Clause17
Commons Bill [Lords]
4:00 pm
Roger Williams (Shadow Minister (Rural Affairs), Environment, Food & Rural Affairs; Brecon and Radnorshire, Liberal Democrat)
I beg to move amendment No. 97, in clause 17,page 9, line 37, at endinsert—
‘(c) to ensure thatland is contiguous with or accessible to the holder ofrights.'.
Theamendment relates to deregistration and exchange orders, but on aslightly larger scale than the village and town greens items that wediscussed. The provision is more directly aimed at common land thatpeople have rights over and which from time to time will have to besurrendered in the public interest, for example when roads or otherpublic infrastructure are being built.
The Minister might say that theamendment would have been better directed at clause 16(6)(a), whichsays,
“the interests ofpersons having rights in relation to, or occupying, the release land(and in particular persons exercising rights of common overit)”.
We would like theprovision to be more explicit, and to say that exchange land should becontiguous to the land over which the rights are currently exercisedand that it should also be accessible. There are instances where landhas been given up and the land that has been offered in exchange isdistant from the existing commons, and is sometimes even divided fromit by a new fenced road.
The recent example that I havebeen given relates to the dualling of the Heads of the Valleys road,which links the south Wales valleys. It goes across the heads of thevalleys and has been a dangerous road for some time. It has been athree-lane road and has been subject to many accidents. Now, thankgoodness, as a result of the intervention of the Welsh Assembly, it isbecoming a dualled road, but land has been taken up to achieve that.Commoners are not happy that some of the land offered to them has beendistant from where they exercise their rights at the moment; indeed,sometimes it has been on the wrong side of the road, so tospeak.
We would like,in clause 16 or clause 17, a commitment that when that exchange ismade, people with rights on the common can continue to exercise thoserights easily, and do not have to go to exceptional lengths to do so. Ilook to the Minister to give us comfort on that point, because that isa real, practical problem faced regularly bycommoners.