National Policy for the Built Environment

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

Tuesday 24th January 2017 Grand Committee

[Lord Inglewood (Con)]

My Lords, I declare the interests I have in the register. In particular, I own Hutton-in-the-Forest in Cumbria, which is a grade 1 listed building, and around it some houses and land. I am also a trustee of a number of similar estates, a chartered surveyor, a board member of the Historic Houses Association, president of the Ancient Monuments Society and president of the Lakeland Housing Trust.

I am not quite sure whether it is my noble friend Lady O’Cathain or the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, whose comments I join about the Government’s response to the report. Let us be clear: they have taken a very long time and the response is very flimsy. We have waited for the gestation period of an elephant and the Government have given birth to a mouse. It is all a bit disappointing.

I want to focus the main thrust of my comments on two things: first, some aspects of what is going on in the north of England; and secondly on historic buildings. I start with some general points. Like the noble Baroness, I think there is great value in an overview of some of the problems to be considered in more detail in your Lordships’ House and elsewhere regarding the built environment, and associated topics and political problems. I entirely concur with the thrust of the report that a decent built environment—and rural environment, for that matter—is a huge contributor to people’s health, general well-being, sense of well-being and quality of life, and as such, should be encouraged and promoted as part of the country’s infrastructure, using that word in its widest sense.

It is not simply a matter of money, although money has to be spent properly and judiciously. Caring, taking trouble, expertise, design, skills and thought are all essential to making the difference between the good and the bad. Having said that money is not the only consideration, we have to recognise that land and buildings are wasting assets and they have to be refreshed regularly to remain in good heart. Over the years this country has wasted an awful lot of investment in the environment—indeed, wasted it on a heroic scale—by failing to look after things. After all, look at the amount of slum clearance we have had over the years and the amount of urban redevelopment and so on. I sometimes flippantly say that I think neglect destroyed more of Britain’s cities during the previous century than the Luftwaffe ever did.

There are two root causes of this, which we did not touch on all that much in our report. The first is rent—using the word in its strict economic sense—and the second is taxation. Rent is important because buildings have to generate a certain amount of money year in, year out, to cover the cost of the maintenance. If that is not happening, you are storing up trouble for yourself. Secondly, our personal taxation in this country is based on 19th century income tax legislation, which was designed for a completely different world, where people’s lives in many cases were very different. It seems that the effect of the rules in various parts of the taxation system is actually to discourage maintenance of the built environment. There are remarkably few incentives to do that. It does not seem that difficult to imagine ways of gathering tax from people to the same levels as they are currently taxed now, in a way that does not chill looking after the fabric of the nation. This applies to both owner-occupied property and let property, be that housing or other. They both have a place in contemporary society and neither should be given priority over the other. Here again, it is maintenance and looking after things that are so important.

Of course, clearly there is a need for new housing and other development but, equally, it is important that what we have should play its full part in the life of the country, and that cannot happen if things are not looked after properly. If no stitch is being put in, there is nothing to prevent having to spend nine later.

If one looks at some high-profile conservation and historic restoration projects and the impact of tax—whether it is income tax, corporation tax, VAT or the impact of gift aid on charitable giving—it is clear that the state is footing a very substantial part of the bill. This bill has been vastly inflated by the failure to get to grips sooner with the problems; for example, the restoration of Wentworth Woodhouse or Apethorpe are welcome and very much in the national interest, but they probably cost the taxpayer several orders of magnitude more than was necessary. Some of your Lordships may have seen the letter from the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, in today’s Times about the problems that this Building we are now sitting in is causing the country and how by doing nothing the cost of the work that needs to be done has hugely escalated.

The systemic response to this should be to devise a system where things are done quicker, which means in real terms you are spending less money. If owners do nothing—whoever those owners might be—the displacement theory so beloved of the Treasury does not automatically mean in some magic way that just because it looks roughly the same the following year, somebody else has picked up the bill; rather, trouble is being stored up, with damp and dry rot, which get worse on a geometric, even logarithmic, scale. I do not think that the arrangements we have surrounding the built environment are at all conducive to that built environment being properly looked after. It goes without saying that a decent planning system is a necessary precondition of a decent urban environment, but by itself it is not sufficient.

I should like to remark briefly on the north of England, where I live. A number of aspects thrown up by the current debate across society about the built environment are different in the south compared with the north, and particularly so when comparing the north with the south-east. Of course, it is the south-east that dominates most of the discussion at present.

Some parts of the north are very prosperous and some are the opposite. In Cumbria, where I live, housing in the Lake District is very expensive, while the west coast of that country is absolutely at the opposite end of the spectrum. In the Lake District there has quite properly for many years been a “house for locals” policy. I chaired the planning committee of the Lake District planning board for four years in the 1980s. The nature of the housing market there is such that demand is effectively limitless. That drives up prices way beyond the ability of many people to conceive of buying houses, despite living and working there, which means that housing for local people has to be provided principally through leasehold.

On the other hand, I hardly exaggerate when I say that in west Cumbria you can scarcely give houses away, even though it is only 20-odd miles from the Lake District. Here, there is much greater scope both for owner occupation and development but the problem is that there is no money. One reason is that there is not much going on, which means that there are not the jobs and so on to support housing, although it is a place where it might be in everybody’s best interests if it were promoted.

An important point is that you cannot completely decouple work and home. Jobs cannot simply be created out of the ether by building industrial buildings—it is much more complicated than that. It is important that a way is found of applying the right economic conditions. If we want to move people out of the south-east, it is a matter of providing not only housing but work. Of course, there have been initiatives for promoting industrial and other activity in the north of England, many of them associated with the northern powerhouse project, but in the eyes of the political commentariat they have been more or less overshadowed by the problems here in the south-east.

If we go back to the central matter of the built environment in the most general terms, I think that everyone is looking for the same thing, albeit perhaps nuanced a bit differently. Quite understandably, ways to achieve it, be it decent housing or the City Beautiful movement, can be contradictory and, in turn, conflict with another important matter—preserving the environment. At the end of the day, this is where judgment and the political process have to step in to resolve the difficulties.

However, my plea is that we must not be dazzled by the big scheme and the flashy—and there are going to be plenty of those about—so that we lose sight of the dull detail that is the necessary counterpoint to all this. I refer to cleaning gutters, repairing roofs and painting windows, which all mean that over a period less and less of our environment will be rotten. If these slightly dull things are ignored, the rest quickly becomes futile. In short, it is good to be boring.