Orders of the Day — Control of Office and Industrial Development Bill

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 1 February 1965.

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Photo of Mr Reginald Freeson Mr Reginald Freeson , Willesden East 12:00, 1 February 1965

I do not recall the phrase. I will deal with passion and feeling later. We had five doses of sympathy from the hon. Member for Wycombe. He sympathised with the intentions, with the objectives, with the feelings, and with the problems facing the Government. Five times he expressed his sympathy and appreciation of the problem. It does not take 13 years to express appreciation and sympathy with a Government who are now trying to tackle the problem.

I certainly speak with some passion and feeling on this issue. I think that we all should. I do so not only because we have witnessed a reactionary attitude towards planning and proper growth points in our economy over the past 13 years, but also because we have seen the kind of architectural mess which has been going up in London and is also threatening other towns and cities. It is nothing to be proud of. I feel passionately about the mess we have inherited. We shall have it with us in terms of the life of buildings for 100 years. Our children will be seeing the mess which has been created during the past 13 years, which is, with a few markedly good exceptions, no credit to the architecture of London or to the architecture of many other places. This point has not been mentioned so far today.

The speech of the hon. Member for Wycombe was—I do not apologise for saying so—typical of the complacency the Tories showed on this issue when in office. I speak with feeling and use these phrases for another reason. During the past 13 years, before I came to the House, I was active in local government. In this service, about all else, I had a special interest in town planning in one of the worst areas of London where my constituency is situated. The action now being taken by the Labour Government was being urged right from the time I joined my local authority. It did not begin as recently as the formation of the Location of Offices Bureau, in 1963.

In 1952, when I joined my local authority, the town planning committee was already making recommendations—and I know that other local authorities were also making such recommendations as are now built into the Bill—for introducing some kind of industrial development certificate procedure for office development. We could all see what was going to happen. In the new Borough of Brent, of which council I am chairman, we have about half a dozen major office blocks which have been standing empty, in the main, for one and a half to two years, and, at the same time, there are new office blocks still under construction.

I shall come back later to deal with my area and Middlesex of which it is part. I referred to our attempts in 1952 to get the Government to do something and we have repeated these attempts throughout the years. About 18 months ago my local authority made a request to the then Minister of Housing and Local Government to do precisely what the Bill now seeks to do, plus one or two of the points to which the hon. Member for Bodmin referred.

In the resolution that I introduced into our council chamber, and which was submitted to the Government, I referred to the need for establishing evidence of tenancy, evidence of real need for the building, in order to get away from the predominance of speculation in this sphere of building activity. It seemed wrong to me then, and it seems wrong now, that every time a local authority wants to build a school, a block of flats, a clinic, a swimming pool or any one of the buildings that a good local authority should provide, it has to submit a detailed and well-argued case to the Ministry yet we have seen during the past 13 years no control over millions of pounds' worth of office development in this country which is, to put it mildly, questionable in its social contribution to our needs. I think it has been estimated as at the time of the General Election, or shortly before, that had all the resources which have gone into new office accommodation in Greater London, which has been standing empty and is in the main still empty, gone into housing, it would have produced another 10,000 to 12,000 dwellings that our hard-pressed community needed in the area.

In the opening speech for the Opposition, and also in the remarks of the hon. Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Costain), it was suggested that by reducing building activity in speculative office development we would not increase the building of houses. It was said that it was an illusion to assume that one could increase house-building by reducing office development. The suggestion that that is an illusion is nonsensical. To suggest that building firms which put up massive blocks of offices cannot adapt their techniques to building blocks of flats is self-evidently ridiculous. Whether we like it or not—and, personally, I do not—most of the housing accommodation in areas like Greater London is being provided in the form of blocks of multi-storey flats. This is regrettable, but it is a fact. Therefore, the same building techniques could be used.

It has been estimated also that 25 per cent. of the building labour force operating in Greater London today and during the past few years has been employed in speculative office development. This is socially criminal. What makes this social crime even worse is the fact that members of the previous Administration who have allowed this kind of thing to go on did so when they knew what they were doing. It was not done in ignorance. One could have forgiven that, but in fact they knew what they were doing.

