Localism Bill

My Lords, this group comprises various minor and technical government amendments to improve the working of the community right-to-buy provisions. Before I go through each amendment, I wish to give a short introduction on them. Clause 82 contains key details for giving communities the chance to bid for listed land. There are four broad aspects to consider: first, who has to do what to initiate the windows of opportunity; secondly, the identification of certain types of disposals which will be exempt from complying with the rules at all; thirdly, disposals which can be permitted within the full moratorium period; and, fourthly, the lengths of the interim and full moratorium periods—that is, the windows and the protected period. We are concerned not to interfere with property transactions where the objectives of the policy will not be compromised. I can assure noble Lords that we intend to make provision for a range of types of disposal to be exempt from compliance with the rules. These include, as I indicated on Tuesday, transfers made by inheritance, gifts, transfers between family members and between partners in the same firm, or between trustees of a single trust. We are also very aware of the concerns of landowners who willingly make land or buildings available for some form of community use. They are worried that this benevolence will risk their property being listed as a result and that, if they wished to dispose of a larger site including the listed asset, they would have to delay the disposal. There are two aspects to this. The first is the extent to which it will be appropriate for the local authority to consider occasional or periodic use of a particular site as meeting the definition of an asset of community value. There is a large difference between the use of a field once a year as a car park for the annual village fete and the licensing or leasing of a barn to a local group to run a playgroup. We will give further thought as to how to make it clearer when such use should be sufficient to justify listing. The second aspect is whether the listing of a small site—say, part of a field or a single building on an estate—should be allowed to disrupt the sale of a whole legal estate of which the site is just a small part. There is a question of proportion here that is of particular relevance in the case of privately owned property, and we need to give further thought to that. As I have previously indicated, I am taking this issue back for reconsideration and we will discuss it with noble Lords. I hope to have a solution for Report. A further area for possible exemption that has been raised through the consultation and in amendments before the House is the disposal of going-concern businesses. Again, we have some sympathy with this concern because we do not wish unnecessarily to disrupt a thriving business, such as a village shop or pub, by delaying its sale. That could relate to a sale for the same use, whereby a pub transfers to another owner who will use it for the same purpose. We wish to consider that issue further and will come back on it at a later stage. We are also keen to ensure that where there is a community interest group with a strong interest in a particular asset and the capacity to pay an acceptable price for it, the owner should have the option to dispose of the asset to that group without waiting until the end of the window to do so. This would, for instance, allow local authorities to make asset transfers to community interest groups without being restricted by the windows. We therefore intend to make provision for this in regulations as a right of first offer. In considering the length of the various windows, we have taken careful account of the responses to the consultation and of the need to balance community benefit and the rights of property owners. In the consultation, a broad consensus of 71 per cent of respondents were in favour of an interim window of six weeks, and 67 per cent were in favour of a protected period of 18 months. We believe that these are the right periods. Opinion was much more divided on the length of the full window. A majority of 55 per cent of respondents favoured a window of six months, as opposed to 40 per cent who favoured three months. We are minded to make the full moratorium a period of six months. This would include the interim six-week period; in other words, the window would last for four and a half months after the interim period. A body of experience suggested that a window of less than six months could undermine the benefits of the policy to community interest groups. We considered that communities would thereby be given the time and the best opportunity to succeed. We also accept that there is a case for providing greater certainty by considering whether to add the respective periods to the Bill. On the other hand, we are also aware that this would limit the opportunity to review the periods in the light of experience, once the scheme is in operation. We will therefore be listening to the debate and will come back to that matter at Report. I shall address directly the Government’s amendments to Clauses 82, 83 and 85 and the proposed new clauses to follow Clauses 84 and 87. All these are technical amendments that are intended to prove how the provisions will work in practice. The introduction in Amendment 147F of a new clause to follow Clause 87 is proposed in response to questions raised in Commons Committee about how sites which are split between two or more local authorities would be dealt with. The new clause would require local authorities to co-operate when making all decisions on a site located in more than one local authority area. That does not undermine what I said earlier to the noble Lord, Lord Beecham. Amendments 142A and 143ZB to 143ZD—the two sets of amendments to Clause 82—and the proposed new clause to follow Clause 84 contained in Amendment 147D are both about the operation of the moratorium. They ensure that the local authority is informed of a community interest group's intention to be treated as a bidder to buy the land, and require the local authority to inform the owner of a listed asset as soon as practicable that it has received such a request from a community interest group. Our second amendment to Clause 82, Amendment 143ZB, ensures that it will not be possible for a new owner to get the benefit of the protected period relating to the owner from whom the land was bought. That ensures that the moratorium conditions apply afresh to a new owner if they wish to sell. The amendments proposed to Clause 83, Amendment 147B and 147C, remove the surrender of the lease as a relevant disposal for the purposes of the community right-to-buy scheme. In practice, it is often difficult to decide whether a surrender of a lease has taken place; surrenders are often determined only retrospectively in the courts. Removing the surrender of a lease from the definition of a relevant disposal avoids those difficulties in the very small number of cases where surrender may occur.