Rural Councils: Funding

Laurence Robertson Excerpts

Wednesday 29th November 2023 Westminster Hall

[Mr Laurence Robertson (Tewkesbury) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Latham. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Chris Loder) for introducing this important debate and congratulate him on the way he expertly presented his case. I represent three local authorities plus a county council. I will focus mainly on Tewkesbury Borough Council and the county council.

Tewkesbury has been a financially responsible borough over many years and has not borrowed, but because it kept its spending low and under control, and kept its council tax low, it now suffers; a 1% increase to Tewkesbury Borough Council’s income is far less than it would be to an authority that already spends a lot more, so it gets penalised for having been a responsible council for so many years.

I am calling not for greater Government spending—the Government are spending an awful lot of money, and arguably too much—but, along with other right hon. and hon. Members, for a fairer allocation of that money. If any Government say that the allocation given to rural areas is correct, why are other areas getting more? Looking at it the other way, if other areas have much higher levels of spending and the Government say that is correct, how can what rural areas receive also be correct?

[Cherilyn Mackrory (Truro and Falmouth) (Con)]

SEND children in Cornwall receive just over half per child what those in Camden receive. How can that possibly be right?

[Mr Robertson]

It is not right. School funding has been unfair for many years, and that is not just about rural areas. It is down to a complete mismatch in what I think was called the area cost adjustment, which we suffered under for many years, and some areas just do not get the adequate funding or funding comparable with other areas. I am glad to say that my hon. Friend took one of my points, so I will skip on.

In what ways does the underfunding of rural areas manifest itself beyond those we have already discussed? In planning, lower funding means delayed decisions and that some councils and planning authorities are reluctant to turn down inappropriate applications because they simply cannot afford such applications to be taken to appeal. Tewkesbury is the fastest-growing area in the United Kingdom apart from London, so we are not nimbys in any way, but we do need to be able to fund the planning system properly.

Another big problem is coming: I am told that, in Gloucestershire as a whole, up to 200 asylum seekers are to be given a right-to-remain status. At the moment, they are living in hotels, which is of course completely inappropriate for them. They will need to be found housing, but that will cost an awful lot of money. If that is their status, it is correct that they should be found proper accommodation. The decision to grant them that status, which is probably quite right, is for the Government, but money must follow that decision, and we do not see any prospect of that. That is a big worry in our area.

Rural transport has been covered in great detail, so I will not go over all that, but I echo what was said by the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron) in that the £2 bus fare is absolutely useless if there is no bus. So many areas have seen their bus routes removed. In my village, the bus has been taken away, so if I want to travel to Gloucester or to Cheltenham, as I frequently do, I have to get a car to take me to Tewkesbury town to do so. We are not the only village to have lost our bus; that has happened across the country.

I do not have time to go into the many other details that I was kindly sent by the county council. A real benefit for rural counties would be to put an end to the process of ad hoc competitive bidding for short-term funding and instead to provide longer-term revenue settlements so that they know what they can do and what services they can provide. That is the way forward as they see it. There is no reason why rural areas should be as underfunded as they are. As I said, I am calling not for more Government spending overall but for a fairer allocation.

Oral Answers to Questions

Laurence Robertson Excerpts

Monday 27th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Vicky Ford (Chelmsford) (Con)]

9. What steps he is taking to build new homes on regenerated brownfield land.

[Mr Laurence Robertson (Tewkesbury) (Con)]

10. What steps he is taking to help ensure that planning authorities prioritise housebuilding on brownfield sites; and if he will make a statement.

[The Minister of State, Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (Rachel Maclean)]

This Government are committed to making the most of brownfield land. The national planning policy framework sets out that planning policies and decisions should give “substantial weight” to using suitable brownfield land, and through our brownfield funds we are investing significantly in supporting redevelopment and release of brownfield sites for housing. We have also committed to launching a review to identify further measures that would prioritise the use of brownfield land.

--- Later in debate ---

[Rachel Maclean]

My right hon. Friend is doing a superb job of pushing forward affordable homes for her constituents in Chelmsford, and we are wholly committed to that shared agenda. Since 2010, over 829,000 households have been helped to buy a home by Conservative Governments. That is a massive achievement. However, it is vital to prioritise brownfield sites such as those in Chelmsford, and we recently consulted on proposed policies to further encourage the use of those small sites. I am happy to meet her to discuss that further.

[Mr Robertson]

Does the Minister agree that prioritising brownfield sites is important particularly to take the pressure off small villages, which face many speculative planning applications and do not have the infrastructure to support them?

[Rachel Maclean]

I know my hon. Friend expresses the concerns of his constituents who live in those villages in the Tewkesbury area. That is why we have already introduced range of policy and funding initiatives to support the development of brownfield land. The Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill will go much further to empower local leaders to regenerate those towns, cities and villages by introducing a new infrastructure levy, which will capture a higher land value uplift to enable more infrastructure to be delivered alongside housing.

EU Funding: Northern Ireland

Laurence Robertson Excerpts

Wednesday 1st February 2023 Westminster Hall

[Mr Laurence Robertson (in the Chair)]

In a moment, I will call Claire Hanna to move the motion. As is the convention for 30-minute debates, there will not be an opportunity for the hon. Lady to wind up at the end.

[Claire Hanna (Belfast South) (SDLP)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered replacement of funding from EU programmes in Northern Ireland.

