Daisy Cooper debates involving the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities during the 2019 Parliament

Tue 17th Oct 2023
Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill
Commons Chamber

Consideration of Lords amendments
Wed 20th Apr 2022
Building Safety Bill
Commons Chamber

Consideration of Lords amendments & Consideration of Lords amendments
Wed 19th Jan 2022
Building Safety Bill
Commons Chamber

Report stage & Report stage
Mon 10th Jan 2022

Planning Reform

Daisy Cooper Excerpts
Wednesday 13th March 2024

(2 weeks, 2 days ago)

Westminster Hall
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Simon Clarke Portrait Sir Simon Clarke
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I totally agree. The hon. Gentleman is exactly right: councils need to have the planning departments to process the applications, and too often, as we know, good planners are poached by consultancies when they are needed in our local government system. The answer is to allow local authorities to capture more of the upside financially from new homes being built so that they can fund the requisite staff and expertise— I see the hon. Member for St Albans (Daisy Cooper) nodding—to do exactly what the hon. Gentleman refers to.

Daisy Cooper Portrait Daisy Cooper (St Albans) (LD)
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The right hon. Member will be aware that there is a Government-imposed cap on how much money local councils can charge big developers when they put in applications. That led to a situation in St Albans where the constituents of a district were subsidising big developers to the tune of £3 million a year. The Government have increased but not scrapped the cap, and councils can still not recoup the full cost of processing an application. Would he support a measure to scrap the cap altogether?

Simon Clarke Portrait Sir Simon Clarke
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That is a very reasonable question. I would need to look at the detail of the policy to see whether simply raising the cap further or scrapping it would be the best solution to the problem. Do I accept entirely that we need to make sure that councils are not cross-subsidising the cost of development, but are incentivised to welcome good development? Yes, I do.

Another important piece of the puzzle is leasehold reform, and I thought that the Minister for Housing, Planning and Building Safety spoke brilliantly on that issue in the House last week. Although nominally owners, the relationship between leaseholders and freeholders often resembles that of a landlord and tenant. There is too little protection against drastically increased service charges and few incentives for freeholders to properly maintain a building.

Secure and fair property rights are a core Conservative principle. The Government are making great strides with the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Bill. It is absolutely right that we fix the balance and ensure that once people get on the property ladder, their home is truly theirs. I encourage the Government to go further, and I welcome the commonhold system whereby leaseholders all own a share of the common development, but we must address the fact that leasehold reform is vital.

We should also address the fact that new homes in Britain are too often of low quality. Poor-quality designs leave new and existing residents feeling that new homes are too often nothing more than ugly boxes, and we should look seriously at how design codes can ameliorate that. For example, we could allow individual streets or areas to vote on a design code for new housing. Establishing pre-set and pre-approved design rules ahead of time would allow everyone on the street to see a large share of the potential uplift, while significantly increasing the number of homes built. Design codes could also increase housing through densification, rather than relying on outward suburban sprawl, which would also reduce the potential dependence on cars and would allow more green space to be preserved.

As we have discussed, even if the public are on board, local authorities need to be as well. Councils are vulnerable to particularly vocal activism, even if it is a minority opinion among residents. Any reform will need to empower councils to take long-term decisions in the interests of their area, giving them the tools to get the right outcome from new development and incentivising them to say yes where appropriate, while ensuring that a few bad apples cannot shirk their responsibility to allow more homes. As you know, Mr Betts, our councils really matter.

I recently had reason to feel considerable frustration at my own planning authority in Redcar and Cleveland, when the chair of that authority made the baffling decision to delay the consideration of the proposed new British Steel electric arc furnace at Redcar. That reflects the power that councils can have for good or for ill, and we certainly want to ensure that their natural incentives are to welcome investment.

To do that, we need to ensure that development plans are brought up to date everywhere. These plans allow builders a measure of certainty when deciding where to construct new homes, but they are often not up to date. Unfortunately, the consequences under current law if an authority does not have an up-to-date plan are often trivial.

One possible remedy comes from California—the so-called “builder’s remedy”. Under that policy, if an area fails to plan for enough homes, it must approve any housing project that contains at least 20% low-income or 100% middle-income housing. That solution can be extremely effective. A few weeks of the builder’s remedy in Santa Monica resulted in more affordable housing being approved than there had been in the previous seven years. I certainly favour restoring a presumption in favour of development wherever an up-to-date local plan is not in place.

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Simon Clarke Portrait Sir Simon Clarke
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I confess that I think the issues surrounding phosphate and nutrient neutrality need to be addressed—indeed, I commented on this with my right hon. Friend the Member for Newark (Robert Jenrick) this morning—by looking at the underlying causes of the problems and allowing mitigation measures to be put in place and counted forward so that homes can still be built where appropriate. That would mean that we do not end up in the situation where authorities either commission homes where they are not appropriate or do not commission homes at all. We need to resolve the Gordian knot of nutrient neutrality, because it is an irrational obstacle to building new homes. It is something that we have created through policy, and we need to resolve it through policy.

The Government have rightly said that development plans ought to prioritise building in cities. I welcome the exciting plans set out by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for major new developments in east London and Cambridge. That is precisely the kind of visionary development that we need and should welcome, and I think it will command broad support. Demand is obviously highest for homes close to city centres, where jobs are located, so those new homes often contribute disproportionately to economic growth. Building in cities also means that less money is required to support the infrastructure needs of new residents, and it is environmentally friendlier. Urban, dense communities inherently encourage lower usage of energy, because living in a smaller space means there is less to heat, and living in an apartment building means that there is natural insulation from other units, and so on.

Estate regeneration is also a win-win way to add more housing in cities and to deliver social justice. Too often, our post-war council estates are impractical and prohibitively expensive to rehabilitate. However, redeveloping an estate with new private housing that helps to cross-subsidise a wider improvement and redevelopment of social housing can result in a plan to deliver a really good outcome for all residents. Allowing tenants to vote on these plans would ensure that their rights were protected while providing new and renovated homes of a kind that is desperately needed.

However, although the brownfield-first policy is sensible, a brownfield-only policy cannot be, and no debate on planning would be complete without my referring to the completely uncontroversial subject of the green belt. The green belt was intended to prevent sprawl, but I would submit that it has done the opposite. Today’s green belt, which is three times larger than London itself, causes a leapfrog effect, whereby individuals wanting to live in London end up settling in distant commuter towns instead, which increases transportation and climate costs. Parts of the green belt—the disused car parks, the petrol stations and the dreary wastelands that make up what the right hon. and learned Leader of the Opposition rightly calls “the grey belt”—are far from the natural paradise that some would have us believe.

The green belt, in truth, has the best spin doctors around, encouraging a widespread misapprehension that it is all beautiful green land, when in fact 11% of the UK’s total brownfield land lies within the green belt.

Daisy Cooper Portrait Daisy Cooper
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Will the right hon. Gentleman give way on that point?

Simon Clarke Portrait Sir Simon Clarke
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I will give way, but then I should make progress.

Daisy Cooper Portrait Daisy Cooper
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Does the right hon. Gentleman accept that some of us do not give or accept that portrayal of the green belt? Some of us are very clear that there are brownfield sites and there are developed sites within the green belt, and most of our concern is about the undeveloped green-belt sites that have natural habitats.

Simon Clarke Portrait Sir Simon Clarke
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In response to the hon. Lady’s point, I am strongly in favour of making sure that we can better enshrine the protections for the areas of genuine natural beauty and community amenity, rather than having a reductive debate that simply suggests that the entirety of the green belt is an untouchable verdant paradise, because it is not all like the front of a box of Yorkshire Tea; we all know that it is a mixed area of land. It was a crude line on a map drawn in the late 1940s, with good intention but adverse consequences today, and I would argue that we need to have a much more sophisticated debate about what is and is not tradeable in that context.

My own party needs to stop pretending that all of the green belt is valuable, which is bad policy and bad politics, and it is time that we started to look at releasing some grey-belt land to provide us with the housing that we desperately need. The hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden (Dame Siobhain McDonagh), who is a fellow PricedOut parliamentary champion and a friend, has done excellent work in pointing out that some of the worst areas of blight in her constituency are characterised as being green belt.

Of course, even where the planning system does allow developers to bring forward new homes, regulations that are too strict can still strangle supply and push up prices. Year after year, conditions and requirements are added at every level, driving up costs without necessarily delivering high quality. Perhaps the most egregious example of this comes from the Mayor of London’s London plan, where the dual aspect rules require every flat to have external windows on multiple walls. Clearly, indeed inherently, that is desirable, but it comes with a cost, and if it restricts the number of homes built, that intervention needs to be balanced against the wider social imperative of creating homes where they are most needed.

