Part of Orders of the Day — Town and Country Planning (Recommitted) Bill – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 13 May 1947.
Mr Simon Digby
, Dorset Western
12:00,
13 May 1947
I welcome the announcement of the Minister, that he will look into the problem again. I can only envisage it in the rather narrow field of a local planning authority. I must say, from the point of view of an authority which submitted to the Minister its interim development scheme well before the war, I can quite see that there will be a certain amount of difficulty. A large number of agreements were entered into, the result of which was that the owners refrained from developing, or selling for development, a lot of land which, I am afraid, would otherwise have gone. That was the result of their agreement, so something has definitely been forgone. There will be a feeling that some of them have been let down if they find the other side of the agreement in any way not implemented, because it was really a question of quite a large number of self-denying ordinances. After the Bill becomes law, the general tendency will be to restrict very much more land, so that people will have lost their chance for ever of developing land which, in some cases, they actually bought with a view to development.
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