I am grateful to have the opportunity to discuss this issue and, I hope, get clarity for a number of third sector partners and other groups in Northern Ireland and, potentially, areas of opportunity for them. It feels like a very long time ago, but during the EU referendum campaign there were assurances that Northern Ireland would not lose out, doing well, as we did, out of the EU funds, which were based on need. We know that the phrase “take back control” resonated with many people, but it appears to mean taking back control from some of the funds that have traditionally underpinned progress in Northern Ireland and from local decision makers, and handing it directly to London, without any sense of a strategy that local groups can try to support.

In March last year, in the early stages of the community renewal fund, I had a Westminster Hall debate, in which various eyebrow-raising allocations from that scheme were addressed. I am afraid that several of the reservations that people had about process, strategy, co-ordination and transparency have been borne out. It is worth saying that these concerns are not held just by groups that are applying for funding or by my party. The Northern Ireland Executive, as was, adopted the position that the best delivery mechanism for the shared prosperity fund would be via existing structures. Invest Northern Ireland, our economy arm, was very clear that it believed that the funding would be best delivered in conjunction with the programme for government. And the think-tank Pivotal and other respected commentators and business voices made the same point. People are up for change. They understand that it is a reality, and they roll with the punches. But it has to feel transparent, and there has to be a sense of fairness and coherence and that there is more to these allocations than just the whim of Ministers in London.

As I said, Northern Ireland was a net beneficiary in the EU. That is not a secret and is not anything to be ashamed of. Those allocations were made on the basis of need and, in many cases, were a counterweight to the obvious challenges that Northern Ireland faced and to decades of capital underinvestment. That is not just a historical issue: in 2021, the average capital spend per head in Northern Ireland was £1,325, compared with a UK average of £1,407. Of course, all that has contributed to a failure to attract quality investment and foreign direct investment, and decent jobs. That is reflected in our rates of economically inactive people, which are substantially higher than those in other regions.

The founder of our party, John Hume, said many times that the best peace process is a job: the best way to enable people to have hope in their futures and see beyond the things that have divided us in our region is to have meaningful employment—a reason to stay, to get up in the morning and to work together. Those were the opportunities that we saw in European participation, and that is why we continue to work so hard to protect our access to political and economic structures. Funds beyond the block grant, the EU funding as was and the promised successor funds, have been billed and are needed as additional, and they should be an opportunity to realise some of those ambitions, to remove barriers to employment and, in particular at the moment, to allow people to take advantage of the opportunities that the current very tight labour market offers. Unfortunately, that is not what we are getting.

Time is obviously short, so I want to focus on the loss of the European social fund and the European regional development fund and on the replacement, the SPF, and to touch on the levelling-up fund. It is worth clarifying that, as well as those assurances back in 2016, during the referendum campaign, the Conservative party manifesto in 2019 committed to replacing the ESF in its entirety. Northern Ireland got an average of £65 million a year from the ESF and ERDF in the period from 2014 to 2020, with Northern Ireland Departments having the power to manage that in line with UK strategy. That allowed them to align projects that they funded with regional and local strategies, ensuring complementarity and targeted outcomes.

The scenario now is that the UK Government and Northern Ireland Departments are essentially two players on the same pitch, in the same space, delivering the same sorts of projects. That has a built-in inefficiency and means that the results are less than the sum of the parts. That overlapping inevitably applies to monitoring, too. How are we supposed to measure the impact of different interventions in areas like skills if the scheme is only one part of an equation in which all the other Departments are trying to do similar things? It seems that it will be impossible to disaggregate that. The governance is sub-par and the quantum is less, too.

By comparison with the ESF and the ERDF averages, the allocation for the shared prosperity fund in Northern Ireland is £127 million over three years, so we are losing on average £23 million per year from that scheme. That has created this massive gap for funded groups, many of whom just cannot hold on. It is not like in the civil service; people have to be put on protected notice or face closure. Again, there is nothing co-ordinated about any of this. It is not even the survival of the fittest—that the strongest and best organisations will continue—because it is largely the luck of the draw on where organisations are in their funding cycle. Again, this is one more downside of the abandonment of devolution. Engaged and responsive local Ministers could monitor the situation and be flexible and creative with in-year allocation, match funding and bridge funding. They could, in short, protect us from the deficit created by Brexit and this devolution override.

I want to touch on how all this affects specific groups. The NOW Group is a highly regarded project that works across Belfast and further afield, supporting people who are economically inactive because of a disability get into employment. It has 17 years of ESF funding and runs high-profile facilities. If anyone has been in the café in Belfast City Hall, they will have seen NOW Group workers. They help hundreds of people with disabilities into all sorts of sectors, including leading corporates and the knowledge sector. It is a safe bet that any credible funder will keep backing a project like this, but the assurances are just not there. Reserves cannot last forever and, of course, smaller organisations will not have such reserves. In that project, 52 people are at risk of being put on notice and another 800 people with disabilities will be left with no service.

Mencap in south Belfast and far beyond has run ESF projects on social inclusion for decades and was well on track to exceed the target set by ESF of supporting 13,000 people by 2023. It is concerned by how limited the scope of SPF is compared to what they were able to do under ESF. The East Belfast Mission described well what is at stake:

“Our programmes have a long track record of being more successful than government initiatives”.

--- Later in debate ---

[Claire Hanna]

That again illustrates the confusion that people have about what was selected. Will the Minister confirm whether any criteria additional to those specified were applied? Were they applied consistently to all projects? Will the transparent list that she will publish include any changes in ranking that occurred as a result of new criteria?

Again—for future learning—it was announced that there will be a round three of levelling-up funding. An enormous amount of work goes into the applications, including, as people will know, many thousands of pounds on proposals and engaging the strategy board. Will the Department therefore develop a reserve list from round two applications? That could prevent some groups from having to run up the same professional fees and pouring in the same time, particularly when they are being left in the dark about the criteria. Further, can the Minister clarify what consultation was held with the Northern Ireland Departments and other funding bodies to address the overlap in applications under levelling up and other schemes? Finally, does the Minister think that the spread of applications in Northern Ireland is appropriate?

