Heritage Public Houses Bill
Debate between Mike Wood and Meg Hillier
Dame Meg Hillier
Everybody is always welcome to Hackney South and Shoreditch—it is the centre of the universe, although others may disagree with me. It is only half an hour by bike or public transport from this place, so I highly recommend it—a good night out will be had by all!
The new breweries and pubs are bucking the trend in hospitality, and the archway areas are becoming hubs for other businesses. High streets can be challenging, but in Hackney our high streets still do reasonably well, partly because although Hackney is often described as being very hip, cool and expensive—and that is true—it is still achingly poor. One in two children live in poverty, although thanks to the Government’s changes on child poverty hopefully that will reduce, and nearly 60% of people live in social housing, many in overcrowded conditions. The arches are part of what might be called “new Hackney”, but they build on the old traditions.
Saint Monday is an innovative brewery that combines brewing with heavy metal, so any heavy metal fans here can get a bit of real ale and heavy metal in the same place. Great Beyond taproom and brewery, another archway-based business, was set up by Ollie, Nick and John, three beer-loving friends. They do some amazing work and people can buy great Shoreditch and Hackney-made beer there. I forget which bar serves which beer—perhaps we need to do a crawl of all the ones named after Hoxton and Shoreditch? That alone would keep us busy.
The Howling Hops brewery brews on site as well, and I really like the 40ft Brewery in Dalston, which I go to every now and again. The name 40ft refers to that fact that it is based in two 20-foot shipping containers, so not arches this time. That would not reach the heritage standards set out by the hon. Member for Kingswinford and South Staffordshire, but there is interesting new heritage coming through in our breweries. Many breweries offer tours, including Signature Brew and Five Points, so if people are thinking about gifts as we approach the festive season, I highly recommend a visit to Hackney and a tour of one of the breweries. This shows the modern culture that is coming through. Some of the breweries are in heritage buildings, and the arches have their own heritage, but the challenge would be whether they qualify under the provisions set out in the hon. Gentleman’s Bill.
I want to talk a little about assets of community value. When I read the Bill for the first time, I was trying to find what was specifically different about the provisions relating to assets of community value. The hon. Member for Kingswinford and South Staffordshire outlined some of that in his speech, so I am now a little wiser to his thinking. Assets of community value were introduced in the Localism Act 2011. It provides communities with a route to nominate and retain any building or land, such as heritage pubs, that they feel
“furthers the social wellbeing or social interests of the local community”.
Local authorities are responsible for ensuring that those schemes are run in accordance with the legislation, as set out in part 5, chapter 3 of the Localism Act 2011 and the Assets of Community Value (England) Regulations 2012. That includes making decisions on whether a nominated asset meets the definition of an asset of community value, as set out in the Act.
Although I have no scepticism about the hon. Member for Kingswinford and South Staffordshire’s intent, which a lot of us share, I remain sceptical about the Bill. The Government are already strengthening the assets of community value scheme, which I am sure the Minister will go into in her remarks, through provisions in the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act 2026. That will introduce a new community right to buy that covers some of the provisions in the Bill, including, from memory, clause 9 about how people can put in a bid to own a property. Communities will have the first opportunity to purchase an asset if it is put up for sale by its owner. They will have 12 months to raise funding and there will be an independent valuation process to ensure a fair price, so that negotiation is successful. That is close to a lot of the provisions in today’s Bill, so he is welcome to intervene and tell me why he thinks his Bill is different.
Mike Wood
The whole point is that it really is not different—large parts of it are copied directly from what the Government introduced for assets of community value. As I said in my opening speech, though, in most cases community groups do not go through the quite complex process of getting the building facility registered as an asset of community value until there is a direct threat that they know about, as we saw with the Crooked House and as we may yet see with pubs such as the Macbeth in the hon. Lady’s constituency, which I do not think is currently an asset of community value. If those pubs came under threat, it would almost certainly be too late for the community to respond and get the community right to buy. This Bill would make sure that that right is available from day one for these really important historic pubs in the hon. Lady’s constituency and in mine.
Dame Meg Hillier
I thank the hon. Gentleman for that clarification. We have already talked with some passion today about the pubs, heritage buildings and heritage in our constituencies that we value, so that means that we need to push for them to become assets of community value.
