I beg to move,

That this House
has considered heritage pubs.

It is a real pleasure to serve under your guidance, Mr Vickers, on a topic that I know you care about, particularly when it comes to those edifices that might be willing to serve you a rum baba, which I know you are keen on.

I am grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for selecting my debate, even if it is on a Thursday when we know most MPs travel back to their constituencies, as indeed I would have done, so I am grateful to colleagues here today.

There are many people I should be thanking. First and foremost, I would like to thank the people of predominately Gornal and Sedgley, but also the wider area of Dudley and south Staffordshire, whose energy and dedication to the cause is second to none. I particularly thank the admins of the Facebook page, “Save The Crooked House (Let’s Get It Re-built)” for their unstinting voluntary effort at keeping the show on the road and for moderating the page. Why is that important? We know the police and the local authority have a painstaking job still to do, and things could be said that unwittingly militate against the common cause in a court of law.

I thank a former colleague of this place, though not in my time—Mr Greg Mulholland—for the part he has been playing supporting our efforts. Thanks also go to several others, including Campaign for Real Ale and Historic England. If I have forgotten to thank any person or institution, I apologise but many people have offered to help, including from overseas, such as in Canada, Australia, the US and even South Korea. The incident around The Crooked House pub has been reported on in broadsheets on every continent.

The demise of The Crooked House pub, while tragic in and of itself, has highlighted a much bigger issue nationwide. Put simply, the framework we have in place to protect our heritage pubs is simply not winning the war against unscrupulous developers or even against our changing socioeconomic environment, which means many establishments that were once profitable are not today. Our way of managing that decline most often leads to one outcome: the demise of the pub, often followed by the demise of the building, too. We need something better to be done.

There is an issue with councils underappreciating the risks to heritage pubs. Not enough heritage pubs have any listed protection, not least because everyone—the system, MPs—presume that pubs could be listed when, in fact, they are not. That happened with The Crooked House. Our system does not compel local authorities to keep a register of heritage pubs; it is voluntary. Historic England, which as I said earlier has been helpful, described the selection criteria that covers heritage pubs of note. It said,

“All medieval commercial buildings will be eligible for designation since they are exceptionally rare…Most buildings prior to about 1850 surviving in anything like their original form will be listable;
intact contemporary details and fittings, both internal and external (like shop fronts, tiled decoration, counters and back-fittings) may justify a high grade. As with all buildings after about 1850, rigorous selection is necessary. Given the high rates of attrition, however, all buildings which retain claims to special architectural interest, irrespective of date, deserve careful consideration. Intact modern retail architecture of note is surprisingly rare, however, so it is important to identify these examples as well.”

Historic England places significance on the date of 1850. The Crooked House was built in 1765, and it had no listing protections whatever. The system as it is failed. It may also be true that some very old buildings do not merit listing. The date per se should not be the only criteria, as Historic England makes clear, but a building such as The Crooked House is the repository of tens of thousands of individual memories. It is the home of the collective memories of the communities surrounding it over centuries. In this case, it saw the birth of the industrial revolution, coalmining, limestone mining and steelworking. It saw the trials and tribulations of a people to whom we owe so much. All that is now burned and pulverised. We need to do more to prevent that from happening again.

That is why I would like to see local authorities being required to hold and review, perhaps yearly, a register listing all heritage pubs. Local authorities should also develop their own risk register so that any event, such as an advert for sale, triggers a system for closer monitoring of what happens to the building. I am also calling for heritage pubs that do not have a listing status to receive immediate temporary listing protections upon an application for listing being made. That system works well in Wales. When it was established—by chance, may I say—that The Crooked House was for sale, an immediate listing application was made, but the building was burned and demolished within days. The listing process never stood a chance of becoming effective.

There was extensive debate on this matter during the progress of the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023, with Ministers concerned by the practical implementation of such a system, since the listing system operates slightly differently in Wales and there would be challenges over scale—this is what I have been told—in England. I respond by saying that those challenges should be circumvented. They should not be a barrier to doing the right thing. How many more Crooked Houses do we need? How many more times do we want to see our own history ripped out of the heart of our local communities before this challenge over scale becomes small enough to manage?