Arrangement of Business
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Viscount Stansgate) (Lab)
Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to an afternoon of four Questions for Short Debate. If there is a Division in the Chamber, we will adjourn for 10 minutes—but, as you can see, they are on Amendment 1. It will be a long day and there will not be any Divisions to interrupt us. As this is the last Grand Committee before the Summer Recess, I wish everyone involved in Grand Committee work a relaxing summer and I look forward to seeing you again in September.
National Accident Prevention Strategy
(1 day, 11 hours ago)
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Baroness Crawley
To ask His Majesty’s Government what plans they have to create a national accident prevention strategy, as set out in the report by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, Safer Lives, Stronger Nation: Our Call for a National Accident Prevention Strategy, published November 2024.
Baroness Crawley (Lab)
I begin by thanking noble Lords for taking part this afternoon. It is really appreciated.
I was recently asked to be a vice-president of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, RoSPA. I am delighted to see my noble friend Lord Jordan here, as he is the lifetime president of that same organisation. There you are—forever young.
This is a body that has been at the forefront of accident prevention for more than 100 years, with landmark campaigns leading fairly directly to legislation, from its campaigns in 1917 for pedestrians to face oncoming traffic through to the Highway Code and the Green Cross Code, cycling proficiency and compulsory seatbelts in 1981—gosh, it seems so long ago now—as well as banning hand-held mobile phones while driving, up to the report in front of us today. Imagine the entire O2 arena, with all 2,000 seats filled; now imagine that crowd wiped out, not once but every single year. That is how many lives we estimate we lose in the UK to accidents. These are not rare events; they happen every day in our homes, on our roads, and in our workplaces and communities.
The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents reports accidental death rates surging by 42% over the past decade. It was that figure that led me to think that we need a wider parliamentary debate about this. This is not just a statistic, it is a crisis: a national failure of co-ordination, leadership and investment. I say to my noble friend the Minister, whom I respect greatly, that we really need government to champion a national co-ordinated approach to accident prevention, because the current system is just not working.
As the Minister will know, responsibility for accident prevention is currently fragmented across multiple departments: Health, Transport, Education, Housing and so on. This fragmentation leads to gaps, duplication and missed opportunities. There is a chart in RoSPA’s report, of which there are copies on the back table for anyone who wants to have a look, of the overview of government departments and agencies responsible for accident prevention, and it looks like the web of a crazed and demented spider. I would bet that no one in this Room could make head or tail of it.
I believe, too, that accident prevention aligns directly with this Government’s priorities. The NHS 10-year plan, Fit for the Future, for instance, rightly focuses on prevention and early intervention—but injury prevention must be part of that, and part of the vision of that policy, and I am not convinced that it is. Reducing unintentional injuries will lower emergency admissions, free up NHS capacity and improve population health outcomes.
We also know that accidents disproportionately affect people from more deprived backgrounds, making them a clear example of the health inequalities that the NHS 10-year plan sets out to tackle. RoSPA calculates that the cost to the NHS of treating accidents is nearly equivalent to the cost of treating obesity, and twice the cost of treating conditions related to smoking.
The Get Britain Working White Paper that the Minister will be very familiar with identified 2.8 million people out of work due to long-term sickness. Many of these cases stem from preventable injuries. A more co-ordinated approach in government to health and employment accident prevention will keep more people healthy and in work. It will reduce benefit dependency and ensure that local authorities are more financially supported in designing safer communities.
Of course, we have the Employment Rights Bill going through the House of Lords at the moment. It offers a real opportunity to improve workplace safety. Day-one sick pay rights will reduce presenteeism and injury risk. The new fair work agency will enforce safe working conditions and whistleblower protections.
As well as the opportunities inherent in the Government’s agenda, there are also opportunities for getting better co-ordinated data into the area of accident prevention. At present, data is siloed, inconsistent and incomplete. Without robust data, we cannot target interventions, measure impact or hold systems to account. Australia’s national injury surveillance unit shows what is possible and it is a good example for us. It would make sense for the Government to encourage standardised reporting across the four nations. At the moment, we cannot compare data across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. We should invest in real-time data infrastructure, as well as having an annual injury report published.
RoSPA’s headline call to government is for a national accident prevention strategy led by a named Minister, perhaps a departmental Minister who already has a portfolio, or a Cabinet Office Minister. I would like to put a few questions to my noble friend the Minister before I close. Does she agree with a named Minister heading up co-ordination? Does she think this is an area for co-ordination of data across the four nations of the UK? What provisions in the NHS 10-year plan actually address accident prevention? Can the Get Britain Working reforms be levered to reduce injury-related worklessness? Does she agree with empowerment through education, embedding accident prevention across the whole life course, from early years to old age, in schools, workplaces and communities?
I will leave noble Lords with RoSPA’s current costings for serious accidents. I found it slightly unbelievable when I first read it. Having had a deeper dive, with the help of the RoSPA team, who are sitting at the back, I understand that it is probably a conservative estimate. It estimates £12 billion as the annual cost of accidents, which is evenly split between the cost to the NHS and the cost to businesses.
Around £6 billion is attributed to NHS treatment costs, based on hospital bed days and A&E attendances, and the remaining £6 billion reflects lost productivity, calculated from working days lost due to injury, post-discharge recovery and time taken off by carers, adjusted to include the wider business impact of staff absence. For an economy in search of growth and a population in search of answers to needless and rising injury and death, this needs serious investigation.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
I congratulate the noble Baroness on bringing forward this debate. It really is about time, because this issue comes in, goes out again and somehow is never really fixed or sorted. I declare an interest as the president of the Road Danger Reduction Forum.
The one problem I have with the accident prevention strategy—I apologise to the RoSPA team, its president and its vice-president—is that we should never use the word “accident”, because accidents very rarely happen. There is almost always a cause. It is a problem with roads, vehicles or drivers. Survivors who have suffered road traffic crashes or collisions find it very difficult to stomach the fact that they are called accidents. An accident is something where you say, “Oops, I’m so sorry that happened. I didn’t mean it”. Actually, often these incidents are utterly preventable, so when we are talking about traffic, collisions and injuries, which are incredibly serious and a blight on society, we should really not be saying that they are unavoidable, which is almost what “accident” suggests.
I have been working on this issue for 25 years. When I was in the London Assembly, when Ken Livingstone was mayor, we worked very hard to reduce the number of deaths and injuries on London’s roads. By and large, we did a very good job. It is about joined-up thinking. As the noble Baroness said, this has to cut through all departments and be a common language, so that it is possible to make progress.
I got the Met Police to stop using the word “accident”. Now the Met and some other police forces do not talk about “road traffic accidents”, as they used to, but “road traffic collisions”, RTCs. This is a direct result of the work we did in London on road deaths and injuries. I often say “crash”. I was a victim of two crashes as a cyclist. The first time, on a zebra crossing, I got knocked off my bike across the middle of the road, past all the signs, and landed on my wrist. I still have a very impressive scar from that. The second time, less than a year later, I got knocked off by a cyclist and got only a black eye, so that was good. I went on “Newsnight” that night, and they had to put huge amounts of make-up on my face and film me only from one side.
When looking at these collisions, deaths and injuries, we have to look at multiple things. It can be the design of the roads or a lack of police enforcement, which comes and goes. When I was working on this in the London Assembly, we made sure that the road traffic element of the Met Police was very active and supported. Every year, people talked about cutting its budget, but we managed to stop those cuts. Crashes can also be the result of badly maintained HGVs, a lack of segregated and safe cycle paths, drugs, drink or inattention. All these things are factors, and we have to be clear that you have to tackle them in different ways and with a joined-up approach.
I was the Mayor of London’s road safety ambassador for seven years. It was a bit of a joke title at first; Ken gave it to me because he thought that I would not do much with it, I think, but actually we were very successful. In those seven years, we saw a big decline in the number of injuries and casualties on our roads. Some of that was due to the introduction of 20 mph zones, which had quite a big impact in terms of traffic calming and people being aware of the fact that cars really ought to drive more slowly and more carefully—this happened across London—and some of it was due to the extra resources for the traffic police, which was a very important component of driving down deaths and injuries.
My point is that it took political will but also money and, to some extent, research to understand how these things happen. The car lobby often did not like the things that we did, but the fact is that it worked, and people could see that it worked. The 20 mph zones became fairly well accepted in London, and segregated cycle lanes worked and made people a lot happier. The measures reduced the number of people who were killed or injured, obviously, but they also reduced the number of grieving family members and partners who had to face the fact that their loved ones were dead and gone or might never be the same again—that is, they might never walk or speak again. As the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, said earlier, they also reduced the costs to the NHS and the care system of looking after thousands of people with life-changing injuries; on a national scale, that is absolutely huge. So, having an accident prevention strategy is worth while, but only if departments are willing both to put resources and safeguards in place, in order to make things happen, and to work together; that is a really important part of it.
On health inequalities, the poorer you are, the more likely you are to live next to a large, dirty road such as the M25, which, of course, gives you not just a huge amount of traffic and air pollution but danger.
The Labour Government are right to keep repeating that prevention is better than cure, but I am not sure that they recognise just how much that involves challenging vested interests. I know that this is not easy, whether it is the car lobby whingeing about the police doing something on our lawless roads; the development industry taking shortcuts with the regulations around fire safety; or people drinking or taking drugs and then driving, thinking that the police have better things to do. For me, it is hard to think of anything better that you can do with your time—particularly for politicians—than prevent deaths and injuries. The well-being of the people has to be our first job. So I hope that Ministers will adopt this call for a crash prevention strategy, but I also hope that they will learn the big lesson from Grenfell Tower and our lawless roads: you have to face down vested interests in order to save lives and progress this agenda.
I very much support the asks from the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, for a named Minister and to co-ordinate the national data. In the NHS 10-year plan, where do road crash victims come in? I do not know much about the Get Britain Working reforms; they sound okay. Of course, education from primary school onwards is absolutely crucial. I would be happy to be the Minister named to do this job for the Government, because I am very well qualified and I am sure that I could get on with the whole Labour Government.
Lord Jordan (Lab)
My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the powerful remarks—we have a problem; it sounds as though my mic is reverberating—of my noble friend Lady Crawley. She laid out the scale of the challenge that we face in accident prevention. I will not repeat her words, but I hope to try to reinforce them. The astronomical costs to the nation of the rising toll of accidental deaths and injuries, as well as the unacceptable costs to every person or family whose lives are ended or wrecked by accidents, should shake any Government into saying, “Enough is enough”—but they do not and they have not.
This crisis has been 20 years in the making, but it has to be faced up to now. Yes, the solution is challenging, but if Labour’s manifesto commitment to
“embed a greater focus on prevention throughout the entire healthcare system”
is to be realised, it must be acted on where it is most needed, and nowhere is it more starkly needed than in the prevention of accidents. It can be done; it has been done before—and by a Labour Government.
The Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 was a turning point in a long and deadly history of industrial accidents. Since its introduction, workplace fatalities have fallen by nearly 80% and non-fatal injuries have been more than halved. These are not just statistics; they are proof that accidents can be prevented by life-saving laws. As a result of the success of the 1974 Act, the centre of gravity in the world of accidents shifted from the workplace to the home and from factory and building workers to vulnerable ordinary people who spend most of their time confined to their house. Statistically, the home is now one of the most dangerous places to be in the UK.
When the 10-year National Health Service plan came out, RoSPA expected—indeed, hoped—that it would seriously address the needs of one of the NHS’s biggest customers: accident victims. But it does not; in fact, the document is virtually an accident-free zone. In Fit for the Future, Wes Streeting has an afterword: “Be the Change”. I say to him and the Labour Government: make a national accident prevention strategy the afterword and RoSPA’s Safer Lives, Stronger Nation report the formula for radical and proven life-saving change.
RoSPA and other safety organisations want to play their part in delivering such a strategy. We know the world of safety; we know what works. For over a century, we have been delivering accident prevention and, after decades of research, trials and pilots, we know that education, engineering and enforcement can and must work together. We also know that Governments have had the means to make a difference to the chronic and appalling problem of accidental death and injury. But, in politics, leadership is everything, and on this issue it has been lacking for 40 years.
I spent more than 20 years of my working life on the shop floor in manufacturing. That was time enough to see accidents up close and ugly, traumatic enough to make my first representative job that of safety shop steward, deep-lasting enough to make me later join Britain’s oldest and most effective safety organisation, RoSPA, and experience enough to know that the 10-year National Health Service plan presents a real opportunity for Labour. It can change the depressing recent history of increasing accidents that target in particular the elderly, the very young and the most disadvantaged people. The Labour Government now need to send out a clear signal to the whole country not only of intent but of priority that there will be a national accident prevention strategy and that a Minister will lead it. That sort of leadership will tell the British people they now have a Government who will treat the colossal cost of accidents, in lives and resources, with the urgency it deserves.
Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)
My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, for securing this important debate. She is rightly concerned about the importance of ensuring that people’s safety should be considered, managed and overseen, not just locally but nationally, and that more should be done by government. The debate takes me back to various jobs that I held in the 1980s, when I worked in personnel in various woollen mills around the country. As the Committee can imagine, health and safety was a key part of that responsibility, on the back of the Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974, as the noble Lord, Lord Jordan, said.
Accident prevention should be a key facet at the heart of our regulatory system and considered to be an integral feature of so many aspects of the way in which we lead our lives, at home and in the workplace. Rather like an insurance policy, we should always seek to minimise the risks. We should also take greater account of how our lives are changing—and I will say more about this later. Safety should be constantly and continuously considered in the manufacturing, purchase and use of products that we use every day, including those imported from abroad. In this respect, to what extent are imported goods regularly inspected and monitored and standards upheld? That is my first question to the Minister.
I turn to the report itself and the findings by RoSPA. As has been said, the results are worrying—and rather astonishing. First, as has been said by other noble Lords, you are substantially more likely to suffer a serious accident today than you were 20 years ago. As the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, said, accidents take 20,000 lives each year. In England, as she mentioned, in the past decade, the accidental death rate increased by 42%. I add to that by saying that in Scotland, it was up by 57%, and in Wales, by 41%.
Last year, 7 million people attended A&E departments following accident-related issues. We always hear anecdotes circulating of the type of surprising and unusual accidents which befall people. As the noble Baroness said, the cost to the nation was £12 billion, of which £6 billion was a direct cost to the NHS in medical care, but not including ambulance callouts, and she went on to give some more granular details on that. Therefore, we can understand the scale of the diversion of NHS resources from other, non-preventable areas of the health system—something worth reflecting on.
