Housing and Planning Bill

Lord Deben Excerpts

Wednesday 13th April 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Deben (Con)]

I am sure my noble friend has noted during our debates that there is an undercurrent of concern about the question of secondary legislation and regulation, and the difficulty that this House has in carrying out its constitutional responsibility to be, in detail, the House that seeks to ensure that legislation is as it ought to be and performs the purpose for which it is designed. In considering this particular occasion, would my noble friend accept that we need, one way or another, to allay that concern and fear? My noble friend Lady Gardner was careful in her choice of words, but we should all recognise that unhappiness and that perhaps this is one occasion on which it might be allayed.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Communities and Local Government (Baroness Williams of Trafford) (Con)]

My Lords, first, I welcome the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, to his first outing on the Housing and Planning Bill and pay tribute to his constitutional expertise in the other place, which he now brings to this House. It may help him if I say that I have listened very carefully to what he and other noble Lords have said on whether regulations on the definition of “high value” should be made under affirmative resolution. I also pay tribute to him for his work on the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee. As a direct result of the committee’s work, I have considered further its point about delegated powers in this chapter. I shall go into a bit more detail in a few moments, but I believe that the House should have the opportunity to scrutinise the detail before the regulations come into force, so I shall return to this at Third Reading.

On the specific amendments tabled by the noble Lords, Lord Lisvane, Lord Kerslake and Lord Beecham, I understand that Amendments 53 and 132 reflect the recommendations made by the DPRRC in its report on Parts 1 to 5 of the Bill, published on 5 February. As I have announced, we will bring forward an amendment to make the high-value regulations affirmative. I shall focus on Amendment 53 and the corresponding part of Amendment 132, which would require determinations to be made through regulations and, under certain circumstances, subject to the affirmative procedure. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, is a member of the DPRRC and will have seen my letter of 23 March to my noble friend Lady Fookes, the chairman of that committee, where I set out the reasons why we considered that we should not accept the recommendation to put the determination into regulations. If the noble Lord will forgive me, for the benefit of your Lordships’ House, I shall now repeat some of my reasoning here.

Our view is that the determination is the most appropriate way of setting out the information of what payment a local authority will make to the Secretary of State. The key elements of the calculation are set out in the Bill, including the housing to be taken into account and the definition of vacancy. Other elements, such as the definition of high value and the types of properties which are to be excluded will be set out in regulations and therefore subject to further parliamentary scrutiny. Indeed, my announcement that the definition of high value is to be made through an affirmative procedure has, I hope, demonstrated my willingness to listen to the House. As I explained in my response to the committee, we also think that the nature and amount of information contained in the determination means that it is appropriate to use a determination rather than a statutory instrument. The determination will contain the formula, the underlying assumptions and the payment for each authority, as the noble Lord pointed out, but it will also include the figures to determine the payments for each of the 165 local authorities, including, among other things, each authority’s vacancy rate, the number of its high-value properties and the level of its attributable debt.

Such a large and complex set of data creates the potential for errors to creep in, which will be noticed only by the relevant local authority. We therefore want to ensure that there is flexibility to amend the determination very quickly to correct any such errors. We of course welcome scrutiny of the formula and other elements of the determination. That is why Clause 69(2) requires the Government to consult all affected authorities, the LGA and relevant professional bodies before making a determination. On this basis, and with the amendment that I have announced on high-value regulations, I urge the noble Lord to withdraw the amendment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Porter of Spalding (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 54 and the other amendments that would add those two letters, “er”, to the word “high” in the clause. Noble Lords will already appreciate my lack of a grasp of the English language, but even I could see how dangerous those two small letters would have been in the wrong hands. I thank my noble friend the Minister for clarifying the Government’s intent to add those and where they will be applied. I ask her to confirm in her closing remarks that this will be used not as an attempt to raise additional income, but as purely a means to spread the burden across more authorities.

Had my noble friend not agreed in the letter she sent earlier and in her remarks on the manifesto commitment that councils would be allowed to retain sufficient receipts to build one-for-one replacement of the same tenure, I would probably have been speaking against these amendments. I should explain to noble Lords why I am prepared to move purely on that basis, and properly in response to the noble Lord, Lord Foster.

In councils such as mine, where we are able to retain sufficient receipts to build a council house out of the sale of a high or higher value, I would probably volunteer to sell all my council houses to anybody who would buy them on the open market, on the basis that the cost of building a replacement unit would probably be about 30% cheaper than the value received on the sale of that unit. I would be quite happy to replace my beautifully maintained 1,600 homes for 1,600 brand new homes in the immediate future, thus doubling the number of affordable homes in my district. On that basis, I earnestly thank the Minister and the Secretary of State in the other place for listening to our proper arguments and the case we made, and for responding appropriately.