Minimum space standards are another example. While young people in other countries live on their own in flats of between 20 and 25 square metres, in the UK they are forced to live with strangers in overcrowded houses in multiple occupation because we have banned new flats of that size. Politicians need to be honest with the public and with ourselves about the options that exist in this area. In the middle of a generation-defining supply crunch, we cannot afford these rules. People would be much better off in small, modern and affordable flats of their own than in ageing, chopped-up homes built over a hundred years ago. We need to nuance this debate.

We also need to talk about tax. Our main real estate taxes often feel to those priced out of home ownership as though they add insult to injury. Stamp duty land tax and council tax both need fundamental reform. Stamp duty, as it is currently constituted, penalises people every time they move house, meaning that some households remain in homes that are too small for them when others remain in homes that are too large for them—in both cases for too long.

Council tax is regressive and unfair, and fails to compensate local councils properly for increases in land or property value, undermining the incentive to add more housing. Given that all parties are, frankly, terrified of the effects of a revaluation politically, and given that there has not been a revaluation since I was a child of seven, we need to look at fundamental reform of local government taxation. That is a major issue—I do not deny it—but at the moment it is worsening the planning system as well as acting irrationally in terms of the tax system. I submit that both those taxes should be replaced with a proportional property tax, which would save households an average of more than £500 a year and result in up to 600,000 extra new homes over the next five years.

I hope that this morning I have highlighted some easy, sometimes controversial but generally win-win solutions that we could use to help soothe our housing crisis. In the long run, there is no substitute for real root and branch reform of our planning system. Ultimately, I favour a rules-based system along the lines set out by my right hon. Friend the Member for Newark when he was Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government. It was unfortunate that the Opposition misrepresented those plans as a “developers’ charter”. If only they had been allowed to do anything of the kind!

Housing has an impact on every facet of our lives. Rising housing costs suppress productivity, increase wealth inequality, worsen climate change and increase homelessness. People need to be together. Bringing people physically together is a social good, but people need homes to do so. This is not an abstract debate; fixing the issue is a moral priority and it also ought to be a top political priority for my own party, as it always was under Prime Ministers as different as Harold Macmillan and Margaret Thatcher. I do not know how we can make the case for popular Conservatism when in too many areas of England people cannot accumulate capital in their own lives. I certainly feel that is why major political change may be brewing in parts of the country that we have long called our heartlands.

One need only contrast the recent success of the Canadian Conservatives to see the amazing difference that embracing pro-home-ownership policies can deliver, even among the youngest voters. The UK is falling behind in the quest for higher productivity and better wages, and at the moment we are only making ourselves poorer by refusing to meet one of our most basic human needs—a place to live. The UK needs innovation, we need infrastructure and most of all we need housing. We will not get enough of it under the current system. That is why the time for talking is over.

We have made too little progress on effective planning reform over the last 14 years and it has become clear to me that politicians are not holding ourselves sufficiently accountable on the issue. That is why I am delighted to announce that PricedOut, Britain’s largest campaign for affordable news homes, will publish an index of Members of Parliament in England running for re-election, ranking their performance on housing, planning and infrastructure issues. That will serve as a guide to voters up and down the country at the next election, showing just for whom the issue is a priority. PricedOut has my support in bringing all of us in this House to account. The country deserves a more serious debate than the one we have had, and we need it soon, before lasting harm is done to another generation by our collective unwillingness to deliver the serious planning reform the country needs.

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Daisy Cooper Portrait Daisy Cooper (St Albans) (LD)
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It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Betts. I thank the right hon. Member for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland (Sir Simon Clarke) for securing this debate. If I am perfectly honest, we have more in common that I thought we might. That gives me great hope, and I hope that we might continue to work together on the reforms about which we do agree.

The Liberal Democrats are committed to overhauling this broken top-down planning system. I supported amendments tabled to the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act that would have given councils the powers to force land bankers to build or sell. Unfortunately, they did not go through. We also supported amendments that would have given local councils the power to regulate Airbnbs, something that is so important to my St Albans constituency. I have also been running a campaign to get the Government to scrap the cap on planning fees, as my constituents are subsidising big developers, and our planning department has been left woefully underfunded. It is really disappointing that those amendments were not accepted for the levelling-up Act.

Today, I want to focus on the failed top-down approach to setting housing targets. The Liberal Democrats have an ambition to build 380,000 homes a year, but by adopting a bottom-up approach we would ensure that they were built in the right places and were the right homes. We would require councils to start by addressing their local housing need and identifying any local constraints. The approach would include ensuring that 150,000 homes each year would be truly affordable for social rent, and I am delighted that that is supported by research from the National Housing Federation, Crisis and Heriot-Watt University.

I want to interrogate recent reforms to the national planning policy framework. I intend to challenge the Minister to clarify whether the reforms her Government announced in December have in fact been incorporated into the NPPF at all. I am sure it will come as no surprise to Members or the Minister that I take a keen interest in the proposals to update the NPPF. The Minister will know that I have tabled scores of parliamentary questions, secured debates, responded to various consultations and tabled amendments to the levelling-up Act. I have been clear that the current Government policy and the NPPF itself do nothing to solve the housing crisis. What they do is incentivise developers to destroy great swathes of precious agricultural land, natural habitat and green open spaces on the metropolitan green belt.

The root of the problem is the Government’s top-down housing targets, which are based on out-of-date population data and which councils are required to meet irrespective of any local constraints. There is no clear guidance in the new NPPF at all about whether those top-down targets or preserving undeveloped green belt space for future generations should take precedence, and that is quite confusing.

Let us look at the history of this issue. In 2015, the then Minister of State for Housing and Planning took steps to address it in a written ministerial statement. On permitting development on the green belt, he said that unmet need is

“unlikely to clearly outweigh harm to the green belt and any other harm so as to establish very special circumstances.”—[Official Report, 17 December 2015; Vol. 603, c. 95WS.]

There was a very clear instruction in that statement to local planning authorities and to the planning inspector that the protection of undeveloped green belt should be given more weight than meeting housing targets.

However, that ministerial statement was made nine years ago. There have been 12 Conservative Housing Ministers since then, and unfortunately not one of them has seen fit to incorporate that statement and that principle into the NPPF. That remarkable state of affairs has meant that the Planning Inspectorate has never been able to give that statement any weight at all when deciding on planning appeals. Nor has the Planning Inspectorate had the ability to apply that principle to its examination of local plans—in fact, the planning inspector said as much in a planning appeal heard for an application in Colney Heath in my constituency that has resulted in the wrong homes being built in the wrong place. As a consequence, many councils are not able to meet the top-down housing targets without surrendering undeveloped green belt land for development.

The Minister will know that in St Albans, we unfortunately have the oldest adopted local plan in England. Two previous drafts developed under Conservative administrations were rejected by the Planning Inspectorate. Since 2019, the Liberal Democrat administration has prioritised the local plan process. It has been put under the auspices of the leader of the council, and in recent months the district council has made significant progress by completing a call for sites, producing a draft local plan and completing a regulation 18 consultation.

The Government’s top-down approach has a real impact in St Albans, and that is the situation our district council now faces. The Government’s standard method produces a top-down target of approximately 14,000 homes that need to be built within the St Albans district. The Government’s approach does not allow for any reduction in that top-down target, even though we have been given a Government-imposed strategic rail freight interchange the size of 3.5 million square metres of green belt, equivalent to 490 football pitches, which could instead have potentially accommodated between 2,500 and 3,000 homes. Following the district council’s call for sites and the regulation 18 consultation, it is thought that only around 5,000 homes can be accommodated on brownfield or grey belt sites. Around 9,000 homes will need to be built on previously undeveloped green belt.

The district council is working at pace to put a plan in place, but the combined failure of the Government to embed that written ministerial statement into the NPPF and of previous administrations in St Albans to develop a local plan now means that the council is currently unable to defend itself and its communities from inappropriate, speculative development. As a result, developers have mostly won their cases by appealing to the Planning Inspectorate.

St Albans City and District Council remains unable to prevent the wrong houses from being built in the wrong place. For example, just in the last year 2022-23, most of the housing built in our district was four, five or six-bedroom executive housing, not the three-bedroom homes that we desperately need. After months of delay, hopes were raised that an updated national planning policy framework would finally address the scandal of local plans being required to meet those centrally produced, top-down housing targets, as produced by the so-called standard method. In St Albans, our council leader took the Secretary of State’s promises at face value, saying that that if the new national planning policy framework is changed, such that the protection of underdeveloped metropolitan green belt takes precedence over top-down targets, our draft local plan will change as well. But it seems to me that the changes to the NPPF actually make the situation worse.