As I said, these statistics are alarming, and we could surmise the reasons which, at first sight, seem counterintuitive, because we might assume that society makes progress, and does it not follow that we learn to look after ourselves better, mitigate risk and that government, over time, improves its regulations and oversight of accident prevention in all aspects of society? The reason for some of these sombre statistics could be construed as a result of a variety of changes in our lives. For example, the greater number of people living longer, and so the greater number of older people, means a greater number of accidents in that cohort. We should note that falls are up by 90% over the past decade and represent 46% of all accidents. It is interesting that poisonings, which represent 26% of all accidents, are up by 96%. This will, of course, give conspiracy theorists a field day, but the serious question for the Minister is: can she enlighten us as to the reason? Could it be to do with pills or greater mental health issues? It is that sort of question that I am seeking an answer to.
There are far more cycle lanes, and we keep reading about the tragic accidents that happen, often very high profile, too many involving cyclists and refuse lorries, or pedestrians killed or injured by cyclists. I am sorry to hear of the preventable accident—let us call it an “incident”—suffered by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones. Having said that, transport accidents represent only 7% of accidents and are down 17% in the past two decades.
Despite the publicity arising from these terrifying traffic accidents giving the impression of worse figures here, could these better statistics be due to improved car design, including in-car electronic systems, or all-pervasive traffic calmers and/or the sometimes iniquitous 20 mph limits? Who knows?
As the noble Lord, Lord Jordan, said, it is interesting to note that over half the accidents happen at home and it may be that the majority are related to falls—which goes back to the point about the correlation with the elderly. Why, as I assume is the case, are homes more dangerous than they were in the past? Perhaps the Minister might comment on that.
Moving forward, it is essential for us to redouble efforts to address the issue of accident prevention to save more lives and reduce the pressures on our oversubscribed health services. This disparity is a concern and it is essential that the Government put measures in place to understand the causes of these differences, close the gap and improve outcomes for all the regions.
In November last year, RoSPA’s report called on the Government to adopt a national accident prevention strategy. The report highlighted eight recommendations to the Government, calling for improved data sharing and collaboration, for inequalities to be addressed, for a joined-up approach to guide policy-making at national level and for agencies to be empowered.
From this report, we can understand that one of the underlying causes of accidental deaths is the dispersed nature of health and safety regulations between the different agencies. The Health and Safety Executive, within the Department for Work and Pensions, for example, in my view does a tremendous and robust job on regulating health and safety for UK businesses. I say this from personal experience, from my recent time in office in DWP.
However, stark differences are faced by product safety, housing and home safety, and some aspects of road safety and healthcare. This means that more cross-government work is required, with clear responsibilities for safety, notably, I would argue, in the Departments for Work and Pensions, Transport, Housing and Health, to name four. I admit that I have not gone as far as the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, in terms of her crazed and demented spider’s web, which passed me by.
I conclude with some final questions for the Minister. Can the Government look further into why accidental deaths are higher for some of the regions, particularly Scotland and Northern Ireland? I mentioned Wales as well. What steps will the Government take to reduce the disparities? Will the Government be looking further into the causes of accidental deaths and how to reduce these? What plans do the Government have to respond to the RoSPA report?
Earlier in my speech, I mentioned that our lives are evolving. We are heading into a new era of driverless cars, air taxis, drone deliveries and the extraordinary, much greater use of airspace and the safety risks that come with this, engendering, perhaps, an image of a science fiction movie.
I mentioned also a greater use of robotics in the workplace and in the home environment. Robots are not supposed to go wrong: totally the opposite, they are supposed to be much safer because of all the testing and the integrated sophisticated technology. But how safe are they? We assume that all these modern gadgets have reached their full proof of concept and are not still at the test and learn stage. Surely, these latter points therefore are some of the most compelling reasons for stepping up our oversight on a national basis, and perhaps the Minister can comment on the most important point of my remarks.
Finally, to echo the remarks made by both the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, and the noble Lord, Lord Jordan, will the Government acknowledge that the pressures faced by the NHS caused by accidental deaths are there? What actions will they take to prevent and reduce the number of deaths caused by accidents, perhaps as part of the 10-year plan? It is one of the few government areas of progress, I would say. There is an emerging strategy here.
The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Baroness Sherlock) (Lab)
My Lords, I am very grateful to my noble friend Lady Crawley for her powerful introduction to this short decade and to all noble Lords for their contributions. What a lot of expertise there is in the room for a short debate. I have to say that RoSPA has made a very wise choice in bringing my noble friend Lady Crawley on board. It could not have a better advocate, with the possible exception of my other noble friend Lord Jordan, its life president. I do not want to set a competition up here, but really it could not have done better in choosing advocates from this side. I pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Jordan—what an astonishing career he has had in standing up for workers and for safety in the workplace and safety more generally. I really commend him for that.
I also thank the noble Viscount, Lord Younger, for noting the importance of what can be done within the workplace, within HR and from a professional standpoint, and also the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, for her work on road death prevention. Again, we have all learned a lot from that, and we are very glad that she emerged relatively unscathed from her encounters with other traffic. I take the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, about when an accident is not an accident. It is interesting, and I do not know whether it is down to her, but I gather that the Department for Transport also now talks about road traffic “collisions”, not road traffic “accidents”. I think that there probably are some accidents—noble Lords may have seen me shortly after Christmas, returning from the Recess and hobbling around in a moon boot. I think that that was an accident; I like to try to imply that it might have been a snowboarding accident, rather than me slipping on the wet floor of a cottage somewhere in Northumberland while cooking—I think that even things with the best design in the world could not stop someone like me falling over. That has been the case ever since I was a child and probably will not stop now.
The noble Baroness’s bigger point is really important: we should not assume that these things are not preventable. In a sense, that is the whole point of the RoSPA report. It is about trying to prevent what is preventable, which is what we are all here to discuss. The report presents a striking analysis of the scale and impact of accidental injuries and deaths across the UK. My noble friend Lady Crawley talked about accidental deaths rising by 42% over the past decade—21,000 lives were lost in 2022 alone. Her vision of the O2 stadium is really powerful.
Of course, these are not just statistics: every one represents a family member or friend and a future that has been lost. The report highlights the cost of £12 billion a year, as well as the disproportionality—as mentioned by the noble Viscount, Lord Younger and others—among different vulnerable groups, including older people, children or those in areas of deprivation. I assure the Committee that the Government have noted the report’s recommendations. I commend RoSPA for the report; it is an important piece of work and we are looking at it.
We also absolutely recognise the value that strategic leadership can provide in tackling complex cross-cutting issues. We are committed to working across government to ensure that our approach to accident prevention or incident prevention is coherent, proportionate and responsive to the needs of people across the country. That is reflected in one example in the report. It mentions climate change as an emerging risk that will make accident rates worse in the future. The Government are focused on taking a coherent, mission-led approach to address that risk. We are working across regulators and across departments to take co-ordinated action to deliver the legislated 2050 net-zero target.
My noble friend Lady Crawley mentioned the key ask: that there should be a Minister. I am very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, for volunteering—I shall be sure to pass that along to the Chief Whip. My noble friend will not be surprised to find that I am not in a position today to agree to that proposal, but the Government will continue to reflect on that proposal and on the report as we consider how best to continually improve effective co-ordination across government.
My friends Lady Crawley and Lord Jordan and, I think, the noble Viscount, Lord Younger, asked about the NHS 10-year plan. The Government’s 10-year health plan for England, published earlier this month, is backed by £29 billion of investment and deliberately sets out a strong preventive approach for improving the nation’s health, rooted in social justice and focusing on reducing health inequalities. It outlines a cross-societal approach to prevention, including action on, for example, tobacco, alcohol and air pollution, alongside strengthened screening and vaccination programmes. I acknowledge that it does not focus specifically on accident prevention, which was a point made by my noble friend Lord Jordan, but it does have a core commitment to shift from sickness to prevention. Through the plan, we will see, for example, primary care, pharmacies and community healthcare working together to help people. If they are managing their conditions at home and living independently, the support should be there to help minimise the risk of accidents and other incidents that require hospitalisation.
My noble friend Lady Crawley also mentioned something dear to my heart in the DWP: the Get Britain Working reforms—as she says, I am very familiar with them. I will keep my remarks short on those, otherwise we may be here some time. They are a real move to try to address the various things that get in the way of people working, either on grounds of sickness or disability. There is a series of partnerships with the health service, the Government and local councils, looking at the interface and looking at supporting people back into work or stopping them falling out of work. We have also, for example, asked Sir Charlie Mayfield, the former John Lewis boss, to do a report on employers and what they can do in this space. I will have a look when that comes out to see whether there are things that we could think about and what are the causes that are driving this in the first place. It is a really well-made point and I thank her for it.
However, if we are getting people into workplaces, we want them to be safe workplaces. My noble friend Lord Jordan mentioned the breakthrough of the Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974. I was very pleased to see RoSPA highlighting the work of the Health and Safety Executive as an example of where accident prevention is working. There is a robust regulatory environment for workplace safety, owned and enforced by HSE, with the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions ultimately accountable to Parliament and for ensuring the HSE performs its duties in accordance with the law. Since the Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974 was established, annual workplace fatalities have fallen from 651 down to 124 in 2024-25, a reduction of 81%.
My noble friend Lady Crawley and the noble Viscount, Lord Younger, asked about the role of the Government in co-ordinating data use, funding and accountability across sectors. There are some encouraging examples of cross-sector collaboration on accident prevention. The HSE’s 10-year strategy—Protecting People and Places—is a good example. The strategy spans a wide range of areas, including workplace safety, chemical regulation, environmental protection, and the adoption of emerging technologies. All those areas require co-ordinated action across government departments and industry, and the efforts there reflect a broader recognition that many of the risks people face in daily life do not fall neatly within the remit of a single agency or sector.
Similarly, the recent independent review of patient safety across the health and care landscape, which came out earlier this month, highlighted the importance of aligning roles and responsibilities to improve outcomes. It brought together multiple organisations to examine how oversight and accountability can be better co-ordinated to protect patients and the public. Collaboration, data sharing and efficient use of resources are crucial for co-ordination and accountability in accident prevention. We remain committed to working with partners to explore how best to support joined-up action. I take the point my noble friend made about the interoperability of systems between England and devolved regions, and I am happy to take another look at that.
Noble Lords will know that one of the Government’s main means of preventing accidents occurring is through regulation, which protects individuals and the environment from harm and reduces public health risks, as well as safeguarding employees from harm at work and enabling a healthy and productive workforce. It can also uphold standards in building safety—a point alluded to by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones. It is vital, though, that regulation and the actions of regulators are proportionate.
We should regulate, where necessary, allowing space for discretion and responsible behaviour, but the RoSPA report addresses the whole of society and touches on the legislation and regulatory duties of multiple government departments and their regulators. Although it is complex, our current regulatory approach does provide a focus on accident prevention that responds to those multifaceted needs. On the protections provided by that sort of regulatory and policy framework, there might be a complicated diagram, but it does mean that the best-placed organisation takes the lead on specific issues, and that is crucial to our response.
The need for data to inform accident prevention is crucial, and departments are working to improve the collection and use of accident-related data. So, for example, DBT’s Office for Product Safety & Standards works with a range of stakeholders to gather information around incidents that might be linked to product safety issues. That includes fire and rescue services, other regulators, consumer bodies and safety charities, which allows emerging issues and serious incidents to be responded to.
My noble friend Lady Crawley raised the importance of public education in preventing accidents, and I am grateful for and absolutely agree with her highlighting things such as the Green Cross Code—things I think those of us of a certain age will never quite forget, which just shows that campaigns well done stick in the mind. I can still see Tufty, I can still do “Clunk Click”. It is all in there somewhere, even though sometimes I cannot remember where I am meant to be. Those things get in very early on, and we agree that education has a vital role to play in shaping safer behaviours today. The Department for Transport’s THINK! campaign continues to raise awareness of road safety with targeted initiatives such as the Safe Adventures campaign, which helps parents prepare children for independent travel. I commend that to her, and indeed to the Committee.
I turn to the issue of road safety, raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones. She made some very important points, and I commend the work of the London Assembly and the work that she did, along with Ken Livingstone, in collaboration or in whatever way—it is extremely important. I reassure her that the Government remain absolutely committed to improving road safety and reducing the number of people killed or seriously injured on our roads. We recognise the importance of continued education but also of enforcement and infrastructure improvements to protect all road users. It is good to see that, between 2000 and 2024, the number of reported road fatalities fell from 3,409 to 1,633, coming down by over half, but we need to keep driving that down. The noble Baroness may be aware that the Department for Transport is currently developing a new road safety strategy that will set out our future direction in this area, and that will be published in due course.
The noble Viscount, Lord Younger, raised the question of monitoring products from abroad. The Office for Product Safety & Standards has established a co-ordinated system of product safety checks at the border, which involves proactive checks on high-risk products as well as working with businesses and supply chains to create sustainable behaviour change. In 2022-23, activity funded by that programme stopped 10 million non-compliant or unsafe products from entering the UK market.
The noble Viscount also asked about the number of poisonings. This is rather less Agatha Christie and slightly more something else. In fact, the RoSPA report attributes the high number of accidental poisonings primarily to drug and alcohol-related incidents, often exacerbated by deprivation. The Government are committed to reducing drug and alcohol-related deaths, and DHSC is currently reviewing its action plan to achieve this.
The noble Viscount mentioned the difference in different parts of the country, which is interesting. Again, the report attributes the higher level of accidental deaths in Scotland and Northern Ireland to a combination of a higher number of transport-related fatalities and socioeconomic deprivation. I do not have much more background to that, but it is an area that it would be interesting to dig into.
The noble Baroness, Lady Jones, touched on building standards and the need to tackle vested interests. Just to reassure her, because she mentioned Grenfell, the Government have accepted all 58 recommendations of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry and are implementing them all. Just to add, the Building Safety Regulator, established under the Building Safety Act 2022, is now operational, and more will be done in that area.
Finally, as I have run out of time and the machine is flashing at me, the Government are not complacent. We recognise the importance of prevention in reducing harm, protecting lives and easing pressure on public services. We also appreciate that the landscape of accident prevention is evolving, as the noble Viscount, Lord Younger, said, with emerging risks coming in—not just climate change but artificial intelligence and autonomous technologies. We may think, as he says, that we get safer and look after ourselves, but maybe we just find new ways in which to damage ourselves and other people. One day, when my promised jetpack finally arrives, I want there to be some system for making sure that I do not hurt myself and other people in the process.
