New clause 1 - Planning permission for high hedges
Planning and Compulsory Purchase (Re-committed) Bill
2:30 pm
Ms Yvette Cooper (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Office of the Deputy Prime Minister; Pontefract and Castleford, Labour)
As I was saying this morning, we have considered whether it is possible to address the issue of high hedges in a different way through the Bill. However, a series of difficulties—many of them similar—arise in the new clause, and they are worth talking through.
The new clause would treat the problem of high hedges and disputes between neighbours as a planning issue, whereas it is, in fact, a dispute between neighbours that is not being resolved. The first problem with new clause 1 is that it is not retrospective and so, as the hon. Member for Isle of Wight (Mr. Turner) honestly recognised, cannot resolve the problem for the many people who have horrible high hedges blocking out their light and suffocating their houses. That means that the genuine problems of huge numbers of people across the country would not be resolved by the new clause. Moreover, it would be difficult for them to resolve their problems through a planning approach, given that it is the nature of planning permission that it is applied for in advance.
There is also a slight difficulty in subsection (4). There is the question of how one would prove at what point a growing tree or hedge passed the 2 m point, and the issue of whether one could argue that a tree that was 1 m 90 cm before the Bill came into force would need planning permission, but that one that was 2 m 10 cm would not, because of the way that the
clause was drafted. The new clause would be slightly difficult to enforce and interpret.
Another aspect that would be difficult was alluded to by the hon. Member for Cotswold (Mr. Clifton-Brown). There are many cases in which a hedge more than 2 m high is not a problem. It may not lie along the boundary between two neighbours; it may be a long way from a house; two neighbours may strongly want a high barrier between them; or the hedge may block out an unsightly view at the end of the garden. There may be no need for anyone to intervene in the growth of a high hedge. Putting additional burdens on the planning process when many cases would not need to be covered seems an inappropriate way of trying to solve a genuine problem.
We are not dealing with a planning problem. The hon. Member for Isle of Wight said that some would argue that it is right that the measures should not be retrospective. The planting of the leylandii or hedge may be seen as a retrospective act, but the dispute is what remains. The problem is that there is an incredibly high hedge between two neighbours that is making a misery of one party's life, while the other is not responding to resolve the issue. They have an ongoing dispute. The issue is not one of passing legislation to cover acts that took place in the past, which is what it would be if the matter was regarded as a planning issue. The issue is about how we resolve the dispute between two neighbours, and that is a current and ongoing problem. We should have legislation that allows us to respond to that fact.