The Secretary of State said on 19 December 2023 that the changes provide

“clearer protection for the green belt…In summary, the new NPPF will: facilitate flexibility for local authorities in relation to local housing need; clarify a local lock on any changes to green-belt boundaries…the Government are ensuring it is clear there is generally no requirement on local authorities to review or alter green-belt boundaries if this would be the only way to meet housing need.”—[Official Report, 19 December 2023; Vol. 742, c. 97-99WS.]

The Secretary of State said all of that, but I have read the new national planning policy framework and I am afraid that it says absolutely no such thing. Rather than softening the need to meet those top-down targets, the changes to the NPPF actually strengthen and reinforce the requirement of councils and their communities to meet them.

There are at least five examples that I can find. Paragraph 15 changes the requirement from “addressing” the targets to “meeting” them, which is a significant change in firming up the requirement. Paragraph 60 adds a new requirement that the overall aim of any local plan

“should be to meet as much of an area’s identified housing need as possible”.

Again, that is a significant firming up of meeting that top-down target. Paragraph 61 codifies the Government’s previous position that

“the standard method is an advisory starting-point”,

but the meaning of “advisory” is not clarified. It is widely understood in the planning sector that “advisory” does not mean that it is merely a suggestion, but it is actually a warning. It is a warning that, if that target is not met, the planning inspector will almost certainly throw out and fail any local plan that does not meet that target.

In paragraph 61, the accompanying footnote 25 restricts the circumstances that might permit deviation from the standard method to extreme examples, such as

“islands with no land bridge”.

It appears to deliberately stay silent on undeveloped green belt constraints. Paragraph 145 had, in the version that the Government put out for consultation, the strongest and clearest indication that

“Green Belt boundaries are not required to be reviewed and altered, if this would be the only means of meeting the objectively assessed need for housing over the plan period”.

Inexplicably to those who expected that revision to strengthen green belt protection, that change was scrapped altogether in the final version of the NPPF. Indeed, there is not one single statement anywhere in the NPPF—none at all—that indicates to the planning authorities or the planning inspector that more weight can or should be given to protect undeveloped green belt over top-down housing targets.

Planning professionals agree that, at best, the new NPPF brings nothing to green belt communities. It was reported that one very senior and respected planning barrister, who attended a Hertfordshire Infrastructure & Development Board meeting on 29 February, described the Government’s changes as nothing more than “window dressing”. St Albans City and District Council has proceeded with its local plan-making, in compliance with the previous version of the NPPF, in the expectation that the Government would honour their promise to give councils more power and the ability to protect parts of undeveloped green-belt land. It is clear that those promises have now been broken.

I am told that the Liberal Democrat administration has followed the advice of the Local Government Association, the Planning Advisory Service, the Planning Inspectorate, its own KC and external experts acting as critical friends. In effect, they have all told the council the same thing: “You must meet this top-down target or you are at risk of your local plan being failed.”

Without a local plan, communities in St Albans will continue to end up with our natural environment bulldozed over for inappropriate and oversized executive homes, with no way for the council to require developers to provide the three-bed family homes that our district so desperately needs. Indeed, the draft local plan that the district council has prepared has identified that more than 50% of the new homes in the area have to be three-bedroomed homes. Yet at the moment we have no way of ensuring that developers build them. There is now a limited window of opportunity for the Government to intervene and clarify whether St Albans District Council can move forward with the draft local plan that revises the top-down housing targets downwards, in recognition of local constraints.

To sum up, I have three questions for the Minister. Will the Minister confirm today whether the Government-imposed strategic rail-freight interchange, the size of 490 football pitches, which prevents the building of 2,500 to 3,000 homes, can be taken into account? Secondly, on 9 January, the Minister for Housing, Planning and Building Safety, the hon. Member for North East Derbyshire (Lee Rowley), responded to my written question on the issue of the green belt to say that the Government would consider whether updates were needed to planning practice guidance in due course. Can the Minister today confirm whether that consideration has been completed and, if not, when it will be? My third and final question is will the Government urgently provide updated guidance for local authorities and the planning inspector, making it clear that the protection of undeveloped green-belt sites—not the grey belt—can be considered an exceptional circumstance, which justifies an alternative approach to assessing housing need?

Since the new year, I have tabled 12 written questions asking for clarity on these issues. So far, not one of them has received a satisfactory response. Instead, I have been redirected back to the very statements on which I am trying to seek clarification. My constituents deserve straightforward answers on the Government’s intentions. I hope the Minister will take the opportunity to provide substantive responses today.

Clive Betts Portrait Mr Clive Betts (in the Chair)
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We now move on to the Front Benchers. For Labour, Matthew Pennycook.

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Felicity Buchan Portrait The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (Felicity Buchan)
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It is a great pleasure to respond to this debate and serve under your chairmanship, Mr Betts. I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland (Sir Simon Clarke) for securing today’s important debate and for his very eloquent presentation. I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski) for his impassioned pleas on behalf of his constituency, and the hon. Members for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron) and for St Albans (Daisy Cooper).

Let me make it very clear that this Government are absolutely committed to modernising our planning system and building more homes. In our manifesto, we had a commitment to build 1 million more houses, and we are on track to do that during this Parliament. We have an advisory target of 300,000. We have not achieved that, but—let me make this very clear—the highest four years of house building in the past 30 years have been since 2018, so our performance is strong.

Daisy Cooper Portrait Daisy Cooper
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The Minister indicated that the new NPPF uses the word “advisory”—the Government have always used that word. The hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Matthew Pennycook) said that is a softening of the targets, but the advice that my local council has received from the Local Government Association, the Planning Advisory Service, the Planning Inspectorate and its own KC is that “advisory” is a warning that, if that number is not met, the local plan will likely get failed. Will the Minister please commit to provide further guidance on what the Government intend by the word “advisory”?

Felicity Buchan Portrait Felicity Buchan
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We are very clear that we want 300,000 more homes to be built in England every year. What we have said is that we have an advisory starting point for each local authority. To answer the question that the hon. Lady posed earlier, the framework sets out clearly that, although changes to green belt boundaries may be made where exceptional circumstances are evidenced and justified, there is no firm requirement to do so. If there are exceptional circumstances, there can be development on the green belt.

Daisy Cooper Portrait Daisy Cooper
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Will the Minister give way?

Felicity Buchan Portrait Felicity Buchan
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I really want to make some progress.

We are absolutely committed to modernising our planning system. We introduced the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act to enable radical improvements in the way planning works. There are numerous measures in the Act, and future support in policy and regulation, that will modernise the system, making it more efficient, effective and accessible. Local leaders will have greater powers and the necessary tools to regenerate town centres and bring land and property into productive use. That will support growth, the delivery of quality homes and environmental improvements.

Underpinning that, the Government believe decisions about development should be driven by sensible local decision making, supported by digital tools to make engagement easier and bring the current system into the 21st century. More local plans must be in place—I agree with the hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich on that point—to deliver the homes and infrastructure that people need, in the places where they want to live and work. In addition, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities has set out his ambition for planning performance. It is now up to those who make the planning system work—local authorities, the Planning Inspectorate and statutory consultees—to expedite delivery. We are committed to building more homes, more quickly, more beautifully and more sustainably, and we must build homes in the places where people want to live and work.

The Opposition parties talk a very good game, but the proof is all in the delivery. I am a London MP, and it really saddens me that under the Labour Mayor of London, in 2022, London had the worst delivery of new houses of any area in the country. We can compare that with the west midlands under the Conservative Andy Street: he actually exceeded his targets.

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Daisy Cooper Portrait Daisy Cooper
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Will the Minister give way on that point?

Felicity Buchan Portrait Felicity Buchan
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I will take this as a final intervention, because I do need to get quite a few things on the record.

Daisy Cooper Portrait Daisy Cooper
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I am incredibly grateful to the Minister for giving way again. Recent interventions have shown that there is a huge amount of confusion and contradiction about what the changes to the NPPF actually mean. A cynic could say that the Government are saying one thing and doing another, but I think that it is really important for communities around the country that we have clarity. Will the Minister please commit to the Government actually producing further guidance on what they mean by “exceptional circumstances” in relation to the standard method, and will she please commit— I ask again—to providing further guidance on the definition of the word “advisory”?