No matter what the challenges are, it is the job of government to make sure that we are ready for them. The RoSPA report is a valuable contribution to the national conversation on safety, and we welcome its insights and ambition. We will continue to work across departments, with local authorities, industry and the voluntary sector, to ensure that our approach to accident prevention is evidence-led, proportionate and responsive to the needs of the country. We are committed to building a safer, healthier and more resilient society.
I thank all noble Lords and RoSPA, as well as all others involved in this work, for the continued contribution that they make.
Specialty Medical Training
Lord Lansley
To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the ratio of medical training posts in each specialty relative to the number of foundation year medical students choosing that specialty.
Lord Lansley (Con)
My Lords, I am very grateful for the opportunity to raise this important issue. Although it will be a short debate, this is not an unimportant subject for us to discuss. It is also very timely, coming just a fortnight after the Government’s publication of Fit for the Future and the 10-year plan. I will refer to that in some detail a little later, but it is timely for us to look at the Government’s statements in that plan and how they are to be delivered.
This autumn, something approaching 24,000 young people will go to medical school. They are among the most intelligent, passionate and motivated young people. Among many of them, there is an understanding that it is a competitive profession and that they will have to fight for their places: 24,000 of them might seek medical school places but only around 9,000 or 10,000 will achieve that. From the outset, it is a competitive situation. However, we do not want to make that competition a career-frustrating experience—something that does not enable them, having achieved their initial medical qualifications, to set out on their career. We want them to be able to see that through to a more successful conclusion.
One of the central issues is that, once upon a time, there was an expectation that there was a flow from initial medical school into foundation-year training and that, following foundation-year training, the substantial majority of people would go into some form of speciality training. This is not an assumption that we can make to the same extent now, when the proportion going into speciality training straight out of foundation year 2 has gone down from something like three-quarters to only just over one-third.
What we want is to follow through on the expectation that we can make a substantial contribution to meeting our own medical workforce requirements and, potentially, make some contribution internationally. The worldwide demand for doctors is rising. The World Economic Forum has estimated a global shortfall of 10 million doctors by 2030, so the fact that we are increasing the number of doctors and medical school places in this country should be welcomed, frankly, whether or not we subsequently employ all those young people in our own National Health Service. If they go somewhere else or work in other parts of the world, fine—so be it. We have always drawn on other parts of the world for our medical services here, so we should be comfortable with that future possibility.
Indeed, the number of international medical graduates coming to this country has substantially increased, particularly after the 2020 revision of the shortage occupations list and the resident labour market test no longer applying. This has led to a substantial increase in the number of international medical graduates. We need to focus on that issue, alongside medical training, in some of our discussions this afternoon.
When it comes to the relationships between the increasing numbers of medical school places, my noble friend may like to recall the successful expansion of medical school places over the past two decades; it happened before, while and after I was the Secretary of State, and it continues to this day. In 2023, the long-term workforce plan set an ambition—not just an ambition but a promise, I think—that there would be 15,000 medical school places by 2031. We are not far off track on that, but I am not entirely sure whether that continues to be the Government’s intention.
However, the ratio for those applying to specialty training from medical school and foundation years has significantly deteriorated. In a number of specialties, we have seen substantial numbers of additional young medical graduates coming through after finishing their foundation year—for some specialties the number has doubled or even tripled—but the number of posts available for them in speciality training has in many cases hardly increased at all. Overall, there has been something like a 34% increase in medical school places but only a 9% increase in speciality training available. Noble Lords do not need me to remind them that the ratio of applications to places in some specialities is severely distorted. When looking at the numbers, you have to do some work to establish to what extent there are unique applications as well as the total number of applications, but, even so, overall there are more than twice as many applications for specialty posts than we have places available. In some specialties, the ratio is significantly higher.
The Government’s report Fit for the Future made a number of important points, on which I think we all agree. As they put it, the Government wish to
“tackle bottlenecks in medical training pathways”.
One of the central ways they plan to do this is by working
“to prioritise UK medical graduates for foundation training, and to prioritise UK medical graduates and other doctors who have worked in the NHS for a significant period, for specialty training”.
We need to know a bit more about what is intended by this reference to
“other doctors who have worked in the NHS for a significant period”.
Are we talking about six months, a year, two years or five years? Making specialty training less accessible to international medical graduates will have a significant impact on the likelihood of their coming to this country to work in our NHS. We are not wholly reliant on that and should not be, but we need to know what the implications are. It could mean literally tens of thousands fewer doctors available in five or 10 years’ time.
The Government also committed to 1,000 new specialty training posts over the next three years. I want to be sure that I understand this. Will they increase the annual supply of specialty training places by 1,000, which would be something like a 20% to 25% increase, or add 300 or so each year over three years? That would not be quite what we are looking for. I hope I will be assured that it will be a 20% or 25% increase in the number of places available.
The Chris Whitty and Stephen Powis review of medical training is continuing and we expect to see the Government’s long-term workforce plan in the latter part of this year. I hope it will include greater detail about the expectations for the requirements for consultant posts and the consultant workforce in future years, specialty by specialty. I hope we will see more detail on the extent to which the Government expect UK graduates to remain in the NHS, and perhaps some incentives for them to do so, so that we do not rely as heavily as we have done in the past on international medical graduates. I hope that the review of medical training and the Government’s workforce plan will use the independent sector more, which supplies something like 10% of treatments overall and should supply a significant proportion of the training support available. I hope we will see more on supporting professional activities written into consultant job plans, because we cannot deliver the increase in specialty training that we are looking for without more of that being available.
I hope that where the Government say that they want to work with the GMC to get a streamlined pathway to consultant status, that means that, in addition to the specialty training places, those who go into locum and locally employed doctor status can also find their way, through certificates of eligibility or experience, to becoming consultants in due course. I also hope that, overall, the workforce plan that we will see later this year gives us many more of the answers that we are looking for to enable us to deliver this improvement in the consultant workforce in future.
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, for having secured this important and timely debate, given that many doctors find in August that they are without jobs. Although those graduating in medicine in this country are guaranteed a pre-registration post, there are not enough posts for all of them in the UK. It is welcome that the Government’s 10-year health plan states that these UK graduates will be given priority for F1 posts—that is, the first year after coming out of university. In those posts, they are the responsibility of the parent university, as well as whoever is responsible for their training at local level.
It has been estimated that there will be a need for at least 1,000 extra GP training posts in the very near future, to say nothing of extra medical educators, to recognise those shaping the future workforce. Although common things occur commonly, diagnosis of complex conditions is not done by simple algorithms. There has been a potentially dangerous overreliance on artificial intelligence. That is already being discussed at major medical conferences. We need the people with the training.
Part of the welcome commitment in the Government’s plan is to reverse the decline in clinical academics, which must address the need to reimburse universities for the additional cost of the contractual arrangements for NHS substantive and honorary consultants. Worryingly, last year’s negotiations took place without the involvement of the universities or the Department for Education, yet, without research, all our medical advances and their benefits to the UK economy could dwindle.
Medical schools are committed to widening participation in the profession, with a more than 50% increase now in the entrants from disadvantaged backgrounds, and a focus on under-doctored areas to strengthen the health economies of remote and rural regions, encouraging graduates who want to return to the areas from which they come. There are, however, major bottlenecks early in training due to a mismatch between training posts and numbers and available doctors between both FY2, the second year after qualifying, and internal medicine training, and then on into higher specialist training. This is contributing to a lack of workforce capacity in higher specialty training, and that feeds on into a shortage in the consultant workforce itself.
I illustrate this from my own specialty of palliative medicine and from emergency medicine, two areas where the need for high-quality medical services is rapidly increasing because of demography and the complexity of multiple comorbidities, including presentations of new conditions and, in emergency departments, of major incidents. Competition for internal medicine training has grown rapidly. Taking into account multiple applications, there are still two doctors for every available post. Applications from international graduates doubled in the last year, and the increase from UK graduates was 33%. This leaves seven in 10 recently qualified and registered doctors concerned about their future employment, of whom a quarter were apparently unsuccessful in applying for specialty training. More than one in 10 are now applying for medical jobs abroad and more than one in five are looking for an alternative career.
One area of great pressure is the number of formal training posts. If a post is taken by a doctor who then works less than full-time, the unused part of that post cannot be filled because there is no additional marginal funding. Job shares are difficult and sometimes do not work well, and internal medicine shows that almost two-thirds of certain speciality trainees are working less than full-time. This then feeds through to the shortfall in trained doctors eligible for consultant posts, leaving many vacant palliative medicine posts, for example, unfilled for prolonged periods because flow-through is stagnant due to funding constraints. It is worsened by the reliance on charitable funding for some of these posts. For example, a colleague of mine in west Wales is struggling to do the job of three consultants because two posts are vacant due to a failure to fill these jobs because of a shortage of suitable applicants.
Given the need for more posts in the community, there is now discussion as to whether general practice and palliative medicine can come together to provide joint training, an option that has proved popular for general practice and public health. I ask the Government to actively support these and other initiatives to free up the mobility of trainees, increasing their ability to move between different disciplines and places and their sense of belonging to a team. This is essential for maintaining more care in the community, which is outlined in the 10-year plan.
I turn now to emergency medicine, routes into which are through the two-year acute care common stem, which allows trainees to train towards anaesthetics, acute medicine, emergency medicine or intensive care. At the end of the two years, they have to reapply for senior training, as there are very few run-through posts. The advantages are that they have a broad experience and can switch from one line to another, having had a common stem, but the reality is that recruitment is highly competitive. Many newly registered doctors are locally employed, which means that they are not in training posts but are doing very responsible jobs. In the London area alone, one trust that I know had more than 800 applicants for a small number of emergency medicine training posts. The bottlenecks are at every point in the system.
This is another speciality where over 60% are now seeking less than full-time training, which is understandable given the stresses of the job and the difficulties of childcare commitments and so on. But if, for example, you have five training posts, and five trainees working at 0.8, which is equivalent to four whole-time posts, currently you cannot appoint a sixth person to the remaining one whole-time equivalent because of the shortfall in additional top-up funding for oncosts and so on. That means that we are chronically underreplacing, even in those disciplines where the fill rates are high.
There is another problem. Training numbers are not evenly distributed fairly within the system and around the country. They need to be determined by population need, set as a formula. It is not appropriate for the south-east to have many more training posts than other parts of the country, such as under-doctored rural areas. Geography is an important consideration for many trainees. They often want to stay near the area where they trained in medicine. That is helpful because they have all the contacts to seek informal advice and support, but the targets to get through a certain number of patients can work against the system and the allocation of training posts. For example, pathologists and radiologists are essential to diagnostic processes but they may not feature in the target minds of many planners.
The movement of finances can underpin the workforce and it is essential that we do this if we are to have our own graduates and know all aspects and the standard of their training, and if they are to be able to work and pursue careers in this country rather than be driven abroad, pulled by the attractiveness of recruitment programmes from Australia and other places. We trained them, and we need to harness all their potential.
Lord Kakkar (CB)
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow my noble friend Lady Finlay and to thank the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, for the very thoughtful way in which he introduced this debate. In so doing, I remind noble Lords of my own registered interest as chairman of King’s Health Partners.
As the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, said, there is a continuum here—a continuum from establishing the number of places that we have at medical school through to the foundation years, where those newly qualified medical students are able to hone and consolidate their skills, and then subsequently to choose to go into core and speciality training and ultimately seek permanent consultant or GP posts.
It is fundamental to the process of planning that each part of that continuum is properly joined up. For instance, how do His Majesty’s Government deal with the question of ensuring that medical schools have an appropriate curriculum that is sufficiently flexible and will meet not only the training needs in the subsequent seven to 10 years after qualification of a medical student but the subsequent 30-odd years of clinical practice? In terms of expectations, how do we set the appropriate expectation for those bright young individuals, as the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, said, going to medical school, so they are better able to understand what clinical practice in future will mean? For a large number of them, with the Government’s determination that care is moved closer to home and into the community, the skills will include the capacity to apply digital technology and to be substantially literate in the use of data, as well as to be able to lead multidisciplinary teams, in addition to having a good understanding of pathophysiology, physiology, biochemistry and other clinical skills.
Once individuals enter their foundation years, we must be clear about what core skills we need to consolidate that will provide them with the ability to adapt over a lifetime of clinical practice—and so too into core and specialty training. It is quite shocking that, in 2022, for those entering their subsequent training in 2023, the General Medical Council assessed that some 75% of those completing their second foundation year did not go into a core or specialty training post. Where did they go? Some of them clearly became locally employed doctors, but it is clear that the majority of those who have gone through medical school and had their early post-qualification training are not going immediately into subsequent training. Why is that? What do we have to do to make that subsequent core and speciality training more effective and agreeable for those who need to commit themselves to it? If they are going into locally employed doctor positions, professional positions where they are locally employed by trusts, principally to deliver service, is there a way we can provide the opportunity for those locally employed doctors to undergo some form of training as well?
There is a substantial financial commitment to their employment and, given that commitment, which probably concerns at least half of the recently qualified workforce in the NHS, there should be an opportunity for training to be provided under those circumstances—as the noble Lord said, ultimately, potentially, to move to a portfolio system, whereby elements of that clinical practice, supervised and attended by training, could contribute to certification that could ultimately contribute to a pathway of accumulating experience, not only in core and specialty training posts with a number but through those locally employed doctor posts, increasing the amount of flexibility available.
Beyond that, we have to consider how we do workforce planning. The previous Government, quite rightly, in 2023 was congratulated for having agreed and settled a workforce plan with substantial ambition in increasing the number of medical school and nursing places as well as in training more clinicians, based on what I assume was a determination of the changing population demographic and therefore a greater need for doctors in certain specialties and disciplines.
With their 10-year plan, the Government have indicated that the workforce plan of 2023 is to be put aside. That, I think, is quite a problem. One of the things we need to be able to achieve in our country is a degree of consensus so that planning can be constructed and delivered over an extended period. What will be the new methodology? The 10-year plan indicates that the previous plan needs to be put to one side because we will have new models of care. We are going to be adopting digital technology and working in different clinical environments. That is all absolutely fine, but how is that to be modelled? What is the methodology? What is the certainty that we are applying the correct parameters to any modelling plan to allow us to determine which specialties and disciplines need to be expanded? Where are the geographical locations where this training should take place? What are the preferences of those who have gone to medical school and completed the early part of their training in terms of taking up such opportunities? In coming forward with the 10-year workforce plan, the Government are going to have to be very clear on these questions, so that whatever is proposed is plausible.
