Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Lord Lansley Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 18th April 2023 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

201: Schedule 7, page 281, line 26, at end insert “to the extent necessary to meet the obligations of the participating authorities to secure net zero carbon emissions by 2050 and in respect of nature recovery and biodiversity in the joint spatial development strategy area.”
Member's explanatory statement
This amendment would require the joint spatial development strategy contribution to mitigation of, or adaptation to, climate change to be consistent with the authority’s carbon reduction and other environmental targets.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, the first group today relates to the ways in which planning contributes to our objectives in respect of climate change. I remind the Committee of my registered interest as chair of the Cambridgeshire Development Forum. I will speak to my Amendments 201 and 214, and refer to Amendments 226 and 309, which I believe make helpful suggestions to a similar effect.

The law relating to plan-making already requires that a local planning authority, when making a plan, must

“secure that the development and use of land in the local planning authority’s area contribute to the mitigation of, and adaptation to, climate change”.

This is presently in Section 19(1A) of the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 and is carried forward into the provisions of this Bill as regards both local plans, which one can see in new Section 15C inserted by Schedule 7, and joint spatial development strategies in new Section 15AA(8).

The purpose of my two amendments is to specify that, when we refer to “contribute to”, we mean that the local authorities should have policies designed fully to meet their statutory obligations in relation to the adaptation to climate change or its mitigation. Amendment 201 would do this by reference in the statute to the obligations of the participating authorities to meet net-zero targets and, given that spatial development in particular extends to the impacts of wider development in an area, to their obligations in respect of nature recovery and biodiversity. Amendment 214 more specifically references the guidance which the Secretary of State can issue to authorities in order for them to adapt to climate change.

Amendment 226 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, takes the approach of defining the terms “mitigation” and “adaptation” by reference to the Climate Change Act itself. Amendment 309 takes the approach of creating additional statutory duties for the Secretary of State in setting policy and seeks to extend the scope of the requirements for climate change mitigation and adaptation to individual planning decisions. I have to say to the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, that I would not go that far. The risk of creating a stand-alone statutory criterion for planning decisions, distinct from its incorporation into the plan-led approach, is too great. The focus of my amendments is plan-making itself, which leads into the subsequent decision-making.

I want this debate to enable my noble friend the Minister to set out how the provisions in new Sections 15AA and 15C inserted by Schedule 7 give statutory force to the requirement for local authorities, when creating spatial strategies or local plans, to meet their carbon emissions targets and achieve net zero, and what guidance the Government can give in securing adaptation to climate change and what measures they can take if local authorities fail to plan accordingly. I would also be grateful to hear to what extent these provisions or other statutory requirements for nature recovery or to secure our biodiversity are applicable to plan-making.

These are key elements in future land use strategies. As we have heard in a previous debate, our buildings represent over a third of our greenhouse gas emissions. Adapting to climate change will demand radical thinking about spatial strategies. The Cambridge City Council environmental assessment prior to its local plan consultation clearly identified the advantages of urban densification and development on public transport corridors in reducing the carbon consequences of development. Developers are increasingly coming to terms with the need for nature recovery and biodiversity net gain to be integral to place-making in the future.

The statutory framework for the planning system needs to reflect the significance and centrality of these environmental principles to plan-making, and indeed place-making. I hope the Government will agree, and that we might use this debate to look at how these principles can be reflected in statute more effectively through this Bill. I beg to move Amendment 201.

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[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I shall speak to the amendments in the name of my noble friend Lady Bennett, and in mine. It is such a pleasure to hear the words “manmade climate change” coming from the government Benches. It is a real pleasure, because when I first came here in 2013, I was the only person talking about it, so thank you everybody who has mentioned it today.

I support quite a lot of the amendments in this group, but I am slightly concerned about the amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, and perhaps he would like to clarify. It looks as if his amendments would prevent a spatial plan or a local plan from targeting net-zero carbon emissions earlier than 2050. It is not enough to achieve it by 2050; we must make sure that it is done incrementally, not all at the last moment. That would create problems for, for example, the Green-led Stroud District Council, which is targeting achieving net zero by 2030. It would be madness to try to delay anything like that. I am not sure if that is the intention, but I would like to know. Sorry, does the noble Lord want to answer me now, before I have finished?

