Protection of Freedoms Bill

After that last debate and listening to my noble friend who is as ever persuasive, knowledgeable and everything else, I am surprised that the Minister did not invite him into the department and offer to let him run it while he took a holiday. My noble friend was so convincing I was fully signed up for it. Let me try my best to get some assistance on this one, too. Amendment 152 addresses a very complex and problematic area around the ownership of land and what I shall call unadopted roads. There are many different names for unadopted roads—unowned, private, and so on—and they are all grouped together. It is not a small problem; there are some 40,000 in the United Kingdom—about 4,000 miles of such unadopted road—so we are not talking about a small problem. It involves rural and urban areas. I want to encourage the beginning of a process and the Minister will be relieved to know that I am not asking her to pick this up and develop it as a full policy because it is a complex area. I am asking her to take on board the complexity of the issue. I have already made some approaches to the Select Committees of the two Houses to see which would be the most appropriate to take the matter forward in recognition that the problem affects a lot of people and causes real difficulty, not just for individuals but for communities living along those unadopted roads. I shall attempt to spell that out a bit more. First, I declare an interest: I live on such an unadopted road and have seen some of the problems at first hand. Only the other year I was involved in giving advice to people who lived in an unadopted road in the county of Surrey where one resident was getting a company to clamp vehicles that were left in the road and the other residents were being charged large sums of money to have them unclamped. I know that Clause 54 of this Bill makes that unlawful and I am pleased about that. I dealt with other cases as an MP and by talking to other Members of this House and the House of Commons, I am aware that this situation has caused a lot of problems. Let me say what those problems are and how they have emerged. This is not a scientific appraisal but it seems to me that a lot of the problems emerged in the 19th century when towns were expanding and fields were being sold off in plots for housing, leaving between them areas that ended up serving as roads or tracks. They became the unadopted roads. The Land Registry in an exchange of letters said that there is no such thing as unowned land. It said that, "““the fact that the ownership of land is not registered does not mean that the land is ownerless. In fact, all land will be owned by someone, even if that ownership cannot be readily identified””." I have my doubts about that because it seems to me—I am not a lawyer—that if somebody who owned that field originally before it was sold off in parcels dies intestate, I am not sure that there can be any owner if that person had no known relatives. To say there is no owner is a vague and difficult concept. It is a curious situation that will have implications for people who live along that road, which is what I want to discuss in a moment. It is also true to say that one of the main problems that ought to be addressed with some degree of concern is the problem of maintenance. These roads are very difficult for people to maintain if their house fronts on to the road. There are rules about what you can do in order to repair, and if the community is functioning well it will often group together and work out a solution. One of the things that troubles me is that it is not clear what the rights are. I draw attention to a good document on unadopted roads produced by the House of Commons Library in October 2010, which makes the point rather well. It states: "““Even if there is no information about the owner, the frontagers can take over the management of the road and will be protected by law from all but the true owner””." The problem is: how do you know who the true owner is or if there is one? At the moment, you are protected if there is no known owner, but only up to the point when an owner suddenly materialises and you have a problem. You have a problem that action may possibly be taken against you if you do something on that road or if you repair it and then the owner appears and decides to charge for that. There are real problems about this. When I discussed this situation with lawyers, the best advice they could give, which was very good coming from lawyers, was to try to avoid going to law on this because it is incredibly expensive and the law is not clear. My main message to the Minister is that we need to clarify this. What I am asking for on the information side is that the Land Registry tells everybody that they can come and inspect its registers, for a certain fee, and see who owns what land. The Land Registry will then say that it cannot be sure about the boundaries. The land may stop at the side of the road or somewhere else, and there is no clarity about where the boundary is. If you then ask who owns the road, the Land Registry will say that it does not know, but there is an owner somewhere. That is what I rather doubt. There are very real questions for the Land Registry about how it prepares and investigates this ownership. One of the reasons why I put down in this amendment a duty to say whether land has been registered with an owner in the past 100 years is because it would enable people who were thinking of taking over the maintenance of a road to ask whether anybody had owned the land in the past 100 years. I have chosen 100 years as a fairly arbitrary figure, but it is good enough to give people some confidence that they could proceed. If it has not been owned for 100 years, it might be worth the community trying to take over the maintenance of the road either through the local authority or directly. Maintenance is not a minor issue. Many of these roads are not lit and are often, but not always, rights of way, so people are passing up and down them. If the weather is seriously inclement—last winter, for example—the road will be heavily pitted and iced over, and people fall and have quite serious injuries. The question is: how can we address this issue in a way that makes it safer for people to use these roads? It is a little easier when the road is not also a right of way, but it is still a problem for the people who live along it. There is also the sad problem of ownership disputes. I dealt with situations where people parked cars, put obstacles in the road, grew hedges into the road and did a host of other things. Occasionally, the police are called in, but they cannot possibly solve what is basically a neighbourhood dispute. It is largely about the lack of clarity in the law. Increasingly, I came to the view when dealing with other cases and going by my own experience that Parliament has a duty to address this complex issue. I will be delighted if the Minister offers to take this away and come back with it in a way that enables people to get more information than is available at the moment, which is not that helpful. We need to acknowledge that this spills over into legal areas, so the Ministry of Justice would be involved. I am not suggesting that this Bill is necessarily the right way of doing it, but I am saying that the information combined with some sort of legal structure is necessary. The department, perhaps in conjunction with other departments, could work out something. It may even need an individual Bill drawn up between the departments or, initially, one of the Select Committees to take it on board and have a detailed look at it. If I can get support from the Minister on that approach we could begin a process that might help us solve this problem. It causes more problems than people realise. It causes a splintering in communities at times when the communities are otherwise okay. We can start that process by looking at the way in which the Land Registry makes information available to the public on issues of this nature, particularly on the 100-year rule, so that groups can ask whether the road, or any part of it, has been owned by anyone for the past 100 years. If not, that will give the community confidence to go forward with their own organisation or approach the local authority and ask it to take it on board. A local authority has the power to install lighting and maintain the road, but only with the permission of the people who front the road or the owner. There are protections—which are obviously easier for a local authority than for an individual—if you think it is unowned and then an owner turns up. We need to clarify that kind of issue and I simply ask the Minister to give an indication of support for the need to develop a process within government, or within Parliament through the Select Committee process, to resolve this difficult issue. Far more people and communities get into difficulties on this than is acceptable. We need to address it. I beg to move.