Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)

My Lords, I follow the noble Baroness, Lady Young, with pleasure and particularly agree with her point about judicial reviews. I have visited more local communities than I can count, where they have desperately been trying to bake cakes and to collect pence and pounds here and there, struggling to stand up a judicial review and simply unable to do it. I have no nervousness at all in opposing Amendment 250, because I bring voices from the community, something I often seek to bring into your Lordships’ House, as represented by the Wandsworth and Merton Green parties and Merton Friends of the Earth, which are strongly opposed to the development by the All England Lawn Tennis Club and opposed to the kind of changes that this amendment would bring. It is also, of course, strongly opposed by the Open Spaces Society. I want to make two specific points. The noble Lord, Lord Banner, talked about “beneficial repurposing”, saying, “Oh, it’s fine if it’s beneficial repurposing”. Beneficial repurposing, I am afraid, is often in the eye of the beholder, and there can be many different perspectives on what it is. The other contextual point I wish to add—these are figures from 2018, which will undoubtedly be out of date—is that what has been described as “the new enclosure”, from the late 1970s to 2019, has seen 10% of what was public land in Britain transferred into private hands. That is 2 million hectares of land. This is probably not large in terms of scale, but it would be yet more loss of public good for private profit, not for the people who have already lost so much. I finally note the strong vote for the recent amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Willis, on protecting blue and green spaces: that is the House strongly showing what it wants to do.