A lot of these issues are very technical, but they are vital to achieving the things that we all want to achieve for Northern Ireland and for progress. They are also vital to people having some faith in this progress—that they have not had their eye wiped, essentially, by funds being promised, removed and not adequately replaced. That is not the case at the moment. People see this as a net loss from what we enjoyed before Brexit, and that should concern the Department.

[Mr Laurence Robertson (in the Chair)]

We have until four minutes past 5, but it is not essential to take up all the time.

New Developments on Green-belt Land

Laurence Robertson Excerpts

Wednesday 12th October 2022 Westminster Hall

[Sir Gavin Williamson (South Staffordshire) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Coventry North West (Taiwo Owatemi) on securing the debate and leading it so well.

Some 91.4% of my South Staffordshire constituency sits within green-belt land, and the largest number of signatories to the petition—616 in all—are South Staffordshire residents. That indicates the real passion, concern and desire to protect the green belt in South Staffordshire.

There are a number of things that the Government can do to make a material difference to protect the environment, nature and conservation—all things that every one of us in this House values and wants to protect so very much. At the moment there is a real lack of clarity in the Government’s approach to the duty to co-operate. That puts enormous pressure on many local authorities, especially ones that neighbour large urban, metropolitan areas.

The Government have said that there will be changes to the duty to co-operate, but they have not come up with the clarification that authorities need to be in the best position to proceed with local plans and understand what the new rules will be. I hope that the new Minister will take the opportunity to set out clearly what the new rules on the duty to co-operate, or its abolition, will mean. If he is not able to do so, will he give a date for when that clarification will come about?

It would also be useful if the Minister could speak to local authorities that are in the process of developing their local plans. In South Staffordshire, we are in a terrible situation. We are having thousands of houses imposed on the green belt by Black Country authorities and by Birmingham as a result of the Government’s saying that they are going to abolish the duty to co-operate but not clarifying what they will replace it with. This is urgent. Will the Minister say whether authorities that are proceeding with local plans are able to pause those plans and make sure that they have protections so that they are not vulnerable to unscrupulous developers coming forward with plans? Authorities cannot properly proceed until the Government clarify what the replacement for the duty to co-operate will look like. I hope the Minister will be able to do that today.

The simple reality is that the duty to co-operate system is causing many local authorities to build the wrong types of houses in the wrong areas. It is a blight on our countryside and our green belt. The Minister needs to act on the Government policy to abolish the duty to co-operate and stop imposing thousands of housing units on the green belt when it would be more appropriate to use brownfield sites and inner cities in order to regenerate.

The hon. Member for Coventry North West made a very important point about how the housing numbers that local authorities are required to use are simply wrong. It is widely known in the industry, by planning authorities and in communities that they are wrong. The 2014 figures, which are currently the basis for plans, are leading to the incorrect numbers being used by local authorities, which puts an even greater burden on councils to provide numbers that are not required. That needs to be urgently addressed. The figures are eight years out of date.

[Mr Laurence Robertson (Tewkesbury) (Con)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that coupled with that is the uncertainty regarding the five-year land supply? Does that not also need urgent clarification?

[Sir Gavin Williamson]

My hon. Friend is spot on. I know that our hon. Friend the Housing Minister has great ambition and drive. He has many predecessors whom he can far outshine by showing great leadership. He can be known as the finest Housing Minister out of many by giving clarity on these issues. Making reforms to the housing market and to housing supply would not only benefit people who want to buy a home, but protect the green belt, our countryside and nature. I urge him to seize the day and do that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lee Rowley]

That is a very important point. I will come to it, but it is important to highlight that the amount of green belt in this country has increased in recent years. The overall amount has gone up substantially. That is due in large part to the introduction of a green belt in the north of England, but it is also the case—we should always stand back and consider this—that, in terms of pure hectarage, the amount of green belt has increased. The hon. Lady makes a very important point, and ultimately we have a decision to make on green belt.

The hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Matthew Pennycook) on the Opposition Front Bench made the important point that some parts of the green belt do not have the same aesthetic quality as others. Moreover—this has been in the NPPF for a substantial amount of time—there will be exceptions. In certain instances, buildings will need to be built for farms and for forestry, and consideration will have to be given to elements that most hon. Members and people out there will accept are reasonable. My point is that there has to be flexibility. The NPPF provides flexibility while making significant statements about the importance of the green belt, which is absolutely vital.

[Mr Robertson]

Will the Minister give way?

[Lee Rowley]

I will conclude my point, if I may. If the process for at least some scenarios needs to be flexible, as is the case here, we need to consider who is best placed to determine that flexibility. In my view, that decision has to be made locally because, in those very small instances, it is the localities and the local councils that will be able to make the best decision about what should or should not happen with this designation of land. That is within the wider context that, ultimately, the green belt should be released only in exceptional circumstances where there is a clear and compelling case to do so and when other things such as brownfield have been considered first.

[Mr Robertson]

I am grateful to the Minister for giving way. In my constituency, 10,000 houses are being built on green-belt land. That does not seem to me to be an exceptional circumstance. It seems like riding roughshod over the green-belt policy.

[Lee Rowley]

As I have indicated, I cannot talk about individual cases, but I understand his point and the strength of feeling that he shares with other colleagues about the issue of appropriateness.