My noble friend Lady Finlay raised the question of clinical academics. These are a vital part of the medical workforce. The Government are absolutely committed to innovation and its adoption at pace and scale across entire health economies, but at the very genesis of that innovation are clinical academics, and we have seen an erosion of clinical academics in the National Health Service over the last 10 to 15 years, with great problems in being able to ensure that those who choose an academic, potentially research-driven commitment, as well as a proper clinical commitment, can achieve training for both those elements side by side and still be able to compete for consultant posts after that. How do the Government propose to address that issue?
Finally, I come back to locally employed doctors. It is critical that that large number of young clinicians are able to continue their early post-qualification clinical practice in a way where they remain strongly motivated and potentially determined to apply subsequently for core and speciality training posts. At the very least, they should continue to be developed in a supportive and meaningful way, so that they are fully flexible and have the capacity to make the important contribution that the health service over the coming years is going to require from all employees.
Lord Rennard (LD)
My Lords, we are all grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, for securing this debate and, as he said, it is an important issue that has been of concern for some years. It is important for our NHS and for the long-term health and well-being of our nation. We know that, in recent years, the competition for specialty training places has kept rising. There were over 33,000 applications for specialty training in 2025, compared with less than 20,000 in 2019.
There are particular problems with some specialisms. In 2024, there were 112 applicants per post for general practice and public health medicine. This shows that there has been a serious breakdown in workforce planning to date. Parties have been ambitious in their manifestos, but not always in the planning and the execution. At the last general election, the Conservative Party expressed the desire to recruit 28,000 more doctors in the NHS than we had in 2023, and to do so by the end of this Parliament. But in government, they did not will the means to enable that to happen in that timescale. Medical school numbers increased by one-third between 2014 and 2024, but specialty training places increased by less than 10% in the same period.
This disparity has created a severe bottleneck, leaving thousands of doctors who have completed their foundational training stuck outside the speciality training pathway and facing potential unemployment or having either to go abroad or to accept insecure roles as locally employed doctors. The General Medical Council observes that, of course, doctors not in training posts have a higher rate of leaving the profession, thereby exacerbating our retention crisis.
Several factors have contributed to this untenable situation: there has been a stagnation in the funding for training places; there has been a lack of funding from Health Education England for training places, which is exacerbating the problem of competition ratios in specialty training; and the career progression of medical graduates has been impeded, leading to questions arising around the quality of patient care. The Royal College of Physicians has emphasised that increased medical school places must be accompanied by a plan to increase specialist training provision. It is illogical for us to invest in initial medical training, then deny thousands of UK doctors the opportunity to advance to specialty level.
There is also the problem that training places are generally distributed based on historical arrangements rather than current population needs. The evidence suggests that trainees often remain in the area where they complete their specialist training, meaning an inequitable distribution of posts, which contributes to disparities in doctor numbers across the country. Health Education England and NHS England have a commendable programme called Addressing Health Inequalities: Distribution of Medical Specialty Training, which seeks to distribute places more equitably, but they must ensure that this leads to an overall increase in training places rather than merely redistributing existing capacity.
The challenges in general practice training are particularly acute. The ambition to increase GP training places to 6,000 by 2031 is welcome, but the current pace of increase is not meeting the need and prospective GPs are being turned away. The current competition ratio of 3.67 applicants per post is too high. General practice is often perceived as less prestigious and GPs’ practices face immense pressures, making it difficult for senior GPs to dedicate the time and resources needed to supervision and training.
I am sure that we will shortly hear more about the Government’s 10-year plan for the NHS to
“tackle bottlenecks in medical training pathways”
and,
“over the next 3 years, create 1,000 new specialty training posts”.
We know that Professor Sir Stephen Powis and Professor Sir Chris Whitty are overseeing a medical training review, but the NHS is unlikely to achieve what is needed for medical training without a clear costed plan for the NHS overall, which must involve properly addressing the social care crisis. Unless we tackle social care, we cannot tackle the problems of the NHS.
The noble Baroness, Lady Casey, was charged with reviewing social care by the Government elected in July last year, but she did not begin this role until the end of April this year and her initial report is not due until two years after the general election, suggesting that plans for conducting such a review were not made in advance of the election. Her final report is not due until 2028, some four years after the general election, suggesting, again, that much more long grass may be involved on the issue of social care. It is 26 years since the royal commission on long-term care, 14 years since the Dilnot commission and six years since Boris Johnson’s pledge to
“fix the crisis in social care once and for all”.
Bookshelves are full of reports such as these. In the meantime, hospital beds continue to be occupied by people who should be in care but lack somewhere to go or people to look after them.
There is an immediate crisis for community equipment providers, who provide much of what is needed to support disabled people. Their business model may face imminent collapse because local authorities cannot afford to pay them, cannot pay them promptly enough or—as in at least one case—are simply refusing to pay. There is much to do. We need a comprehensive, fully funded workforce plan that genuinely addresses the current shortfalls and the projected needs. This plan must be ambitious, adequately funded and published urgently. The current situation, where thousands of doctors are finishing their foundation programme only to find themselves unable to secure a training post, represents a cliff edge.
This impacts doctors’ morale, potentially leading more towards the industrial action that we seek to avoid, more migration of medical talent and further harm to patient care. The commitment to increasing medical school places must be matched by an equal commitment to expanding postgraduate training capacity, ensuring that every doctor we train has a clear and secure pathway to becoming the consultant or GP of the future.
Lord Kamall (Con)
My Lords, first, I should declare my interests. We are not allowed any more just to say, “I refer my interests as in the register”. Very quickly, I am a professor of politics at St Mary’s University, Twickenham, and I am helping that university set up its medical school at the moment. It wants to tackle some of the issues, becoming an innovative medical school looking at technology and AI, but also at doctors becoming entrepreneurs in their own right. I also teach at the Vinson Centre at the University of Buckingham and, in those seminars, I invite people to come and speak on the future of healthcare. I have worked in the past with the Institute for Economic Affairs, have written on healthcare, and Buckingham itself has a medical school. I hope I have covered all that now.
Having taken that one long minute to declare my interests, I thank my noble friend Lord Lansley for securing this debate and for sharing his experience and concern about the complex environment faced by foundation medical schools seeking to provide specialist training posts in the UK. Indeed, on entering the Chamber today, the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, said to my noble friend and I, “It’s complicated”, and I think this debate shows that it is.
In the UK, we are proud to boast some of the world’s leading universities in medicine and science. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the nation watched with admiration as our brilliant scientists and medical experts led the UK in becoming, if not the first, one of the first countries to roll out an approved Covid-19 vaccine. This reflects not only the dedication of our scientific community and excellent research facilities but the effectiveness of well-designed systems and our huge medical experience, some of which has been on display in this Room today.
The noble Lord, Lord Kakkar, spoke of the continuum in medical training. After graduating from medical school in the UK, graduates enter the NHS’s two-year foundation programme, where they are exposed to a variety of medical specialties. Following this, they are supposed to embark on specialty training.
However, as many noble Lords have pointed out, in recent years, UK-trained medical graduates have struggled to secure a speciality training post. Recent Answers to Written Parliamentary Questions asked by my noble friend Lord Howe and I reveal the scale of the problem. In 2024, there was only one medical oncology specialist training post in the north-east training region. For paediatric training, at stages 3 and 4, in 2024 there was again only one space available in the north-east and two in the West Midlands. Furthermore, in 2024 there were 14,104 foundation programme training places in England, but only 7,929 level 1 speciality medical training posts, meaning that there were almost half the number of speciality posts available for those in foundation training.
If we look at the competition for postgraduate places, as other noble Lords have said, there has been an increase in the ratio from 1.9 applications per place in 2019 to nearly five applications per place in 2024. As my noble friend Lord Lansley said, it has been suggested that this is partly due to international medical graduates being able to apply under the same conditions as doctors in the UK.
As someone who teaches in UK universities, I believe our education system benefits from foreign students. They are good for the UK’s soft power, the health systems in the countries these trainees come from and return to, or even places our British trainees go to. I believe we should continue to train world-leading doctors. If the problem identified by my noble friend Lord Lansley is left unaddressed, it could lead to a transformation in the make-up of our doctors and a decline in opportunities for British graduates. As the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, said, it is welcome that priority is being given by this government to UK students. In light of this, may I ask the Minister what action the Government are taking to increase the number of speciality posts available and to fill some of the vacancies referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay?
I have to admit that I have heard from some doctors I met during my time as a Minister, and now as a shadow Minister, that we should focus less on specialism and that we want more people to go into general practice. But the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, just pointed out that there is a bottleneck in GP training. The noble Lord was also absolutely right that social care has to be taken care of.
At this point, I should like to divert slightly, because the late Lord Lipsey and I were working on a cross-party solution to fund social care, but he sadly passed away recently. On behalf of everyone, I pay tribute to Lord Lipsey. I did tell him when he was ill that I would work with another Labour Peer to make sure that we work on a cross-party solution.
As the noble Lord, Lord Kakkar, said, under the previous Conservative Government, former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak unveiled the NHS Long Term Workforce Plan. At the time it was called the most ambitious transformation of NHS staffing in its history. As with any plan, there were critics, but the plan aimed to double medical school places to 15,000 by 2031 and to train 24,000 more nurses and midwives, reducing the reliance on international recruitment by cutting agency spending.
Now that the Government have launched their 10-year plan for healthcare, there are obviously many questions on how this will be delivered and the implications for the workforce. We have heard how the new Government will put aside the previous plan and will produce their own 10-year workforce plan later this year. My noble friend Lord Lansley referred to some of the commitments in the recently published 10-year plan and the noble Lord, Lord Kakkar, rightly raised some fundamental questions that need to be answered. Can the Minister enlighten the Grand Committee on some of the aspects that will be included in that 10-year workforce plan? I know the noble Baroness may have to say that she cannot jump ahead or reveal details, or that it is still being worked on, but could she say whether there are some broad issues that will be tackled at the high level, without necessarily giving numbers? I understand that it is always a challenge to ask a Minister about specific issues in advance of a plan.
Although foreign students are good for our education system, can the Minister clarify what more specific actions will be taken to ensure that there are more opportunities for new UK medical graduates. We should be clear that this is not an anti-foreigner sentiment at all. It is good that we can train people from all around the world—good for our universities, our economy and the countries they will go to. As a country, we will benefit from this in the future, but there are some fundamental questions that all noble Lords have asked. I know the noble Baroness may not be able to answer all of them at the moment, but it is critical that we address these crucial bottlenecks and understand how we can ensure that, while we want to see more students trained and new medical schools may be opening, including the one I am helping with at St Mary’s University in Twickenham, we make sure there are opportunities—to tackle not only the bottleneck but the other side of that bottleneck. Then we can make sure that those trainees, whether British or otherwise, can go on to deliver world-class care in our National Health Service and beyond.
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)
My Lords, I apologise to the Committee; I should have declared my interests. I am an observer on the Medical Schools Council, I chair the Bevan Commission in Wales and I hold the chair at Cardiff University.
Baroness in Waiting/Government Whip (Baroness Blake of Leeds) (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, for instigating this debate and the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, and noble Lords for their contributions. We have had a rich discussion. I will not be able to answer all the points raised, as I am sure noble Lords are aware, but this is extremely topical and essential to determining the way forward through the 10-year plan and the workforce plan, as noble Lords have referred to. To pick up on what the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, said, at a time when morale is quite low across the piece, for reasons we do not need to go into now, focusing on how we harness potential and make entry into these professions fit for purpose, exciting and rewarding must be at the heart of everything we do.
We must be honest that the Government have inherited a system where competition for specialty training posts has grown significantly in recent years. In 2024, there were 4.7 applications per training post, an increase from 2.4 in 2020. That is a significant change. We recognise the frustration this has caused resident doctors and that their career progression is becoming a lot more complicated. I reassure the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, that we are committed to tackling this.
There are multiple reasons why competition ratios have grown. As a result of changes to the Immigration Rules in 2020, international graduates have been able to apply on equal terms with domestic graduates. We are also seeing more people graduate from UK medical schools, as we have heard. More domestic graduates are entering training, a number of private medical schools have opened and some UK universities now run medical courses at overseas campuses. All this creates a perfect storm. Like the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, we welcome the increase in the number of graduates, but we need to work on managing the process of dealing with it.
As a Government, we have consistently acknowledged the concerns of resident doctors and are actively working to address them. As set out in the 10 Year Health Plan for England published on 3 July, we recognise that we need to work across government to prioritise UK medical graduates for foundation training. We will also prioritise UK medical graduates and other doctors who have worked in the NHS for a significant period for specialty training. We recognise that internationally trained staff remain an important part of the workforce, but there is an explicit understanding that we have become overreliant on them and must address this, as the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, mentioned.
We are aware of the concerns about specialty places, particularly in certain specialties. Without doubt, the NHS and universities must do more to get doctors into the specialties where the NHS and patients—we must remember patients’ needs throughout this—need them. As I said, the Government will address this head-on. As the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, mentioned, the flow of this is critical.
To respond to the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, our 10-year health plan commits to creating 1,000 new specialty training posts over the next three years, with a focus on specialties where there is greatest need. I will have to write to the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, on his point about this. We cannot make specific geographic commitments, but we recognise that this is an issue. That is why the 10-year plan focuses on neighbourhood planning, bringing together all the experts in an area.
The 10-year workforce plan will be published later this year to create a workforce ready to deliver a transformed service. This is becoming a bit repetitive, but I have to say to the noble Lord, Lord Kamall, that I cannot pre-empt the outcome of that work. However, it is significant. We recognise the comments on bottlenecks and emergency medicine and the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Kakkar, on locally employed doctors—a fundamental part of the picture—and the need for clarity. That absolutely runs through the work we are doing.
So the workforce will be more empowered, more flexible and more fulfilled. The whole basis running through the 10-year workforce plan is to ensure that the NHS has the right people in the right places with the right skills to care for patients when they need it. I emphasise to the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, that social care runs through this. We absolutely recognise that it is critical that we deal with this. We want to make sure that the noble Baroness, Lady Casey, is allowed to get on with the work. She is committed to working cross-party and bringing all the experts together to tackle this. I did not know about the work that the noble Lord, Lord Kamall, was doing with Lord Lipsey, and I am grateful for his comments.