Felicity Buchan Portrait Felicity Buchan
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I think I have been very clear in what I have said about the green belt. The green belt should be protected except for in exceptional circumstances, as has been set out.

Let me make some progress. The Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023 will speed up the planning process, delivering a faster and more efficient system, and cut out unnecessary and costly delays. It will ensure that local plans are shorter, more visual and map-based, and built on open and standardised data. They will be concise and focused on locally important matters, with repetition of policies across plans eliminated. New mandatory gateway assessments will reduce the time spent examining plans. To ensure that plans are prepared more quickly and kept up to date on matters including housing supply, there will be a 13-month preparation timeframe and a requirement for councils to commence plan updates every five years.

To respond to the hon. Member for St Albans, I must put it on the record that St Albans has one of the oldest plans in the country. It has been designated. To be honest, I do not know how the Liberal Democrats can stand up and say they have a housing target of 380,000 a year when they object to every single development on the ground. I just do not get it.

Let me move on. We have had quite a lot of talk about nutrient neutrality. I must say that I was hugely disappointed that the Opposition in the House of Lords blocked the Government amendments in the 2023 Act that would have made a targeted and specific change to the law, so that there was absolute clarity that housing development could proceed in areas currently affected by nutrient neutrality. That was done at a cost of 100,000 new homes. It is unacceptable to talk the talk and not to deliver, and the Opposition did not deliver in the House of Lords.

Long-term Plan for Housing

Daisy Cooper Excerpts
Tuesday 19th December 2023

(3 months, 1 week ago)

Commons Chamber
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Lee Rowley Portrait Lee Rowley
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My hon. Friend is absolutely right: a balance must be struck. We will review the situation in London. We do not think that it is acceptable; we do not think that the Mayor has done his job in this regard and we will be reviewing that. We also recognise—I hope my comments earlier indicated this—that there are places in urban areas where character is very important, and we need to make sure that there is an appropriate balance in that regard.

Daisy Cooper Portrait Daisy Cooper (St Albans) (LD)
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Liberal Democrat-led St Albans City and District Council is rightly pressing ahead with the development of its local plan, after the previous Conservative administration had its plan thrown out by the inspector. Two years ago, I wrote to the Government requesting additional funding so that we could accelerate our plan-making process, but the Government said no. I then requested that they allow us to charge developers the full cost of processing applications, but, even with all the tinkering, we are still not able to do that, and taxpayers in St Albans are still subsidising developers to the tune of £3 million a year to process their applications. Today the Government have asked our local council to publish a timetable in the next 12 weeks, but if Ministers and their officials used Google, they would find it on the website.

Apparently, Ministers have announced that the new protections apply to areas with local plans, but not to areas with draft local plans. That means that in St Albans, villages such as Colney Heath, which are besieged by inappropriate development, will not benefit from the protections. Will the Minister confirm whether our local district council and planning inspectors can firmly say no to inappropriate, speculative development, or is this just another empty promise from this Government?

Lee Rowley Portrait Lee Rowley
- Hansard - - - Excerpts

I believe that the Liberal Democrats have been in charge of St Albans City and District Council since 2019. That is four and a half years of opportunity to put a local plan in place. It is on the Liberal Democrats for failing to do so. Perhaps the Liberal Democrats could explain whether, as part of that local plan, they will take their share of the 380,000 homes that their conference said they needed to build in the future.

Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Daisy Cooper Excerpts
Rachel Maclean Portrait Rachel Maclean
- Hansard - - - Excerpts

I thank my right hon. Friend and esteemed predecessor in my role. I will come on to speak a bit more about the “banana” policies of the Liberal Democrats later in my remarks. For the avoidance of doubt, that stands for—

Rachel Maclean Portrait Rachel Maclean
- Hansard - - - Excerpts

No. The hon. Lady will have her chance to speak later. It stands for “build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone”. That is their policy. The whole House and the whole country know it. We on the Conservative Benches are building the homes that the country needs. My right hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton (Dominic Raab) is absolutely right to say that where local authorities have a local plan more houses are built, and that where local authorities do not produce a local plan they are failing their residents and letting down future generations who will live in those areas. I will not take any more interventions now; I need to make some more progress.

The Government agree that it is vital for local planning authorities to have the resources they need to deliver an effective planning service. On 20 July, we laid draft affirmative regulations that, if approved by Parliament, will increase planning fees by 35% for major applications and 25% for all other applications. This is a national fee increase that will benefit all local planning authorities in England. We are also undertaking a programme, with funding, to build capacity and capability in local planning authorities. The Government do not believe that enabling authorities to vary fees and charges is the way to answer resourcing issues. It will lead to inconsistency of fees between local planning authorities and does not provide any incentive to tackle inefficiencies. It would also create significant financial costs to the taxpayer. We do not require the fee income to be formally ringfenced, as there is already a requirement through primary legislation for planning fees to be used for the function of determining applications. We have been very clear that local planning authorities should use the income from planning fees to fund their services. That will allow them to build their capability and capacity, and improve their performance. Therefore, the Government are not able to support Lords amendment 82.

On the environment, the Government agree that the planning system must support our efforts to meet our legal net zero commitments by 2050 and to tackle the risks of climate change. We have committed to updating the national planning policy framework to ensure it contributes to climate change mitigation and adaptation as fully as possible. What is crucial, however, is that we address climate change in a way that is effective without being unnecessarily disruptive or giving rise to excessive litigation for those seeking to apply the policies once they are made. That is why we cannot support Lords amendment 45.

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Rachel Maclean Portrait Rachel Maclean
- Hansard - - - Excerpts

I will not give way.

There is no credibility at all on the Labour Front Bench. You do not have to take my word for it; just look at housing delivery in London and in Wales, where Labour has been in government, with all the powers, funding and levers, for many years. It has an atrocious record on house building, housing delivery and affordable house building. It is hardly surprising, when house building fell to the lowest level since the 1920s the last time Labour was in government. That, along with everything else, is something that the Conservatives had to sort out when we took office.

We are on track to deliver our manifesto pledge to build 1 million homes during this Parliament, with housing delivery at near-record 30-year highs. We are not complacent, and we need to deliver more of the right homes in the right places. That is why the Prime Minister and the Housing Secretary set out our long-term plan for housing in July—a plan based on the principles of building beautiful, with homes built alongside GP surgeries, schools and transport links, where communities are listened to and where we enhance the natural environment and protect our green spaces. It is a plan where we will build beautiful neighbourhoods modelled on the streets of Maida Vale, the crescents of Bath or the rural and suburban vernacular of Poundbury, not on soulless dormitory towns.

Now I shall turn to the Liberal Democrats. Even by their own standards, we have seen the most extraordinary fiasco unfolding within their party. I have to hand it to them: their balancing act is pretty impressive. They are taking the high-rise tightrope walk art of holding two entirely different positions at the same time to newly dizzying heights. Historically, the Lib Dems have been the BANANA party—build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone—but amid incredible scenes, their youth wing has thrown out the yellow bendy fruit and forced on the party a top-down Whitehall-driven target of 380,000 houses a year.

Daisy Cooper Portrait Daisy Cooper
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Will the Minister give way?

Rachel Maclean Portrait Rachel Maclean
- Hansard - - - Excerpts

No, I will not give way. The hon. Lady can speak later.

This policy has been described by the Lib Dems’ own former leader—

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Liam Fox Portrait Dr Fox
- Hansard - - - Excerpts

My right hon. Friend makes an important point. It is incumbent on us all to work with Government and the banking sector to ensure that our constituents have access. She makes a good point: the lack of access was previously more pertinent to rural locations, but then it applied to smaller villages, then smaller towns, and now even larger towns face the situation that she describes.

I wish to make two points to the Minister, one of which I raised during an intervention when I asked, “When will we see the new NPPF?” She indicated that we will see it as soon as the Bill receives Royal Assent. I hope that means that we will have the new NPPF by the time we get to Prorogation, which is not far off. I am sure that we will all hold the Minister to account for the very welcome timeline that she placed on that today.

I would like the Minister to consider one issue above all else, and to respond to it during the debate. There will be a hiatus between the passage of the legislation and its implementation date, but planning permission requests for housing developments will still be made. Will the Minister make it clear that the Planning Inspectorate needs to take into account this legislation, rather than the previous NPPF, when considering such planning applications? It would be quite wrong and profoundly undemocratic if both Houses produced legislation along the lines that the Government have proposed but planning inspectors applied an older version of the NPPF, thereby allowing planning applications that are clearly against the expressed will of Parliament to be approved. We cannot have unelected inspectors making decisions against what this Parliament has clearly decided. I hope that the Minister will give an assurance in her wind-up that, for any planning applications in that hiatus, instructions will be given to the planning inspectorate that it is expected to follow what the Government have set out in the legislation.

