Town and Country Planning (Discharge of Local Planning Authority Functions) (England) Regulations 2026

Lord Evans of Guisborough Excerpts

Tuesday 30th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Evans of Guisborough (Con)]

My Lords,

“the days of Whitehall fighting devolution of power … are over for good”.

Those are not my words; they were the words of the right honourable Member for Makerfield in his speech yesterday morning. I understand that he may soon hold a position of power within the Government, and I wonder what he would make of these regulations that are placed in front of us this evening with their top-down, Whitehall-knows-best approach to local planning.

I chaired a planning committee for four years. I did five terms as a local councillor, and I know many of my noble friends and indeed noble Lords on all sides of the House—including the Minister—did good service in local government. I have a degree of déjà vu in talking about this again because I addressed this issue at Second Reading of the Planning and Infrastructure Bill last year when we first discussed this matter. One of the points that I made at the time was that relatively small planning applications can create precedents, which then mean that other buildings nearby can be developed in the same way; other pieces of land can be developed in the same way. A relatively small precedent can very quickly change the nature of a whole area of town or a whole borough; in particular, it can change the nature of our small villages and towns.

It is right that there is democratic input to that decision from people who are elected, rather than the decision being taken just by planning officers, who are there to provide guidance on the law and planning rules rather than direction to the committee. Furthermore, those of us who have been in local government know that quite often during campaigning we are asked about relatively small planning applications and controversial planning decisions, and what we are going to be doing about them.

Quite often, candidates campaign on those decisions. Of course, having campaigned, you have to recuse yourself from a planning committee decision; you cannot vote on it. At the moment, however, there is nothing to stop a person who has been elected appearing before a planning committee and making that case on behalf of their constituents. It is a very important role for elected members. Under these proposals, not only would a councillor not be able to do that, but there very often would not even be a committee for them to appear before.

When I chaired the planning committee at Havering, I was always very careful about keeping the public involved in what was happening. I knew that, for quite a lot of people, that committee was the only contact they had with the democratic elements of our local council. So the way that committee was conducted and the results that it produced reflected more widely on the whole organisation—not just on the elected councillors, but on the nature of the body itself and the way that it was seen by the public.

I was clear that the committee was basically a shop window for the council. What these proposals do, sadly, is take a shop window and turn it into an opaque window through which things are seen happening inside, but no one is quite sure what they are, and we leave the public to draw their own conclusions about it. In the current political atmosphere, that is quite a dangerous thing to do. The conclusions that people draw may not always be logical, and they may not always be fair to the people involved. This puts a lot of weight on our council officers as well, which quite often they do not want to have to take on.

My noble friends have dealt in detail with a lot of the inadequacies in the legislation. I had a fair bit I wanted to say, but I am mindful of the time and I promise the Whip that I will not run over. Still, I wonder—perhaps the Minister can explain it to us —how this set of regulations will pass the Makerfield test.

Social Housing Bill [HL]

Lord Evans of Guisborough Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 17th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stoneham of Droxford (LD)]

My Lords, I intervene briefly to say that the regeneration of some of our social estates is a high priority. The last Labour Government spent a lot of money regenerating city centres. I hope that, if they have long enough, this Labour Government will give a similar high priority to the regeneration of some of our social estates.

It has not been easy, and more difficult in some respects, given the right to buy. As the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, said, regeneration takes a long time— 10 or 20 years—so it is difficult to see easy or quick returns, and resources are a huge problem. To achieve the regeneration of these estates, often you need partnerships, not just the local authority but housing associations and private developers. There is obviously an important role for mayors in this as well as we progress.

The main experience that I have had is of the Rowner estate, in Gosport, which was a Royal Naval estate. It was in huge dereliction after the Navy left its responsibilities. The regeneration of that estate has taken 30 years, with a genuine partnership that involved quite difficult decisions, such as the decision that to regenerate it would require it to be turned into an estate that was one-third owner-occupied, one-third private rented and one-third social housing. The transformation has been remarkable. There are many estates up and down our land that are neglected and need an initiative from the Government. In the rush to get high numbers of new houses, we must not forget the regeneration of our older estates.

[Lord Evans of Guisborough (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 117D, which I have tabled. This is the first time that I have tabled an amendment in Committee, so it is a momentous occasion, for me at least.

I apologise for not having taken part in the Second Reading debate as I was unavailable. Clearly, I missed something because the debate so far on the Bill has been extremely well informed and knowledgeable. It is a privilege to contribute, and to follow the noble Lord, Lord Bird, who has done so much to help homeless people in London. As a former Deputy Mayor of London, I can say that we are very grateful for the work that he has done over the years. I am not sure whether I support his amendment, but I certainly support his efforts.