The noble Lord, Lord Kakkar, asked about how this will be done. It is a huge amount of work, and he is absolutely right to focus on how it will be done. The important thing is that we are asking the question. Given our reform plan, what workforce do we need? What should they do? Where should they be deployed? What skills should they have? This is reflected in the three shifts in the 10-year plan. We will use a range of methods to determine this, including traditional modelling, of course, and in discussion with those who deliver these services, local system leaders and planners, higher education institutions, which are absolutely critical in this, and, of course, the royal colleges. It is critical that our whole workforce is fit for the future, and we are determined to make that happen.
Interesting comments were made about a portfolio approach. The medical training review was launched in February, the consultation has come back in and we are looking forward to the report.
The Government have also committed to training thousands of new GPs. Perhaps I should have declared that my son is a GP—he got through—so I have had some personal experience in this area. It is important that we all pool our collective experience. We are committed to training thousands of new GPs and are already well on the way, having recruited an additional 1,900, and there will be an additional 250 later this year. But it is critical that we then address how they will be employed in the current estate, for example. That of course is addressed in the 10-year plan.
I want to reassure all noble Lords who mentioned concern about clinical academic roles. We will reverse the decline through a collaboration between the Government and major charity funders. The collaboration will fund a year-on-year increase in these roles over the next five years. We are also encouraging additional funders to support clinical future leader fellowships as the scheme develops. We agree that this needs to be a co-produced piece of work across the patch.
As I said, the Government understand the high level of competition. It comes at a time when many doctors are already feeling unhappy with their experience in work and in training. That is why we have laid out the 10-year health plan and the 10-year workforce plan, working together to address these issues.
We have been listening to doctors to make their working lives better. There is much more to do, but the NHS has been making good progress. We want our trainees to stay in this country. We recognise that a number of them go abroad, but many of them come back. We need to be very careful when we analyse the statistics in front of us. We are making progress with the improved exception reporting system, for example, reviewing rotational working and reducing mandatory training, which has been something of a nightmare. NHS England is also delivering the retention programme, working with trusts so they better understand why staff have left.
I thank noble Lords again for their time today. I know it is frustrating at this moment not to be able to answer all the specific questions, but I hope all noble Lords will recognise the significant pieces of work going on—
Lord Lansley (Con)
Just to return to a point I mentioned about supporting professional activities as part of consultant job plans, I think it would be very helpful if the Minister would say that, notwithstanding the prioritisation of delivering on things such as waiting list targets, consultant job plans must make provision in their contracts for them to commit their time to training activity.
Baroness Blake of Leeds (Lab)
I would be surprised if that was not already under consideration and, when the pieces that have been out to consultation come back in, I would expect that that would be part of the consideration. I certainly recognise the significance of the noble Lord’s comments.
I just want to reinforce that, as well as being in delivery mode, the Government are in listening mode. Over too many years, there has not been enough listening and enough recognising that people out there in the workplace have a lot of the solutions to some of the problems we are facing. It is complex and challenging, but the prize at the end of this work is well worth striving for and I look forward to updating noble Lords as we go forward.
Online Communication Offence Arrests
(1 day, 11 hours ago)
Grand CommitteeRead Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Lebedev
To ask His Majesty’s Government what estimate they have made of the number of people arrested daily for non-threatening, online communication offences, and what assessment they have made of the implications of such arrests for freedom of speech.
Lord Lebedev (CB)
My Lords, I am grateful to have the opportunity to discuss the question of free speech this afternoon and look forward to hearing from the Minister in due course. I know how seriously he takes concerns that have been expressed across parties in this House and the other place, and I hope that we can find consensus.
Free speech is the foundational freedom, the freedom on which all our liberties depend. We recognise that parliamentarians in both Houses cannot do their jobs of checking abuses of power and upholding freedoms without having their right to free speech protected, and parliamentary privilege has long existed to defend just that right. But free speech—the ability to provoke, challenge, argue and dissent—should not be a privilege extended to a few; it is the essential right of all citizens. There is no cause so noble, no argument so sound, that it does not deserve to be challenged. Beliefs we now regard as antique, ridiculous or pernicious were once orthodoxies, which were overturned only because dissident voices challenged them. Restricting the vote solely to men who held property, maintaining a legal ban on homosexual acts and believing that prices and incomes should be controlled by legislation are all now seen as past follies. All were once the present wisdom, all discarded only because of brave dissidents.
For me, the word “dissident” has a special resonance. I grew up in Soviet Russia, a regime in which expressing the wrong opinion led to imprisonment. A famous house on Granovsky Street, where I grew up, had once been home to the likes of Khrushchev, Molotov and Trotsky. During my childhood, the presence of secret policemen, there ostensibly to protect us, was a constant reminder that a word out of place could mean cancellation in its most brutal form. In that environment of oppression, I came to admire those who were the dissidents, who spoke out so that others might live free—the Sakharovs, Brodskys and Solzhenitsyns. I have sought to honour their memory in my work as a media proprietor, always seeking to champion voices that challenge. Sadly, today, my motherland is not much better.
Comparisons with the Soviet era may seem overwrought to some. In the England of my boyhood, they would certainly have been misplaced. But consider this: in November last year a journalist, Allison Pearson, had the police at her door for a single tweet. In January this year, two parents were arrested by eight officers and detained in a cell for six hours for private messages on a WhatsApp group. In May this year, the heroic human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell was arrested for displaying a placard criticising the terrorist organisation Hamas. Last month, the Turkish human rights campaigner Hamit Coskun was found guilty of a criminal offence in court for burning a Koran. This month there have been reports of a police investigation into what a musical act at Glastonbury said on stage, and also calls from elected representatives for the arrest of a columnist, Rod Liddle, for what he said about that music festival. These are all examples of criminal justice, the system that is there to defend our freedoms, being deployed to investigate, intimidate and punish those with dissident positions.
You do not need to admire any of the people I mentioned above to find this deeply concerning. You can think them rude, mistaken or offensive, but the right to free speech means nothing if it does not mean the right to offend. I dislike the symbolism and reality of book burning but, to make a man a criminal—to find him guilty of the crime of racially or religiously aggravated hatred—for the expression of an opinion is to bring back blasphemy laws by the back door. I find calls from a public stage for soldiers to die sickening but, once we start telling artists what they can and cannot say—no matter how offensive it is—we strangle art in its cradle.
The tendency to police—literally—what people are saying has been encouraged and enabled by not just this Government but their predecessors. The Malicious Communications Act 1988 and the Communications Act 2003, specifically Sections 1 and 127, give the police the power to arrest individuals for what they say online. On average, 30 people are arrested daily. In 2014, under the coalition Government, something called non-crime hate incidents were introduced—words uttered that are not yet criminal in themselves but which the police should officially record none the less and hold against people. Since 2014, more than 133,000 such incidents have been recorded; that is more than 13,000 each year. Some of those who have had their names recorded in police files are children whose words were taken down when they were below the age of criminal responsibility and may be held against them for the rest of their lives. The innocence of youth has been replaced with the presumption of guilt.
The think tank Policy Exchange has estimated that investigating these incidents has taken up to 666,000 hours of police time. Every hour devoted to policing speech is an hour not spent investigating phone theft, shoplifting, burglary or assault. When this is juxtaposed with 90% of all crime going unsolved in 2023 and 89% of violent or sexual offences going unsolved in 2024, it is hard to conceive of a worse waste of police time. It is perhaps no surprise that Britain’s most effective police chief— Sir Stephen Watson, the chief constable of Greater Manchester—has stated that this policy is now “past its sell-by date”. He knows that Manchester is safer when his officers are chasing violent muggers rather than egregious tweeters. Sir Stephen enjoys the support of Manchester’s Labour mayor, the commonsensical Andy Burnham. I hope the Minister will follow his lead.
I had hoped that this Government, with a Prime Minister and an Attorney-General who are distinguished human rights lawyers who have represented unfashionable causes and unpopular defendants, would understand how important it is to allow dissent. But there has been no move to get rid of non-crime hate incidents and no clear message in defence of free expression. Indeed, as this House learned only last week, former Attorney-General Dominic Grieve has been asked by this Government to further restrict free speech by introducing a new definition of Islamophobia, designed to punish those who dare to question certain beliefs. What impact does the Minister believe Government-sanctioned restrictions on free speech, on Islamophobia grounds, would have had on reporting into the grooming gangs scandals? Would it have made the work of brave reporters such as Andrew Norfolk on uncovering the Rotherham scandal easier or more difficult? I think we know the answer.
I hope the Minister will give those of us who wish him well reason to believe that Labour—the party of George Orwell, Michael Foot and Tessa Jowell—still understands how precious free expression is and how important it is that we defend it.
Lord Frost (Con)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lebedev, for securing this important debate and for his powerful opening speech. We now live in a world in which everyone, if they wish to, can make their views known to everybody else. It is a world where political debate is not the preserve of a small establishment group but is open to all. Yet not everyone seems comfortable with this, and rather than welcoming this uniquely open debating environment, we find many politicians talking of disinformation and misinformation and even of putting outright bans on certain kinds of speech.
Unfortunately, the British legislative framework gives them plenty of power to make these words reality. Our legal framework potentially criminalises wide categories of speech and messaging. The noble Lord mentioned a couple of them. We have the Communications Act 2003, criminalising “grossly offensive” messages. We have the Malicious Communications Act 1988, criminalising “indecent or grossly offensive” communications. We have the Public Order Act, which criminalises causing harm or distress, including the notoriously broad “stirring up” offences. All these are aggravated if motivated by “hate”. Of course, we also have the Online Safety Act 2023, which criminalises false communication by an individual; it makes fake news literally illegal.
These laws raise a number of problems. First, there is definition creep, with “grossly offensive”, “abusive”, “insulting” and “false”—says who? What these mean, in fact, depends ultimately not on law but on CPS guidance, which can easily be changed in line with prevailing fashion and fashionable beliefs. Secondly, there is the chilling effect. In a country where, clearly, there are problems of immigration and integration, one person’s fair commentary is another’s abuse or insult. For example, is commenting on different characteristics of migrant communities in the UK and crime levels among such communities fair political comment or is it “stirring up” racial hatred? The risk of drifting over that border and committing an offence creates a chilling effect that means that people are frightened to comment.
Thirdly, all these laws were written either well before this great democratisation in political debate or by legislators who had not caught up. They are written for a world of green ink letters and shouting in the street; they are not written for the very punchy, sharp, meme-based, satirical social media world. In my view, these laws should mostly be abolished or at least focus much more clearly on genuine incitement. Until that happens—and I am not exactly holding my breath about it—our only protection is a Government, an establishment or a wider climate of opinion supporting free speech. Unfortunately, of course, we have no such thing.
We know from the Covid era that the commitment to free speech is thin to start with. Politicians of all parties muse about controlling social media further; they often believe that, in this new world, the ill-informed populace is easy prey to false beliefs and conspiracies. The Government are particularly well placed to do that because most misinformation actually comes from Governments. Trump’s supposed collusion with Russia and the Covid lab-leak theory are two outstanding examples of that. On most political issues there is simply no authoritative interpretation of the facts. Instead, what a fact tells you depends on the interpretation you bring to it, what you see as the goals of a policy. The same fact or number can be used to support very different arguments, depending on your prior beliefs, your interpretative framework and what you are trying to achieve. Thus, the only way to reach an outcome is to have a free debate and see who wins the argument.
I worry that we are heading towards a real crisis. There has always been some censorship in Britain—more’s the pity—but, until recently, it was more artistic and cultural, rather than political. We prided ourselves on being a free country in which we could speak freely. We simply cannot say that now. We are, in fact, all vulnerable. Say the wrong thing in the wrong way at the wrong moment, and any of us might find the police at our door. I hope that the Minister will be able to reassure us when he responds.
Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Lebedev, on securing this short but crucial debate on free speech. Usually, when I talk about the concerns that my organisation, the Academy of Ideas, has about the erosion of free speech as a key factor in the public’s distrust of state institutions and fury at feeling that their views are not just ignored but silenced, or when others, such as the noble Lord, Lord Young of Acton, talk about the work of the Free Speech Union, we get a groan in the House. “There they go again” they say, “scaremongering”, “hyperbolic”, and all the rest of it, so it is great that the issue is being taken seriously today. When, as in May, the Economist headlines with “Europe’s free speech problem” and identifies the UK as one of the most censorious countries, we should all be worried, and I hope that the Government are.
The figures for arrests tell their own story. As we have already heard, there are 12,000 arrests a year, a 58% increase since 2019. I note that the Library briefing for this debate stresses that convictions and sentencing for relevant offences are decreasing dramatically and tells us not to worry, but I find that even more worrying, because it suggests that arrest is being used promiscuously to set an example, a warning to others that if they post or say the wrong thing, the police will turn up at their door, enforcers of conformism and suppressers of dissent, regardless of the law.
The journalist Fraser Myers recently asked:
“So what are we allowed to say in Britain that won’t get us arrested?”
Something certainly seems to have gone awry in the police and criminal justice system. Every force in the country has a team of officers sifting through people’s posts, trying to determine whether they cross some undefined line. The Economist, discussing this special zealotry, concludes:
“It is much easier to catch Instagram posters then thieves; the evidence is only a mouse-click away.”
Does the Minister worry that the police indeed seem to have become distracted?
Some of the detail in recent high-profile cases suggest skewed priorities. The noble Lord, Lord Lebedev, has already referred to the Times Radio producer Maxie Allen and his partner, who were arrested for the crime of posting disparaging messages about their daughter’s school in a private WhatsApp group, but the detail that I noticed was that Mr Allen’s partner asked the police officer for an example of malicious communication. The detective stared blankly and then had to google the crime.
There is the case of the Met Police intelligence unit, which usually deals with terrorism and extremism, sending Kent Police to investigate tweets from Julian Foulkes, a former police officer, about the rise of antisemitism since the 7 October pogrom. The body-cam footage from that raid showed a police officer rifling through Mr Foulkes’s book collection and expressing alarm at some of the “very Brexity” things on his shelf. Does the Minister, like me, wince when he hears that and wonder whether the police have become politicised in their actions and what they are up to? I am worried that the police will lose credibility over this.