Daisy Cooper Portrait Daisy Cooper
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First, I associate myself with the remarks of the Father of the House, the hon. Member for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley). I agreed with almost all his points, including on having the right measures in place to stop opportunistic developers, on supporting virtual meetings of local government, and especially on leaseholders.

May I reiterate my support for some of the comments made by the right hon. Member for North Somerset (Dr Fox), particularly his call for a timeline for the national planning policy framework update? The Minister will be aware that I have tabled a number of written questions asking her to clarify for the record the status of that consultation. She has very kindly confirmed that it is just a consultation. There is a lot of confusion among my constituents, who believe that the NPPF has already been updated when it has not. I therefore associate myself with the other Members across the House who want to see the NPFF updated—in the Minister’s words—“as soon as possible”.

I rise to oppose the Government’s motion to reject Lords amendment 82, on planning application fees. Ministers will know that I originally tabled this amendment to the Bill 11 months ago, and in March I also tabled a presentation Bill that would have had the same effect. I had a number of meetings with the Minister to explain the reasoning behind this amendment.

My amendment, ultimately, is very simple. At the moment, a Government-imposed cap on planning fees means that local authorities cannot charge big developers the true cost of processing their applications, and the result of that is scandalous. In 2020-21, council tax payers across England effectively subsidised big developers to the tune of almost £2 billion. In St Albans district alone, the figure was a shocking £3.2 million. That’s right: during the biggest cost of living crisis in recent history, taxpayers in St Albans district are subsiding big developers to the tune of £3 million a year.

The Government themselves have recognised this problem. They have run a consultation and agreed to raise the cap on planning fees, but they still refuse to scrap it altogether. According to a “Dear colleague” letter that was circulated yesterday, the reasons are twofold. The first is that the costs might become inconsistent between local authorities. All I would say to that is that planning fees are less than 5% of all professional fees, and that would not cause a huge problem. The second argument is that it would not provide any incentives to tackle inefficiencies in planning departments. I think it is fair to say that local authorities are not awash with cash at the moment, so that is a pretty spurious argument.

The fact is that planning services up and down the country are operating on a shoestring. Funding cuts mean that in many cases, planning departments can no longer even meet their statutory time limits to determine planning applications. Developers and householders find their proposals delayed, in some cases for many months, as councils lack the resources to process them. The Local Government Association says that the current Government caps are

“resulting in significant capacity and skills challenges”

and “undermining” councils’ ability to deliver the quality housing and infrastructure that communities desperately need. It also says that

“councils must have the ability to set planning fees at a level which cover the true costs of processing applications”

if they are to improve the system to the benefit of both communities and developers.

This amendment would allow local councils to put an end to developer subsidies and take steps to pass on the costs of planning applications to those who submit them. Let us look at one specific example. As it stands, a multibillion-pound developer with an incredibly complex development is not obliged to contribute any more than £116 to have each of its planning conditions discharged. In 2014, the Conservative Government decided that a freight terminal the size of 480 football pitches should be built in my constituency of St Albans.

Where the Government decide to build a big piece of infrastructure in a constituency, it is up to the developer to decide whether it wants to enter into a voluntary planning performance agreement and to agree to pay non-statutory fees—effectively volunteering to pay additional fees—for the delivery of a larger site. Some developers do enter into such agreements, but some do not, and there is currently no obligation for them to do so. Where they do not, there are considerable resource implications for local authorities that are trying to discharge planning conditions imposed by Whitehall. Many constituents can face years of misery and chaos due to the construction of a large site and end up paying the developers’ planning costs. It is absurd, and it is unfair.

This vast underfunding also leaves effective planning enforcement activity a distant memory for most people in England. I am sure colleagues across the House will recognise that portrait. What is more, as planning departments across the country struggle with fewer qualified planning officers, developers and applicants say they are willing to pay what it costs to ensure they get a better service. In the light of big developers being prepared to pay this money, it is inconceivable that the Government would tie local authorities’ hands behind their backs by rejecting the amendment.

Government’s refusal to allow local councils to pass on the true costs to developers is lumbering local people with poor planning services and delaying the delivery of sustainable housing, with unscrupulous developers not brought to account for breaching planning conditions in a timely way. All the while, local residents are subsidising big developers. There is no excuse for that to continue. I urge Members across the House to support Lords amendment 82 and oppose the Government’s attempts to vote it down.

Wendy Morton Portrait Wendy Morton
- Hansard - - - Excerpts

There are many amendments to consider this afternoon, but I assure you that I will keep my comments very brief and specific, Madam Deputy Speaker. I rise to speak about Lords amendment 44, which was clearly designed to address what some of us see as a deficit when it comes to scrutiny.

Short-term Holiday Lets: Planning

Daisy Cooper Excerpts
Tuesday 23rd May 2023

(10 months, 1 week ago)

Westminster Hall
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Kevin Foster Portrait Kevin Foster
- Hansard - - - Excerpts

My hon. Friend is absolutely right to highlight that. A range of factors go into the pressures that push some landlords from long-term residential lets to short-term holiday lets. Factors include the system of taxation and whatever wider regulation is in place for landlords. We might also consider what incentives we can provide for people to build to rent. If a company builds a property specifically to rent it as a home, they are likely to offer longer-term tenancies and the landlord is highly unlikely to want to move back into the property, which is one reason why a residential tenancy might come to an end. My hon. Friend is right to highlight that the issue is part of a wider debate about how we ensure there is an adequate supply of housing in our constituencies so that organisations such as the NHS can recruit staff. We have reflected on that issue before. If people cannot find somewhere to live in the local area, clearly they will not take up jobs in that area. That goes to the heart of the debate.

To expand my argument I should define what I mean by a short-term holiday let. The term “short-term letting” is most commonly used to refer to the offering of residential accommodation to paying guests. It can include single rooms within a shared premises or the letting of an entire premises such as a house or flat. Short-term lettings are distinct from private residential tenancies because they do not require the occupier to treat the property or part of it as their principal home. They are also distinct from other forms of guest accommodation such as hotels or hostels as the lettings are in premises that could or would otherwise be used as a permanent residence—in essence, a home.

There is evidence that the number of short-term lettings in England has increased significantly in recent years, particularly because of the development and growth of the sharing economy and peer-to-peer accommodation services such as Airbnb. Those online platforms essentially provide marketplaces that connect people who want to rent out their properties or spare rooms with people seeking short-term accommodation.

Daisy Cooper Portrait Daisy Cooper (St Albans) (LD)
- Hansard - -

I am grateful to the hon. Member for making those points and for giving way. He will be aware that platforms such as Airbnb have been calling for a register of short-term lets for a long time. Does he agree that a register is precisely what the industry wants because that would allow it effectively to nick properties from other platforms? However, what communities need is their local planning authorities to have the powers to decide on the number of short-term lets and whether to renew licences when there has been antisocial behaviour.

Kevin Foster Portrait Kevin Foster
- Hansard - - - Excerpts

First, I would gently point out that the debate is focusing on the planning system and giving local councils the ability to prevent overconcentration in particular areas, as well as having an eye to the wider housing situation when deciding whether a property should be converted.

On the allied issue of putting a registration system in place, my own tourism industry would like to see that, and having a register of properties being used for this purpose would make it easier to do certain compliance checks. If people were in breach of lease obligations, whereby they might not be allowed to sub-let a property by the freeholder, that would be highlighted.

A register needs to be seen as part of a range of measures, but it is worth noting that a wider regulatory system would be introduced once there was a register of such properties. Today, however, the focus is clearly on the planning system and how we could empower local authorities on behalf of their local communities to shape the housing market in this area to ensure that we do not see streets that should be providing residential homes becoming holiday parks.

Owing to the issues with registration, or the lack of registration, it is hard to get exact numbers for the properties involved. However, I note the report by Alma Economics commissioned by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport to analyse the results of its recent consultation on developing a tourist accommodation registration scheme in England. The report concludes that although there is no single source of data on short-term lets in England “one plausible estimate” is 257,000 properties in 2022.

Another piece of analysis, which was undertaken by the charity CPRE—the Campaign to Protect Rural England—looked at property data collected by AirDNA on Airbnb and similar platforms, and estimated that 148,000 properties in England were being used for short-term lettings in September 2021. That analysis points to what makes this a core issue for those of us lucky enough to represent beautiful parts of our United Kingdom such as Torbay, where tourism is one of the main drivers of our economy owing to its concentration in the area.