[Lord Deben]

I had not intended to speak in this debate until the noble Lord, Lord Foster, spoke. The House ought to remember that the idea that we cannot do anything here and should leave it to the local authorities to make all these decisions runs up against the problem that we have not built the houses we have needed to build over a long period. The people who have had all these opportunities to do so and who know their localities and their needs so well do not seem to have noticed that the big need in most localities is to build some houses. I am a bit suspicious of the Foster doctrine. The truth is that many local authorities need a kick up the backside on housing. That is obvious and real.

[Lord Porter of Spalding]

I cannot let that remark go unchallenged. The problem of the housing shortage in this country is not the fault of any local authority; it is the fault of successive Governments of all colours. They have gone out of their way to stifle the ability of local councils to build houses. I am pleased that the current Government and, to some extent, the coalition Government moved towards that. I am pleased that the current Government are fully encouraging local councils to build houses. It is not the councils’ fault.

[Lord Deben]

If my noble friend had let me finish what I had to say he might have found that we rather agreed. I was going on to say that the second lot of people who have not done what they ought to have done in building houses are successive Governments. When I hear some of the speeches from the Front Bench over there, and realise the appalling history of Labour Governments and housing—

[Lord Beecham]

My Lords—

[Lord Deben]

I will give way to the noble Lord but I want to tell him a personal fact. When I was the Secretary of State responsible and worked out the lowest number of houses we needed, what did the Labour Party do? It denied that that was the number needed. Indeed, when the noble Lord, Lord Prescott, came in, he reorganised the figures to cover up the fact that I was right; we did need those houses. I do not think that the Labour Party, the Conservative Party or indeed the Liberal Democrats had anything to trumpet about in the past. We now have a Government who are actually trying to do something about it.

[Lord Beecham]

I do not for a moment disagree that insufficient numbers of houses were built, in particular council houses, under the Labour Government, but the massive investment in the condition of the housing stock under that Government should not be forgotten.

[Lord Deben]

I do not think that I was entering into a discussion on how it was spent and where it went—although I could, I do not want to get into that. I just want to say that we should all be ashamed of the fact that, over many years, we have not delivered what we ought to in housing—not council housing: housing. In one of the earliest moments of my political life, I remember listening to Harold Macmillan say that he was going to build houses, and that it did not matter where you built them in terms of the levels, because there were so few that people would move into one and up to another. What you really needed was numbers of houses, and that is what the figure of 300,000 houses a year was about.

Every time anybody produces a way of doing something better, there is always somebody who gets up and sounds like one of my civil servants, saying, “Better not, Minister. It might go wrong, something might be wrong”. It is about time we said, “Let’s try to make this work”. There are lots of things about this Bill that I am not happy about, particularly not knowing the regulations in advance. That is a constitutional issue, not a housing issue, but we have to give the Government the chance to do something, given that no one has a good argument to say that they have come up with anything much better than the radical proposals before us.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

My Lords, I wonder whether the Minister can help me understand a little more what she proposes with this swap from “high” to “higher”. I quite understand that going for “higher” rather than “high” will protect some authorities—largely London, but maybe Oxford, Cambridge, Winchester and so on—from seeing most of their stock disappear because, on the national level, they have a “disproportionate” number of high-value properties. We all understand what “higher” means: possibly the top decile or the top 20% of house prices in this country. Obviously, they would then respond to a redistribution across the country, which the Minister, if she wished, could control by having local, district, regional or county controls on that redistribution.

I have a worry, which I hope the Minister can allay, that “higher” will be anything above the median, which effectively means that every local authority in the country will have some high-value stock above the median and some lower-value stock below the median, even though that area may be very poor. Does this mean that the Minister and her officials will determine for each local authority what proportion of housing it must be expected to sell because it is higher than the median? We can tell her now that that will be some 49% in Oldham or Great Yarmouth.

I can see why the Minister is trying to move away from a situation where she redistributes from a few very high-value authorities across the country, but she can address that issue by containing the area within which that redistribution occurs. Instead, by going for “higher”, at the moment, based on my understanding of the English language, she opens up the potential for every local authority to lose up to 49% of its stock because it is “higher”—not “high”, but “higher”—and therefore above the median. That would be utterly perverse.

