Housing and Planning Bill

Debate between Baroness Andrews and Lord Deben

Monday 25th April 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Andrews]

My name is on this amendment and I support what my noble friend has said. The contribution we have just heard from the noble Lord, Lord Taylor of Goss Moor, gives us very important context in our understanding of the possibilities. We all need space as much as we need light. That was what Parker Morris recognised when the first space standards were set down, and so many people have benefited from those. We now face the opposite situation. Government policy decrees that it is optional for local authorities to adopt national standards. There will be many good ones that will want to do that because they recognise the health benefits of having proper space and light, but many more will be inhibited by the requirements that are attached, which are going to add more burdens and complications.

It is interesting how often this Government generate more bureaucracy while constantly railing against it on every occasion. There will, therefore, be another dimension to the postcode lottery: local authorities which recognise that space is essential to good health and family and social harmony and provide for it, knowing that the converse means greater family and social stress; and local authorities which will not do that. It will mean less room for children to do homework; for teenagers to have necessary privacy; for parents to have room to move. All those things make for well-being.

Nowhere is this more crucial than in areas where there are no planning standards at all. I raised this issue in last week’s debate on the conversion of offices into dwelling spaces. It was very late in the evening and I did not want to test the patience of the House, but the other issues we have discussed, such as the impact on the viability of town centres and the general viability of enterprise, make it timely to raise it again. In 2013, when the Government amended permitted development rights without planning permission, this was at first for only three years. In October last year it was made permanent. This has given rise to grave concerns, in addition to the very serious ones raised last week by noble Lords such as the noble Lord, Lord True. There is a great deal more to be said about this aspect of policy and its impact in evidence from local authorities as diverse as Bath and Camden. For example, the London Borough of Barnet told our Select Committee that because there are no planning standards for converting offices to domestic dwellings, local authorities have no control over important details such as space standards, dwelling mix and tenure. The London Borough of Barnet told us that:

“There are no planning standards, so you could theoretically build rabbit hutches, as people sometimes refer to them, if you wanted to, whereas planning standards that define a good-quality size of units are almost set in stone”.

I refer noble Lords to a recent report by RIBA, which pointed out that, of the 170,000 homes built last year, 20,000 were converted offices. As such, under the regulations, there are no planning standards which give safeguards for the new home owners. The conversions need not meet space standards or any other planning-based quality standards such as energy efficiency. Some of these apartments are no more than 14 square metres, which is about one-third of the national average. If noble Lords are sceptical, I invite them to look at the RIBA report: it is on the web.

Overall, this is serious. It weakens the ability of local authorities to secure good quality housing, and it will lead to a new generation of home owners who will be expected to manage in conditions which are neither ethical nor healthy. Given the number of homes that may well be coming forth through these conversions, I hope the Minister appreciates that these are inadequate and, frankly, unsafe conditions and that she will undertake to review the need for full planning conditions to apply to them.

[Lord Deben (Con)]

I have some sympathy with the arguments behind it, but the amendment seems entirely the wrong one. The noble Lord, Lord Taylor, is absolutely right about the release of land. If one has a criticism of government, it is the very strong one that we have not made people release land. There is enough land in London to provide the homes we need if it were released. We have not done it; nor did the previous Government; nor the one before; nor the one before that. Yet all the way along we have known that the land is there.

However, it is not very helpful to bring forward an amendment which simply tells every local authority that it must do the same thing. I deeply disagree with the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews. You cannot just talk about localism and the postcode lottery. Local authorities have got to be able to make up their minds. The other day, I had a rather sharp disagreement with my noble friend Lord True because I happened to suggest that local authorities were not entirely without guilt in the provision of houses. He immediately jumped up to defend them. I happen to think that local authorities can be good and bad. We have to believe in them and give them the right to make decisions. The noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, is just wrong to say that we have to impose from the centre these particular requirements. It is acceptable to choose to have them or not.

I want local authorities to have that choice but I do not want the Government to get off the hook on the fundamental thing, which is that action is required to make land available. It is not being made available because local government, national government and quasi-governmental bodies all say, “Well, we might need it. Probably better not to do it now. We would get a bit more money if we hold it back and put it in penny parcels”. We need a serious battle to release the land, particularly in London. If we did that, I think the price would plummet because I would make it compulsory to get rid of the whole lot together and insist it was developed within a short period of time, not just hoarded by housebuilders. There is a great deal to be done but we need some radical change on that front.

If I may dare say so, this is not a sensible amendment because it does not make radical change. It merely says, once again, that every local authority has to do what the Government say. I am not in favour of that but I am in favour of some radical change.

