Clause 73 - Compulsory acquisition of land for development etc
Planning and Compulsory Purchase Bill
8:55 am
Mr Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (Cotswold, Conservative)
Good morning, Mr. Amess, and members of the Committee. Today we have reached the home-straight—the last two sittings on the Bill—and, following the extremely tight timetable set by the Government, we will be considering part 7, which relates to compulsory purchase, and part 8. We would argue that that timetable is unsustainably tight, in that much of parts 1 and 2—the two key sections of the Bill—was not debated. There was a reasonable debate on part 3, but important aspects of part 4, on simplified planning zones, were not debated, and part 5—''Correction of errors''—was not debated at all. We did, however, have an entire sitting on part 6, ''Wales'', and debated that part fully; we believe that the system suggested for Wales is better than that for England.
Let us see whether we can do better on part 7. Compulsory purchase is a pretty all-embracing power. Totalitarian, authoritarian, dirigiste regimes all over the world—Zimbabwe is a typical example—have three features. They tend to kill people on a whim, they tend to imprison people without proper trial and proper process, and they take property away from people without proper compensation or process.
We in this country, as a democracy, are far more civilised than that, and we have a proper compulsory
purchase regime. The Government intend to revise that regime, and we are concerned this morning to make sure that that revision is even fairer to the citizen than the present system, and that it delivers a speedier outcome at a reasonable cost. There is no doubt that the proposed measures will cost more.
Westminster city council, for example, tells us that the problem with the current system is that
''the laws and procedures affecting compulsory purchase are unwieldy and extremely complex. This has led to a situation where the vast majority of local authorities have little or no expertise or experience of compulsory purchase orders''—
I will refer to them as CPOs from now on—
''and are therefore reluctant to use them.''