Fidelización de Clientes en la Banca

Compulsory Purchase Orders are an important part of the toolkit available to councils to unlock land for new homes and to play a more proactive role in land assembly. In practice, these powers should rarely need to be used, but they can operate as an effective incentive to landowners to engage early and negotiate and to enter into development partnerships more readily.

In general terms, CPOs are used in two different circumstances:

● to address individual ‘problem’ sites within the existing development pipeline. The landowners here will usually be reluctant to either develop themselves or sell the site for a reasonable market price in order to facilitate development. This covers most existing CPO use on brownfield sites.

● for larger land assembly purposes, such as urban extensions or new settlements and urban regeneration. The landowners here may be either keen or reluctant to sell, but the primary

obstacle is their expectation of obtaining a sales price at levels commensurate to land with existing residential planning permission.

There is a history of Compulsory Purchase in England, notably in powers granted to New Town

Corporations and Urban Development Corporations. A number of regeneration focused local authorities already successfully use CPO to unlock large development projects and land market blockages.102102

Compulsory Purchase

Wellingborough council made judicious use of CPO powers to overcome one recalcitrant land owner who was preventing the delivery of Stanton Cross station. The project stalled in 2008 due to the land owner’s objections, but was delivered in 2013 after the land had been unlocked by a CPO102_.

The Prince Regent Lane site between Plaistow, Beckton and Canning Town was identified by Newham Council as a strategically important site where development would lead to a wider public good than if it was left undeveloped. The Council used its compulsory purchase powers to acquire the site and develop new highly-sustainable homes.

However, CPO powers are not used as widely now as they once were in this country or as they are in continental Europe. As evidence to the review highlighted, there are a number of reasons for this103_: ● the process is controversial, long, potentially risky, and drawn out;

● the Council may lack the skills or the budget to pursue a CPO and there may be cultural barriers to its use;

● the local authority or other public body needs to identify very clearly and in some detail what it wants to do with the site. Thus, a local authority cannot expect to secure a CPO if a site is allocated in a plan but not being brought forward unless they have first developed detailed plans.

Strengthening local authorities’ development role and responsibilities as proposed by this review should make successfully obtaining a CPO easier as it will be clearer that they have a vision for the development of sites and will also increase their capacity and capability to develop.

However, numerous submissions to the review highlighted the need to review CPO legislation.104 _This supports the widely acknowledged view that legislation is no longer fit for purpose, confirmed by the Compulsory Purchase Policy Review Advisory Group in 2000 who concluded that the problem was partly in the fact that the legislation was derived from the Lands Clauses Consolidation Act 1845 or earlier and that:

“Even where the provisions of the 1845 Act have been subject to later amendment or re-enactment, the Victorian concepts and antiquated phraseology have often been carried forward leading to difficulties in interpretation, or even comprehension” ;

and by the Law Commission who in 2003 stated that:

“There can be few areas of the law which are in more obvious need of radical treatment, under each of the heads mentioned in the statute, than the law of compulsory purchase”.105

102 RTPI submission

103 RTPI, Shelter submissions and others

104 For example, RTPI, TCPA, Berkeley Group and discussion of forthcoming work from Shelter and IPPR

105 The Compulsory Purchase Policy Review Advisory Group was established by the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions to review the compulsory purchase and compensation arrangements in England and Wales; The Law Commission’s report “Towards a Compulsory Purchase Code: Compensation” was published in December 2003,

The review proposes that the CPO legislation should be updated to enable greater use of CPOs as a tool to drive effective regeneration strategies and work in partnership with developers to take forward development of sites through:

● streamlining and clarifying existing legal guidance and legislation on CPO as far as possible, to reduce uncertainty and confusion;

● amending legislation with a clear aim of streamlining the process and reducing opportunities for landowners to stall progress;

● land valuation should be considered by the tribunal up front, in cases where a CPO is contested, not at the end of the process, creating greater certainty for both the local authority and the landowner and making it easier for it to find a development partner. Currently this happens at the end of the process – often several years after the CPO starts – and creates unnecessary uncertainty and risk for local authorities and their development partners. This uncertainty may also reduce incentives for some parties to reach agreement outside the CPO process.