The hon. Member for Coventry North West made a substantial number of important points. Again, I congratulate her on securing the debate. I am not sure I agree with some of her slightly more partisan elements, but I will disregard them in the spirit in which this debate has largely been pursued. The reality is that everything in planning is a challenge. There is a balance to be struck and a set of trade-offs. There are no easy answers. We all share the same desire. I have a substantial proportion of green belt in my constituency, which I want to enhance to protect our natural environment. I want it protected so that everybody can enjoy it in future, as the hon. Member for City of Chester (Christian Matheson) indicated in his remarks.

We also want to ensure that people can get on the housing ladder—a point that was highlighted by the hon. Member for Coventry North West. The proportion of home ownership is not as high as it used to be, although it is starting to rise again. We have to balance these things, and that requires a nuanced and mature debate, which we have largely had today, with a recognition that there has to be flexibility in the system, as well as the great protection that is necessary.

Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Laurence Robertson Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 8th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Dr Ben Spencer (Runnymede and Weybridge) (Con)]

rose—

[Mr Laurence Robertson (Tewkesbury) (Con)]

rose—

[Michael Gove]

Ah, yes—brilliant! I give way to my hon. Friend the Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Dr Spencer).

[Michael Gove]

Yes. The reason I was so pleased to be able to give way to my hon. Friend and constituency neighbour is that I think his legislation and the arguments he made were incredibly powerful. I am a bit wary about criminalisation, but I am keen to explore with him and others how we can have effective tools—real teeth. We have some proposals in the Bill, but they may not go far enough, which is why I hope we can discuss in Committee exactly what we need to do to ensure that enforcement is stronger.

I should say—I touched on the environment briefly earlier—that as well as making sure we have new development that is beautiful, that is accompanied by infrastructure and that is democratically sanctioned, we need to make sure we have new development that is appropriately environmentally sensitive. Let me repeat—

[Mr Robertson]

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

[Michael Gove]

Oh, yes. I do beg my hon. Friend’s pardon.

[Mr Robertson]

I am very grateful to my right hon. Friend for giving way. Just before he entirely leaves the issue of infrastructure, to which he is right to draw attention, one of the big problems is that the water companies do not provide adequate drainage systems when new builds are being proposed, so should they not have such systems in place before new developments actually start?

[Michael Gove]

My hon. Friend is getting me on to a subject that I have often touched on in the past, which is the role of water companies overall. When I was fortunate enough to be Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, I was able to talk to the water companies about the way in which they have privileged financial engineering over the real engineering required to ensure that new developments are fit for purpose, and in particular about how we deal effectively with a lack of investment in infrastructure, such as a lack of effective treatment of waste water. The way in which some of the water companies have behaved, frankly, is shocking, which is why my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs will be bringing forward more proposals to ensure that the water companies live up to their proper obligations, because it is a matter of both infrastructure and the environment.

I mentioned earlier that the environmental outcome reports, which the Bill makes provision for, will strengthen environmental protection, and of course the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is helping to ensure that biodiversity net gain is integrated fully into the planning system to make sure we have the enhanced environment that all of us would want to pass on to the next generation.

As we recognise the need to develop homes in the future that are beautiful, with the right infrastructure, democratically endorsed and with the environmental externalities dealt with appropriately, we also want to ensure that they are parts of neighbourhoods, not dormitories. That is why it is so critical that we deal with one or two of the flaws—I will put it no more highly than that—within the current planning system. Such flaws mean, for example, that we can have developers that, because they do not build out, subsequently exploit the requirement for a five-year housing land supply to have speculative development in areas that local communities object to. We will be taking steps in this legislation and in the NPPF to deal with that.

We will also be taking steps to ensure that the Planning Inspectorate, when it is reviewing a local plan and deciding whether it is sound, does not impose on local communities an obligation to meet figures on housing need that cannot be met given the environmental and other constraints in particular communities. There are two particular areas, I think, where the Planning Inspectorate —and it is simply following Government policy—has in effect been operating in a way that runs counter to what Ministers at this Dispatch Box have said over and over again. That has got to change, and it is through both legislation and changes to the NPPF that we will do so. We will end abuse of the five-year land supply rules, and make sure that, if local authorities have sound plans in place, there cannot be such speculative development. We will also make sure that, even as we democratise and digitise the planning system, we are in a position to make sure that the Planning Inspectorate ensures not that every plan fits a procrustean bed, but that every plan reflects what local communities believe in.

Oral Answers to Questions

Laurence Robertson Excerpts

Monday 24th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

The hon. Gentleman makes a very good point. It is the case that there are a number of people in the private rented sector who are not getting the deal that they deserve, both regarding the level of rent and the decency of their homes. I look forward to working with the hon. Gentleman on that.

[Mr Laurence Robertson (Tewkesbury) (Con)]

T2. Will the Minister consider changing building regulations to require all new buildings to be self-sufficient in energy, which would have the triple benefit of securing supply, helping us towards net zero and reducing fuel poverty?

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (Eddie Hughes)]

The building regulations set out the minimum energy performance standards. They do not prescribe the technology that is required—they just set the goal—which allows builders and homeowners the flexibility to innovate and select the most practical and cost-effective solutions appropriate to any development. Obviously, our intention is to go further. We have had the part L uplift, and building regs will move towards the future homes standard for 2025.

Oral Answers to Questions

Laurence Robertson Excerpts

Monday 29th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Christopher Pincher]

I salute the hon. Lady’s industriousness, the all-party parliamentary group that she leads, and the work that Habinteg and other groups undertake. She will know that as part of the affordable homes programme, between 2021 and 2026, 10% of the homes to be built—about 20,000 new homes—will require adaptation for living. I am very happy to meet her to discuss what more we can do and how quickly we can bring forward our response to the consultation.

