Public Petitions Committee

Meeting date: Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Official Report 372KB pdf

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New Petitions

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Vacant Land in Private Ownership (PE1465)

Agenda item 2 is consideration of two new petitions. As previously agreed, the committee will take evidence on only one of them—PE1465, by Tony Ivanov, on the maintenance of vacant land in private ownership. Members should have a note from the clerk, a Scottish Parliament information centre briefing and a copy of the petition.

Mr Ivanov, you are very welcome. Thank you for coming along to the committee today. I ask you to give us a brief opening statement, which will be followed by questioning from me and my colleagues.

Good morning, everyone. The petition started out on behalf of the local community, and it is about plots of land. Normally, when developers create housing estates, they create various green belts, so to speak. Some of those might be for children’s play areas, and others might be just so that the place looks nice for the community.

Over the course of time, for various reasons, those pieces of land have been acquired by speculators in the hope that they might build on the land. They have taken away the children’s playgrounds and so on. However, many of those people have then been refused planning permission, either because the ground is not suitable or for various other reasons, so they have just let the land go into disrepair. I have provided some photos to give an indication of what I am talking about. The vacant land is spoiling the community, it is just an eyesore and it can be a breeding ground for vermin.

For 20 years, we have been trying to get something done about that in the local community. I took the issue to my regional MSP but, unfortunately, he totally ignored all my requests to get things done. I took it to another MSP, and he informed me that it is a national issue that extends to the whole of Scotland—it probably affects England as well, but let us deal with Scotland. I thought, “Well, if it is a national issue, what can we do?” In the end, I thought, “Why not petition Parliament? I will give this a go and see how we get on from here.”

I lodged the petition to see whether anything can be done. At the moment, there is no law that says that landowners are obliged to keep their ground in a respectable condition for the community. I want to see whether we can achieve that.

Thank you very much for coming along to the committee to present your petition to us. Before we look at the next steps, my colleagues and I have a few questions to try to get more information on your petition.

As you probably know, the briefing that we have been given points out that the Town and Country Planning (Scotland) Act 1997 provides councils with the ability to take action to abate adverse effects. This might not be information that you have to hand, but have you tried to use that legislation to resolve your problem?

Along with my local councillor, we have been hammering the council about the issue. The council has looked into the matter in depth, and at every stage it has come back to say that absolutely nothing can be done. It was the same with Mark Griffin MSP, who helped me.

The only thing that we came up with is that a similar petition was lodged previously and there was a consultation document called “Maintenance of land on private housing estates”. However, that covers a different issue, whereby all the occupiers are responsible for those sorts of pieces of ground under a land management agreement. That is totally different from what we are asking about.

It may well be worth our approaching the Scottish Government to get a more detailed understanding of how the 1997 act is working in practice but, obviously, that is for the committee to decide. You have certainly raised an important point. I am sure that my colleagues will have other questions that they want to raise.

Good morning, Mr Ivanov. You have cleared up one issue that I was going to question you on—ground maintenance contracts. The photographs that you have provided for us today are useful, but they do not take into account the ground maintenance of the areas that you are talking about.

You referred to play areas. I understand that the developers of housing estates are usually asked to give back something in kind to the community, which is often a children’s play facility in a central area. In your oral presentation, you indicated that some play areas have been purchased by speculators, as you described them. I understand that the maintenance of such play areas should be subject either to a common agreement among the householders in the area or to a land management scheme to ensure that they are maintained to a reasonable standard. Are you saying that that is not happening?

That is not happening. I can speak about the play area in my housing estate, which may be representative of others throughout the country. The developer who built the housing estate went bust. Perhaps in an attempt to recoup costs, bits of land were sold off—according to my council, that was done. I do not know whether they were perhaps the council’s property at one time even—maybe the council sold them off to get rid of some of the family silver, so to speak—but they are in private ownership now. As I said, because the owners have been refused planning permission, all those grounds are just an eyesore in the community.

The reason for my question is that the planning consent that was granted to the developer should have included details on what play areas and other facilities were to be constructed as part of the consent to build. If you are saying that the developer put forward plans to build houses that included a play area but that the land on which that play area stood has now been transferred to another developer—or what you described as a speculator—I find that difficult to understand, if the planning consent detailed that a play area had to be provided.

