provide sites for that small proportion of Travelling people—which, as has been said, includes showpeople—who need them. The DCLG’s published figures for the Traveller pitch fund are 533 sites for 2011 to 2015, but even that small number is misleading, because it is not a net figure: it omits the pitches lost to development. The real figure is in the region of 305 to 335, according to research done by Friends, Families and Travellers—that is 61 to 67 a year, which can barely respond to household formation, let alone repair the huge gap in provision.
Homelessness is now more acutely on the increase, particularly in the Midlands, because of the Government's new definition of Travellers, so well explained by the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, which ignores their ethnicity as established in law. Clause 115 did not emerge from consultation, nor was it presaged in the Conservative manifesto. It is as if the Government want, stealthily, to do away with a culture and traditional way of life that is different from that of the settled majority. Instead of bringing in measures that could improve social cohesion and oppose the prejudice that has made this very small minority so often marginalised and deprived—to the severe detriment of its health and education opportunities, let alone ordinary peace of mind—they seek to deepen that deprivation.
Clause 115 did not go unchallenged in the other place. My honourable friend Teresa Pearce cited over 11 national and local organisations, including the Joseph Rowntree Trust and all the leading Gypsy, Traveller and showmen bodies, in her request to remove it. In his response, the Minister, Brandon Lewis, did offer welcome recognition of the duty to assess all housing need. His justification for removing the reference to Gypsies and Travellers was:
“Our clause emphasises that Gypsies and Travellers are not separate members of our communities”.—[Official Report, Commons, Housing and Planning Bill Committee, 26/11/15; col. 345]
It has long been recognised that identical treatment is not at all the same as equal treatment. Indeed, in this case it would result in manifest inequality. Mr Lewis may have realised that he was on sticky ground, because he then offered to incorporate,
“any necessary elements of the current ‘Gypsy and Traveller Accommodation Needs Assessment Guidance’ in wider planning guidance”.—[Official Report, Commons, Housing and Planning Bill Committee, 26/11/15; col. 345]
Guidance has indeed just been published, but without the consultation which the noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Trafford, had offered at her very helpful meeting with the all-party group. It would have benefited from that. What guarantee does it give Travellers, forcibly evicted at great cost to the evicting authority or continually refused planning permission, that their local authority will be obliged by law to ensure that their need for a site is accommodated? I emphasise again the small number concerned—perhaps 25,000 in the whole of England—but even that has proved too much for our majoritarian culture. Advisory guidance with no statutory backing, open to change without parliamentary intervention, will hardly do much when there is no political leadership.
The Government’s own impact assessment has the grace to recognise this, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans, said. It says that,
“some local housing authorities may misinterpret the removal of a specific reference and therefore possibly fall short in their duties”.
However, it claims that this is balanced by the eight years’ experience of implementing the previous system and the reference to the provision of caravan sites and houseboats for canal workers. The problem is that the minimal provisions of those eight years needed strengthening, not eroding, to make enough of a difference.
The truth is that the studies which housing authorities carried out to assess need have been, at the best of times, insufficiently disaggregated to pick up small minority communities. Only specific Gypsy and Traveller assessments can ensure that a proper attempt can be made to provide sites which can preserve their way of life and allow them to live legally, in harmony with their settled neighbours. I hope that the Minister will take this on board and accept all the amendments in this group.
Lord Lansley (Con)
My Lords, I will briefly intervene in this debate. It is quite important when considering this issue to bear in mind that some of the local authorities that have dealt with the situation as it currently applies in legislation have found that the legislation itself has given rise to difficulties for them and, in some circumstances, to abuse.
I will say another word about travelling show people. I very much appreciated what the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville, said about them, and I want, in a sense, to support what they said.
First, on local authorities, I remind your Lordships that I was Member of Parliament for South Cambridgeshire. That district has one of the largest numbers of sites for Travellers, relative to its population and area, of anywhere in the country. Contrary to some of the implications about the attitude of local authorities in the absence of statutory provisions requiring them to behave in certain ways, the local authorities in the district have always rigorously sought to assess the requirements of Travellers in our area and to provide for it. That is because it has historically been an area where Travellers have been welcome in order to support the industry in the county, not least because of the needs of the farming community. However, the issue is that the specific statutory provisions, which Clause 115 would in effect remove, have not enabled local authorities to make disinterested and even-handed assessments of housing needs for all the members of our community, but have given an opportunity—often not for the legitimate Travelling community, who have been coming to South Cambridgeshire over generations—frankly, for abuse.