[Mr Laurence Robertson (Tewkesbury) (Con)]

18. If he will take steps to help ensure that additional infrastructure is in place before medium to large-scale housing developments are started; and if he will make a statement.

[The Minister for Housing (Christopher Pincher)]

That is exactly what we are doing. As we consider new housing developments, it is important to ensure that infrastructure is in place for local communities. Our £4.3 billion housing infrastructure fund seeks to achieve that by investing to improve connectivity, healthcare services and vital infrastructure before housing is built.

[Mr Robertson]

I welcome the Minister’s words, but, having visited my area and observed the flood risk there, does he agree that the drainage capacity of an area should be assessed before any houses begin to be built, and that that assessment should be independent rather than being conducted by the water companies?

[Christopher Pincher]

As my hon. Friend will know, the national planning policy framework was amended in July this year to ensure that all sources of flood risk, including drainage, are fully considered before planning permission is granted by a local authority. Sustainable drainage infrastructure is hugely important. I should be happy to discuss the subject further with my hon. Friend, and I draw his attention to the speech that I made in last week’s Adjournment debate in response to my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (Greg Smith).

Green Homes Grant Voucher Scheme

Laurence Robertson Excerpts

Thursday 27th May 2021 Westminster Hall

[Mr Laurence Robertson (in the Chair)]

Sorry for the slight delay due to technical problems. I ask Members attending physically whether they would not mind cleaning their spaces before they use them and as they leave the room. I remind Members that Mr Speaker has stated that masks should be worn in Westminster Hall other than when speaking.

[Philip Dunne (Ludlow) (Con) [V]]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the future of the Green Homes Grant voucher scheme.

It is a pleasure to serve under you, Mr Robertson, albeit remotely. Apologies if I am improperly dressed. I thank the Chairman of Ways and Means for allowing the debate to take place, because it was postponed as a result of Prorogation happening a day earlier than previously planned. I am grateful for that flexibility. I am moving the motion because, as Chair of the Environmental Audit Committee, I have a particular interest in energy efficiency and the contribution that it needs to make to enable the country to meet our net zero obligations.

The green homes grant scheme was announced with some fanfare in July last year by the Chancellor of the Exchequer as the centrepiece of the economic package of emergency measures to aid our economic recovery from covid. It was announced as a £1.5 billion scheme, not previously flagged as part of the manifesto commitment from the previous general election, with a very welcome ambition to improve 600,000 homes by March 2021 and in so doing create some 100,000 jobs.

The scheme did not open for applications until late September last year, which in itself led to an unfortunate hiatus in orders for energy efficiency improvements, as householders intending to proceed with some improvements stalled orders while they awaited the prospect of grant funding. The financial grants on offer to install energy efficiency measures and some types of low-carbon heating such as heat pumps were capped at £5,000 per property but up to £10,000 for fuel-poor households—but accessing the grants proved extremely difficult. I am sure others will come to that.

In November, the green homes grant scheme was extended for a further year to March 2022 due to the demand for applications. That was welcome, because one of the shortcomings of the scheme had been its short duration. The scheme was intended to mobilise the energy-efficiency supply chain, but as a consequence of intrinsic problems in its application and implementation, it had a perverse impact, with several installation companies seeking to use the scheme having to lay off staff because of the difficulties consumers had had in gaining access to it.

Prior to the voucher scheme’s closure in March this year, it had received more than 113,000 applications— 10 times as many as under the coalition Government’s green deal—so it was clear that there was demand. By 5 May, the last date for which statistics have been published, some 57,500 vouchers had been issued and 15,500 measures had been installed. Some 1,880 installation companies had expressed interest in becoming accredited under the scheme, but only 1,021 were classed as active, so barely half of those installers who had been interested in participating in the scheme had done so. I suspect that was in large part due to the varying uncertainties surrounding the scheme.

The Environmental Audit Committee held an inquiry on the energy efficiency of existing homes, which we launched in May last year—before the scheme had been announced—and concluded in March, a week before the scheme was scrapped. I am pleased to see my excellent Committee colleague, my hon. Friend the Member for North Norfolk (Duncan Baker), in his place for the debate; I look forward to his contribution. The Committee made recommendations about necessary improvements to the scheme. We wanted to see it overhauled and, crucially, extended to make it more effective. We certainly did not want to see it scaled back or scrapped. I will not dwell on the shortcomings of the scheme any more than I have already—they were manifest, and I am sure others will point out some of the specific challenges—but focus my remarks on what is needed in the future.

It is hard to overstate the scale of the challenge presented by the need to improve the energy efficiency of our homes. The UK has one of the least efficient housing stocks in Europe. Domestic properties account for almost a fifth of the UK’s carbon emissions. There are 29 million homes across the UK, 19 million of which do not meet the energy performance certificate C rating. Even those that do, in many cases, do so without effective insulation and so could do better. The Climate Change Committee has said that the UK’s legally binding climate change targets will not be met without the near-complete elimination of greenhouse gas emissions from UK building stock by 2050.

Failure to address, with urgency, the energy efficiency of the country’s homes could seriously jeopardise our emissions, now enshrined in statute to be net zero by 2050. The Government know that, having been elected on a manifesto that allocated £9.2 billion to be spent during this Parliament on improving heat in buildings, only a third of which has been allocated now that the green homes grant scheme has been ended. The funding needs to be deployed in new, more flexible, more enduring and more realistic schemes, as I shall touch on when I conclude my remarks.

