Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Lord Deben Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 6th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

As far as I understand these amendments, they are an intention to return the planning system to the time before 2022 happened—the golden age when the system worked. I must say that I was looking for some fairy dust. I will explain by going back to 2010, when an incoming coalition Government discovered that only 15%—I think it was 15%—of local authorities had an up-to-date local plan. That is when the Department for Communities and Local Government, in which I was then a junior Minister, came up with a way to encourage local planning authorities to speed-up their local plan process.

That was after a 30-year statutory requirement—it is 30 years old—that they should have such a local plan. This was essentially to let developers loose in areas where there was no up-to-date local plan. I have scars from an Adjournment debate in that place, which is a bit like a QSD at this end. As a junior Minister, I drew the always available short straw, and I was faced—or rather I was backed, because they were behind me— by 20, 30, 40, although it seemed like a thousand, angry MPs complaining that the Government were blackmailing their district council by setting developers loose. It was like Dunkirk, only there were no boats.

The coalition Government kept their nerve, and so that system endured until 22 December, I think—the dispatch date given by the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham. However, whether the coalition Government held their nerve, or whether, like the Conservative Government, they did not hold their nerve, the outcome was still not 300,000 homes a year. The missing ingredient for us was fairy dust. That system does not deliver 300,000 homes a year. I wish the noble Lords good luck with their amendments, and I shall be interested to see what the Government have to say, but even if passed, it will not deliver 300,000 homes a year. That seems to me to be the fundamental point. I absolutely take the analysis delivered so powerfully by the proponents of this. Unfortunately, the lever that they intend us to use for it is already deficient, and we have seen it. So, please, where is the fairy dust?

[Lord Deben (Con)]

My Lords, I refer to my registered interests, particularly that I chair a company that advises people on sustainable planning. I must say to my noble friends, with whom I very often agree, that I find this debate extremely difficult. First, this Bill should never have been in this form at all. No previous Government would have provided a long title for a Bill that means that it takes this long to go through Parliament and that, every time they think of something, they can add it to the Bill. We must be very clear about this Bill. Historically, we used to have the tightness of a title which enabled you to keep responsibly and respectably within the subject. So I start with this difficulty.

Secondly, this concentration on the numbers misses the point. Since the Government got rid of the net-zero requirement for houses, we have built over a million and a half homes that are not fit for the future. Every one of them has meant that the housebuilders have taken the profit, while the cost of putting those homes right has been left with the purchaser of the home. That is a scandal which is shared between the Government, who were foolish enough to get rid of the net-zero requirement, and the housebuilders, who knew precisely what they were doing. One of them made so much money that it offered its chief executive £140 million as a bonus. He did not get all that in the end, but that was the situation.

My problem is that in the absence of a proper policy, we are talking about the wrong thing. We should not be talking about the numbers, except to say that we need significantly more homes. We should be talking about the quality of the homes and the places where they should be. I go back to my own experience as Housing Minister. We were very interested in ensuring that we built homes on already used land. We thought it important to recreate our cities. We thought that was just as important a part of this as the numbers. At the moment, I can drive back from my local railway station and see every little village, every little town, spreading out into the countryside, homes being built on good agricultural land and homes being built which are, by their nature, the creators of commuters, as there is nowhere else for people to work.

If I may say so to my noble friend, it is no good ignoring that many district councils have a real problem with the number of places in which they can build the homes that they were asked to build. A lot are NIMBYs, and some I quite agree you would not like, but if you are faced with building homes in a council where most of the area is green belt, areas of outstanding natural beauty or historic areas, you find yourself in a huge difficulty. I agree that many of them do not try as hard as they ought to, but let us not kid ourselves as to what the local issue is—not just wanting to win that particular ward but a matter of real difficulty.

For that reason, I say to my noble friend that I am sad that in this elongated, extended, overblown Bill, we have not had time to do four things: put in the future homes requirements to raise the standards of housebuilding so that they are fit for the future; create a system whereby housebuilders should provide the resources for rebuilding the insides of many of the homes that they built over the last five or 10 years; and understand that we should reuse land and think about place-making where people are within a quarter of an hour of the resources they need. Then, we can talk about how we can have a relationship with local authorities that can build the number of houses that we need.

I intend to support the Government on this amendment because I am not prepared to be put into a position where the answer to our problems is numbers. That is not the answer. The answer is a housing policy which looks at sustainability, the ability to buy and the future, not a collection of odd clauses stuck together and added when it happens to be convenient.

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

My Lords, I have a much less eloquent and much less exciting question to the proponents of Amendment 195, and certainly no fairy dust. If you are linking national targets to the local plan, what happens when national targets change during the five-year plan period? Does the plan have to be rewritten, do parts of it have to be rewritten, or do you have to wait until the end of the period and then apply the new target? It is a purely technical question and, as I say, much less exciting than some of the material we have just heard, but I would be grateful if the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, could help me with that.