Further analysis from CPRE confirms that some areas have seen a dramatic increase in short-term lettings in recent years. For example, in Cornwall, short-term listings increased by 661% in the five years to September 2021. While Airbnb is one of several providers of listings of short-term lets, it is the best known company operating in this area and is generally held to be leading the market, with its name becoming synonymous with such activity.

Oral Answers to Questions

Daisy Cooper Excerpts
Monday 27th March 2023

(1 year ago)

Commons Chamber
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Rachel Maclean Portrait Rachel Maclean
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As I said to my hon. Friend the Member for North East Bedfordshire (Richard Fuller), we are considering the report of the National Infrastructure Commission, but this Government are committed to levelling up and to devolution across the country. We saw in the Budget, delivered by my right hon. Friend the Chancellor, that we have devolved significant powers to Mayors across the country, such as Andy Street in the west midlands. That is the right thing to do to drive prosperity across the country.

Daisy Cooper Portrait Daisy Cooper (St Albans) (LD)
- Hansard - -

3. What recent progress his Department has made on its consultation on the national planning policy framework.

Michael Gove Portrait The Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (Michael Gove)
- Hansard - - - Excerpts

Our consultation on proposals for the national planning policy framework closed on 2 March. We are now considering all the comments that we received and will publish an update in due course.

Daisy Cooper Portrait Daisy Cooper
- Hansard - -

Sites in Chiswell Green and Colney Heath in my constituency and the north of St Albans district are under threat from the Government’s top-down housing targets that do nothing to tackle our problems of overcrowding or the lack of affordable homes, but do decimate the green belt. In 2015, Ministers issued a statement saying that these targets could not constitute a very special circumstance for allowing green-belt destruction, but they failed to incorporate that statement into the national planning policy framework. Seven years on, can the Secretary of State please say when those changes will be made and whether they will be put in place in time to stop the planning inspectorate forcing through speculative applications if they go to appeal?

Michael Gove Portrait Michael Gove
- Hansard - - - Excerpts

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for raising that point. It is precisely because we want to stop speculative developments wherever possible that we are encouraging a plan-led system, and our changes to the NPPF should achieve precisely that. But under threat? Honestly, the Liberal Democrats have a right cheek on this. They say nationally that they want more than 300,000 homes everywhere, and then, on individual planning applications, they out-nimby every other political party. I know that the word “hypocrisy” is unparliamentary, Mr Speaker, but there is no other way to describe Liberal Democrat policy on planning and housing.

Oral Answers to Questions

Daisy Cooper Excerpts
Monday 20th February 2023

(1 year, 1 month ago)

Commons Chamber
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Daisy Cooper Portrait Daisy Cooper (St Albans) (LD)
- Hansard - -

Some of the Homes for Ukraine six-month placements are now starting to come to an end, and some Ukrainian nationals in my constituency cannot get into private rented accommodation because they have no credit history. The local council is ready to look at rematching families, but if that does not work out, some of those Ukrainian refugees will have no choice but to present as homeless. Will the Secretary of State look at this issue, and look at the suggestion of a guarantor system backed by the Government?

Michael Gove Portrait Michael Gove
- Hansard - - - Excerpts

That is actually a very fair and constructive point. Making sure that there are not just banking facilities, but the kinds of guarantees that the hon. Lady asks for, is something we have been looking at in the past. I will ask the Under-Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, my hon. Friend the Member for Kensington (Felicity Buchan), to talk to the hon. Lady and to St Albans council in order to make sure that the generosity of her constituents is not undermined by the activity of the financial sector.

Oral Answers to Questions

Daisy Cooper Excerpts
Monday 21st November 2022

(1 year, 4 months ago)

Commons Chamber
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Lucy Frazer Portrait Lucy Frazer
- Hansard - - - Excerpts

The national planning policy framework is clear that a local authority should not propose to alter a green-belt boundary unless there are exceptional circumstances and it can show at examination of the local plan that it has explored every other reasonable option. Any proposal to release land from green belt is subject to rigorous examination by the planning inspector, who is independent and who acts on behalf of the Secretary of State.

Daisy Cooper Portrait Daisy Cooper (St Albans) (LD)
- Hansard - -

Taxpayers in St Albans district are shelling out £3 million a year to subsidise big developers because the Government’s cap on planning fees prevents my local councils from charging the full amount for processing a big application, and last week I tabled the presentation Bill to scrap that cap. Given the enormous pressures on household budgets, will the Secretary of State meet me to discuss how we can urgently address this issue, perhaps through the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill?

Michael Gove Portrait Michael Gove
- Hansard - - - Excerpts

I sympathise with the position in which the hon. Lady’s constituents find themselves, We can certainly do more to ensure that developers pay their way when dealing with applications of this kind. One of my colleagues would happily meet her.

Building Safety Bill

Daisy Cooper Excerpts
Stuart Andrew Portrait Stuart Andrew
- Hansard - - - Excerpts

The issue is the proportionate measures that can be made in those buildings to ensure that they are safe. We want to make sure that we get this right, and we will be continuing to look at all of these. If the building safety regulator assesses that further work needs to be done, or that the Government need to look at what needs to be done, we will absolutely make sure that we do that, and I make that commitment to the House.

Daisy Cooper Portrait Daisy Cooper (St Albans) (LD)
- Parliament Live - Hansard - -

On that specific point, I am grateful that the Minister has said that he will look at this issue of buildings below 11 metres. As part of that, will he commit to focus especially on those buildings where there are many vulnerable residents—whether that is care homes, shelter buildings or perhaps even schools where there are children with special educational needs or disabilities who might find it harder to escape buildings? Will he commit to look specifically through that lens of risk to the vulnerable adults in those buildings?

Stuart Andrew Portrait Stuart Andrew
- Hansard - - - Excerpts

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for her engagement, too. She raised this important point with me yesterday. Yes, absolutely, we have officials looking at that, but also, as I have said, the Building Safety Regulator will be assessing buildings such as those. If this becomes an area that needs further consideration, we will look at what measures need to be introduced.

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Daisy Cooper Portrait Daisy Cooper
- Parliament Live - Hansard - -

I declare an interest as I am a vice-chair of the Local Government Association. I add my voice to those who have paid tribute to the extraordinary building safety campaigners who have shared their stories, put this issue on the national agenda and shamed the Government into several significant concessions. We are in a better place than we have been over the past couple of years, but the situation is still not good enough. There have been, from the beginning of the debate, a very few principles that the Government should have followed—that homes should be fixed as quickly as possible, that the innocent should not have to pay for the mistakes of the guilty, and that the Government should use their weight to go after those responsible. It is a sorry state of affairs that those principles have not been upheld two pieces of legislation later.

On Lords amendment 184, many of us are in agreement that innocent leaseholders should not have to pay a penny, end of. But the costs cap undermines that principle. Two years ago, when I tried to introduce that principle for the first time in the Fire Safety Bill I was told time and again by Ministers in Committee that it was not the right place, or that it would not work as intended. If we ever needed confirmation that that is code for “we don’t want to do it”, we get that from this Bill.

By arguing for the costs cap, the Government are opening themselves up to legal challenge. It cannot be fair, or in keeping with natural justice, that in some cases the single determinant of whether someone has to pay £10,000 or £15,000—and someone else does not—is the arbitrary fact of whether the Government can find another party to carry the can.

The Government have said that by their calculations the vast majority of leaseholders would not have to pay, so I would like the Minister to respond to these questions in his remarks. He says the vast majority. How many? Where is the Government assessment? Will he publish it and put it in the Library? Where is the web page for every leaseholder to find out whether they will be in the camp that might have to pay?

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Stuart Andrew Portrait Stuart Andrew
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It is always wise for a Minister answering the Father of the House to take his sage advice, and of course I will speak to my officials.

The hon. Member for St Albans (Daisy Cooper) asked about valuations. I am aware there has been a discussion about how the Bill proposes to assess the value and banding of individual flats. The process set out in the Bill—further detail will be set out in regulations—takes the last price at which a flat changed hands, which will be recorded at the Land Registry, and uprates it in line with the national house price data produced by the Office for National Statistics. We recognise that this may produce a value that differs from the flat’s current market value, but we are using this approach for two specific reasons. First, it uses publicly available data and so avoids any potential for gaming the system. Secondly, it avoids the need to value a large number of flats individually, which would likely be both expensive and time-consuming and could delay the needed changes and improvements to those properties.

