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Lords amendment: No. 42, after clause 65, to insert the following new clause—High hedges.
Yvette Cooper: I beg to move, That this House agrees with the Lords in the said amendment.
Mr. Deputy Speaker: With this we may discuss Lords amendments Nos. 43 to 61, 63 and 66 to 71.
Yvette Cooper: The amendments give local authorities the power to deal with complaints about high garden hedges that cannot be settled by negotiation and to take action if necessary. They import into the Bill the provisions so ably championed by my hon. Friend the
Member for Ealing, North (Mr. Pound) in his private Member's Bill, the High Hedges (No. 2) Bill. The Government are extremely pleased to incorporate those measures in this Bill. I congratulate my hon. Friend on doing so much to pursue the cause and to raise the concerns of people who are troubled by high hedge disputes.There have been seven private Members' Bills on the subject. Most received broad support, certainly from Labour Members. Opposition Members also wrote to the Government on behalf of their constituents. The hon. Member for Solihull (Mr. Taylor) introduced one of those Bills. Baroness Gardner of Parkes recently introduced two Bills on the subject and we have responded to the concerns that she raised in the House of Lords. The Government backed the Bill introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, North and looked for other ways to pursue it when it was talked out by a small number of Conservative Back Benchers. We have also responded to Members of both Houses who asked whether the measures could be incorporated into this Bill, which we decided was the right thing to do.
Unreasonably high hedges can block out light from neighbours' houses and gardens. Hedgeline estimates that there are 10,000 cases across the country of neighbours who are in dispute over the height of a hedge. We are all aware of problems such as bungalows crowded out by towering leylandii. We know that that makes neighbours' lives a misery, especially if the hedge owner refuses to respond. It is unfair on those who are suffering from the problem to leave them with no mechanism for appeal or adjudication.
Mr. Greg Knight (East Yorkshire): On fairness, my reading of the new clauses is that they would also apply to a case in which a new property is built on a plot of land next to an existing high hedge. Why should the owner of a high hedge have to cut it back because of a property that is subsequently built next door? Would it not be more reasonable to exempt those cases that arise when the house comes after the hedge?
Yvette Cooper: We hope that neighbours will resolve such problems themselves. Local authorities can take a wide range of considerations into account when addressing such disputes. They have discretion to respond to the nature of the circumstances involved and to direct remedial action. They may, however, decide that although a hedge has an impact on a house, remedial action is not appropriate in the circumstances. We will consult further on the guidance and the implementation of the measures.
The problems involve disputes between neighbours that we hope they will resolve. If they do not, the fundamental principle is that it is right to have a dispute resolution mechanism and some way of sorting out the problem. In truth, to those who suffer the most extreme forms of the problem, it can be just as antisocial as graffiti or noisy neighbours. We should not accept the stereotype that antisocial behaviour is only about teenagers on low-income estates. People face a wide
range of antisocial behaviour and it is right that we can address problems relating to high hedges in the Anti-social Behaviour Bill.
Mr. John Horam (Orpington): Following on from the intervention of my right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire (Mr. Knight), I think it important that in this respect we keep the Bill as simple as possible. I strongly support and greatly appreciate the efforts made by the hon. Member for Ealing, North (Mr. Pound) to bring the issue to the attention of the House through his private Member's Bill, and I am delighted that the measure has all-party support. However, we need to keep things simple and rely as far as possible on common sense and neighbours sorting the problem out between themselves. If we make the provision too complicated, with too many exemptions, we will land ourselves in serious trouble.
Yvette Cooper: The hon. Gentleman is right. Furthermore, we should allow local authorities to take the most appropriate decision in the circumstances, because every case will be different. It would not be appropriate to try to prescribe in legislation the types of hedges that people should have, nor to set down blanket provisions. The approach taken should be one of dispute resolution—finding a way to solve the problem.
Mr. Jim Cunningham (Coventry, South): I agree with my hon. Friend. These are human situations in which emotions are involved, and there has to be some form of resolution. That should be achieved primarily through conciliation, but if that does not work, something has to be done.