I understand what you are saying. I can go only on what my present and previous councillors told me when they looked into the issue. We have battled on it for at least 10 years. Every time, the council has come up and said that this is the situation. I just have to accept what it says to me. If it says, “This is such-and-such,” I need to take that for granted.

It is the same thing with MSPs. I have done my bit by asking them for the information. If they come back and tell me something, I have to accept it.

I will leave it at that for the moment, convener.

I hear what you say about having to take what the council tells you. That is not necessarily a route that some of us would pursue. Have you checked who owns the lands that you are talking about? Are they registered?

I have certainly checked two plots in my area. My councillor got the council to check the land registry and I believe that the people who own the land have been approached to no avail.

On what basis were they approached?

You will see on one of the photographs that there is a public footpath, which was overgrown and blocked. Eventually the council came and cut back the vegetation, and I assume that it will bill the person who owns the land. The owner was just not interested.

Given that lack of interest, has anyone approached the Health and Safety Executive?

The council keeps coming back and saying that it has done everything. I get on to the council every month in the hope that, somewhere along the line, someone will say that they had better do something about the issue, but the council just keeps coming back with the same answer—that its hands are tied, there is nothing that it can do and no legislation exists. If the property was council property, it could have done something, but because the property is in private ownership, it can do nothing.

The local authority still has some responsibility under planning legislation. Have you thought about approaching any body outside the local authority, such as the Health and Safety Executive?

No. I would have thought that Mark Griffin, my MSP, would have advised me if there was such a body. I have to trust such people. He is more educated on these subjects than I am so, if there is an avenue that I can go down, he should tell me, but that has not been forthcoming.

Are there any health implications of the areas not being developed?

There are vermin, such as mice, but the council says that it cannot do anything about mice. If it was rats and people’s homes were being infested as a result, the council might be able to take action.

The pieces of ground are just complete eyesores in the community. It is just unfortunate that I seem to be the one who is taking action.

No, it is quite courageous. Are you sure that there are no tigers in there?

I did think about getting a farmer to supply me with a hundred rats to throw in.

Perhaps it would be best not to go there.

We can all identify areas of land in our constituencies that have been virtually abandoned and are lying untended and unkempt. It is probably fair to say that different local authorities do not prioritise the issue in a way that we would prefer.

The position of local authorities is made more difficult by the fact that there is no criminal sanction for failure to comply with a waste land notice. Perhaps the committee should take that point up and bring it to the attention of the Scottish Government and the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities with a view to encouraging revision of the legislation to allow for such criminal sanctions. That would give the local authorities an extra hammer to hit landowners with. Would that be a step in the right direction?

10:15

We certainly need something to be done. From the feedback that I have had, I think that the situation is happening all over the place. I really do not think that people should get away with it. I have nothing against speculators trying to make a profit for themselves in the future but, if someone owns a piece of land, they should at least keep it tidy and let the community see that it is okay. All the plots that are going into disrepair are a blight on communities.

Absolutely. I have immense sympathy with your point. I hope that we can consider changing legislation to ensure that local authorities can impose a penalty on landowners and speculators.

Mr Ivanov, I feel your frustration on the issue, and I admire your strength for keeping hard at it to try to resolve it. Thank you for bringing the issue to our attention. Although the convener said that there is a law on the issue, it is clear that it is not working in practice. It is important for us to contact the Scottish Government and COSLA to get details on how the legislation is working—or not working—in practice. We should highlight the petition to those bodies and try to get answers.

At one point, some plots of ground in my area were not fenced off, even though they were in private ownership. I can speak only about my area, but I imagine that the situation might be the same elsewhere. They were grassed areas, and the council used to tend to them and cut the grass. Then, the landowners told the council to stop that, because they wanted to build on the land, and some areas were fenced off to stop the council going in. I think that the landowners’ idea is that, if they let the land go into a bad state, the council will eventually decide to just give them the planning permission, and that will be it over and done with. However, as I say, there are reasons why the council will not give planning permission in various areas, and those should be adhered to.

There are questions about the current law and how useful it has been. As members have suggested, it would certainly make sense to write to the Scottish Government and COSLA.