On Saturday 29 June, 20 year-old Montgomery Toms, known as Monty, was arrested while standing alone quietly at the side of the London Pride march. His crime was wearing a handmade cardboard sandwich board showing a “trans flag = mental illness” message. Monty left the scene when approached by two officers but, two streets away, he was surrounded by 11 officers, handcuffed, held in solitary confinement for nine hours at Charing Cross police station and, while not charged with a crime, placed on pre-charge bail conditions. Such ludicrous overreach led Douglas Murray to write in the Spectator that if Monty had wanted to avoid being arrested, he should have worn a pro-jihad sign; or, even better, have indulged in a bout of phone thefts, and then he would not have seen a police officer for miles.
I do not want to just blame the police here: they take their direction from the top. The message is clear: speech crimes are on a par with or even more dangerous then real crimes. The UK Government’s public information campaign in relation to the riots was menacing. “Think before you post”, was their meme. The public fury about the excessive 31-month sentence for Lucy Connolly’s offensive Facebook message about setting fire to hotels was partly because Philip Prescott, an actual rioter who physically attacked a mosque, was sentenced to only 28 months. No wonder the police see online communication as on a par with violent actions.
Finally on the data, we need to note that communications offences are not the only gauge of attacks on free speech. Criminal lawyer Luke Gittos warns us that public order legislation, especially stirring up hatred, as we have heard, is being defined too broadly and making people feel too
“scared to speak out about important topics in case they face criminal prosecution”.
Mr Gittos recently successfully defended an ex-Royal Marine, Jamie Michael, charged with that offence simply for posting a video of himself ranting about illegal migration. He was held for 17 days, but acquitted in 17 minutes by a jury, and Mr Gittos reminds us that the jury system often acts at a curb on the worst excesses of the state. Now even that is under attack. Can the Minister assure us that it will be protected?
Lord Sarfraz (Con)
My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Lebedev, on securing this timely debate. I know that he has been a great champion of the media and free speech for many years.
At the heart of this debate lies the matter of ensuring that the police have the resources, tools and training to arrest the right people, without compromising freedom of speech or privacy online. We cannot expect the 45 territorial police forces in this country suddenly to get it right. There are more than 33 social platforms with over 100 million monthly active users. Each is very different, with different interfaces, community rules and approaches to content monitoring. To expect police officers to do their offline jobs while monitoring online non-threatening communication is very difficult. To meet the challenges of the future, the police need the tools of the future. I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say about that.
What might it look like? First, we need to get the basic tech right. The police national database has not been upgraded since 2019. That is a lifetime in tech; their systems are pretty much obsolete. That is the database that records data on arrests that have not led to conviction, which goes to the very heart of the Question from the noble Lord, Lord Lebedev. If the police are not able to efficiently collect and manage data, they can hardly use it in a useful way.
One promising area is predictive policing. A number of trials are happening around the country, and the focus is on crime prevention—for example, trying to predict where a discussion in a group is heading before it escalates. Like all tech, it has great potential but must be deployed ethically to avoid overpolicing. Like all these things, the platforms have and will continue to have an important role to play.
Let us take, for example, basic content filtering. If you turn on Google’s SafeSearch, there is a pretty decent chance that you will not receive harmful content when you do a search, but that is really difficult to do on a messaging platform, for example. There is no setting on WhatsApp to block explicit unwanted photographs from coming in. The tech exists and is being trialled on a number of platforms, but these tools are still optional and require users to opt in. Perhaps they should be the defaults, requiring users to opt out instead of using opt-in filters.
One other big area of potential is AI-powered content moderation. This is real-time monitoring of content, analysing text, images and videos to identify non-threatening but potentially very harmful content. Several platforms are trialling this but we do not yet have the standards for deployment around transparency, accuracy and bias mitigation. Just as we are putting technology at the heart of our defence and national security strategy, we must facilitate innovation across all forces, not just within specialist units. Only then will we have arrests that lead to conviction and only then can we do a better job of ensuring a free and open internet.
Lord Strathcarron (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Lebedev, for this debate. I declare an interest as an author and publisher. With the noble Lord’s blessing, I should like to extend the Question from freedom of speech to freedom of expression, as non-crime hate incidents, which I believe are in scope of the Question, affect the written word just as much as the spoken word. I am talking about authors rather than journalists or users of social media.
Apart from targeting high-profile authors such as JK Rowling, the mere existence of non-crime hate incidents has a deterring effect on all authors’ freedom of expression, not because they have committed a crime—after all, we are talking specifically about a non-crime—but because non-crimes nevertheless affect authors through the three first cousins of non-crime hate incidents: cancel culture, which can ruin an author’s career; the empowering of the Twitter mob, who can endanger an author’s physical safety and mental well-being; and mealy-mouthed publishers employing sensitivity readers to scour texts for anything that someone somewhere might find offensive and use non-crime hate incidents and its first cousins in retaliation, thus stifling freedom of expression.
Fortunately for those of us who believe in free markets, although the censors may have the first word, the readers often have the last word. After Puffin Books sanitised Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, there was outrage from not just literary figures of all persuasions but even politicians, such as the generational smoking ban enthusiast Rishi Sunak. Customers voted with their bookmarks and, consequently, the rereleased original version by Penguin Classics continues to outsell the neutered Puffin version by three to one—but still it persists.
As a publisher, I have a worrying example in front of me now: a title called The History of Islamic Art, written by an Oxford University postgraduate. The work includes a study of images depicting the Prophet Mohammed. As the book points out, and as is well known by Islamic scholars—including the Koranic scholar who addressed the Islamophobia meeting that many of us here were at yesterday—the banning of such images is a fairly recent Sunni phenomenon. The fact is that such portrayals continue to this day among the Shia and other sects. However, such is the febrile atmosphere created by non-crime hate incidents and its cousins that Oxford University Press turned the book down purely in fear of a reaction to it by the student mob. I am pleased to say that we are going to publish it—and with an American co-edition, so the book will enjoy a far wider circulation than it would otherwise have had. Again, this is proof that censorship is counterproductive for those who propose it.
Talking of counterproductivity, I agree with Sir Andy Marsh, the chief constable of the College of Policing, who addressed many of those of us who are here, as members of the free speech Peers’ group, about three months ago. Last month, he said that non-crime hate incidents should be scrapped and that police officers should refocus on crime rather than non-crime. It is not as though non-crime hate incidents actually do any good. As freedom of information requests have shown, there is no evidence at all that, nationally, they are even logged properly or prevent crime.
Scrapping them would also help the police recover their reputation as they become a laughing stock in their overreaction to thought crime while leaving real crime more or less completely undetected. It has got to the stage where, if you have been burgled, the police will not come round unless you also tweet that the burglar was in some way being dishonest, in which case half the force will descend on you. The problem that the Minister might address—apart from encouraging the Home Secretary, who seems worryingly keen on non-crime hate incidents—is that different forces completely ignore the College of Policing’s guidance. This begs the question, “What is the point of the College of Policing in the first place?”, but that is a question for another day.
Lord Kempsell (Con)
I declare my interest as a freelance journalist and publisher and, therefore, as somebody who makes his living from freedom of speech. I join noble Lords in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Lebedev, for securing today’s timely and important debate. As I find myself the last Back-Bencher on the speakers’ list, perhaps I might venture to sum up the situation.
Anybody listening to the debate in this Committee today will have concluded that, in 2025, the United Kingdom is in a state of free speech emergency. As we have heard, the police are now making more than 30 arrests a day for online offensive messages—an increase of 121% from 2017. As the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, adumbrated so well, every police force in this country has a dedicated team monitoring social media. My noble friend Lord Frost’s point deserves further weight, to emphasise that, in the modern online world, communication has changed. It is the internet of 2025 that authorities are observing, with memes and rapid forms of communication, when the legislative framework feels as though it was built for the internet of 20 years ago.
I turn to another topic that we are yet to cover in the debate, which is the free speech of parliamentarians. I am now not the only media publisher or journalist in your Lordships’ House; in fact, our number is ever increasing. However, as a publisher, I found myself in January served with the super-injunction—now lifted—that precluded and prevented the reporting of the scandal of the Afghan response route being exposed. I was served with that super-injunction in my capacity as a journalist and reporter. I had no knowledge of the scheme or the policy while in government, but it of course prevented me reporting the facts of this enormous debacle, which is of huge public concern.
Could I have made those points in your Lordships’ House? Well, I took advice, and there are limits to parliamentary privilege in both the other place and your Lordships’ House. There are a large number of Ministers and parliamentarians who were also effectively gagged from exposing the truth of this scandal to the public, even in Parliament. In a rare note of congratulation, I note that the Government have, in my view, done completely the right thing in supporting the lifting of this super-injunction. It gives me some regret—and, I am afraid to say, shame—that my own party, the Conservative Party, instituted this super-injunction and supported it while in government. I note, though, that the current Labour Government chose to extend its application until recently.
As I said, there are limits to parliamentary privilege, but there was also a moral dichotomy in this case. Those who were served with the super-injunction were told that breaking it would constitute an immediate and real threat to life but, lo and behold, we now learn from the Government’s own recent review that the basis for that assumption may well have been faulty. That review has cast considerable doubt on the notion that those whose data was subject to the leak were in fact at imminent and real risk. The reviewer wrote:
“There is little evidence of intent by the Taliban to conduct a campaign of retribution against”
former officials. Indeed,
“the wealth of data inherited”
by the Taliban would have already enabled that, notwithstanding the leak of the spreadsheet. That claim has also been repeated by the Talban themselves.
Why was it, then, that parliamentarians were even gagged, let alone the media prevented from reporting this outrageous scandal of high and real public interest? As a parliamentarian, I find it deeply troubling that that was the case. I urge the Government, in their response to the wash-up of these issues, to adumbrate what they will do to ensure that the privilege of parliamentarians is protected and that never again can a scandal on this scale be concealed from the public.
Baroness Meyer (Con)
My Lords, like the noble Lord, Lord Lebedev, I too consider freedom of speech very close to my heart for personal reasons. My mother was born the day before the Russian Revolution, in February 1917. I can only imagine my grandmother, having just given birth, hearing the chants of over 100,000 women marching through Petrograd demanding bread. They were soon joined by peasants, workers and soldiers, exhausted by war. The Tsar was forced to abdicate and a provisional Government was formed, but Soviet committees quickly sprang up. By March, the revolution had spread across all of Russia.
Amid the chaos, Germany saw its chance and transported Lenin from exile in Switzerland to Petrograd. He called for
“All power to the Soviets”
and the overthrow of Kerensky’s fragile Government. In October, Lenin seized power. One of his first acts was to establish the Cheka, his secret police. Anyone deemed a threat was arrested, deported or executed. That is how most of my grandparents’ family disappeared.
Once in power, Lenin built a one-party state, starting with the restriction of any political opposition and the arrest and deportation of anyone who did not support communism. Titles and ranks were abolished. Land was confiscated from landowners and farmers. All schools were brought under state control to include ideological teaching. Newspapers were censored. Political opposition was suppressed. Workers’ rights increased, and there was a reduction of working hours. A state planning body—Gosplan—was established. Does it all sound very familiar?
These policies devastated Russia. Industrial output fell by 40%. Some 6 million people died of famine. Then came Stalin’s purges, the reign of terror, where more of my family were arrested and executed, and another 1.2 million people perished. These events destroyed a civilisation and replaced it with a regime built on fear and silence. We must not assume it could never happen again.
Today, in Britain, we face a quieter, but troubling, assault on freedom of expression. This is not the mark of a confident democracy. Once the state begins to police thought and language, the line between protection and repression vanishes. Freedom of speech is not a luxury. It is the foundation of all liberties. Let us not ignore the lessons of history. If we allow fear or ideology to override our freedoms, history may not just echo, it may repeat itself, and on our own soil. Will the Minister agree to revise and scrap the non-hate crimes that make our freedom of speech practically impossible?
Baroness Doocey (LD)
My Lords, as I understand it, this debate was not about non-crime hate incidents; it was about non-threatening online communication offences, so I shall confine my remarks to that.
Many of the points I would have made have already been made and it has been a very interesting debate. Those arrested under these laws are considered to have communicated something that has been deemed grossly offensive, indecent, obscene or menacing, or to have said something false, intending to cause distress, annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety.
I want to highlight two issues, which I think are very important, which have not yet been covered. In some cases, this will not be a difficult call for the police to make, but in others, the judgment call will inevitably be much harder. In practice, these cases are often very complex. Arrests for malicious communications are rarely made in isolation; they frequently overlap with sexual offending, harassment, or hate crime. We also know that some police forces include serious domestic abuse-related crimes within this category. This complexity makes it difficult to isolate online offences in the data, or to calculate how many might rightly be classified as “non-threatening”.
Nevertheless, as other noble Lords have mentioned, arrests for malicious communication have risen sharply—up by nearly 60% between 2019 and 2023. But although the police are making more arrests, many of these cases never get to court. Some of this will be because of huge court backlogs—some cases are now being listed for 2029, which almost beggars belief—but the falling conviction rate also raises legitimate questions about how the police are enforcing these laws, with genuine concern that, in some cases, their approach may be too heavy-handed, with implications for freedom of speech.
We can change laws and update guidance, but fundamentally we must ensure that our front-line police officers receive the training necessary to respond proportionately and effectively in these often sensitive situations. Yet the police workforce is now less experienced than at any time since records began. As of last year, more than one in three officers had fewer than five years of service. Despite this, there has been no independent review of police training since 2018, which I find frankly disgraceful. The Minister will be aware that HMICFRS has linked inexperienced officers and inadequate training and support to poor investigation standards. It has also repeatedly recommended independent evaluation processes and better feedback mechanisms. What steps are the Government taking to address this serious issue?
Secondly, improved accountability for social media platforms is long overdue. This is not universally popular. Indeed, whenever this is raised, the big tech companies and even some high-profile international figures express concern. Can the Minister assure us that the Government will not water down vital protections under pressure from either industry or abroad? Protections against online harm must not come at the expense of free speech, but neither is free speech absolute. Online abuse can have a devastating impact on lives. Criminal sanctions must be applied proportionately, with appropriate safeguards in place.
In conclusion, we must strike a careful balance. The Government must ensure that police officers receive the training and support they need to make difficult judgment calls. Police powers must be exercised wisely, and online platforms must be held accountable. More than anything else, victims must have confidence that the law is on their side.
Lord Sandhurst (Con)
My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Lebedev, for securing this debate and for his compelling opening speech.
Freedom of expression is a fundamental right for us. Recently, the future of free speech on the internet has become a contentious topic in the United Kingdom. It is right that we examine the implications of this trend for our society and democracy. The noble Lord, Lord Kempsell, has also raised interesting questions regarding the Afghan super-injunction. I cannot go there today.
