Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Deben Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 29th October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Maclean of Redditch (Con)]

My Lords, I want to make a few remarks on Amendment 121G in the name of my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe. I also support Amendment 117 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, on gambling premises. I am a former MP who represented a town centre, Redditch, where we often saw these challenges in maintaining a healthy mix of shops and businesses. Thinking about planning decisions on a holistic basis would have been very beneficial. These challenges cannot be fixed by planning alone, but planning can play a part.

Turning to Amendment 121G, I declare my interest as someone who was a small business owner and an entrepreneur for more than 30 years. I thank my lucky stars that that was not in the construction sector because, honestly, that is one of the hardest sectors to operate in—particularly for a small business. When I was the Housing and Planning Minister, I spent a lot of time with small and medium businesses. It was really difficult to hear their stories, which were often frustrating, heartbreaking and tragic. Ultimately, we as a country are losing out if we fail to support and nourish these incredibly hardy and resilient people. Many of them are at risk of losing their livelihoods; in fact, some recent statistics suggest that around half of SME construction businesses are at risk of insolvency by the end of this Parliament. That is why I support this amendment.

What my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe has put forward is very sensible. She makes the point that, too often, the system defaults to one-size-fits-all requirements, which land heaviest on smaller firms. We talk about the NPPF. It has 76 pages and is relatively concise, I agree, but it sits on top of a very large and complex ecosystem of guidance. This is one of the concerns that businesses repeatedly raise: the real burden lies in all of that additional guidance, not just in the 76 pages of the NPPF. Volume housebuilders can navigate such things easily, but it is not so for SMEs. For instance, negotiating Section 106 agreements hits them disproportionately harder, on top of all of the cost burdens that they face.

Anyone who has been a local representative—whether a councillor or a Member of Parliament—knows well that opposition exists to virtually all housing of any kind, no matter where it is. However, in my experience, SME local builders with roots in the community are in a much better position to overcome these hurdles and contribute to desperately needed housing.

In conclusion, these are practical amendments that support local authorities to plan for places in which families want to live, shop and invest.

[Lord Deben (Con)]

My Lords, I support the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Foster. I am appalled by the statement read to the House by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett. Noble Lords have to understand that it is very embarrassing for me to be on the side of the noble Lord, Lord Foster, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, but I have to say that what she just read out shows what a disgraceful industry this is and how much money is being made out of the poorest and most deprived places.

I have lived with this problem for many years. My father was a clergyman in one of the worst slum areas of Britain. He always said that gambling was much more damaging than drink or any of the other things to which referred. It was particularly damaging in his parish, which contained a large number of military personnel, both retired and present.

I hope that the Minister will not make the speech that I suspect I might have had written for me as a Minister. It goes like this: “This is a planning Bill, and this amendment refers to the licensing duties of a local authority. I know that we already said that it was more appropriate for licensing authorities than the Planning Bill but, because this is a planning Bill, we really believe that it should be left for a different piece of legislation”. Yet the Government have said that they will make these changes immediately when there is some opportunity in Parliament to do it.

This amendment is an opportunity. What is more, it has been shown to be within the long title of the Bill, so, if the Minister says that it cannot be done because it is not appropriate, I will have to say to her that I do not believe the House should accept that. The House should simply say that it is clearly appropriate and that this is a clear opportunity. If the Government do not support that, I say something very tough to them: this is about the very people whom this Government are always banging on about and are supposed to be supporting. These are the people who are most at risk from the bloodsuckers who run the gambling industry and know what they are doing. They are applying to the very people who are most vulnerable and from whom they get most of their money.

I say this to the Minister: there is a growing anger around the country at what is happening and at the vast sums of money that some of the people who own these companies make. The biggest payer of income tax in Britain runs a betting company. That says something deeply offensive about our society; I do not believe that any of us should stop the battle to change this.

I wish also to say one thing about my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe’s amendment. I hope that the Government will not say that it is not necessary to make the point about small businesses. My noble friend has concentrated on the construction industry but, very recently—in the past three years—I applied to the local authority to change a residential building back to what it had originally been since 1463: a public house.

That piece of planning change for a very small business —I do not know what I was doing starting a small business at my age, but there we were—for the benefit of the community, took a year. It was the year in which construction prices rose faster than they had for generations. At the end of that year, the cost of what one was trying to do for the community was significantly greater than at the beginning. The reasons for holding it up included the conservation officer complaining that we were going to use second-hand pamments and bricks; we were obviously going to do so because that is my attitude to these things. My architect said, “My client is strongly concerned about climate change and wishes, therefore, to use second-hand materials”. He got back from the conservation officer a note that said, “I don’t care about climate change; I’m interested only in conservation”.

