Control of Office and Industrial Development Bill

Part of Ballot for Notices of Motions – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 14 April 1965.

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Photo of Mr Charles Curran Mr Charles Curran , Uxbridge 12:00, 14 April 1965

I begin by apologising for failing, through circumstances that I could not prevent, to take part in the Committee stage of the Bill, but I have done my best to familiarise myself with all that then happened by reading as carefully as I could the available reports. Without wishing to be in any way controversial, I want to say something about these two Amendments. Like my hon. Friend the Member for the City of Chester (Mr. Temple) I prefer Amendment No. 15 to No. 11.

I suggest that in the Greater London area there is a real problem caused by the reorganisation of local government that is now taking place, and if I quote the situation in West Middlesex to illustrate that situation I do so, not to make a purely constituency point but because the circumstances there are paralleled elsewhere in Greater London.

In West Middlesex, four local authorities have been telescoped to form a new borough. None of the municipal premises which were in each case adequate for the local authority area concerned are big enough for the administration of the new area, so that the need to look as sympathetically as possible at a request by a new local authority for facilities to provide itself with an efficient administrative centre is very real. I agree that in Committee the Minister dealt very sympathetically with this point, and I do not now seek to be critical of him but merely to ask him to elaborate a little further what he then said.

In West Middlesex, the Hillingdon Borough Council, created by the London Government Act, merges four local authorities, but as none of the offices it has taken over from those authorities is large enough to give it an administrative base it has had to rent premises at a very high cost. It will be appreciated that rent level in West Middlesex is very high, and the Hillingdon Council has been obliged to rent two lots of offices and to pay an annual rent for them of £30,000 a year. Figures of that kind underline the need to see that these new local authorities can as soon as possible have premises big enough to enable them to do the job given to them by Parliament.

I intervene now to ask the Minister for an assurance that he will be prepared to meet the demand of the new local authorities in London for the premises they need to do that job.