Contribution
I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
It is a pleasure to be the promoter of this Bill, on a subject that not only matters deeply to my constituency, but is dear to my own heart. I know that for many colleagues, escaping Westminster to head back to their constituencies is usually the highlight of the week, so to see hon. Members forgo a Friday in their home patches to be here is deeply encouraging, and I thank all those who have taken the time to attend today.
As we have seen over the past few months, private Members’ Bills can come in all shapes and sizes—some extremely contentious, and others narrow and technical. When I was fortunate enough to come third in the private Member’s Bill ballot earlier this year, I was very briefly more popular than I can remember being in some time. I received all manner of helpful advice; some suggested that I take on grand, sweeping constitutional reform, while others suggested fixing something rather closer to home and entirely uncontentious, like dog grooming standards. I decided, however, that I wanted a Bill that could bring people together, and I think there is little that can bring people together more than the importance of our historic pubs.
As a past chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on beer, I confess that I have spent a little time inside our nation’s public houses over the years, conducting what I can only describe as exhaustive, selfless and entirely public-spirited research, if not a constitutional duty. But while I take my beer seriously, I take the future of our historic pubs even more seriously. Behind the warmth, conviviality and the familiar clinking of glasses lies a sobering reality. Today’s debate is not about party politics, because there is far more that unites us than divides us about this subject. It is about whether this Parliament is willing to step in and stop the wanton destruction of our shared history.
For centuries, the British pub has been the beating heart of our communities. Pubs are the social glue that binds our villages, towns, cities and suburbs together. They are places where friendships are forged, birthdays are toasted, wakes are held and where older, perhaps isolated, residents may have their only regular conversation of the week. Yet all too often the planning system treats these irreplaceable institutions as nothing more than convenient plots of land waiting to be cleared for speculative development.
We cannot pretend that this is an abstract, theoretical debate. We know the brutal reality because we saw it happen before our very eyes in Himley, which I now have the honour of representing in Parliament. Just over three years ago, an unbelievable act of destruction shocked the community, and the wider Black Country and Staffordshire, to its core. On the evening of 5 August 2023, flames engulfed the Crooked House. Built in 1765 as a farmhouse before becoming a pub, it had stood for over 250 years, rather longer than the present Palace of Westminster in which we are having this debate today.
Thanks to intense 19th-century coal-mining subsidence, the building settled at a bonkers 15° tilt—three times the lean of the leaning tower of Pisa. It was world famous as “Britain’s wonkiest pub”. A coin could be rolled uphill across the bar counter. Bottles appeared to defy gravity. First-time visitors would take one step inside and swear that the beer had gone straight to their heads. It was an extraordinary monument to the Black Country’s industrial heritage.
The fire was devastating enough, but what followed was an absolute outrage. Barely 48 hours later, before the ashes were cold and before investigators could properly inspect the scene, heavy diggers rolled on to the site. In a matter of hours, more than two-and-a-half centuries of history were flattened into a pile of crushed rubble without planning permission. The perpetrators thought that they could crush a building, fence off the land and wait for the world to move on, but they underestimated the local community.
More than 40,000 people signed petitions that demanded that the Crooked House be rebuilt. South Staffordshire council moved swiftly to serve a binding enforcement notice, ordering the owners to rebuild it brick by brick. That enforcement notice is currently being appealed. Staffordshire police completed an exhaustive criminal investigation and the file now sits with the Crown Prosecution Service, so the appeal against the enforcement notice cannot be heard until the criminal proceedings have been concluded one way or another.