Localism Bill

My Lords, obviously, I support Amendment 136ZD, ably proposed and argued for by my noble friend Lord Gardiner, to which I added my name. I shall not go over that ground again. I also welcome the opening remarks of the Minister. I did not catch all of it, and will read with interest in Hansard tomorrow exactly what she said. She may well have allayed some of the fears that we have heard about relating to this chapter. Some months ago—it may have been many months ago—I recall the Prime Minister saying that he would bring forward measures for communities to save their village shop, pub and post office. That is an admirable idea, and here we have Chapter 4 before us, but now we have a huge expansion of the assets that communities can save to include all assets from which members of the community derive some benefit. That has put the cat among the pigeons for those landowners and others who allow their communities to enjoy the open spaces of their farms in one way or another. As other noble Lords have said, the unintended consequence of the way that the Bill is written is that landowners will withdraw permission for any activity on their land, a point powerfully put by my noble friend Lord Moynihan. That would be disastrous. If it were to happen, it would go against the grain of the big society, which is what the Bill is meant to be all about. Amendment 133D goes some way to remedy that, as it focuses on business assets—that is, the village shop the pub and the post office—which, after all, was the original intention of the Prime Minister. There is another amendment in the names of my noble friends Lord Jenkin and Lord Greaves, Amendment 136ZZB. That would leave out subsection (1) and insert that, "““the local authority will determine whether or not a building or other land is of community value””." I am afraid that I do not share the view of my noble friend Lord Jenkin. I am slightly nervous of leaving it to a local authority to say what it thinks an asset of community value is. What if the local authority is signed up to the idea that all assets should be to the benefit of communities? That would be very dangerous for landlords and I do not think that I could support that. In this area, I was having a similar thought about tabling an amendment that would try to take the matter back to business assets rather than all assets. My idea was to provide that ““a building or other land may be of community value if it is used on a commercial basis by the local community””. That is very much in the same vein as the first amendment in the group—Amendment 133D—on business assets.