It's now been six months since the Crooked House, Himley was badly damaged by fire, with a bulldozer then completing the destruction. The results of the police investigation into the events are still awaited, as is the decision of the council's planning department on action regarding the unauthorised demolition. 

In the meantime, CAMRA developed its own follow-up campaigning strategy and we have also worked with the local MP, Marco Longhi, and the West Midlands Combined Authority and mayor Andy Street, on measures they have been pursuing. 

Part of our strategy is to secure legislative changes that would further strengthen pub protection. To this end, on 31 January, a CAMRA delegation met with the housing and planning minister, Lee Rowley MP, and his officials to discuss our potential policy solutions. 

We focused in particular on two areas: the need for enforcement action to be more effective and the importance of a legal definition of a pub being introduced into planning law.

Currently, councils have discretion on whether to investigate reported breaches of planning control and we consider this should be a statutory duty. Also, with the Crooked House in mind, we feel that enforcement should be extended to requiring the complete restoration of unlawfully demolished pubs - a brick by brick order. In this context, demolition of a pub should be made illegal, as against unlawful as at present, so that stronger penalties could be imposed. 

Many of the cases we identified involved the conversion, without permission, of pubs to restaurants, despite these being in different use classes. This highlights a grey area between where a pub stops and a restaurant starts. Clear definitions would greatly assist the enforcement task. 

Mr Rowley listened very sympathetically to our concerns and agreed that we should now discuss our proposals in detail with his officials. Those discussions will also cover other areas that we had no time to go into, including the permitted development rules in Wales and Scotland, the high street rental auction proposals, the Assets of Community Value regime, and unauthorised residential occupation of closed pubs. 

We will of course report further on these discussions once they get under way. 

Photo of the Crooked House from Alamy. Do not republish image