I will give an example from my constituency: the Chesham Arms on Mehetabel Road, which was Hackney’s first ever asset of community value. That pub is 162 years old; it closed in 2012, and the owner at the time just assumed that it would be possible to turn it into flats. It is on a residential street—it is a traditional east London pub in a terrace. It is not very big; it is just a little neighbourhood pub, and when it closed there was an assumption that it would be easy for it to be redeveloped, but the council stepped in. At the time, the council was under Labour control—we also have an elected mayor in Hackney, although of course planning matters are not matters for the elected mayor—and it defended the Chesham Arms from redevelopment. It reopened in 2015; it is a real success story.
The hon. Member for Kingswinford and South Staffordshire is right, though, because the challenge was that that pub closed and then became an asset of community value. Learning from that example and from the comments that the hon. Gentleman has made, we all need to be ahead of the curve on this. Whether it is a tramshed that is a heritage building and has become a pub, a pub that has been there for a very long time or a coffee house that has become a pub—whatever the cultural issues are—we can push for those buildings to be assets of community value in a wider way than the hon. Gentleman’s Bill allows for. I suggest to the Minister and all colleagues that we take today as a call to arms for us to implement the essence of the hon. Gentleman’s Bill, without having to go through a quite complicated process that I think narrows the scope too much. There is an opportunity for us to broaden our understanding of what a culturally rich heritage site is, and push for assets of community value to be more widespread ahead of a threat arising, as the hon. Gentleman rightly says.
I am not going to go through all the pubs in my constituency—we would be here for a very long time, and I am aware that other people want to speak. Needless to say, I would be very happy to arrange a tour at any point, and I am sure that the various bodies I have worked with over the years on beer and breweries would be keen to help enable that. In fact, when the current Chancellor was working in the Treasury, he was instrumental in changing the taxation of small breweries to make it possible for these craft breweries to exist—breweries that create many jobs in brewing and, of course, hospitality. They still struggle at times, but they are bucking the trend compared with a lot of our other assets, so as Members, we need to be more ambitious.
We do not necessarily need to legislate for everything; the legislation is already in place, and I think we are very capable of using the legislation we have to protect the assets that hon. Members have spoken eloquently about and defended. I am happy to continue to work with the hon. Member for Kingswinford and South Staffordshire on the intent of his Bill, but I do not feel that this is the Bill to support. I think we can deliver on his agenda without passing the Bill today.
Heritage Public Houses Bill
Debate between Mike Wood and Meg Hillier
Dame Meg Hillier
Absolutely. I am tempted to get into the second part of my speech, but I will touch on this because our railway arches in Hackney South and Shoreditch are becoming a real hub of diverse businesses. A lot of the breweries in my constituency are based there—I will not go through them all now—brewing on site and providing wonderful venues in a historic environment, but they would not count as heritage pubs under the Bill because they have not been around as a pub for 150 years.
Mike Wood
I thank the hon. Lady for the point she is making. She will see in clause 12 that one of the criteria given for what makes up a heritage pub is it having been around for 150 years, but the other part of the definition is if
“the local planning authority deems its building or interior to have a degree of heritage significance”.
It has been well established that “heritage significance” includes links to events and famous people in the past, so it will cover the type of event she was speaking about earlier. If she thinks that that definition needs to be broadened, will she work with me to find the right amendment in Committee to improve the Bill, so that it does what she and I want it to do?
Dame Meg Hillier
I make a heartfelt commitment to the hon. Gentleman that if his Bill progresses today, I will certainly work with him on that. Let us wait and see what happens in that respect. The challenge of a Bill of this length is that is quite complex to amend, because there are a lot of moving parts that already cut across, as I have touched on briefly. I will go into a bit more detail on that, but I will come back to the point about the vibrancy of modern pubs and breweries as they are making a really big difference in my constituency and up and down the country.
In planning terms, we had arches that were, unfortunately, sold off under the previous Government. When Network Rail was classified as a public body and therefore came under public spending rules, there was a gap in funding that previously would have been raised from private markets. To fill that gap, the Government of the day sold off the family silver, selling the railway arches that Network Rail owned—in my area, we also have ones owned by Transport for London—including a large percentage of them in my part of London and in parts of south London, including maybe in the Minister’s constituency. The Arch Company has a job as a landlord, and it inherited some very interesting businesses, which I will touch on in a moment.