Housing Estates

Lord Deben Excerpts

Tuesday 9th February 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Deben (Con)]

My Lords, does my noble friend agree that one of the ways to make homes affordable is to ensure that they are energy efficient, so that people do not have to pay too much for their heating? Will she assure the House that these homes will not be built so energy inefficiently that they have to be dealt with again within 20 years? Can she assure the House that energy efficiency will be high on her list of priorities?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

My Lords, I will not be sitting on the panel, but I shall certainly bring that point to my noble friend Lord Heseltine. Of course, my noble friend is absolutely right that, the more energy efficient a house is, the cheaper it is to live in and the cheaper the bills are for the tenants or the owners of it. I will certainly bring that point to my noble friend’s attention.

Syria: Foreign Affairs Committee Report

Lord Deben Excerpts

Thursday 26th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston]

We have certainly offered RAF Akrotiri to the French Government. I am afraid that I do not have any information beyond that, but I will see if I can provide anything further to the noble Lord in writing.

[Lord Deben (Con)]

As one of the 16 Members of Parliament who voted against the Iraq war and defied a three-line Whip, I point out to my noble friend that this situation is wholly different from that very foolish occurrence. In this situation we ought to support our allies, and to accept that we are involved and that our people are in fact threatened. The Prime Minister’s Statement should gain the support of all of us.

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston]

I am very grateful to my noble friend for his comments, particularly because of the remarks he prefaced them with about his views on the war in Iraq.

Chagos Islands

Lord Deben Excerpts

Tuesday 10th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Deben (Con)]

Will my noble friend make quite sure that whatever arrangements are made, they protect and support the remarkable new ocean reserve which is around the Chagos Islands? This is a proud part of Britain’s dealings in this area.

[The Earl of Courtown]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Deben, refers to the marine protected area. He is quite right that this is one of the most important areas of biodiversity in that sort of environment on the planet.

Syria: Refugees and Counterterrorism

Lord Deben Excerpts

Monday 7th September 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Boateng (Lab)]

My Lords—

[Lord Deben (Con)]

My Lords—

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

It is the turn of the Liberal Democrats.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Boateng]

My Lords—

[Lord Deben]

My Lords—

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

My Lords, we have very little time. It is the turn of the Conservatives.

[Lord Deben]

Does my noble friend accept that the words of the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury, remarking upon the fact that many Christians cannot stay in the camps because of intimidation, mean that the policy of the Government, which may be logical in every way, ought to be reconsidered in such a way that we can take those refugees who have had to leave the camps and find themselves on the continent of Europe? To refuse to do that would not represent or respect what the British people want.

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston]

My noble friend heard what I said in response to the most reverend Primate and I do not really have anything to add to that. I have tried in my responses today to demonstrate that the Government are providing refuge to people in desperate need. We are building on a programme of support that has been extensive and very much at the forefront of what else is being provided by other members of the European Union. We will continue to do all that we can. I am sure we will continue to discuss this on other occasions, and I very much look forward to that.

European Council

Lord Deben Excerpts

Monday 23rd March 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Davies of Stamford (Lab)]

My Lords—

[Lord Deben (Con)]

My Lords—

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords—

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston]

We remain absolutely clear that Russia’s annexation of Crimea was illegal and illegitimate, and we will certainly not change our view on that.

[Lord Deben]

My Lords, while my noble friend is taking messages back, will she take the message back that it is very often easier to get people to join with you if you occasionally say how good it is to be party to and a member of the European Union? Would it not be much more helpful, in the perfectly proper desire to have reform in the European Union, if we just remarked on the huge importance to Britain of being in the European Union and to the European Union that Britain is in it? If we were a bit more positive, we would have more chance of winning.

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston]

I am grateful for the message from my noble friend as well. I agree with him at the same time as I agree with my other noble friend, because this is precisely the point. We believe that there are really important, positive advantages to Britain being a member of the European Union. However, we do not believe that the status quo is where we should remain. We believe that some changes are necessary in Europe—that is what the Prime Minister is committed to renegotiating; then he is committed to putting that clear choice to the British people. But there are very important and positive reasons for us to remain a member of the European Union.

EU Council

Lord Deben Excerpts

Monday 28th October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

I am not sure that I can enlighten the House on a huge amount of detail but there are two strands to what the Prime Minister and those who agree with him in the EU are seeking to achieve. One is that the Commission has its own process under the REFIT programme that my noble friend will know about, which is coming up with a series of regulations, measures and so on that it thinks could be repealed, not introduced or otherwise revised. That is a Commission-led process. Alongside that, the Prime Minister has been working with British business, and the British Business Task Force has been working with European businesses, to come up with suggestions from a business perspective regarding further changes that could be made. A twin-track process is going on. One track is led by the Commission and, in the other, Britain with its allies is trying to take forward this issue of how one can have the right amount of regulation that will not hold back economic growth, which is our priority, and get that balance right.

