Dame Meg Hillier

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. With your indulgence, Madam Deputy Speaker, I do not want to get too much into every clause of the Bill, because this is a debate about its principles, but the important principle my hon. Friend highlights is that we can have heritage buildings that might or might not quite meet the definition. To be clear to the House, the definition the hon. Member for Kingswinford and South Staffordshire rightly highlighted is that a pub must be “at least 150 years old and…used as a public house in the past ten years”. There is still a debate there about something that maybe was a pub 11 years ago, so I think there is also a gap there. It also states: “has been most recently used as a public house and the local planning authority deems its building or interior to have a degree of heritage significance meriting consideration in planning decisions”. That is a debatable point, when a tram shed may have gone through further changes—different eras of planning may change things. I remember that there was one warehouse in the heart of Shoreditch that, very unusually, had not been basemented in the Victorian era and had been in sole ownership for many, many years. As a result, when development occurred on that site, the fantastic Museum of London, now renamed the London Museum, brought in its archaeology department—as it is in London for every planning development—which discovered that there was land there where Shakespeare himself had performed one of his first plays. When the building was developed, the very ground where Shakespeare—the bard himself—trod, was preserved under glass. That shows that buildings move and change. So, without swaying too much into the detail, the definition is really important. It may be that the tramshed in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Anna Dixon) would qualify, but if some of the old tramshed trappings have been removed, with the change of use, it may not, so there is an interesting point there. I will turn back to the point I was trying to make about planning and the existing measures, which is why I think this Bill may be over-layering that unnecessarily. Local planning authorities do, of course, have powers to use an enforcement notice for a breach of planning control, with the maximum penalty being an unlimited fine. The Crooked House, sadly, was a breach of planning control, and the fine did not resolve the problem, so there is a gap in current planning law. I am sure we all have examples in our constituencies of mysterious fires or things happening, whether in our time or in a predecessor’s time, because the penalty is not enough of a deterrent to somebody with deep pockets, who can simply pay that penalty and then go ahead and continue with the redevelopment. With the Crooked House, there were clearly people who had no regard for the punishment that might fall on them.