My Lords, it is a pleasure to be back in harness with the noble Lord, Lord True, on matters of mutual interest to south and south-west London boroughs. I am grateful to him for his quite lengthy explanation. I will try not to repeat much of
what he said but to add to it. I am glad that he started by suggesting that the solution suggested in his amendment might not be what happens in the end. That is probably right and partly why I did not add my name to it.
I first came to this problem when I became leader of a London borough council, coincidentally at exactly the time that the GLC was abolished. When the regional park was established in 1966, it was funded by the Greater London Council and paid for through the precept on all London boroughs to the GLC, not to the park authority. It was brought to my attention in my first year as leader of a London borough council when suddenly we found that we had a precept to a park authority, the existence of which we were only vaguely aware of—I must confess that at the time I thought that the park was in Essex, although as the noble Lord, Lord True, said, it is not—and that we were going to be paying several hundred thousand pounds to this authority right across London. I inquired how many visitors from Sutton—my borough—went to the park and was told that there were fewer visitors from my borough, which was paying several hundred thousand pounds that year towards it, than there were from Northern Ireland. This has been a thorn in the flesh for the past 30 years, at least, and continues to be so. It gets raised on a number of occasions—the last occasion I remember was during the passage of the Localism Bill—always by ingenious methods such as that which the noble Lord, Lord True, has devised today, for which I am grateful to him.
This has become a little more important now not only because of the financial pressure on all local authorities, including the London boroughs, but because whereas 50 years ago, when the Lee Valley Regional Park was established, there was only one regional park in or partly in London, now there are three. There is the Colne Valley Regional Park, a relatively small part of which is in London, and the Wandle Valley Regional Park, which is wholly within Greater London and which covers the boroughs of Wandsworth, Croydon, Merton and Sutton. It was established a few years ago, not as a statutory authority but as a trust, and at that time I was one of the trustees. It has no funding stream. It has been funded in recent years, to the extent that it has been funded at all, by voluntary contributions from the four Wandle boroughs, as we call them. Rather than keeping the money that we obtained by Lee Valley’s reduction in precept, we chose to pass on that discount or reduction to help to fund the Wandle Valley Regional Park.
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The sums involved are very small; Croydon has never paid that money at all, and last year Wandsworth stopped paying it, so currently it is paid only by Sutton and Merton, each of which paid £5,000 last year. We are therefore in the position where the four Wandle boroughs between them pay well over £1 million to a regional park way over on the other side of London, which goes into Essex and up into Hertfordshire and which is visited by very few of our residents. It is an excellent facility—I am very glad that the noble Lord, Lord True, said that, because this is in no way an attack on the regional park; the issue is simply that the funding is all askew.
I share the noble Lord’s view that the authority probably ought to be looking to raise more funds itself and, indeed, it has been doing that in recent years. To give it credit, it has reduced the precept each year for the last few years—not by very much, but nevertheless it is a welcome reduction, as I said, which two of the four Wandle boroughs have passed on to the regional park. It makes no sense, however, for four boroughs that have a regional park in their midst to pay over £1 million, while those boroughs pay something like £10,000 towards the establishment and development of another new regional park.
I very much share the sentiment of what the noble Lord, Lord True, has said, not so much in his amendment but in his urging of the Government to take charge of this issue and to look at it. Over the years there have been numerous attempts to do this. London Councils, as it now is, is not able to do it, because it is a member authority, and while many of its members are disadvantaged by the precept arrangement, many benefit hugely from having this excellent facility quite literally on their doorsteps, with that facility being quite heavily funded by boroughs whose residents seldom if ever go there. Similarly, it receives significant contributions from Essex, Hertfordshire and a rather smaller one from Thurrock. I remember the last time that we raised this issue, a DCLG Minister said, “Well, it needs primary legislation—if London comes forward with the solution, we might do something”. We have waited 50 years—or 30, certainly, since the abolition of the GLC—to try to find such a solution and it will not happen that way, such are the conflicting interests.
I hope very much that one thing that will arise from the initiative of the noble Lord, Lord True, in raising this issue is, as he suggests, that the Minister will say to us, “Yes, DCLG will take this up and look at it, and will look at the funding, not only of the Lee Valley Regional Park but of the three regional parks that are wholly or partly within the greater London area”. In that way we would get the funding on a basis that gives all of them—whatever form that funding takes—a secure and stable future, which Wandle Valley Regional Park certainly does not have at the moment.