The task is colossal. In England alone, more than 10 million owner-occupied homes and more than 3 million private rented sector landlords need to upgrade the energy efficiency of their homes to become at least EPC C rated by 2035. In the Government response to our report, the suggestion was made that the target will be brought forward to around 2030. I would just like the scale of that to sink in with the Minister, who I know is not normally responsible for this area. If that acceleration were to happen, 13.6 million homes in England would require retrofitting over nine years. That is equivalent to 1.5 million properties a year or 125,000 properties a month, each and every month between, say, the end of this year and the end of 2030.

This will be at the same time as the construction industry, which is by and large responsible for this work, is supposed to be delivering 300,000 new homes a year. For context, I should say that the green homes grant scheme achieved 15,500 installations in six months. That is a fraction of what would be required every month from now until the end of the period.

The good news is that this is a colossal business opportunity, including for many small and medium-sized enterprises, for whom, as small business Minister, my hon. Friend has responsibility. For contractors to seize this opportunity, they need to have their confidence restored that the Government have a coherent plan, with support available, to be clearly established once the domestic renewable heat incentive scheme ends next March, which is currently the only scheme available.

The Government have been dropping hints that they will mandate energy efficiency at the point of sale or renovation of a property. We expect that to be spelled out in the heat in buildings strategy. Homeowners need support to get there. I would find it very challenging for the Government if minimum standards of energy efficiency were brought in for owner-occupiers without some financial support, given the scale of work required. It is not just buying a heat pump; it requires significant insulation, in particular to properties that are in isolated rural locations. Rural, stand-alone or elderly properties are often much harder to insulate with a retrofit and it is therefore more expensive. If no support is available, there is a genuine risk of blight on millions of homes.

What can we learn from the green homes grant scheme? Demand for the scheme was there. Our Committee received no evidence that covid was causing a problem, which at one point the Government hinted at. That was evidenced in the consumer survey that the Committee conducted: covid was not referenced as a problem at all. The good news is that there is demand there from home- owners.

The Government redirected some of the green homes grant funding to the local authority delivery scheme, which is welcome, but it will not reach all those who need help as only some local authorities have had successful bids. It may not help SMEs in the sector, where support for jobs is needed, since local authorities will often award projects to larger construction companies or to their own in-house workforces.

An example is E.ON, which recruited some 100 permanent roles to deliver the local authority scheme. That is good for those who were employed, but it does not help SMEs. We need to see support available to homeowners across the country—and with it, jobs. Bringing all homes up to EPC C would achieve more than the 100,000 jobs that the Government were talking about; one of our witnesses at the Committee, the Energy Efficiency Infrastructure Group, indicated that it would support 150,000 jobs from the moment it began.

I want to see a long-term replacement—certainly five years and preferably 10 years—for the green homes grant scheme. It should be funded as one of the spending review announcements. A replacement scheme needs to be as free of bureaucracy as possible, consistent—obviously—with the need to beware of the risk of fraud. Government and industry need to work together to design a scheme. Sadly, that was not the case with the green homes grant scheme from the point of inception. The scheme needs to be long-term to give the right signals to the sector, to train the people required to do the work, and to enable them to have confidence that they can afford the accreditation process.

Above all, the scheme needs to be easy for the public to understand. It needs to cover a simple hierarchy of measures and to be flexible enough to cope with the individual requirements of individual properties. No two properties are identical, and the notion of having two different tiers—in which some work has to be completed under one tier before being able to move on to the other —was far too complicated and put many people off.

The Government should look to other solutions to improve domestic energy efficiency. In our report, our Committee called for a reduction in VAT on renovations that improve energy efficiency. That would be a simple way to incentivise work. We already have zero rating on new homes, so why not zero or 5%, depending on the item, for those that need improving as well?

We feel that the Treasury has taken a sceptical approach to such measures. It ruled out changes to VAT or stamp duty rebates, which is another suggestion made by industry that we think has significant scope: the rebate would be spent on getting the building up to energy efficiency standards. The UK Green Building Council published a report this week containing a revenue-neutral proposal for just that: a stamp duty rebate to encourage energy efficiency, and I strongly urge the Minister to encourage his colleagues at the Treasury to look at such a scheme.

We welcome the fact that the Government are working with lenders for green mortgages. That has real potential, and there is a lot of enthusiasm in the mortgage industry for attaching green mortgages to their product portfolio. Again, we need to be wary that if we raise standards without providing support or mechanisms to allow people to improve their properties, potential buyers of properties that do not meet the standard may not get access to mortgages. That could have a significant impact on those properties’ value. The Government should also look to the national infrastructure bank to provide finance. The Government have said that the bank’s remit will be established this summer, and we hope that this will be included within it.

I will touch briefly on the energy performance certificate regime. The certificates were originally designed to provide a basic indicator of the energy cost of running a home, but they now underpin a range of Government policies and targets—including not only the legally binding fuel poverty targets, but the ambition to have as many homes as possible at grade C by 2035 or earlier, as indicated by me, and the minimum energy efficiency standard for private homes.

EPCs have a range of flaws, as was demonstrated to me by an assessor who I met last week. I asked to be taken through how the algorithm works. It is now undertaken through a centralised Government website, where the assessor puts in the parameters of the property and out comes the result. Just to illustrate to Members how perplexing this is, for a rural three-bedroom cottage currently fuelled by domestic heating oil in my constituency, where we had all the details, replacing that heating oil with a heat pump and doing nothing else would increase the EPC rating by two points. It is necessary to move by nine or 10 points in order to move up a rating, so doing so barely moves the dial on its own.