Daisy Cooper Portrait Daisy Cooper
- Hansard - -

Notwithstanding the Minister’s explanation that the valuation might not meet today’s market value, which he also gave to me yesterday, does he accept that, precisely because the starting point is the most recent sale price, the owner of a flat might have to pay up to the cap to get remediation done, whereas the owner of the identical flat next door in the same block might not because the two flats sold at different times for different sums of money? That is simply not fair.

Stuart Andrew Portrait Stuart Andrew
- Hansard - - - Excerpts

I recognise the hon. Lady’s point, and I have committed to coming back to her after we have done further work in this area.

I am conscious that there will be a large number of Divisions in a moment, so I reiterate my thanks to hon. Members on both sides of the House. This is an incredibly important issue, and I am aware that my Department has a great responsibility to get it right. I hope that the direction set by the Secretary of State shows that we are determined to get it right for people who have been living in these worrying circumstances for too long.

Amendment (a) made to Lords amendment 93.

Amendment (b) made to Lords amendment 93.

Lords amendment 93, as amended, agreed to.

Before Clause 117

Meaning of “relevant building”

Amendment (a) proposed to Lords amendment 94.—(Stuart Andrew.)

Question put, That the amendment be made.

Building Safety Bill

Daisy Cooper Excerpts
Christopher Pincher Portrait Christopher Pincher
- Parliament Live - Hansard - - - Excerpts

We will work with parties across this House—across both Houses—and with interested parties to ensure that these issues are properly understood and debated.

Daisy Cooper Portrait Daisy Cooper (St Albans) (LD)
- Parliament Live - Hansard - -

Will the Minister give way?

Christopher Pincher Portrait Christopher Pincher
- Parliament Live - Hansard - - - Excerpts

No, I will not.

We want to ensure that these matters are properly debated and properly agreed. We also want to ensure, through a suite of mechanisms such as the extension of the Defective Premises Act and working with the sector to ensure that it pays for the defects it has caused, that this issue for leaseholders, which has gone on for far too long, is finally put to bed. This group of Government new clauses and amendments make key improvements to the Bill and extend its benefits to include the whole of Great Britain. I hope therefore that Members across the House will feel able to support the new clauses and the new schedule and allow them to stand part of the Bill.

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Robert Neill Portrait Sir Robert Neill
- Parliament Live - Hansard - - - Excerpts

I restate my welcome for the Minister’s tone and approach to the Bill, as well as that of the Secretary of State, and I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Stevenage (Stephen McPartland). The Minister’s approach does enable some of us to support the Government in the Lobby tonight when we might have been tempted to do otherwise, given their clear undertaking to look at the substance—at any rate—of the significant number of amendments in my hon. Friend’s name, which I and many other Conservative Members have signed. We look forward to taking that forward.

I stress again in particular that leaseholder protection is critical. The right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) made an important point on that, and as someone who has spent all his working life involved in litigation of one kind or another, I can tell my right hon. Friend the Minister that the legal route is always a risky one and always an expensive one.

The real problem that we need to deal with is the position of residents such as mine in Northpoint in Bromley. Their flats are unmortgageable, they have exhausted their funds on a waking watch and other remedial measures, and they cannot realistically rent out their flats—perhaps some can—so it is not realistic to suggest that collectively or individually they could fund legal action against their landlord, which is an offshore property trust. I have nothing against giving leaseholders the ability to litigate—where that can be done, that is fine—but that will not be the answer for many people, so we need a fail-safe system to protect them. The best route is a form of liability clearly falling on the developer. That is supported by the Law Society, which recognises the value of litigation in its right place but also its limitations, and I hope that the Government will work with the Law Society, which has real expertise in such matters, to strengthen the provisions.

I turn to finding a means of capturing the consequential defects, which I have previously raised with the Minister. We have done a lot on that already—I welcome what was done with the waking watch relief fund and so on—but there are still a number of areas not yet explicitly covered by the Bill’s provisions where the fault, and therefore the cost on the leaseholder, flows clearly and demonstrably from the regulatory failure or the failure by the developer to build in accordance with the regulations then in place. My right hon. Friend and I have talked about the protection required for that—I am glad that the loan scheme has gone, because that was not fair—which could be some form of insurance arrangement, or the Government by some means funding the cash flow to enable works to be done and recouping that through a levy system from those in the industry who are at fault in some way. I think that would be perfectly workable. He has moved a good way towards that, and I ask him to continue talking to those involved about taking that one stage further to deal with that important issue.

Finally, I specifically commend to the Minister new clause 10, which stands in my name and that of a number of hon. Friends, which is about the 25-year post-sale insurance cover. That is really important. Again, the Law Society supports the measure, and I think that there is a lot of recognition of the good sense of that from the insurance sector, too. If he could take that on board, that would remove a great deal of risk of future litigation, should—heaven forbid—things go wrong in the future.

We have had a constructive set of proposals from the Government, but there is still more to do. I thank the Minister, but I hope that, in the spirit in which he started, he will take away the means to work constructively across the House to deal with people who are in an appalling situation through absolutely no fault of their own. That is what we need to stress time and again.

Daisy Cooper Portrait Daisy Cooper
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When we started on the Fire Safety Bill, I tabled the first amendment to the Bill to try to protect leaseholders from these unimaginable, eye-watering costs. The Government said repeatedly that that Bill was not the place for it. Eighteen months on, we have had a huge cross-party effort, and while we are considering this second piece of legislation there is still no guarantee to protect leaseholders from those costs in law. The Government’s tone has changed, and I welcome that, but their position has not. I welcome talk about working cross-party and collaboratively, but I urge the Minister and the Government to make clear assurances on the record today, because I do not believe that the good will displayed in the House will last much longer if we do not get better answers.

The Secretary of State announced last week that the loan scheme will be scrapped and that cladding costs will be covered for buildings over 11 metres. Where is that statutory protection? It should be on the amendment paper today, and we should be discussing it in this House, not kicking it into the long grass.

On non-cladding problems and fire safety defects, the Minister must be aware that since the Secretary of State made his announcement last week there has been a huge rush of bills and enforcement notices because freeholders think they can get away with suddenly asking leaseholders to pay for these first safety defects. Will the Minister make a strong statement at the Dispatch Box today that he intends to issue a moratorium on freeholders issuing such enforcement notices, as that is what is needed?

I welcome that action under the Defective Premises Act will be extended to 30 years, but the Minister knows as well as I do that, as we showed in Committee, the current legislation is condemning leaseholders to years and years of litigation, litigation, litigation. In some cases, they may have to take their freeholders to court twice before they can take those responsible to court. That is not a satisfactory situation.

The Government keep saying that they want to work with freeholders and developers to find a voluntary solution, but cladding victims and fire safety victims have given the Government the answer time and again. They are asking the Government to stump up the cash to make homes safe and to use their power to go after those responsible.

I listened very carefully to the Minister’s carefully crafted answers on when we might see some of these legal protections. I note that the Bill’s Second Reading in the House of Lords is scheduled for the start of February, yet the Secretary of State has indicated that he wishes to continue his discussions with those responsible until March. When questioned by other hon. Members on whether the House of Lords will see these amendments, the Minister said it “may include” in the other place, not that it “would include”. Will he make a clear commitment from the Dispatch Box today that the statutory protections announced last week will, in fact, be amendments to this Bill, that those amendments will be introduced in the other place, and that sufficient time will be provided in this House for us to discuss them? If the Government make any attempt to railroad this Bill through without those protections in place, he will have a very significant cross-party fight on his hands.

Mike Penning Portrait Sir Mike Penning
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I do not think there is a conflict, but I refer to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. As an ex-fireman, although my concerns and thoughts are with the victims of the Grenfell fire and their families and loved ones, I say that we must put on the record our thanks to the emergency services, and particularly the firefighters, who have to live with what they saw—most of them will never have seen such an incident in their life. They went in one direction while, quite understandably, the public went in the other.

I do not disagree with anything I have heard in the House today. My constituency neighbour, the hon. Member for St Albans (Daisy Cooper), and I are as one. If this is not sorted in the other House, as promised, we in this House will sort it. That is not a threat but a promise. The Minister, the Secretary of State and the Prime Minister, as we heard, have been brilliant in changing direction. They realised the risk that no thought at all had been given to leaseholders.

I declare an interest because my daughter has a leasehold property. When she bought it, why would she have dreamed that this situation would occur and she would face such penalties?