I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Young, who reminded us of the housing action trusts, not least because one of those first trusts was in the London Borough of Waltham Forest. I can well remember the Chingford Hall estate, because it was in my ward, and the trust started its work in my first year as a newly elected councillor in 1990. I stayed in that ward for 12 years, so I was able to see the work continue and conclude. That estate has been transformed. There is clearly a lesson here for all of us.

I move to my amendment. As a former deputy mayor, I understand that housing is a challenging and complex issue for us to deal with, and many factors affect whether a mayor can achieve their targets. My noble friend Lady O’Neill reminded us that there are now 1.3 million households on the social housing waiting list. I am very much aware that the construction industry and the property sector in this country provide an underpinning for general economic activity. If we can get homes being built, we will provide jobs and skills for people, and we will feed more money into the economy. It is vital not just for providing homes for people but for growing the economy.

In London, I am afraid that the story recently has not been so good. In 2022-23, there were 26,000 starts, which was a pretty good performance, but, by 2023-24, that had fallen to just over 3,000. In response, the mayor has reduced the amount of social housing that he requires in developments from 35% to 20%; that will bring some developments within a range where it is profitable for the builders to build them, which was clearly not the case before, so it is a step forward, but even with that concession, London is still struggling. The most recent figures that we have, from the JLL Partners survey that took place earlier this year, was that in the first three months of 2026 only 7% of housing starts were achieved, which leaves London’s government with 93% to complete for the rest of the year, which I think noble Lords will agree is a challenging target.

It is against this background that I am promoting this amendment, which would provide a mechanism to ensure accountability not just for the Mayor of London but for mayors and authorities around the country. At this stage, we are just asking for a feasibility study, but I think the possibilities may range beyond housing targets: the results of the study could be applied to other targets and to democratic accountability for mayors in future. I place the idea before the Committee, and I very much look forward to the Minister’s response.

[Lord Bailey of Paddington (Con)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 117D, tabled by my noble friend Lord Evans of Guisborough, which is about a simple principle: if elected mayors are given strategic housing powers, receive billions in public funding and repeatedly fail to deliver, there must be proper accountability. This is an amendment that challenges the rhetoric.

If you take the basket case which is London, the Mayor of London endlessly talks about housing figures and about delivery, has the cheek to use the word “record” quite regularly, yet has failed to deliver on a spectacular scale, to the point where the Government had to step in and ask him to change his figures on the amount of social housing he would ask for on any given development. That was a good idea by the Government, which is why I support this probing amendment.

The housing need in London is around 88,000 units a year, as determined by the Government, yet in our best year recently we delivered only 31,000 units. The mayor’s own affordable housing target was 52,000 a year and he failed to hit that by a wide mark, getting to only 32,000. The affordable housing target under the current programme was originally 35,000 starts—just starts. Londoners cannot live in a start; a human being cannot live in a start. I think we need to start looking at completions: that is when a house actually becomes a home. The target was 35,000 originally, and that has been lowered to between 17,800 and 19,000, but in 2024-25, there were only 3,991 affordable housing starts. Again, I refer to the point that we need completions, not starts. That is only starts.

Of course, the cost is paid by Londoners, who are living in poor and expensive accommodation. We have over 100,000 children living in temporary accommodation and 210,000 Londoners are actually homeless. I have been homeless. It is an absolute blight on your life. It is impossible to move forward if you are homeless. You need a base to operate from, and that base is commonly known as a home, so when we have mayors who have been given great support by Governments of all colours, they need to be brought before some kind of reckoning if they are not delivering on that.

Again, I refer noble Lords to the basket case that is London. London cannot keep its place as a world-leading city if we cannot afford to house people here. If you are a police officer, a nurse, a factory worker, a youth worker—name any job that keeps this city going—you cannot afford to stay here; you are being pushed out. If you are an international employer, you cannot set up in London, because you know staff cannot afford to live in London. So, of course this amendment needs to be supported.

Accountability must follow power. Amendment 117D asks the fair question: what happens when mayors fail repeatedly to deliver on social housing delivery? At present, the answer is “Not enough”. This amendment would allow the Government to examine proper thresholds on repeated failure over years and the level of required public support for a recall petition.

Local Councillors: Recruitment, Retention and Well-being

Lord Evans of Guisborough Excerpts

Thursday 4th June 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Evans of Guisborough (Con)]

My Lords, I express my gratitude to the noble Lord, Lord Forbes, for bringing this subject before us today. I was shocked to hear many of the incidents that he relayed to us. For the first time in many years, I began to think that perhaps my decision to give up as a councillor back in 2014 was not such a bad one. It is a decision that I have regretted, really, ever since I made it. I served five terms, and I very much enjoyed them. One of the reasons I decided not to continue was that I felt it was becoming acceptable to attack elected members. I felt we were having targets painted on our backs, and it was not a situation that I was prepared to continue to be a part of.