The EPC rating penalises off-grid and rural homes in particular, as too much weighting is given to fuel costs. If a person is on a domestic heating oil system because that is the cheapest method of heating their home, but they then introduce energy efficiency measures, that does not move the rating, and they cannot adopt a non-fossil fuel system if it is more expensive. The EPC methodology is therefore not addressing the fundamental challenge, so we recommend that it is fundamentally overhauled to support low-carbon heating measures by indicating in its headline rating not only the fuel cost of heating a property, but its energy and carbon metrics. This must be done before we set minimum efficiency standards for homes. Eye-catching top-line targets for heat pump installations are welcome, and raising minimum energy performance standards for homes is all very well, but what is desperately needed is a coherent plan to achieve the targets that are being set.

Homeowners need to be made aware of the benefits for the planet, but also for their pocket, as reduced energy demand will reduce energy bills. They need to be given the confidence to invest in energy efficiency and low-carbon heating. My Committee and I remain of the view that a replacement scheme for the green homes grant is needed, and that this should be announced and funded in the next spending review.

This replacement scheme will need to endure for several years and be free of bureaucratic obstacles. Alongside that, an overhaul of energy performance certificates is needed to make sure that progress towards decarbonising our homes is not penalised. The Government’s recent response to our report frankly raises the stakes for the heat in buildings strategy, which is due to be published; it has been much delayed, and we would like to see it published as soon as possible. We very much hope that we will not be disappointed by that strategy, and that tangible action to implement it, backed up by Treasury funding, is taken as soon as possible after its publication.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Alan Whitehead (Southampton, Test) (Lab)]

We have had an excellent debate, with a very high degree of agreement among those taking part, not only about the failings of this particular scheme but about the imperative at the heart of what we have been talking about this afternoon. That is the imperative of ensuring that, within a very short time, we have secured in this country a massive uplift in the energy efficiency of homes across all sectors of housing—not just the easy-to-treat homes but the ones that have single cavity walls, for example, and are difficult to treat. We have to put into those homes different forms of heating to go along with the energy efficiency uprating, and the reason why we have to do that is of course to decrease very substantially the emissions from buildings, which contribute so substantially to CO₂ emissions overall, which could lead us well away from our target of net zero by 2050. Indeed, buildings in the UK emit some 19% of emissions overall, and the vast, and a substantial, majority of that is in residential homes, so the targeting of schemes to uprate energy efficiency in homes is vital.

The Chair of the Environmental Audit Committee, the right hon. Member for Ludlow (Philip Dunne), made an excellent contribution. By the way, I congratulate his Committee on its hard work in looking forensically not just at this particular scheme, but at the things we need to do in order to get to where we want to go on home insulation. He mentioned the figure of 13.6 million homes—not new homes but homes of all kinds. As he said, all homes have different requirements when it comes to their retrofit. There are 13.6 million homes that will basically need work to be done on them over the next nine years. He estimated that that equates to about 1.5 million properties a year over the next nine years needing to have those measures.

Although I welcomed the Treasury’s initial announcement in summer 2020 that what looked like a substantial amount of money would be made available for retrofitting homes, we have to understand that, even at that point, it was substantially less than the sum required to meet the ambition set out in the energy White Paper to make all homes EPC conform to EPC band C. I fully accept the Environmental Audit Committee Chair’s strictures about the use and accuracy of EPCs. Nevertheless, the ambition is that all properties should be band C or above by 2035. That date, I think, should come further forward, but that is the area that we are looking at.

The idea that we could make some reasonably rapid initial progress with a scheme in the private sector involving vouchers was a welcome start. I think that the only lesson or conclusion that we can draw from the allocation of this particular fund, the particular way it was done and the subsequent requirement placed on BEIS to draw up a scheme is that we should never do it in this way again, as far as our targets are concerned. Perhaps there is a lesson from what has happened over the last few months.

I am interested to hear from the Minister about this. My understanding of how the scheme progressed is that the Treasury, without any idea of what was involved in the process, announced that money would be made available—£1.5 billion, with £500 million for the local authority delivery scheme—with about as much detail as I have set out this afternoon. The Treasury then said to BEIS, “Go away and work up a scheme to make it happen, and we want it on the ground as quicky as possible.” Had I been a fly on the wall during those discussions, I would have hoped to have seen BEIS kicking back at the Treasury and saying, “Look, this is ludicrous. You can’t do it this way. You can’t expect a scheme to be worked up in this way. And, by the way, you can’t expect a scheme to be conceived, put into operation, undertaken and closed within a year. You just can’t do it that way.” That is what BEIS should have said to the Treasury. Instead, it rapidly produced a scheme and, in so doing, undertook the services of a consultancy company based in America which had no experience of doing these sorts of operations.

Frankly, the scheme was doomed not to work from the start. Indeed, that is what happened. The final figures, which came out in May, show the frankly pathetic number of measures that arose from the scheme. We also heard, while we ran through that period, dreadful stories of building companies that had geared themselves up to do the work but did not get paid for it. There were immeasurable layers of bureaucracy involved in getting voucher schemes going, even though many householders desperately wanted to take advantage of them.

I have the figures from the end of February, which were released before the final figures were made available. At that point—the scheme was still going but it was nearing its end—123,000 vouchers had been applied for, but only 28,000 had been issued. What was the company running this organisation doing by working out the scheme in such a way? There were only 5,800 installations at that point, and of those, only 900 or so were for low carbon measures. This scheme was not just a pathetic failure; it has put the cause of retrofitting homes back substantially. Companies that wanted to do the work were burned yet again and will perhaps be reluctant to undertake further work. Disappointed householders were grievously misled on the energy uprating process, and precious time has been lost for getting to grips with this. To say, “This is a lesson learned in how not to do it,” is a bit of an understatement.