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

I just want to say that my purpose was to incorporate into the legislation what are existing statutory obligations on local authorities. That would not constrain them from planning for something more ambitious.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

I thank the noble Lord; ambitious is good.

On Amendment 226, we need to define “mitigation” and “adaptation” in relation to the Climate Change Act 2008, because that Act’s target is again 2050, and we cannot risk any council plans that seek to achieve net zero sooner.

Moving on to hedgehogs, I think that everyone that I have mentioned this to today is so supportive of holes in fences and hedges for hedgehogs. I am really pleased about that because hedgehogs are an indicator species, which means that we can monitor what is going on with other ecosystems because of hedgehogs. If they become rare or even extinct, it will be harder to track damage to ecosystems and the environment. They indicate the health of the environment and of nature as a whole. The State of Britain’s Hedgehogs 2022 report found that numbers are down in rural areas by between 30% and 75% since 2000. Clearly, we have a problem here. Globally, hedgehogs are of least concern, but here in the UK the population is now classed as vulnerable. Therefore, I beg everybody to support this tiny but important amendment.

On Amendment 273, in the name of my noble friend Lady Bennett, I am delighted that it is being supported by Labour, which has an amendment to that amendment. I personally have been talking about this since I was elected in 2000, and I do not know why it is still not understood. All buildings have a carbon content and when you destroy them, when you knock them down and throw the debris away, you are wasting carbon and you are then generating more carbon by replacing them, so, please, something along these lines must go into this Bill. I do not understand why the Government have not woken up to that yet.

On my Amendment 293, I really wish I had put something in, after the hedgehogs, about swift habitats. There are real concerns about the swift population in Britain. Obviously, preserving and enhancing habitat has a big impact on all birds, but particularly swifts. They arrive in the UK during the summer, lay their eggs and incubate them here. They like to live within houses and churches, and they need spaces to get into nesting sites. A lot of developers are now using swift bricks with little holes, which allow swifts spacious housing very safely within houses. Also, we can retrospectively put swift boxes up, which can do the same. Swifts play a crucial role in controlling insect pests, for example, so we need to support them. Numbers have plummeted, with a 53% decline since 2016, which is very disturbing. The Labour council in Ealing is doing its best to develop a site that has got a lot of swift habitats, so I would be grateful if any noble Lords who know anyone on Ealing Council could point out to them how destructive this is and that they should not be developing an area which swifts desperately need in London.

Of course, you need ecological surveys. Most noble Lords here care about nature, and if you do not know what nature is there, then you do not know whether you will disturb it or damage it in any way. A survey is basic to everything that is part of development of any kind. I thank your Lordships for listening.

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[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

Absolutely, we are very happy to meet on all these issues.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for her full response to this debate, which admirably demonstrated the degree of consensus and agreement there is that this issue is both important and urgent, and that, as I think the noble Baroness put it, the planning system is not adapting. It is not securing the adaptation to climate change that we require or, arguably even more so, the mitigation of climate change. It is not even seeking in any substantial way to mitigate climate change. As the Government presently put it in the National Planning Policy Framework, the system is simply seeking to try to respond to the potential impacts of climate change. That is not sufficient; we require something more than that.

I say to my noble friend Lord Caithness that there are 14 paragraphs about flooding and coastal erosion in the draft National Planning Policy Framework. The only reference I can see that might bear upon his concern is the reference to the risk of overheating from rising temperatures. There is nothing about a planning response to the risk of fires and wildfires in the way that my noble friend expressed.

I say to my noble friend the Minister that the point is that, if we could look at the National Planning Policy Framework and see that it set out in very clear terms how the planning system s to secure the necessary level of mitigation and adaptation to climate change, I do not think we would have an argument. We have an argument because we cannot look at it. Chapter 14 of the draft NPPF is simply about making the necessary adaptations to deal with the impacts of climate change. It does not say that the planning system should be seeking to shift in any major, radical way so as to reduce the contributions which development in this country makes to continuing climate change risk.