When I intervened on the Minister, I said I would mention a way out. Those hon. Members who have been here long enough will remember that I took the Mesothelioma Act 2014 through this House. The Act compensated people whose lives, through no fault of their own, had been devastated by asbestos. We could not fine the insurers, the companies, the directors or the shareholders, so they had suffered and they had not got compensation. This Bill is an opportunity to resolve the problem for leaseholders where we cannot impose fines.

There is no reason why leaseholders should drag themselves through the courts. We are trying to sort the matter out in this House. We should put a levy on the insurers. Without any doubt, the insurers got the premium from these companies, because otherwise they would not have been allowed to build the properties, so liability insurance was in place. The fact that we cannot find the developers—some have gone offshore in parts of my constituency—is irrelevant now. If we can find them, fine, but if not, we will levy the insurers.

We do not need to reinvent the wheel. We have already done it with the mesothelioma Bill. Originally, we gave the victims 80% of the compensation that they would have got through the courts. Eventually, we gave them 100%. This House was unanimous in its support of the Bill as it went through its stages. It was probably one of the easiest Bills that I have taken through the House—apart from having to pronounce mesothelioma, which, to this day, still troubles me, as Members may have notice.

This is an option that I have mentioned to the Minister before. I have said that his civil servants can come and talk to me, or to anybody at the Department for Work and Pensions who took that legislation through. I am more than happy for that to happen. Sadly, though, no one has talked to me about this—I am gently looking towards the civil servants in the Box, which I am not meant to do. This is a great opportunity to right a wrong that we can see coming down the line here.

--- Later in debate ---
Peter Aldous Portrait Peter Aldous (Waveney) (Con)
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New clause 2 and amendment 1, which stand in my name and are kindly supported by the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Emma Hardy), add “the protection of property” to the list of purposes for which building regulations may be made under the Building Act 1984, and require the Building Safety Regulator to carry out its work

“with a view to furthering the protection of property”.

In many respects, in terms of drafting, these are tweaks to the Bill, but they could have far-reaching and positive consequences. Modern methods of construction and the increasing compartmental sizes of industrial and commercial buildings are leading to more challenging and larger fires, which put lives at risk and also cause enormous social, economic and environmental consequential damage. That is exactly what happened at Wessex Foods in Lowestoft 11 years ago, in July 2011. If adequate property protection measures—in the form of sprinklers, in that instance—had been in place, a huge amount of disruption would have been avoided, and the firefighters would have been back at their station in four minutes.

If the consideration of “property protection” were added to the Building Act and the building regulations, we would secure a significant double dividend: greater safety for people, including firefighters, and more sustainable buildings. It is far better to be preventing fires than to be putting them out. I should therefore be grateful if the Minister gave serious consideration to accepting new clause 2 and amendment 1, so that the Building Act can be amended to provide for the protection of property. These proposals have the support of professionals across the fire sector: the National Fire Chiefs Council, the Fire Sector Federation, the Fire Brigades Union, the Fire Protection Association and the Institution of Fire Engineers.

The new clause and amendment would provide an appropriate framework for the future fire safety of building design, and we would therefore know that homes, schools, care homes, student accommodation and all industrial and commercial buildings had adequate property protection and fire prevention measures built in at the start, so that we were not putting people—including firefighters—and property at risk. As I have said, I should be grateful if the Minister considered these proposals.

Daisy Cooper Portrait Daisy Cooper
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I will speak very briefly about amendment 75 and new clauses 24 and 25, all of which stand in my name and are supported by the Local Government Association.

Amendment 75 is pretty straightforward. At present, the Bill lacks clarity in relation to social housing providers. This amendment to clause 57 would make registered social landlords exempt from the additional financial burden of the building safety levy. I think it unacceptable that council and housing association tenants have to subsidise the failures of private developers under this scheme.

The purpose of the two new clauses, taken together, is to introduce a more stringent building safety framework that would apply to multiple dwellings under 18 metres in height as well as those above. We have already heard from hon. Members about how crude the 18-metre cut-off is and how it has no basis. Indeed, many of us remember seeing a leaked video of an adviser to the Government saying that that figure had been plucked out of the air.

These two new clauses, taken together, would prevent having a two-tier building safety regime. I ask the Minister to respond to the amendment and the new clauses to see whether the Government might be willing to adopt them all during the passage of the Bill.

Paul Maynard Portrait Paul Maynard (Blackpool North and Cleveleys) (Con)
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I rise to speak to new clause 17, which stands in my name.

The Minister, probably more than anybody else in this Parliament, already knows that I have a tendency to fall over. Because I am teetotal, this is not down to drink either. Indeed, I suspect that every single Member here will know someone—a friend, a loved one or a relative—who has had a fall on the stairs. They are a silent killer and claim the lives of over 700 people every year, as well as thousands more who suffer injuries and lose their independence.

Finding a solution to the issue of flammable cladding has proven fiendishly complex, as we know from our time here, but for staircase safety it should be, and indeed is, simple. A British standard already exists that reduces falls by a staggering 60%: British Standard 5395-1. It means that stairs must have a minimum size of “going”—the horizontal surface on which one treads—and a maximum rise in height limiting steepness and providing enough surface area on which to step. Provision of easy-reach handrails is also required for staircases to be compliant. While such staircases hardly look different at all to the naked eye, their impact on preventing falls is remarkable.

British Standard 5395-1 has been in place since 2010 but never enshrined in law as a requirement, so today I am proposing this new clause, alongside the hon. Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts), for whose support I am most grateful. This is the result of ardent campaigning by the UK’s leading accident prevention charity, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, but also, crucially, major players in the housing industry such as the Berkeley Group. Industry wants this regulation. It wants a level playing field where there is one simple rule for all to adhere to. Because I am only calling for the standard to be applied to new-builds, there will be negligible cost and no need for retrofitting.

I can almost hear what the Minister is about to tell me—that it is uncommon to use primary legislation to enshrine such a standard into law. The Government will argue that our focus should be outcome-based rather than legislating on method, but I might point to regulation 7 of the building regulations, on combustible materials, which is in itself descriptive and sets out how the industry must achieve that particular regulation. If the outcome that we are all aiming for is safety of stairs, then the status quo is simply not working, and hundreds of people are dying every year from something that could so easily be prevented: I refer back to the 60% figure. If the Government have some other way to achieve such a reduction in preventable death in the home, then I am all ears, as many people have often pointed out to me. Independent safety campaigners such as RoSPA are confident from the statistics that this simple measure will save more lives than perhaps anything else in the entire Bill.

Genuine low-hanging fruit does not come along very often in politics, and I would like the Minister to grasp it when he sees it. He may not wish to satisfy me by granting me the agreement of the Government to the new clause. He has spent many years working on this with me trying to keep me satisfied and happy, but failed. Now he has his chance to redeem himself after 12 months of horror. Will he at least agree to meet me to discuss how we can take this matter forward? He can make my day by saying, yes, the Government agree. He can give me a minute of happiness and take forward Conservative party harmony, so rare these days, just by agreeing to meet me. I look forward to hearing what he might just have to say.

Building Safety

Daisy Cooper Excerpts
Monday 10th January 2022

(2 years, 2 months ago)

Commons Chamber
Read Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Michael Gove Portrait Michael Gove
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There are few people in the House who know as much about fire safety as my right hon. Friend. We will certainly work with him to explore the specific insurance provisions that he mentioned. I cannot, unfortunately—I would not want to mislead him—say that we will be in a position to compensate those who have already contributed. We are seeking to ensure that individuals do not face costs in the future, but again, I will work with colleagues across the House to try to get to the most equitable position possible.

Daisy Cooper Portrait Daisy Cooper (St Albans) (LD)
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I look forward to seeing the amendments from the Government about how leaseholders will be protected, because my constituents in St Albans, like many others, have had too many false dawns. I want to ask about the Secretary of State’s review of proportionality. In the past, building safety assessors have been chosen because of their willingness to recommend the less expensive safety work, and that has created a race to the bottom. Will he confirm that the BSI guidance will be mandatory for building safety assessors, and will he put protections in place so that assessors do not get away with offering the lightest touch mitigations that they can?

Michael Gove Portrait Michael Gove
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First, I thank the hon. Lady—it is always difficult for me to praise a Liberal Democrat, but she has been campaigning consistently on this issue for some time and has done a great job of bringing to light some of the defects that need to be addressed. It is the case that the BSI work, we believe, will ensure a properly proportionate approach. There are incentives either way—incentives, sometimes, for some to seek to do work on the cheap and for others to exaggerate the scale of the work that may be required to generate business. I hope, however, that a truly proportionate and safe approach will now be followed as a result of the BSI’s work.