Sustainable Communities Bill

My Lords, as I rise to speak in support of the Bill, I must first declare an interest as chairman of the Somerset Strategic Partnership, which I hope will continue to play its part in reinvigorating the communities of Somerset. It will come as no surprise to noble Lords to learn that I support this Bill from the perspective of rural settlements, although I realise that it applies equally to urban communities. The first aspect that pleases me about the Bill is that it defines sustainability as promoting the economic, social and environmental well-being of an area. All too often, sustainable development is assumed to be an environmental agenda which should take precedence over everything else, whereas in reality a sustainable community is one where family and friends support each other, where jobs are available, where there is a mix of housing—and if we are extremely lucky, even an availability of housing. There should be a range of services available and a sufficient mix of people to sustain them, and there should be community activities of all sorts, ranging from a football club to whist drives to work with charities and even people who just make donations to the local youth club. It should be somewhere in which people are generally prepared to come together to give something to their community. I probably could have declared an interest as a former chairman of the Countryside Agency, if being a former chairman of anything is reckoned to be an interest. I should say that the agency took a keen interest in and was a strong supporter of the rural sustainable development agenda. We tried to use the countryside to promote businesses there and to lift people’s lives. Above all, we tried to promote anything that encouraged community sustainability. We supported all sorts of community activities with grants. Quite often they were small payments, and we sought to make the application process a simple one. We devised and administered the local heritage initiative, funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund. We helped hundreds of communities create their own village greens using the New Opportunities Fund, and we had our own village grant scheme to help anyone do almost anything that brought people together. Actually, it was not quite as loose as that, but there is no doubt that the scheme was as much about promoting community working as it was about implementing the various projects being proposed. Creating pride of place within a community was very important to us. I remember being heartened by the report of a schoolgirl from a very deprived and run-down former coal-mining village in County Durham. When asked why she was supporting a particular project that we were promoting, she said that she had been involved the year before in a school project to write a history of the parish, which we had also helped. She said, ““I used to think that my village was””—and here she used a rather unparliamentary word which stems from a well-known firm of plumbers called Thomas Crapper and Company—““but now I know it is not””. I thought, ““Great. You beauty, that is exactly what it is all about””. Her new pride of place led her to contribute to village life, and therefore we had been successful. It meant that she might not want to leave the village the moment she finished school, and that if she did leave she would be prepared to come back and start a family there, thus making a contribution. In that case, we had definitely achieved something. Alongside these very small incentives for parish activity and innovative pilot schemes to help promote the delivery of local services by having joint outlets, mobile post offices and so on, we tried to encourage both market towns and parishes to think about what they wanted. They were to draw up plans to work out what they wanted their parish or town to be like in 10, 15 or 20 years’ time. Did they want a pub, a village school or a village shop, and what would they have to do to encourage that to happen, or to ensure that their public and private services survived? What mix of community did they want? Did they need some affordable housing—the answer to that question was almost always yes. We also ran training courses for parish councillors so that they could implement their plans. All that is now dead and gone, but this Bill incorporates the principles of our agenda, and for that reason I strongly support it. I was sorry to see that the earlier intention of giving more direct control to parish councils got squeezed out in the Bill’s passage through the other place, and that it is now the principal councils that have control. However, I am glad that they are specifically obliged to have regard to parish plans. One of the biggest bugbears of parish councils is that, having gone through the often rigorous process of devising a parish plan, they then find that no one in authority pays any attention to it. As your Lordships will be aware, parish councils have all too little control over the future of their community, either in terms of planning decisions or meaningful spending powers. Anything Parliament can do to help in that respect is most welcome. My own town of Ilminster in Somerset, for example, is furious that it appears to be in the process of almost being destroyed by a series of planning decisions that neither the town council, nor the chamber of commerce, was able to prevent. We should bear in mind that this town, in the old days, used to be its own urban district council. Unlike the town in Suffolk mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, a very large Tesco store is being built in our town, despite the fact that there is a Tesco only six or so miles away. To give Tesco its due, it wanted to put the store on the rural side of the town car park but the planners insisted that, for environmental reasons—this is why, all too often, sustainability and the environment get muddled up—it had to put the store in the town car park, which has now been moved to the outskirts of the town. Soon, anyone coming to shop in Ilminster will have to walk past the new Tesco to get to our shops—if they can be bothered; some of the shops are now nearly half a mile away. The situation has been made worse by making one of the main roads into the town a one-way street running out of town, so that most people parking and shopping have to go literally all round the houses to get home. The decisions have not been easy. I highlight the problems of Ilminster only because there is no doubt that the concerns of the town were never properly heeded throughout the process. Residents now feel completely disillusioned with our local democracy and the planning system. I sincerely hope that this Bill will ameliorate that situation in future. I hope that the Bill will have an easy passage through this House and that, if anything, more power will be given to parish councils to control their own future, rather than leaving it to the principal councils to dribble down favours that they might think the parishes should be allowed. I do not quite understand whether the local spending reports can now go down as low as to parish level, or whether they only apply to the principal council areas as a whole. Perhaps the Minister or the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, could respond to that. I believe that, with the possible formation of more unitary authorities, it will be particularly important for parishes to be able to grasp their own futures. I guess that it will all depend on the signals given out by the Secretary of State, with reference to the action plans being prepared by the principal councils. So, in spite of some very minor misgivings, I strongly endorse this Bill.