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Sir Patrick Cormack (South Staffordshire): He is the chairman.
Mr. Clark: Is there a director?
Mr. Forth: They are all apparatchiks.
Mr. Clark: They are all apparatchiks, and I do not doubt that they all have huge expense accounts.
The House may take the view that the conservation officers employed by local authorities could do most of the work themselves using the Heritage Lottery Fund. They have far greater knowledge and easier access to the buildings within their purview. They could do the work more simply and more cheaply.
Mr. John Bercow (Buckingham):
I am not at all surprised to hear that my right hon. Friend has not applied for a grant from English Heritage. Does he agree that he is, in a sense, rather fortunate not to have done so? A number of my constituents have complained to me, and I have reported to the Leader of the House, that they have found increasingly commonplace waits of up to six months before English Heritage determines whether their application for grant in aid is successful. Might that conceivably be because an individual member of staff at English Heritage is preoccupied with leaking inaccurate information about the intentions of my right hon. Friend instead of focusing on the responsibilities of his or her office?
Mr. Clark:
I do not want to engage in extended research into the motives of the officials at English Heritage. However, I could claim to be bitterly affronted that someone to whom I have in the past extended
It remains true and very sad that a number of important listed buildings are decaying. I would not feel comfortable taking money from the taxpayer to repair a building that I live in privately. That would not be appropriate. However, the Chancellor of the Exchequer should consider certain points. Hectoring the owners of historic buildings will not improve matters. The majority cannot even afford to do the repairs that they have apparently been asked to do. I have never been asked to do any repairs; I have simply been told that my building is at risk.
The key to preserving old buildings is to keep them in good repair and, where possible or necessary, to find a way for them to earn their keep. Such grants as there were have been cut. I have never had one, as I said. VAT has to be paid at the full rate on repairs, although new buildings are generally VAT free. It cannot be right that if a part of our heritage is at risk, VAT should have to be paid on its repair bills, when that is not the case for a brand new building.
Estate owners are not allowed to offset the cost of repairs to the building against other estate income in assessing their tax. In other words, the building must be an absolutely net liability--it is cum the income tax that has already been paid on the money that will be used to make the necessary repairs. The Finance Bill will end any such relief, so all income from the estate will be taxable and no offset can be made for repairs to any aspect of the building, even if it is listed grade 1 or grade 2.
One does not like to be too party confrontational in holiday Adjournment debates, but this attitude is part and parcel of the distasteful posture adopted by the Government. It is part of the pop culture, cool Britannia ethic that they will live to regret. People are already uneasy with that. This disdain for our heritage is part of a package that has led the Government to have the millennium dome constructed not in marble or granite, so that it could conceivably be a heritage building in future centuries, but in plastic. That is the culture of the image consultant; it is the culture of obsolescence. This is pop culture at its worst--top of the charts one month, bottom of the charts and taking an overdose of narcotics in an Australian lavatory three months later.
That is the culture to which the Government, like it or not, are trying to attach a part of their ethics. It is high time that we rejected that and said that there is a more permanent culture. Theirs is part of the move to modernise--if that is the word--the royal family by dressing the Household Division in fatigues instead of bearskins, even at the birthday parade, by making sure that when the Queen arrives to open Parliament she is wearing a suit, possibly, for all I know, even a shell suit, and by ensuring that she arrives not in a Rolls-Royce, which will not be possible anyway in 10 years, but in a black cab, perhaps. It is part of a deliberate attempt to extinguish our heritage in all its different aspects, a heritage which has illuminated and invigorated our society for so long.
Our heritage is nothing to do with class or with party, but everything to do with the intrinsic nature of what we are as a people. Pop culture is irredeemably opposed to it, and the cool Britannia ethic is distant from it.
Mr. Mark Todd (South Derbyshire):
I should like to express some concerns about management of the reorganisation of magistrates courts by the county magistrates courts committee in my area, and, more generally, about the lack of guidance of that process elsewhere in the country.
On Monday, Derbyshire magistrates courts committee confirmed its proposal to reorganise the magistrates courts in my county through a private finance initiative. Among its proposals was a proposal to close the court in Swadlincote--which is the only court in the 120 square miles of my constituency.
I realise the need to rationalise courts. Some courts are antique and expensive to run, and others are relatively close together. My concerns fall into five categories, several of which relate to the general process of court reorganisation.
The first category concerns access to justice. The original private finance initiative consultation document issued by my magistrates courts committee sought to define the meaning of "local justice"--words that we often hear used in discussions about how we should run our magistrates courts system. The suggested definition was:
What about the 60-minute public transport time criterion? I think that we can reasonably assume that the chief executive of the committee was not a regular bus user: he had certainly not chosen to consult the bus timetable for the South Derbyshire area. My constituency is rural; the town of Swadlincote is essentially a necklace of villages; and getting to the bus station is an exercise in itself. It takes 67 minutes to travel from Swadlincote bus station to Derby bus station, which exceeds the time specified by the committee in its consultation document on the key criteria for the siting of a magistrates court--and the 67 minutes does not include the time it might take to find the magistrates court on leaving the bus station.