Even if you know something about these things, it is very difficult to put up with a year of that kind of conversation. I merely say to the Minister that it is essential that we have in this Bill a clear statement that small businesses must be treated with the consideration that they do not have the means to do things that big businesses have. I really hope that we can resurrect small construction businesses, but we will not do that unless they have special understanding as far as planning is concerned.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I will be brief; I had not intended to speak but I want to say a few words.

First, I completely agree with my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe’s excellent amendment; I pay tribute to her persistence and indefatigability in defending small and medium-sized enterprises. However, I find myself agreeing with my noble friend Lord Deben—not always a common phenomenon—and with his excellent, passionate remarks in support of Amendment 117 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Foster. I say this only because my own experience leads me to believe that we have a responsibility to ensure that there is balance and fairness in the planning system between betting companies, which have significant resources at their disposal—in particular, legal resources—and planning departments, which are often in small local authorities and do not have the capacity to push back against some of the planning policies that allow betting companies to put fixed-odds betting terminals in very deprived areas, for instance.

I raised this issue when I had the privilege of serving in the other place with, among others, my right honourable friend Iain Duncan Smith, the Member of Parliament for Chingford and Woodford Green. As a communitarian, not a libertarian, I believe that civic society is about protecting those people who are most likely to be the victims of market dysfunction. This is another example of market dysfunction. It is zeroing in on people who have very little money; advantage is being taken of them. This is not a draconian proposal to close down betting shops, gaming arcades and other facilities; it is about redressing the balance to allow there to be a cumulative impact assessment on issues around adult social care and on the depression, illness and penury, frankly, with which many people suffer; I saw this in my constituency of Peterborough a number of times.

You do not have to be liberal, anti-capitalist or anti-free market to support this amendment. It is about fairness and equity, treating people equally giving planning officers, in our local councils and on planning committees, the weapons to make a reasoned, fact-based case for preventing development that would be undesirable and damaging to their local communities. It is on that basis that I support the noble Lord’s excellent amendment. I hope that the Minister will give it a fair hearing, because it is well thought through and considered. I know that my Front Bench will do a similar job in analysing the amendment. I think there is consensus that fair play should be at the heart of this and that planners need weapons to deal with potentially very unsuitable developments.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Jamieson (Con)]

I believe I have made our position very clear, and we will hold the Government to account.

[Lord Deben (Con)]

Before he sits down, will my noble friend accept that he has not made the position clear? The Benches behind want to know why we are not supporting this but merely giving the Government yet another chance to get off the hook. Can we not be a bit tough and actually do what we are here for—to oppose them when they have got it wrong?

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I am loath to explain the Legislation Office’s rationale. I am surprised that the amendment was allowed for the planning Bill, but we are where we are. I am trying to respond as straightforwardly as I can: we want to put this cumulative impact assessment in as quickly as we can, but we do not believe that this Bill is the right place for it. We want to put it in a Bill where it is in scope and will do that as quickly as possible.

[Lord Deben (Con)]

Can I help the Minister on this? Why does she not just say that she will accept this in the same terms as the regulations on alcohol? Then she would not be promising anything that is not there. Frankly, it is very worrying for us that she cannot accept, having listened to the debate, that the Government have got the measurement of scope wrong and have said something about gambling which, if it were true, would mean that the present law on alcohol is wrong. I am sure that she does not mean to say that to the House. Therefore, is not this the moment for her to say to the House: “I will take this away and come back having looked at it”? In that case, we would not need to have a vote on it, which would be much more sensible.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

This is Report, and I believe that the Government’s position that this should be related to licensing and not planning is right, so I will hold my line on it. I know that that will be disappointing to the noble Lord, Lord Foster, but it is very important that we take the issue of cumulative impact assessments as part of the licensing regime. We will endeavour to bring that forward in an appropriate way when the relevant legislation comes forward.

I turn to Amendment 121G, which seeks to ensure that public bodies discharging duties under this Bill pay consideration to the difficulties faced by small and medium-sized developers when engaging with the planning system. I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, for her strong championing, as ever, of this sector. I share her passion for ensuring that we do all we can to support it. I also commend the work of my noble friend Lord Snape on the APPG for SME House Builders; he continues to keep me informed on the concerns and challenges within the sector. I welcome the recent launch of its report setting out all the issues that they are facing and what the Government can do.

The Government are committed to increasing support across the housebuilding sector, especially for SMEs. SMEs have seen their market share shrink since the 1980s and this long-term decline raises concerns about the sustainability of the construction sector and the loss of weaker firms weakening market diversity and resilience. I gently point out to the noble Baroness that there was a period of 14 years when her party was in government and might have looked to support the sector a bit better during those years.