Localism Bill

Debate between Baroness Andrews and Lord Deben

Wednesday 12th October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Deben]

I do not think that anyone would accuse me of not being committed to sustainable development. Indeed, I declare my interest in helping others throughout the world to promote this issue. However, I have a warning about this amendment. We are trying to change the planning system in order to achieve a number of ends including ensuring that Britain is able to grow in a sustainable way and that the time taken by the process should not be such that we avoid all those good ends. I started being concerned about a detailed definition of this sort when I realised how many people will use it to take the courts into consideration. I hope that the Government will recognise that there are two elements to this: there is the natural desire of those of us who are concerned with sustainable development to ensure that no future Government with less concern should be able to use this Act to avoid some of the necessary decisions which we are making while on the other hand not wanting a definition that brings sustainable development into disrepute because it is used as the mechanism for yet again holding up decisions. I hope that the Government, in considering this amendment whose spirit I wholly support, will think hard about how we do this in a way that does not open this whole thing up to a kind of justiciable approach where every person desiring development will be able to find something here which they can use to try to overturn what a local authority has done.

Secondly, I am concerned about the definition. I know it draws from all sorts of learned and worthy bodies, but the truth is that sustainable development is two words: “sustainable”, and “development”. An awful lot of green people talk about sustainability as if development is not in it, and a lot of people who are keen on development talk as if it does not have sustainability in it. It is necessary to stick these two together. If you read this definition, there is a great deal about sustainability, but I am not sure that there is a tremendous amount about development. Yet my noble friend Lord Jenkin, who taught me these things when I was his PPS, is absolutely right to say that these two things come together. They either fuse together, or neither is able to operate on the other side. I hope that in consideration we will take that into account as well.

The third thing we have to take into account is something very fundamental. It is that we ought to move to a stage in which you do not need both words. We ought to move to a stage in which the very word “development” inevitably means that you are going to develop in a sustainable way. Here I have to say something a bit hard about the Government. It does not help when the Government say things for convenience which suggest that they do not have their heart where it ought to be. It does not help when the Chancellor of the Exchequer suggests that we are going to move at a slower speed in dealing with our emissions than the law says we have to and proposes something illegal. It does not help us when those things happen because then others can doubt our fundamental support for these beliefs.

I say to the Minister that it is crucial that we go further than we have gone so far in making sure that people understand that we mean business. The first Prime Minister to use the words “sustainable development” was John Major. I know that because I wrote that bit of the speech but, in the end, people do not give speeches unless they are happy about them—at least, if they have anything about them. He used those words because he believed fundamentally—this has to be said—that it is in the nature of conservatism that we develop sustainability. That is what the country party, on which we are based, had as its heart. We conserved; we believed in handing on to the next generation something better than we received from the previous one. There is much in this Bill which will help us to do that. We need the speed to do it, but we also need the clarity to ensure that people do not fail to recognise the two elements of sustainability and development until it becomes so much second nature that we need only one word because it means both because we have redefined it properly.

[Baroness Andrews]

My Lords, there is much that the noble Lord has said with which I agree. I must put on my English Heritage hat and declare an interest. One of the disappointments that we have tried to address in this Bill is the need to get greater clarity about the nature of sustainability. While I see the point that the noble Lord is making, that sustainability and development are two words, it is sustainability that raises greater confusion and there has been a marked lack of clarity about the whole notion. The debate that we have seen in recent weeks about the nature of sustainability in relation to development has exemplified the search for general agreement about the content of sustainability.

It is difficult because there are competing definitions, but I support the noble Lord’s amendment. I spoke at some length in Committee about this and will not repeat it, but we have inclusivity in this definition, in terms of the lifetime issue of how we must address sustainable developments in future. It also specifies content and that gets us a long way down the track. It is also a definition that is fairly familiar, so we might be able to get some agreement on it. Whether it is workable, practicable and applicable raises enormous questions about the way that the planning system operates.

I also have a great deal of sympathy with what the right reverend Prelate has said about what else might go into a definition of sustainability. I may be drifting into the danger of a list, but I feel strongly that one of the elements that is not in this amendment—and the Minister might take this away and consider it—is including something about our vital cultural and heritage needs, including those of future generations. That is an important guiding principle for what we mean by sustainability in many different ways. It would also fit alongside this expression of a strong, healthy and just society.

I do not want to draft an amendment on my feet, but one might add, for example, “meeting the diverse social, cultural, heritage needs of all people in existing and future communities and promoting well-being and social cohesion and inclusion”. This is important, because if we are to take this definition of sustainability seriously, this is a moment when we might be able to agree and implement something. It has been debated for goodness knows how long in this Chamber and I believe that our culture and heritage fit this Bill. They feed our sense of belonging, of pride, identity and resilience and they feed into our roots of personal and community life. They express, as the right reverend Prelate said, our sense of community. They help us to know who we are and what we are capable of. All that is about sustainability for future generations, for the future shape and feel of our country.

I hope that, if we are to debate the amendment—and maybe I should bring it back at a further stage—the Minister will consider whether she can be flexible in her approach to it and maybe include the new elements of the definition.