Was the committee swayed when those facts were drawn to its attention? Regrettably not. The committee took the view that its failure to calculate the times correctly was an unfortunate accident. Although I am sure the committee thought that the 60-minute criterion was quite sufficient to provide for the areas affected by the closure, it miscalculated--and there we are.
My second category of concerns is convenience of access to other components of the justice system. Swadlincote magistrates court incorporates facilities for the probation service, which is thus readily able to make its important contribution to the court process. The court premises also provide the probation service with a local base. However, no proposals have been made on the integration into the court process of the critical role played by the service in the area should the court be closed. It seems likely that a visiting service into the area from Derby will be provided, using currently unspecified premises--at greater cost and less convenience both to existing staff and, more critically, to users of the service.
The Swadlincote court is immediately adjacent to the local police station. Currently, the attendance of the police to act as witnesses and--in very rare cases in my constituency--in other capacities, such as dealing with someone who is misbehaving in the court, is efficiently operated, with police being called from the station as needed. The alternative would involve a substantial increase in police travelling and attendance time. My area is already thinly policed, as the Derbyshire police force is one of the least well funded in the country.
The part of my constituency south of the Trent--the bulk of it, geographically--is policed usually by four to five officers and one sergeant. If we are to chew up substantial proportions of police time by requiring them to travel to and from a court in Derby, we will obviously have fewer police available to deal with issues in our community to which they should be attending.
The third category is community identity. The committee made the assumption that Swadlincote was in some sense a suburb of Derby. That is not how the citizens of Swadlincote view themselves. The bus time probably says as much about that as anything because, if people used the service more often, someone would no doubt have found it worth while to run a faster bus. People do not look towards Derby as the main centre for jobs, entertainment or shopping; they use other urban centres in the area, or choose to stay in South Derbyshire. The mistaken view of the community of which Swadlincote is a part does not seem to have concerned the committee--and I think that such views have been more broadly applied elsewhere in the country.
The fourth category is the importance of the convenience of court users. Only a tiny minority of people ever attend court. In a generally very law-abiding community such as South Derbyshire, only a very small number of people ever attend court--which, in some senses, is part of our problem, as the committee has claimed that the court is not used very heavily. We are actually rather proud of that, and do not wish to encourage greater court use because of wrongdoing in our community.
Although only a tiny minority attend court--and then only very rarely, perhaps once or twice in their lifetime--their rights and convenience should not be ignored.
The chief executive of the magistrates courts committee was quoted as saying--and chose not to deny in correspondence with me--that criminals should allow in their activities for the cost of transport to a rather more distant magistrates court; perhaps they should thieve a little more to raise the funds for the bus fare to a court in Derby, rather than Swadlincote.
I drew to the chief executive's attention the fact that court users were not merely those rightly or wrongly accused of offences, but witnesses. We already have a problem nationally in persuading people to give up time to attend court as witnesses. I cannot believe that expecting people in my constituency to spend half a day travelling to and from a court in Derby--in addition to attending the court and waiting to be called--will encourage more of them to bear witness in cases.
Others also attend court. Magistrates handle the distribution of licences of various kinds to perfectly law-abiding people running businesses, and those people want to go somewhere locally convenient, rather than some distance away. I do not see why they should be put to that inconvenience either.
My fifth category of concern is the court premises. I could well understand that there might be concern if those were crumbling and decaying, but they are not. They were opened in 1978 and I readily concede that they are not a thing of beauty--they are an example of the architecture of the time. The right hon. Member for Kensington and Chelsea (Mr. Clark) referred to our heritage: I do not think Swadlincote magistrates court will feature in the list in the foreseeable future. I also concede that some routine maintenance would be desirable, but it is nothing serious.
Space is certainly sufficient to allow the separation of witnesses and defendants. One of the key problem areas in cramped, old-fashioned magistrates courts is that witnesses and defendants have to sit together, which can occasionally cause some friction. That is not the case at Swadlincote court. Also, the cells are appropriate for their purpose, although I would not say that they are luxurious. So, there would be appear to be no structural reasons to close the premises.
In addition, the local district council, having identified cost as one of the issues that might concern the magistrates courts committee, has said that it might be able to contribute towards the cost of the building by leasing it from the committee for training activities and so forth, thus supplementing the income drawn from the building.
Clearly, the proposal is ill founded and I very much hope that the paying authorities, Derbyshire county council and Derby city council, will not endorse it when they decide their position. The project will also be expensive--this is not a PFI that will save us a lot of money.
"Magistrates drawn from Petty Sessional Divisions sitting in judgement on cases arising in those divisions using accommodation which is reasonably accessible to Magistrates and Court users."
The phrase "reasonably accessible" in the definition is clearly material, and the committee consequently sought to define it, which it did in the following terms:
"within 20 miles of the major centres of population that it might serve . . . and accessible by public transport with a travel time of up to 60 minutes . . . and within 15 minutes walk from the nearest public transport node".
In earlier correspondence with the committee's chief executive, I attempted to obtain some definition of a 15-minute walk. I can walk a lot further in 15 minutes than many other people can. No attempt was made further to define that term, however.
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