I refer not least to Smithy Fen at Cottenham in my former constituency, where some come, assert that they are part of a Travelling community—even in circumstances where they already have established residential accommodation in other places—and use the requirement for an assessment of need, which they then assert has not been met, buying at agricultural prices property in a place where development land values are many orders of magnitude greater. They then take possession and seek planning permission over a period for those properties, giving themselves very large uncovenanted benefits and, in some cases, moving on and doing the same elsewhere. The statutory provisions give a sense that, contrary to what the settled community feels, there has to be a fair assessment and an even-handed effort to meet everybody’s housing needs. Those housing needs are being met in ways that would never be accommodated for the purposes of the settled community. The same piece of land would never be able to be developed by somebody from the settled community whose need for housing might be at least as great. Often, in villages, there are young people who would love to live in that village and would love to have that site available for development but, for material planning reasons, it is not available. Therefore, it is important to them that the local authority has the ability—and should be required—to look at housing need and to respond to it across the community. In many places in consideration of this Bill, many Members on all sides of the House have taken the view that we should trust local authorities, through the planning process, to assess planning need and to provide for it. Frankly, that is what we should do in this case.
Baroness Whitaker
Does the noble Lord accept that overall, nationally, there is a huge shortage of legitimate sites?
Lord Lansley
I shall not comment on that. I am simply commenting on South Cambridgeshire where there is evidence that we—the people of South Cambridgeshire, the local authority and Cambridge city—are trying our hardest persistently to increase the availability of sites and have done so successfully. However, with all that effort, at no point have we been able to satisfy the requirement on the basis simply of asking how many people are seeking sites in South Cambridgeshire. That is a different issue. The issue is—as is true for all housing need—that local authorities must be in a position to decide the balance between the requirement for housing and the availability of sites, consistent with the wider development framework.
Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)
My Lords, I am afraid my experience in the adjacent county of Bedfordshire is different from that of the noble Lord, Lord Lansley. That is why I support the amendments of my noble friend Lord Beecham and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans. I used to be responsible for Gypsy and Traveller health in north London. In my mid-40s I decided to reassess my career and to abandon London—he who is tired of London is not tired of life—to live in rural Bedfordshire.
I saw that the first parish council meeting in my new village was going to deal with Gypsy and Traveller assessment. That sounded like a place that I should be, being really keen having seen the huge mountain that Gypsy and Traveller communities have to climb in a wide variety of areas, not least housing, but also in health and equality generally. It gave me the biggest education I had ever had. It was like a bear pit. The amount of undiluted prejudice on both sides of the argument was so huge that it terrified me. I sat at the back of the parish council meeting—I should say that the parish council regularly attracts about three spectators but on this occasion we had 600—and kept my lip severely zipped. In integrating into the community, I had to recognise that there was huge prejudice surrounding the Gypsy and Traveller community. Ever since that night I have regretted not standing up and saying something.
Having followed the issue for over 25 years, I know that Bedfordshire’s assessment record has improved immensely, but in terms of achieving sites for the Travelling community it has not improved as significantly as I would like. Therefore, anything that allows the importance and prominence of this hugely difficult issue in rural communities to be diluted is a retrograde step. Given half a chance, local authorities faced with this horribly controversial issue will take the line of least resistance if they are allowed to. Therefore, the amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans are absolutely required.
Lord Beecham
My Lords, by the standards of Committee stage on the Bill, this has been a relatively short debate, and I will not prolong it too much. But I find myself slightly puzzled at the position that we end up in.
First, I thank those who participated. Most have supported the amendments. One of the most telling phrases was that of the right reverend Prelate, who said that the provisions in the Bill failed to capture the nuances of the needs of Gypsies and Travellers. I think that that is right. I particularly welcomed the participation of my noble friend Lady Whitaker, who is a tireless campaigner for the groups that are the subject of this amendment.
I was, however, slightly puzzled by the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Lansley. I very much welcomed the rare degree of agreement between us, which we did occasionally experience in his ministerial past, but the notion that somehow it was the system that created the problem in his constituency where, as he put it, a particular group took possession of land and developed it, strikes me as a little odd. This is not the Wild West. Presumably they did not just walk on to somebody else’s land and erect fencing around it. They must have acquired the land and they must, presumably, have got planning permission for building on it. The implication was that they had developed it and sold it and moved on. The noble Lord is shaking his head. Perhaps I have misunderstood him.
Lord Lansley
To be clear, yes, they acquired it, but at agricultural values. Then the utilities were provided because the utility companies were required to do so. Then, of course, they subsequently made retrospective planning applications. Often in particular circumstances, when they were refused planning permission, they based the essence of their argument to the inspectors that they had a housing need as Travellers in the area, that the local authority was not providing collectively for all the housing needs of Travellers, and that therefore their particular application should be granted.