Yvette Cooper: My hon. Friend is right, and I pay tribute to him as one who piloted two of the Bills on high hedges through this House. He has championed the cause strongly in the past few years. We in this House have had many hours of debate on these issues—
Yvette Cooper: As my hon. Friend reminds me, we have had 21 hours of debate during the passage of the many private Members' Bills on the issue. We know that hon. Members receive huge numbers of letters about high hedges from their constituents, and we at the Department have received many as well. The Government are keen to get the measures on to the statute book as rapidly as possible, and I am pleased that the Anti-social Behaviour Bill has provided a mechanism by which to achieve that.
Mr. Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (Cotswold): The Opposition called for a provision to deal with high hedges in the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Bill. Will the Minister say what the regulations, which I understand are not yet published, will contain? Will they be based on the current Building Research Establishment guidelines? Will she say something about costs? How much of an extra burden will be placed on local authorities?
Yvette Cooper: That is the purpose of the consultation. We aim to have regulations published and out for consultation as rapidly as possible. We will consult over the course of next year, with the aim of having the measures fully implemented toward the end of 2004 if possible. Fees and the guidance that is to be
issued are precisely the type of thing on which we shall consult. I do not think that they are appropriate matters to deal with in the Bill—we should consult on and deal properly with such details through regulation.
Mr. Paice: As the Minister rightly says, high hedges have taken a great deal of the House's time throughout the years that I have been a Member. The Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, the hon. Member for Sunderland, South (Mr. Mullin), who is present on the Treasury Bench, and I entered the House at the same time, I think, and we have witnessed most of the innumerable debates that the Minister described. The hon. Lady is right to say that the issue is one that has featured in every MP's postbag—except perhaps that of the hon. Member for Western Isles (Mr. MacDonald), because there are not many hedges in his constituency.
Shona McIsaac (Cleethorpes): Or in the City of London.
Mr. Paice: The Minister's Parliamentary Private Secretary is being wholly improper in speaking in the Chamber, given that her Minister is in charge of this issue.
High hedges are of huge concern to many people, but although the fact that they can be a problem is indisputable, views vary on the best way to tackle it. Several attempts have been made to deal with the problem in private Members' Bills—not all of which were the same—but the most recent and, if the measure is passed tonight, the most significant attempt was that of the hon. Member for Ealing, North (Mr. Pound).
When scrutiny of the Anti-social Behaviour Bill started many months ago, few of us realised just what a Christmas tree it would become. In Standing Committee, my hon. Friends and I and the Liberal Democrats thought that we were pushing our luck in trying to introduce measures to deal with animal rights activists, travellers and raves, but all those things are now well and truly in the Bill, and I am delighted about that. The Government's decision that high hedges constitute an antisocial activity and therefore come within the compass of the Bill was a surprising, albeit worthwhile, piece of initiative on their part.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Cotswold (Mr. Clifton-Brown) said, the Opposition have supported measures to deal with problems of high hedges, and we shall not oppose this provision tonight. The Government have taken an opportunity to address the problem—I was going to press my luck by saying "Once and for all", but rarely does any piece of legislation solve any problem once and for all. However, for a period, the Bill will address the problem of high hedges and the Government are right to have acted.
I do not want to sound churlish, but I should sound a note of caution. Picking up a private Member's Bill and adding its provisions to a major public Bill is not an idea that I want to be taken up often, because it is not necessarily the right way to legislate. Despite the number of hours spent discussing this issue, most people accept in their heart of hearts that scrutiny of private Members' Bills is not always as robust as scrutiny of
public Bills, simply because of the number of right hon. and hon. Members present on the days when private Members' Bills are discussed.None the less, the subject has had a great deal of time devoted to it, and the Government have taken the opportunity to do something about a problem that besets all our constituents—or at least constituents of us all—and have done so in a way that I hope will deal with the problem without being over-burdensome and over-intrusive.
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