In 2023 alone, the police made 12,183 arrests under Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and Section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988. Of those arrested, fewer than 10%—some 1,119—have been convicted and sentenced. The criteria for arrest appear seriously flawed. Police are wasting their own time.
Freedom of speech is a right of the utmost importance, but I acknowledge that it is not unqualified. Under the previous Conservative Government, the Online Safety Act created new offences for false and threatening communications online. Its prohibitions, if properly and sensibly applied, are sensible. They include content relating to child sexual abuse, extreme sexual violence, extreme pornography, the promotion or facilitation of suicide, sexual exploitation and promoting terrorism. All of that is obviously right. Our concern should be to criminalise violence and words leading to acts which harm our citizens, but not merely what offends some people. That includes blasphemy or so-called blasphemy. At a meeting with President Trump and Vice-President Vance, the Prime Minister defended the United Kingdom’s stance on freedom of speech. He promised to protect this right for a very long time, but is that being done?
The noble Lord, Lord Strathcarron, made compelling observations about non-crime hate speech. As I have shown, thousands have been arrested and questioned for messages that have somehow upset others but have not ended in conviction. Our police must be getting too many things badly wrong; that must cease. Let me give an example. Earlier this year, Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine were arrested by at least six police officers. They had expressed concerns on a WhatsApp group about their daughter’s primary school. The chief constable later conceded:
“With the benefit of hindsight, we could have achieved the same ends in a different way”.
Did they really need hindsight to see that sending six police officers to a suburban house was unnecessary? This case raises serious concerns around the treatment of those arrested. It raises questions about the thoughtless interpretation of legislation. In that case, and in many others, did no senior officer ask: “Is this really criminal activity? Do we need to send six officers?”
We on this side of the Committee are clear that free speech is being mispoliced. This is serious. Those in authority must cease intrusive bullying and we, as legislators, must act to prevent this continuing. As I have explained, the intentions behind the current legislation are worthy and legitimate, but let us all remember that the way to hell is paved with good intentions. We must be free to provoke, to challenge, to dissent and, within reason, to offend. We rightly pursue the removal of harmful and dangerous content online, but the ability to speak freely is a defining pillar of our democratic society. In common law, everything is permitted that is not forbidden by law; that truism goes back to the 19th century and Dicey.
Is the Minister confident that police resources are being directed properly in this field? Will the Government issue guidance to ensure that, while probable online offences are properly examined, freedom of expression is robustly protected for all United Kingdom citizens? I hope that the Minister will set out what the Government intend to do to restore public confidence, to uphold the law as it was intended and to ensure that freedom of expression is protected in the United Kingdom.
The Minister of State, Home Office (Lord Hanson of Flint) (Lab)
My Lords, I welcome this debate. As of this week, I have been in your Lordships’ House just over a year and today is the first opportunity I have had to exchange views with the noble Lord, Lord Lebedev. I appreciate the opportunity to do so and thank him for the powerful case that he made and the arguments he has put forward. I thank noble Lords from across the House—though mostly not from my side of it—for their contributions to this debate.
I want to make an initial statement which, I hope, will resonate with noble Lords across the Committee. The Government are clear that freedom of speech is a fundamental right and underpins our democratic society. I stood at the Dispatch Box in the wake of the offences committed in the August riots last year, after three young girls were murdered, and set out clear boundaries on those issues. However, I also said that there was an important point around protest and people expressing a view on political issues.
I have said things that are controversial. I have stood in open debate as a Member of Parliament, as a Member of this House and as a person outside both Houses. I have undertaken protests against causes that I felt were unjust. I have ensured that, within the legal framework, individuals are allowed to express their views freely. That is sometimes controversial and unpopular but, as even the noble Lord, Lord Sandhurst, just echoed, freedom of speech comes with responsibilities and is rightly qualified by legislation from Governments of my party and of other political parties.
The law rightly sets proportional limitations where necessary to protect public safety, to prevent crime, and to safeguard the rights of others, particularly minorities. That legal framework also ensures that individuals are protected from criminal conduct, including threatening, harassing and abusive behaviour. The Government are clear that there is freedom of speech, but that freedom of speech cannot be used as a justification for breaking the law. That means that that speech must not incite criminal activity that this House—and the House of Commons—have deemed to be a line in the sand. Non-threatening communication offences are captured across multiple pieces of legislation to which noble Lords have referred to today.
Section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988, passed under the Government of Mrs Thatcher—who I spoke out and protested against in a free and open society—was passed in 1988. That concerns messages of an
“indecent or grossly offensive nature”
and I hope that there is a shared understanding across this House that messages that are indecent or grossly offensive do cross a line. Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003—passed by the Government of Tony Blair, in which I served as a Minister—again looked at messages which are obscene or menacing, or persistently making use of public electronic communication networks in a way that encourages those offences. I do not know whether noble Lords want to see that repealed. Let us discuss it and we will see where the line in the sand is drawn.
The Online Safety Act 2023, passed by the Government of Rishi Sunak, which the noble Lord, Lord Sandhurst, mentioned, includes new communication offences—including false communication offences—and deals with a range of issues, including issues of sexual abuse and exploitation. That is a line that both Houses have drawn, and I reference those three Acts because they are from three different political parties from even within, dare I say, several different shades of blue within the Conservative Party. That is a complex area, but it has been agreed to be a line in the sand. But again, if Members wish to challenge, let us discuss where that line is drawn.
Under our legislation,—and I hope this reassures the noble Lord, Lord Lebedev, and others who have spoken—arrests by the police are manifestations of what the public expect them to do, which is to enforce the law as passed by both these Houses, without fear or favour, based on the information they have—or is put before them—at the time. The police are operationally independent. Noble Lords would not wish me to be directing the chief constable of Greater Manchester to make arrests, or indeed to not make arrests. That is not the job of a Policing Minister, nor does it come under policing responsibilities in the Home Office.
We do expect the police, who are operationally independent, to fully investigate potential alleged offences, to work with the Crown Prosecution Service—which will test whether the police have acted fairly—and, if they both believe that there is a case to answer, to put it before a jury of 12 good and true peers, who will determine, rightly or wrongly, whether an offence has been committed. That is the basis of where we are today. In response to the Noble Lord’s initial headline for this debate, we do not collect or publish data on the number of arrests by police forces for communication offences as such. However, it is not unlawful to be arrested—it does not mean you have committed the crime. Many of those arrests do not lead to crimes which go before the court, because the CPS has tested them and/or the police themselves have determined that it is not appropriate to do so. Importantly, however, through freedom of information requests to police forces, arrest data under the offences can be gathered and the findings have suggested that the number of arrests has broadly doubled in the past seven or so years.
In response to a couple of the points that have been made, first to the noble Lord, Lord Sarfraz, there has been £1 billion in extra investment in policing this year: £1 billion over last year’s investment that is being put to local police forces, 43 across the country. It is important they look at modernising the equipment that they have and making sure that they are fit for purpose.
The noble Baroness, Lady Fox, and others asked where the boundary will be drawn. We have talked about challenges with AI and there will be further challenges in future. It is important that we reflect on those issues in a positive way and that this legislation is enforced, but at the moment our police focus as a Government is on neighbourhood policing, tackling knife crime and violence against women and girls, increasing the number of neighbourhood police officers and putting 13,000 more police on the street to give community resilience and support. The legislation is there—if Members do not like it, in this democracy they can put forward amendments to try to change it—for the police to operate in a fair and appropriate way.
The noble Lords, Lord Lebedev, Lord Strathcarron and Lord Kempsell, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Meyer and Lady Doocey, raised non-crime hate incidents. The noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, made an important point about training standards for national police, so that they understand the remit and limit of the current legislation. That is for chief constables, but there is a need for guidance, training and support.
Importantly, the National Police Chiefs’ Council and the College of Policing, at the request of the Home Secretary, are currently undertaking a review of how non-crime hate incidents are dealt with. We expect to see some information from the police on that. It is self-evidently important that some of those incidents help us gather intelligence on potential future crime, but, equally, we do not want the police to do things that waste their time and not focus on the type of crime that the noble Lord rightly mentioned in his introduction. Violent crime, knife crime and sexual grooming are really important issues.
However, that does not get away from the fact that, if someone incites racial hatred or hatred against an individual for their sexuality, that needs to be considered in the framework of the law of the land. If noble Lords have concerns—and a number of views have been expressed today about the operation of this—the bedrock is the legislation currently on the statute book. That has been passed by different Governments of different political parties and it is meant to ensure that we take action to stop harassment, malicious information or potential activity that leads to physical or mental violence. That is what it is designed to do. If noble Lords want to tighten or change that, they should put their proposals before both Houses and let us debate them. I believe in freedom of speech, tempered by the freedom to enjoy life without harassment, attacks or information online that says, “Let’s take action against this individual for what they are doing”, which is beyond their responsibility.
The noble Lord, Lord Kempsell, mentioned the very complex Afghan issue. We in the Home Office have been subject to those injunctions as well. They were passed by the court, not the current Government, who set out their position clearly in a Statement made in the House of Commons earlier in the week and repeated in our House yesterday. I refer him to that, because it sets out the justification for the original injunction, the super-injunction and the Government revising that procedure to date.
I am conscious that I have about one minute left. This has been a useful debate that has surfaced issues that I am trying to respond to in a way that sets out my and the Government’s view in a positive way, but recognises that there will be opportunities for Members to address further the concerns they have expressed. We must remember that online abuse is neither a trivial nor an inconsequential matter. At the heart of each instance that I have mentioned under the legislation is a victim—a person or group of persons—who has been potentially subjected to vile, dreadful abuse. We must also remember that it is a complex area where no data held by the Home Office can draw sufficient conclusions. The police are continually negotiating a difficult balance between freedom of speech and enforcing our laws on malicious communications to make them fair and proportionate. We must support them in doing so. I commend the debate to the Committee. If I have not covered all the points, at least in part, I will reflect on them once Hansard has been read.
India and Pakistan: Peace Representations
Lord Hussain
To ask His Majesty’s Government what representations they have made to the governments of India and Pakistan to bring about peace between the two countries, including with regard to Kashmir and the suspension of the Indus Water Treaty.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Garden of Frognal) (LD)
My Lords, we are starting slightly late, so we will go on to 5.02 pm.
Lord Hussain (LD)
My Lords, I will begin by reminding your Lordships that the issue of Kashmir is the oldest dispute in the history of the United Nations and has been a bone of contention between India and Pakistan since their independence. According to United Nations resolutions in 1948-49 and many subsequent ones, both countries agreed to hold a ceasefire, withdraw their military and help the UN Commission hold a plebiscite. As a result, the ceasefire took place, but the plebiscite did not, hence the state was divided between the two countries, with both claiming the entire area. Both countries have been to war several times over this, but Kashmir remains unresolved and divided.
The human rights situation in the state, particularly in the Indian-controlled part, started deteriorating from day one. With time, Kashmir has become the biggest militarised zone in the world, with 900,000 military and paramilitary personnel operating with complete impunity under the Indian Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act. According to renowned international human rights organisations, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the UN Commission on Human Rights and Genocide Watch, more than 100,000 people have been killed, with many more injured, and thousands are held in detention centres and prisons in Kashmir and other parts of India.
The Indian Army is reported to be involved in illegal detentions, torture, extrajudicial killing, rape, fake encounters and enforced disappearances, while more than 3,000 mass graves have been identified. The Amnesty International report, A ‘Lawless Law’ illustrates a catalogue of cases where individuals were subjected to repeated use of draconian laws such as the Public Safety Act and the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, detaining them in custody from two years to more than 30 years. The victims of a widely publicised case of gang rape in the remote village of Kunan Poshpora, where more than 100 women and girls were reported to have been raped by the Rajputana Rifles 68th Mountain Brigade of the Indian Army, are still waiting for justice.
Prominent Kashmiri leaders Maqbool Bhat and Afzal Guru were hanged and buried in New Delhi’s Tihar prison, while Mirwaiz Mohammed Farooq, Ashfaq Majeed Wani, Burhan Wani and many others were shot dead, and 90 year-old Ali Gilani died under house arrest. Other prominent leaders, including Shabir Shah, Yasin Malik, Asiya Andrabi and dozens of others have spent most of their adult lives in torture cells, detention centres and prisons.
In its reports of 2018 and 2019, the UN Commission on Human Rights asked for free access to both sides of the state to investigate all the reports of human rights abuses, but India has refused to co-operate. Instead, the Indian Government unilaterally abrogated sections 370 and 35A of the Indian constitution, which gave some internal autonomy and preserved the state’s Muslim identity. According to a 2019 Genocide Watch report, Kashmir is at the brink of genocide.
With this grim picture of India’s human rights record in Kashmir, all 1 million British Kashmiris are dismayed to know that the British Government are not even prepared to include a human rights clause in our free trade agreement with India. Many call this double standards. Perhaps the Minister can tell us what more must happen in terms of human rights abuses in Kashmir to convince the British Government to include human rights in our free trade agreement with India. When was the last time our Government raised human rights in Kashmir with their Indian counterparts?
Recent India-Pakistan military clashes started after a massacre of tourists in the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir, which killed 26 innocent tourists. This was a cowardly act of terror, and it received international condemnation. India blamed Pakistan-based insurgent groups for the attack, an allegation Pakistan disputed. It is reported to have offered full co-operation in any joint or international investigation, but India instead announced Operation Sindoor to hit what it called “terrorist infrastructure” in Pakistan and Pakistani-administered Kashmir.
Soon after this terror attack, India closed its border with Pakistan, stopping bilateral trade and unilaterally suspending the Indus Waters Treaty. The treaty was signed in 1960 to regulate the management of the Indus river basin, which is important for supplying both countries with water for irrigation and hydropower. Those tensions turned into a conflict between 6 and 10 May 2025. India and Pakistan conducted a series of military strikes that saw the countries strike deep into each other’s territory, and civilians and soldiers killed on both sides of the line of control.
One of these Indian strikes hit a residential area in my parental town of Kotli in Azad Kashmir, where some of my close relatives escaped very narrowly, while two of their neighbours were not so lucky and were killed while asleep in their homes. The scale of the recent conflict took many international observers by surprise, leading to fears of further escalation between two countries which both possess nuclear weapons.
According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, this is the first time India and Pakistan have engaged in drone warfare in their rivalry, indicating a new era of technological conflict in the region. Similarly, the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada noted how close the conflict came to sensitive sites in both countries, including nuclear command and control installations.