The agitation against this kind of development in Greater London has not started recently. It has been going on for several years—if not as early as 1952 when my own local authority first raised the matter, certainly over the past 10 years. Nothing was done until 1963, when the Location of Offices Bureau was set up. It was the Location of Offices Bureau which our local authority was told about by the previous Administration when we asked for action to be taken along the lines proposed by the present Government.

What does the Location of Offices Bureau contribute? I think that there have been about 780 inquiries to the Bureau from firms interested in moving out of London or to the outer edges of London. Of these, about 112 are prepared to negotiate a removal. But what happens to the premises that they vacate? The Bureau does not prevent the use for offices purposes of the accommodation that those firms vacate. In any case, what possible help is the movement of 112 firms out of Greater London to the situation when, at the same time, two and nearly three times that number are occupying new accommodation?

Let me deal with another aspect of the situation. I said that I would return to the subject of Middlesex, because I know the area well. I live there and I have been engaged in local government there. During the speech of the hon. Member for Wycombe, when referring to compensation as being the only problem, I intervened to say that this was nonsense. I want now to explain why. First, there is the clear reason, which I have explained in general terms, of the failure of the past Government to do anything during the past 10 to 12 years. That was the problem, the fact that we had that Government. I do not say that in any easy sloganising sense.

In more specific town planning terms, let us see what was attempted. Middlesex county planning authority, in discussion with the London County Council some few years ago, in an attempt to do something about the situation in very difficult circumstances, decided to start zoning certain sites beyond the North Circular Road for office development as part of a policy for easing out the concentration in Central London and getting the development more evenly spread in the Metropolitan area. Planning permissions were issued. I refer to the kind of office blocks which have either been completed, like those at Hendon, Finchley, Wembley and Brent, or which are now under construction.

Two or three years went by, and it was clear that this was not making a single dent in the problem. At the same time as new sites were being created by means of planning powers—which, according to the hon. Member for Wycombe are so adequate—with the right motive of trying to encourage the movement of offices to the outskirts, it was not possible to prevent the continuation of development in the Central London area. We ended up with a situation in which more office accommodation was being provided in Greater London than was originally envisaged. The result was that the Middlesex county planning authority, together with the borough councils, decided that there would be no more planning permissions for the provision of office blocks in the outer London area, because they knew that planning control had not worked. This is why I suggest that the use of planning powers as they exist now are not adequate.

Of course, the issue of compensation has been vital. But what I found interesting when the hon. Member for Wycombe and others spoke of compensation was that although they did not come out and say, "You must be prepared to pay for what you are doing at the full market price", they hinted and suggested that this is what they wanted. Planning control, as we now know, has not been able to operate in the right manner and therefore we need this negative Bill, as it has been described.

I hope that the Minister will not treat applicants with a great deal of sympathy, as he has been asked. I hope that this will be a tough Measure. We have been waiting far too long for it. Far too much damage has already been done, and there is far too much damage still in the pipeline by way of planning applications and schemes already in operation. Thousands of square feet of office accommodation will still go ahead in the London area while blocks of offices are still standing empty.

The question of compensation for firms who might suffer has been mentioned. How will they suffer? If any issue of compensation is to be raised and I do not entirely object to this—I hope that it will be confined to one or two elementary needs. Let us have an assessment of the cost of preparing abortive planning schemes and the cost of the actual purchase of the land and then say to the people who apply, "Right, that is all you will get".

Let us do away with the nonsense of their coming to the planning authority or a Government Department and saying, "If we had been allowed to build a 10 to 15-storey block of offices on this site, look at the income we would have had and the value which we would have had accruing to us" when they had not actually put up the office accommodation and were wanting compensation on value which had been created. Let it be compensation which a local authority now pays when it rescinds planning permission. In such a case an assessment is made of resources and costs which have gone into preparing a scheme up to a certain stage and payment is made on that basis.