When I left local government at Havering Council, I was invited to go abroad to help advise councillors there and see their culture—in Fiji, as it turns out. I was phoned up shortly afterwards by the organisers, who told me there was no space left in Fiji, so in fact they were sending me to Basra—and could I come into the Foreign Office for my kidnap training on Tuesday? I went and did it, and I found councillors there who were very keen on helping their community, but they all constantly accused each other of corruption and all required bodyguards. It was a culture that I really would not want to see developing here, a future culture that we do not want: there was a constant churn, a constant change of members, no learning from previous experience and very little progress for the citizens of that city, quite apart from the elected members.

In the little time left to me, I will speak in support of a comment made by my noble friend Lord Udny-Lister about part of this being about the lack of power that councillors now have. People expect us to be able to achieve things and yet, very often, we are just relaying bad news to them. That is creating expectations and then letting them down, which is bound to lead to problems.

There is no excuse for bad behaviour, but I remember chairing a planning committee about expanding a sixth-form college in Havering. It was an excellent application, worth £60 million, from the Government. A mass crowd turned up and did not want it. I understood them: if I had lived next door to it, I probably would not have wanted it either. But it was a case of the greatest good for the greatest number—a really good facility, there for the future for all the young people of our borough. So we approved it, and we got a lot of abuse from the people who had come to the meeting. We got accused of corruption. When we had finally cleared the room out, gone away and signed the whole thing off, the Government came back to us just a few months later and told us they were withdrawing the money, so we could not have our sixth-form college after all. We had taken that massive reputational hit for nothing. That is something we want to avoid in future.

English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Lord Evans of Guisborough Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 8th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Evans of Guisborough (Con)]

My Lords, I start by declaring an interest, in that I am a contributor to the Local Government Pension Scheme. Sadly, I am not able to take any money out of it as yet, but I know that it is in good hands.

I am particularly pleased to follow the contribution by my noble friend Lord Borwick, whose wife, Victoria, I served with on the London Assembly for two terms. She was a wonderful deputy mayor of London and set a very high standard for the rest of us to follow. I particularly agreed with my noble friend’s comments on disabled access to taxis. If he brings forward that amendment, I would be delighted to support it and help it, because it is about time.

I agreed with much of what the noble Lord, Lord Bradley, and the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, had to say about out-of-area licensing. While I was in London, I visited cab drivers and would go out with them to see some of the challenges they faced around London. I was often dismayed to see the number of out-of-area plates from towns around London that were plying in the centre of town, seemingly with no enforcement, even though we knew that the standard they had to pass was far lower than the London cab standard. That was in the days before the noble Baroness, Lady Casey, made her report on the grooming gangs, which makes that type of licensing only even more urgent. I am pleased to see the Government bring that forward.

It is 25 years since the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, and I arrived at Romney House, just down the road from here, to take up our role as founder members of the London Assembly, which celebrated its 25th anniversary this year. I will confine most of my other comments to London issues, because that is the area I know a bit about. I was pleased to hear the Minister talk about the London-wide licensing strategy, which was added to the Bill at a fairly late stage. I note that, in the other place, Dame Meg Hillier, another former colleague of mine now representing Hackney South and Shoreditch, had some very technical questions to raise about the licensing strategy. I will be interested to see how it develops as the legislation moves forward.

I have some questions about London-wide entertainment and alcohol licensing, largely on the basis of why it is being done, why it was asked for, what the objectives are and how we will be able to judge whether this trial is successful before it is rolled out to the rest of the country. Local communities guard their decisions on licensing fiercely. There needs to be a very obvious benefit for taking them away or making that decision at a higher level further up the ladder.

I join the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, in her comments on the assembly’s powers and, perhaps, improving them. I suspect many people here will not know that there has been no occasion at any time in the 25 years that the assembly has existed when the assembly or its committees have been able to amend or overturn the mayor’s budgets or strategic powers, despite the fact that that power was put into the legislation. That is because those committees and the assembly require a two-thirds majority to do that. Linked with proportional representation, that is almost mathematically impossible.