I hope that the considerations raised by every contributor this afternoon will be at the heart of the lessons that the Department will take on board for future projects on energy efficiency uprating. The scheme has to be serious. It has to have the right amount of money to make a difference. The timescale has to be long enough for people to be able to do the work properly and have confidence in the system, and for the variety of necessary measures to be put in place, including, as the Chair of the EAC said, measures that suit the different circumstances of each household and the time required to get the work done.

We also ought to take lessons from the element of the scheme that had some purchase—namely, the local authority part, which has been a relative success. Although it made local authorities adhere to breakneck timescales, they were nevertheless often able to deliver because they were not an American consultancy firm trying to do things by numbers overseas. Rather, they were on the ground with their local communities, engaged in the work. That is another lesson that we ought to draw from this fiasco—give it to local agencies that can actually do the work properly on the ground and make it happen on a daily basis, rather than run it remotely from the centre.

We can draw some valuable lessons from this fiasco. I am tempted to say that it is such a dreadful catastrophe for the cause of energy efficiency activity that, in the words of Stanley Holloway,

“someone’s got to be summonsed!”

It is a shocking failure of Government.

I hope that the lessons will have been at least partly learned by the time the heat in buildings strategy comes out, which, as hon. Members have mentioned, has been delayed on several occasions. I should not say this as a shadow Minister—it should be for the Minister to say this—but I am confident that it will come out shortly. I hope that the Minister will be able to tell us that it will come out in the next few days or weeks and that it will contain a number of the lessons mentioned this afternoon for bringing forward the ambition of energy efficiency.

All of that is contained in the energy White Paper. I hope that the heat in buildings strategy will address itself to the width and depth of the task in front of us. We know that that we have not appreciated the scale of the task, but I hope that the strategy will, finally, address what we actually need to do to achieve our energy efficiency targets.

[Mr Laurence Robertson (in the Chair)]

We need to leave a couple of minutes for Mr Dunne to wind up at the end. We now go to the Minister, Paul Scully.

Oral Answers to Questions

Laurence Robertson Excerpts

Monday 16th November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr Laurence Robertson (Tewkesbury) (Con)]

What steps he is taking to improve the supply of affordable housing.

[The Minister for Housing (Christopher Pincher)]

The Government are investing £12.2 billion in affordable housing over the next five years from next year. That includes £11.5 billion for the affordable homes programme, which we anticipate will provide up to 180,000 new affordable homes, should economic conditions allow. Furthermore, at spring statement 2019 we announced a new £3 billion affordable homes guarantee scheme, which will build on the success of the existing £3.24 billion scheme and support the delivery of new build affordable homes.

[Mr Robertson [V]]

I thank the Minister for that very full reply; it is good that so much work is going on. Does he think it might be useful to revisit the definition of affordable homes? In the past, we tended to use the definition of 80% of average market value, which, when prices are high—as they often are—is still not affordable. Will he consider that, please?

[Christopher Pincher]

I am always happy to consider my hon. Friend’s suggestions. He will know that the affordable homes definition in the national planning policy framework includes:

“Housing for sale or rent, for those whose needs are not met by the market”

and the assumption is that that is at 80% of average cost. Of course, we also have a social rent option that local authorities can leverage, and we have certainly allowed local authorities greater ease in developing their own social homes. I also point him to our first homes programme, which provides discounts of at least 30% on homes in perpetuity so that people can realise the dream of their own home.

Planning and House Building

Laurence Robertson Excerpts

Thursday 8th October 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr Laurence Robertson (Tewkesbury) (Con)]

Very many colleagues have said that we need to build more houses. I am not sure that that is entirely true as a statement in itself, because the planning system so far has built very many houses. What it has not done is built the kind of houses that young people in particular can afford. It has failed in that respect, and it has also not built enough houses that older people may want to downsize into, thereby freeing up the houses they formerly lived in.

As was so very eloquently said by my constituency neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for The Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown), we are building the wrong kind of housing. It is pointless to come to Gloucestershire and build more three, four or five-bedroom houses. All that does is concrete over green fields and perhaps the green belt—and, indeed, floodplains in my area, which I will come back to in a minute—and create all those extra car journeys, and we are still left with the problem. We are left with the problem because the wrong kind of houses have been built.

Of course, house building has never—certainly not in living memory—been a free market, open-ended way of going about business; there have always been restrictions. However, when the state does intervene—and I think it is right that the state should intervene in planning—it needs to make sure that it intervenes in the right way. We really do need to get away from this idea that having more and more houses therefore makes them more affordable. In itself, it will not, and we have to think beyond just the housing numbers.

We also have to think about where we are building those houses. Tomorrow, I am visiting an area in my constituency called Twigworth, just north of Gloucester, and I am visiting it because very many fields there are flooded. That is not unusual in my constituency, which has always had a lot of flooding problems. The reason for visiting those flooded fields is that there are diggers on them: 500 houses are being built on those fields. It is ridiculous. If we are going to go forward with this algorithm or any other system that insists that my area builds thousands and thousands of houses, I have to tell the Government that those houses will be built in flood risk areas and on the green belt. Does that not go against the policies that this Government and the party I support also have about protecting such areas?

Councils, as I understand it from the White Paper, will be given the opportunity to designate certain land as protected, but will that protected land take precedence over the housing numbers when they are handed down by the Government? I do not think that it will. As things stand, I think that the housing numbers will take precedence. That is wrong and it goes against what we stand for as a party. We want more affordable houses, we have to redefine what “affordable” means and we have to build them in the right places.