I suggest that we also write to ask Falkirk Council for its views. I am particularly interested in Mr Ivanov’s point that open space that was set aside as part of a housing development and which, as I mentioned earlier, would have been part of the planning consent is now being sold off to speculators—to use Mr Ivanov’s term—that hope that they might eventually be able to build on those pieces of ground. My difficulty is that, if planning consent is given to a developer for a development that includes open space, there is an onus on the developer or residents in the area to maintain the open space. There are issues about what has been done in the intervening period between an estate being built and the land being sold off.

I am particularly concerned by the allegation that play areas have been sold off to potential developers. As I said, such play areas are part of the community gain from developments. Many local authorities insisted—and still insist—that play areas should be included in new housing estates. If a developer has sold a piece of land, which has been allowed to return to natural vegetation or has not been kept in a proper manner or a manner that is expected by residents in the area, that issue needs to be dealt with. It would be useful to examine Falkirk Council’s responses to the issues that Mr Ivanov raises.

Mr Ivanov’s petition is useful. We probably imagine that more is being done than it appears is being done. This is one of those issues to which the application of common sense is not very common after all. I notice that neither we nor the Government have considered the issue for a number of years. Paragraph 5 of our briefing paper points out the inherent weakness in the current situation.

If we are writing to ministers, we should ask specifically how many appeals have been made to them to avoid having to implement a waste land notice, as that might give us an early indication of how many such notices have been served. The clear suggestion is that somebody who has been served a notice can avoid doing anything about it until a minister has heard an appeal. Part of me thinks that a person who is served with a notice would inevitably take that course of action to avoid having to incur any cost or do anything.

If we find that there have been very few appeals, we might need to write to local authorities—perhaps we should do so in any event—to see how often waste land notices are being served and what criteria are being applied, because the suspicion is growing that a number of authorities take the view that, with no particular sanction in place, it is all a bit of a bother that they would rather not get involved in. I think that we all have constituents who imagine that more is being done, and we probably imagined that, too.

That is a good point.

I echo and support that. My question is: why should we particularise Falkirk Council? I know that Mr Ivanov has concerns about that council, but Jackson Carlaw’s point is well made. We should ask several councils—we could take a random sample—or all of them how many waste land notices they have issued over, say, the past five years. I suspect that we will find that the answer is nil.

It has also been suggested that we write to COSLA on the basis that it represents all the local authorities. I hope that we will get a cross-representation of local authorities’ views on the issue.

Are members happy with the course of action that has been identified by various members, including me?

Members indicated agreement.

I thank Tony Ivanov very much for coming to the meeting, presenting his petition and giving evidence. As you have heard, the committee is very interested in your comments. Our staff will keep you up to date with developments, and we will write to all the bodies that we have mentioned. When we have received answers, we will discuss the petition again at a future meeting.

I suspend the meeting to allow our witness to leave.

10:22 Meeting suspended.

10:22 On resuming—

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Non-residential Services (Local Authority Charges) (PE1466)

The second new petition is PE1466, by William Tait, on local authority charges for non-residential services. Members have a note by the clerk, which is paper 2, a SPICe briefing and a copy of the petition.

I welcome Mr Tait’s petition, which highlights the concerns of a number of relatives in particular who have found that the care in the community service charges that local authorities levy seem to vary from authority to authority. As the petitioner has indicated, there seem to be no standard charges and there is no guidance on standard charges. The Scottish Government issues guidelines, but I understand that it is up to local authorities to determine their own charging regimes.

It may be useful to continue the petition for further examination. From the information that we have received, I note that the Scottish Government has been looking at the issue and that a short-life working group has been established this month

“to review social work complaints and appeals procedures”.

It might be useful if we investigate through the Scottish Government whether that short-life working group will also look at the charges that local authorities levy, because we could end up once again with a postcode lottery. If a person lives in one authority area, they may be charged at one level, while a neighbouring authority may charge at a different level.

People need to get answers about the inequity that they see taking place. Local authorities may—quite rightly—say that their level of service is much better than that in a neighbouring authority area, but we should look for a common approach to charging regimes and the delivery of services.

As no other member wishes to contribute, are members happy that we continue the petition, speak to the Scottish Government and COSLA, and in particular take up John Wilson’s very good point about the short-life working group?

Members indicated agreement.