[Lord Deben (Con)]

Does my noble friend agree that the opposition Front Bench was a little curmudgeonly in the second part of its response on youth unemployment, given that this Government have done remarkably well on unemployment during a very difficult time? Was it not also true that his Statement showed just how important it is for Britain to be a full member of the European Union? None of these things would have happened in the way they have and to the degree they have had not the Prime Minister taken an active part. Is it not time that people stopped complaining about the European Union and in fact spent their time improving it in the way in which the Prime Minister is clearly doing?

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

My Lords, I would never—although perhaps I might occasionally—accuse the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, of being curmudgeonly. My noble friend is quite right about what has been achieved in terms of generating jobs generally and the improving trend of economic figures that we are beginning to see. There is much more to do but there has definitely been progress. He is also right about what has been done to tackle youth unemployment. On his broader point, the Prime Minister has demonstrated that it is possible both to argue strongly for Britain’s national interests and to build alliances with other similar-minded countries in Europe to bring about change for the common good. The issue is sometimes presented as a false dichotomy, whereby if you argue for Britain’s national interests you jeopardise your influence within Europe and you either have to go with the consensus or become an outist. The Prime Minister has set out that one can argue very strongly from within the EU for what is in the interests of the whole of Europe as well as Britain.

Climate Change

Lord Deben Excerpts

Thursday 25th April 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Verma]

My Lords, the noble Lord of course knows that renewables will play a vital role in both the UK and the EU’s low-carbon energy mix. We will continue to ensure that that is the case after 2020. Our own electricity market reform proposals will provide strong support for renewable electricity generation, and at EU level we need to consider, within the proposed broader 2030 climate and energy framework, how best to support renewables and other low-carbon forms of energy.

[Lord Deben]

My Lords, did my noble friend notice that our noble friend who has just asked a question was not present at the launch of the Committee on Climate Change’s report on competitiveness, which showed clearly that electricity market reform and working towards a carbonless energy system do not diminish Britain’s competitiveness but indeed increase it? Would it not be helpful if my noble friend listened to the science and to what the Committee on Climate Change put forward?

[Baroness Verma]

My Lords, I could not have put it more eloquently.

Death of a Member: Baroness Thatcher

Lord Deben Excerpts

Wednesday 10th April 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Deben]

My Lords, I was chairman of the Conservative Party on that terrible night in Brighton and I was with the noble Lord, Lord Butler, and Margaret Thatcher at that very time. It was very late. We were writing the speech. Those occasions went on for ever. I thought I had the final bit. I knew I had not, of course, because there used sometimes to be speeches where I would be in the cellar writing on the autocue as it was moving and as she was speaking a bit that she decided she did not like. However, on this occasion, the noble Lord, Lord Butler, was finishing some work with her and I had just walked across the corridor to get the final speech photographed when there was a terrible bang. Automatically, the girls working in the office running off the speech and I all got to the floor. There was a second bang because the roof lifted off and then dropped again. It sounded like another explosion. The dust began to fall.

On my knees, I moved towards the door, opened it and put my head around it. On the other side of the corridor, the door to Mrs Thatcher’s room opened and she was on her knees looking around the door. Tragic comedy are the only words that I can say to describe what was happening. It was a mixture of, “What has happened? What should we do? Don’t we both look silly?” She got up, brushed herself down and said, “Right, we had better get on with something”. But what should we get on with, because we had no idea? She knew that things had to go on. She never said, “The party conference will continue”. Everyone assumed that it would because we knew—that was the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Tebbit—exactly how she would react and precisely what we would be expected to do. So we went off and organised the continuance of the conference. No one asked the question, except for the local chief of police. We soon told him that he had better not ask her that or he might be in even worse trouble than he clearly was going to be. The conference continued, although it was a harrowing and difficult time.

I was lucky enough to help write a lot of Mrs Thatcher’s speeches. She kidnapped me after a speech I had made at a wedding. I was not in Parliament at the time. She said, “Would you come and help me write speeches?”. I was surprised because I did not come from the same part of the party and I would not automatically have been thought of as a natural writer. But once she knew that you were loyal and that you cared about her, the relationship was absolutely one of trust, confidence and support. Occasionally, she would say, “Don’t listen to this John, I am going to say something nasty about Europe.”. She would say it and then she would say, “You can listen again now”, and we would move on.