There has only ever been one term in which that might have happened, which was the second term of Ken Livingstone’s office, when the Labour Party was reduced to seven assembly members, which was not enough to provide a one-third blocking number. On that occasion, a number of deals were done with colleagues in the Green Party: I think the mayor’s conversion to green policies was dragged along partly by the political necessity of having to get his budget through. Perhaps the solution to that is to allow the assembly and its committees to amend the budget by simple majority rather than by a two-thirds majority. An amendment to that effect was introduced by Peter Fortune, the honourable Member in the other place who represents Bromley and Biggin Hill, another former assembly member. I think it was defeated, but we might see it again here.

I also believe that another look at the way the assembly is described in legislation may be overdue. The assembly has been in existence now for 25 years. In that time, the population of London has increased by over 1 million people. That is an increase in the size of the population of London of over 10%. Yet the assembly is still made up of 25 members: it has not grown to reflect that. The reason is that the legislation says that the assembly should be made up of 25 members, so some legislative change is required to enable a boundary review to take place. Perhaps the Minister will consider that, while we are going over London matters. It has been an asymmetric growth in numbers. Two particular constituencies in London—North East, which covers the Lea Valley, and City and East, which covers the Barking Riverside development—have grown much faster than others and therefore the people in those constituencies are possibly underrepresented.

I am indebted to my noble friend Lord Porter, who mentioned “Yes Minister”. There has been a lot of discussion about the title of this legislation. I dug the quote out from the first episode of “Yes Minister”. Sir Humphrey Appleby’s advice to Ministers on drafting legislation was, “Dispose of the difficult bit in the title. It does much less harm there than on the statute books”. I hope that the Minister will be able to reassure us that that is not the case.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Evans of Guisborough Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 25th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Evans of Guisborough (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure and something of a challenge to follow the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, in this debate. Indeed, it is something of a challenge to follow the 50-odd other contributors whom we have had today, because there is little left to say that has not already been said. In that respect, I would like to go in to bat to defend council planning committees, notwithstanding the fact that several other people have done the job already.

I spent four years chairing the planning committee in the London Borough of Havering, on the north-east border of London, where the city meets the country. There was a great deal of pressure there between the housing demand and the green space that people wanted to build on, so it was quite a tough place to do that job. All my committee members were trained in basic planning law so that they could do their jobs better, so I do not think that is a bad idea; I think it is a bad idea to insist that they be trained and then to take their powers away from them and have them discharged somewhere else. That seems somewhat perverse.

I must admit to the Minister that, even though we were a good planning committee, occasionally we discussed people’s extensions and modifications to their homes. That was quite important because, in allowing something to change on one house, you created a precedent and the ones next door could do the same thing. You could pretty soon see whole streets, and whole neighbourhoods even, change substantially because of decisions made on a relatively small number of properties. Because of that, it is still a really good idea to allow some democratic involvement in those decisions, because people will look at their changing neighbourhood and say, “Where did I vote for this? Where did I have a say in what is happening?”

I also used to feel that it was very important to run a committee that was fair and gave people a say because, for quite a lot of the public, the planning committee was the only democratic part of the council that they met or encountered. If we did our job badly, were unsympathetic or were poorly briefed, that reflected badly not just on the committee but on the whole of the authority.

On occasions, we were quite independent. We even sent the council’s own applications back for changes to be made to them. A good committee should not be scared to do that. We had some challenges while I was there. We had a race for golf courses. Suddenly, there was a demand for lots of golf courses around north-east London—not because there was a demand for golf, but because there was a demand for space to dump inert waste from building sites without having to pay the landfill tax. It is that sort of perverse incentive that, if we are not very careful, badly drafted environment law creates. I urge Ministers to take a close look, particularly at Part 3 of the Bill, to imagine how it might be misused. If they do not take that look, I am sure people in the property industry will do so—and will take advantage of it. It is worth taking the time.

I was also impressed by the speech made by the noble Lord, Lord Best, at the start of the debate. He said some fairly strong things about the big housebuilders. The noble Baroness, Lady Levitt, said some good things about design and architecture in the future, but I think they could have been a lot more cutting than they were. I have lived in new-build flats in London for the past 30 years. There have been a considerable number of problems with not just the design but the execution of the build. We hear a lot about fire safety—quite rightly after the Grenfell disaster—but the shortcomings go much further than that. I can give the Minister, if she wants, a whole list of defects and problems that regularly occur in new builds.

I hope the Government achieve their target to massively increase housebuilding, but a wave of increased housebuilding must not come at the expense of the quality of the properties that are built. We do not want to see people who buy their houses and flats landed with the costs of repairing them and making changes to them a short time after they have been built. To allow that to happen is bad news anyway for the housing market in the UK in the long run, because people will not want to participate in it if they think that what they are buying is junk. I am really looking forward to taking part in the scrutiny of the Bill in the coming weeks. I hope we can do a constructive job of it.