Indeed, where biodiversity is concerned, there is more in chapter 15. I will look at it very carefully to see whether the NPPF tackles that. However, in this debate, the next debate and a subsequent debate on the design code, we are all going to be trying to use amendments to this Bill to achieve things which ought to be, by the Government’s own admission, in the National Planning Policy Framework. They want to have general legislation which allows them to specify what should then happen, but we need to see it in there.

The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, in her first speech asked when we are going to see the NPPF. My noble friend more or less said that it would be after we have finished with the Bill. That, I am afraid, will not wash. We have to see it before Report. If not, it is an inescapable conclusion that we will have to amend the Bill on Report in order to be sure that the subsequent instructions, as it were, to local authorities about what they need to do are clear from Parliament and the Government—otherwise it is simply left to the Government, and the Bill is silent. Where the environment is concerned, as things stand there are references to the Climate Change Act 2008, but the Government are proposing to leave them exactly as they are. The expectation is that, by doing the same thing as they did in the past, the results will be better. As Einstein might have said, that way lies madness. If we carry on doing the same things, we will get the same result. We have to think hard about how we do things differently.

I will return to this issue in the next group and in a subsequent one, but I think we have made our case to look at this again in the future. I beg leave to withdraw Amendment 201.

Amendment 201 withdrawn.

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It is clear that this issue is becoming more and more urgent. Amendment 207 would help create the conditions necessary to achieve that elusive tipping point in making rightsizing for one’s older age the norm and providing for the thousands more who need and want a suitable home. I hope the Minister agrees, and I beg to move.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

I will speak to Amendments 215 and 218, tabled by me and my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham. That might be helpful because there is a substantial additional issue in this group which, I have to say, even after eight and a half days of debate on the Bill, may prove to be the most significant of all our debates thus far. It is about future housing supply.

The Government assert that the planning system is broken, and the fact that only 40% of local planning authorities have an up-to-date local plan might suggest that that is true. The public anger at the approval of planning permissions as a result of the lack of a five-year housing supply has created a deep lack of confidence in the system. The Government have a target of building 300,000 homes a year; we are 200,000 homes short of that target since it was set in 2018—possibly as much as 100,000 short in the past year. Even at that rate of new build, it would take decades to bring our housing supply up to anything comparable to other western European countries.

I do not think the issue is whether the planning system is broken; the issue is whether these reforms mend it. Unfortunately, the Government’s proposals for reform over recent years have not led to any acceleration in the building of new homes or the processes leading to it. On the contrary, the rate of plan-making has slowed to half the rate before the housing White Paper was published in 2020. Since the ministerial Statement in December last year concerning changes to the NPPF, 33 local plans have been delayed. Among the changes in the draft National Planning Policy Framework were that the standard method for the assessment of housing need should become an advisory starting point. It also included the watering down of the housing delivery test and, consequently, that the limitation on the use of the presumption in favour of sustainable development would also be watered down. It proposed the removal of the test of “justified” in the examination of plans, so local planning authorities can make the plans they wish to without having to justify them. Since those changes, fewer plans are being approved, fewer planning consents are being granted, and, consequently, fewer homes will be built. This is not mending a broken system.

I see nothing in the Bill and have heard nothing in our debates so far that leads us away from the idea that there should be a plan-led system. However, as my noble friend and I made clear in a debate on his earlier amendments, it requires the preparation, publication and approval of up-to-date local plans. If those local plans are approved timeously, we will have as a consequence a basis on which more homes can be built—particularly if those plans incorporate the necessary assessment of housing need.

Amendment 215 would place a statutory requirement on local planning authorities to plan for a housing supply which “meets or exceeds” that which would be specified by the standard method and the Government’s housing target. They can deploy an alternative method, but not in order to diminish the number of homes that the Government’s target would imply for their area. Amendment 218 would require local planning authorities to have regard to the Government’s housing target and to the standard method in assessing their housing requirements.