I could not understand why I was seated next to her on the day we went with the Queen to open the Channel Tunnel. I was the Secretary of State for the Environment. We were both sitting there and I could not understand why. Then I realised that I was the foil. As we moved out of the station, she said, “This has got nothing to do with the Germans, you know. It is entirely the French. But I do not see why we import all that food from France. Why should we buy French cheese? We have perfectly good cheese of our own.”. I realised that she wanted an argument; so an argument we had. The argument went terribly well and we were half way through before either of us recognised that we had gone into the tunnel. It was absolutely a typical part of what she loved, which was to discover where she wanted to be by saying something to which she demanded a response. Her only demand was that you were rigorous in your argument. I have watched her destroy people, although never her unequals. She never set people down if they were in a humble position. However, she destroyed people who pretended that they knew the facts but came ill prepared. You never went ill prepared to a meeting with Margaret Thatcher.

I support the comments that have been made about her amazing kindness. You grew to have a very deep affection for her, even though you often disagreed. That was a very unusual ability on her part, and it was, as the noble Lord, Lord Young, said, down to her kindness to us all. If you had not had anything to eat, there were late-night meals in her flat. The first thing she would ask if you were late was, “Have you had something to eat?”. I have eaten more coronation chicken produced by Margaret Thatcher than I have at any other place or at any other time. I think that she did know how to cook other things but that was the staple diet. She also always knew about your family. She always asked about them and was interested in them. She knew their names and never forgot any of those things. When you think of the number of people she had to deal with, that was remarkable.

Of course, she could make terrible mistakes. She came to my constituency during the campaign for the 1979 election, which she won. She did so as a favour, because I was fighting a seat which the Conservatives had always won, but she made time to come. We decided that it would be very good if she went to a farm. She arrived and there was a rather ill calf, which she was not supposed to touch. We had a nice fluffy lamb for touching. However, she walked up to the calf, put her arms round it and picked it up. It was very heavy. For the photographers, it was fantastic—wonderful. Holding up the calf, she said, “I’m going to call it Victory”. However, the calf was ill and we got every vet in Suffolk to attend to it. We hid the calf from public eye and kept it alive until after the election. We were terrified that this blooming calf would die on us.

I want to say two very serious things. First, I echo the comments of the noble Baroness, and my very much loved friend, Lady Trumpington. Margaret Thatcher was a very beautiful woman. She had beautiful hands and lovely ankles, and she knew precisely how to use both. Any woman who is stupid enough to think that there is something unsuitable about using the gifts that God has given her should be ashamed of herself. She knew perfectly well that she used them not because she was not as good as men but because she was better than men, and she also wanted to have a bit of an advantage. It was a pleasure to see how she turned herself out and how she never forgot that she was a woman.

Secondly, I think that history will remember a rather special thing about her. She was a very cautious woman. She did not take on things lightly and she took them on one at a time. She recognised that you could not have a whole plethora of interventions, initiatives, new ideas and headline-grabbing ideas. She knew that you won things only by taking them one and one, fighting them through and succeeding with them one at a time. Caution is something that does not normally go with a charismatic leader, but one reason that she stayed for so long and was so successful was that she did not go ahead with the abolition of the dock labour scheme until she had dealt with the problems of the mining industry. She did not move to privatise water until she had made sure that people recognised that it was the only way to pay the bills. She had a quality of caution, which is something that very few people of her strength have ever evinced.

It was a privilege, a pleasure and enormous fun to work for her. Things were always unexpected and changed utterly all the time. You never knew what she was going to say or how she was going to receive a carefully crafted few paragraphs, but you did know that you were in the company of greatness. She was a star, and stars rarely come. When they do, we should recognise them without rancour and certainly not say, “It is not quite as bright as we would like it to be”, or that it fell in a different way than we might have liked. We should just say, “Thank goodness that our lives have been enlivened by that star”.

EU Council

Lord Deben Excerpts

Monday 2nd July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine]

My Lords—

[Lord Deben]

Does my noble friend accept that we will be more likely to get the rest of Europe to help us, and do the things that we want in terms of growth, if occasionally we emphasise the advantages of our membership instead of constantly suggesting that all sorts of things have to be changed? Will he please ask for a bit more positivity in our discussions about Europe?

[Lord Strathclyde]

There are many of us on all sides of the House who no doubt would like to be positive about the EU, but there a number of aspects to change over the course of the past 15 years that we do not believe should be dealt with at a European level; we would like to repatriate some of these things back to the United Kingdom. I know that my noble friend Lord Deben may not be entirely in agreement with all of that, but dare I say that when we have seen this audit of competences, there may be more agreement around the House as to what should be done at a national rather than a European level than seems to be the case at the moment?