International mediation, including the British Foreign Secretary and American President Donald Trump, who offered to help resolve disputes, including the Kashmir issue, and greater trade with both countries, secured a ceasefire on 10 May 2025. Despite that ceasefire agreement, according to Al Jazeera on 22 June 2025, the Indian Home Minister Amit Shah reportedly said that India would “never” restore the Indus Waters Treaty and that the water flowing there would be diverted for internal use. Pakistan has previously suggested that any such move would breach the terms of the treaty and would constitute an act of war. Using water as a weapon of war is a highly dangerous and inhumane act. Water is a lifeline for the people of Pakistan and any attempt by India to disrupt the water supply would have serious consequences. Hence, I ask the British Government to use their friendly relations with India to encourage it to restore the Indus Waters Treaty with Pakistan to avoid any future conflict on this issue.
The ceasefire agreement of 10 May 2025 is hugely welcomed by all, but the world has seen many ceasefires signed by both countries in the past, with commitments to resolve disputes—including Kashmir—peacefully, and they have never reached an agreement for the past 78 years. I therefore believe that third-party mediation is the only way to get the leadership of both countries to sit down and agree on a settlement, taking the aspirations of the people of Kashmir on board. The road to long-lasting and sustainable peace in the region goes through Kashmir. As long as this open wound keeps bleeding, any prospect of peace in the region will remain pie in the sky.
The majority of the people in India, Pakistan and Kashmir want peace. Now that the US President has made the offer to help to resolve the Kashmir issue to bring peace, stability and prosperity in the region, countries such as Britain must seize this opportunity and join these efforts to bring a solution to this issue that is acceptable to India, Pakistan and the people of Kashmir. Finally, I ask the Minister whether the British Government would join the mediation efforts to bring peace between India and Pakistan.
Lord Parekh (Lab)
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Hussain, on securing and initiating this debate. I will not pay particular attention in this address to the question of Kashmir. For me, Kashmir is a legacy of the partition of India. If the partition had not taken place, Kashmir would have had a very different character. To link Kashmir and India in this way is a mistake, because Kashmiri Islam has very little in common with Indian Islam. It is also the case that Kashmiris define themselves primarily as Kashmiris, rather than as Hindus or Muslims. So, left to itself, the Kashmiri problem would have been solved in a normal, amicable, political manner.
Thanks to the partition, the Kashmir issue has become acute. The partition in turn took place as a result of the British Empire. Wherever Britain has been faced with multi-ethnic societies, it has left many of them after partitioning them—we can think of Malaysia, Cyprus, Ireland and many other countries. Britain has had limited capacity to handle multi-ethnic societies. Therefore, when confronted with India, the problem became even more acute and the partition that took place was the most horrendous event in the history of these two countries. We here do not appreciate how much it is seared into the consciousness of people in India and Pakistan. It was a partition in which millions moved across the boundary and thousands were raped or wounded. That partition is remembered daily by those people who suffered at the hands of it, in broadly the same way that the Holocaust is remembered by Jews whose families suffered.
Given all that, the question for us is not to get into the debate about what to do, but whether something can be done to reconcile these two countries to the existence of each other. India and Pakistan were both born within the crucible of the partition. This horrendous event has now built up mutual hatred, so that India cannot say anything good about Pakistan, nor Pakistan about India.
In that kind of situation, how can we get these two countries to accept each other as the neighbours they are? I end by suggesting two or three ideas which need to be pursued. The first important thing is that there is a phobia. In India, there is a tendency for people to refer to Pakistan in a very elder brotherly and cavalier kind of manner, saying that they do not expect anything civilised from that part of the world. Conversely, in Pakistan there is a tendency to have a kind of younger brotherly hatred towards India, dismissing the idea that India could ever do anything good. That kind of phobia, with a built-in incapacity to see the good in the other, has to be broken. Unless you do that, you cannot make any sensible reconciliation. To respond to that phobia, you require not just ordinary political forms of co-operation—you need the capacity to appeal emotionally to people, so that they can respond to each other in terms of those historically shared memories, triggered by events.
The other thing would be that there are no deep conflicts of interest between India and Pakistan—no economic or political conflicts. They even look alike: culturally, they are similar. The question therefore would be for these two societies to establish institutional relations for clearing up misunderstandings and to create a situation in which they can talk to each other intelligently and peacefully.
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hussain, for tabling this debate. Two lands, two people, two nuclear powers—yet, despite the borders that exist and the wars that have been fought, there is a shared history, intertwined with our own. It was two days in 1947, as the British left India, that changed history and the destiny of this region—14 and 15 August 1947, which saw the birth of two independent nations, Pakistan and India respectively.
In my view, war lays the foundations for an inevitable peace, but peace itself is not the mere absence of war. It is the recognition of each other’s rights, embedded in respect and justice, which is ultimately the destiny of these two nations and of Kashmir. At the heart of this inevitable peace is the peace across the lands, often referred to as “heaven on earth”, the state of Kashmir. It was after the Kargil war of 1999 that the late General Musharraf of Pakistan, together with Prime Minister Vajpayee of the BJP, and subsequently Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of Congress, recognised the opportunity that it was peace that was the ultimate victory for all. In that respect, they proposed a four-point plan: no change of borders, but free movement of people across the line of control; self-governance and recognised autonomy for Kashmiris; the demilitarisation of Kashmir; and a joint mechanism, with India, Pakistan and Kashmir all involved. Sadly, political change and instability, and of course the tragic and abhorrent terror attacks in Mumbai in 2008, ended that track of hope.
Yet if, as we often say, lessons are to be learned from history, it shows that mediation is key and peace is possible—and that is what we need now. It was only a few days ago that we saw these two nations at war, yet I pay tribute to the role, the leadership and timely mediation, of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, the US and Qatar, friends to both nations, which saw the shocking prospect of two nuclear powers in full-scale war recede. What we saw was a courage and recognition by both sides that there would be no eventual winner of the war; therefore, the next step must be respect and trust, as the foundation for confidence-building measures, along with the four principles that I have outlined: respect for peace, and respect for treaties signed and agreements reached, be they the Simla accords or the Indus Waters Treaty, and an end to terrorism, with joint efforts to eradicate the scourge of this abhorrent evil, and ultimately a vision of an inclusive and prosperous future for Kashmiris, which is possible and in reach, based on the framework that I have outlined for the inevitable benefits to both nations and the stability of the wider region.
Our role is as a friend to both nations. Yet I would argue it is more than others. We have a legacy, as we have already heard, that we left behind—a legacy I feel most personally attached to, with family and friends. It is a history etched into my own DNA of a shared heritage of both nations. Therefore, I ask the Minster, for whom the whole Committee has great respect, to now be proactive in our facilitation, which provides the basis of direct mediation efforts between our two friends—two nations of the Commonwealth. Let us be proactive in averting the next crisis, the next war, through whatever channels necessary to ensure that vision of peace for Kashmir becomes a living reality.
Baroness Gohir (CB)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hussain, for his powerful opening to the debate. I want to express deep concern about India’s decision to suspend its participation in the Indus Waters Treaty. It is a breach of international conventions. It is also a highly unethical action. Water should never be weaponised. It is not just a resource; it is a basic human right. For decades, even in the face of war and hostilities between India and Pakistan, that treaty was maintained. It has long been a good example of co-operation and diplomacy, despite the tension between the two countries. That is no small achievement and something both countries can be proud of.
What has changed? Why is India now threatening to cut off the water to Pakistan? Even if India has legitimate grievances and concerns about terrorism, its response is disproportionate, because it punishes Pakistan’s 240 million civilian population. This will not increase its security. In fact, it is more likely to destabilise the region. India’s decision has not emerged in a vacuum. In other parts of the world, we are witnessing the dangerous normalisation of weaponising water. The most glaring and disturbing example is Israel’s systematic use of water as a tool of domination and deprivation in Gaza. The world has failed to hold Israel accountable; that failure has likely emboldened India and will embolden other countries in the future, who will weaponise water and punish civilian populations. This could happen to India too in the future, which has upstream neighbouring countries.
We must not stay silent given what is at stake. Water from the Indus basin is a lifeline for the population of Pakistan. It relies on the Indus basin’s water for around 80% of its agriculture, which accounts for over 20% of its GDP and supports over 40% of its workforce. One-third of Pakistan’s hydropower also depends on the basin’s water. Inaction now will lead to crop failures, deepen food insecurity and increase poverty. Even a small diversion or blockage will have catastrophic consequences. For example, Pakistan could feel the impact during the dry season when water availability is already at its lowest. The suspension of the treaty also means that data-sharing mechanisms on river flows have been suspended. Without real-time data, Pakistan will not be able to forecast and prepare for floods or droughts, or plan for irrigation, hydropower or drinking water.
India could also use other tactics to cause harm to Pakistani civilians, such as temporarily holding back water and then suddenly releasing it, without warning, causing massive damage downstream. Sudden flushes of silt that can build up in dams could also cause significant damage downstream to crops in Pakistan. The world cannot look the other way, and the UK can play a crucial role as a mediator and involve the World Bank. Does the Minister share my concerns? Are our Government willing to get involved? Can she share what representations she has made to the Indian Government? How confident is she that she can get representatives from both sides to sit down and try to talk through and resolve this issue?
The time to act is now because, once the flow of water stops, so does the hope for peace between India and Pakistan.
Baroness Verma (Con)
My Lords, I am also grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hussain, for initiating this debate. Of course, all of us come with very different viewpoints from where we originate. The ultimate goal is to ensure that there is peace in the region. Therefore, the first thing we need to do is look at the elephant in the room: why we cannot have a discussion without it becoming so toxic in this country with the diasporas here. We need to remember that words matter when they are expressed here to what happens in the countries of India and Pakistan.
The Minister will of course agree that the recent attack was abhorrent. Every community in India united against the attack and came together. That is how this debate should be framed: wherever there is an attack, we come together. Far too many times, I have been in this House listening to attacks on one country or the other in a way that is unhelpful to the UK being able to be a friend to both. We, as those of that diaspora, need to start playing a constructive role in the way that we approach the debate.
I know that the noble Lord, Lord Hussain, often talks about the people in Kashmir. I am not going to talk about Kashmir, apart from to repeat what I have said to him before: that I hope that he is as affected by the deaths of all the murdered Kashmiri Pandits as he is of any other Kashmiri. We need to show that every human being matters to us, not just those who we seek to represent.
I turn to my questions to the Minister. After the attacks in Pahalgam recently, most of us will have seen the report of a Pakistani diplomat making slitting throat gestures to British protesters. That cannot be allowed in our country. I raised it in the main Chamber, but I did not get a response from the Foreign Office on what action has been taken about that incident. Will the Minister also tell the House what is happening about the aid we give and how it is utilised and monitored, so that we are not inadvertently aiding that minority of people who perform terrorist attacks? The large population of Pakistan and the large population of India do not want to be involved in such heinous crimes. Will the Minister respond on those two points?
The largest democracy on the planet is now understanding its responsibility, and we need to make sure, in the way we perform with both countries, that Pakistan, too, becomes a thriving democracy.
Lord Mohammed of Tinsley (LD)
My Lords, I support the vital question from my noble friend Lord Hussain, and speak to a crisis that has profound implications for not just peace between India and Pakistan but for the foundations of international co-operation in our water-stressed and climate-vulnerable world. I have noted a number of comments made by noble Lords during the debate on Kashmir. I stand behind every word of the 2019 UN report. I hope that the Minister will read it, and I am happy to provide a copy, but I must warn her that it makes for grim reading. Matters have only got worse since July 2019, and we need an urgent update of that report.
The violence in Kashmir, as other noble Lords have said, and the aerial strikes that followed between India and Pakistan earlier this year, shocked the international community, but the most devastating development was India’s unilateral suspension of the Indus waters treaty of 1960, a move that was less visible than air strikes but whose long-term consequences may be greater. For Pakistan, a nation of 240 million people, the Indus River system is the backbone of its agricultural economy. It grows crops and sustains entire communities. Suspending the treaty is not a mere diplomatic gesture, it is an act directly threatening the livelihood and food security of millions. Access to water is not a luxury; it is a right.
The treaty itself has no provision for unilateral suspension or termination. Article XII(4) explicitly states that the provisions remain in force unless replaced by a new treaty, mutually ratified. India’s action is a flagrant violation, as my colleague, the noble Baroness, Lady Gohir, said, of international law. Our commitments and principles are that agreements between states are to be upheld.
This move sets a dangerous precedent. If one country can arbitrarily suspend a decades-old treaty, what becomes of the entire framework of bilateral and multilateral agreements that underpin peace, trade and co-operation around the world? In other parts of the world, such as the Nile basin, the Euphrates, the Tigris and central Asia, Governments will take note of how the Indus Waters Treaty is treated; if one treaty can easily be cast aside, others may follow.
Beyond India and Pakistan, others are watching. China, upstream of both nations, is already constructing dams and diversions in the Tibetan plateau. Altering river flows will have implications for not just India and Pakistan but Bangladesh and the entire Ganges-Brahmaputra basin. Victor Gao, a Chinese commentator, recently said, “Do not do down stream what you would not like others to do up stream”. The logic is simple: today, it is India’s up stream; tomorrow, it could be China or another power cutting off a vital river.
The unintended consequences of escalating water conflicts, particularly with Bangladesh caught in the crosshairs, are too grave to ignore. It is vital not to forget that climate change is already compounding water scarcity. Suspending the treaty on preventing conflict is a reckless act and, as such, creates a fragile environment. We should welcome the offer from the US to mediate. I hope that the Foreign Secretary will follow suit; I would like the Minister to comment on that, on the back of the recent engagements with Delhi and Islamabad.
We urge the Government to go further and to act as a guarantor of peace. We call for the immediate reinstatement of the Indus Waters Treaty and support dialogue not just on the treaty’s revival but to modernise in the face of the climate realities and to look towards resolving the Kashmir conflict. The Indus has sustained civilisations for millennia. If the river runs dry and co-operation fails, it could be not just an ecological disaster but a geopolitical one.
Lord Bilimoria (CB)
My Lords, last month, as co-chair of the India All-Party Parliamentary Group, I hosted a delegation of cross-party Members of Parliament from both houses of the Indian Parliament to the UK. They were sent by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to communicate to us the horrors of 22 April in Kashmir and the horrors that followed.
Similarly, Shashi Tharoor, a member of the Indian National Congress whom I have known for many years, led an all-party delegation to the United States. There, he said that there were three particular reasons for this situation and stated:
“The first is that we have had a 37-year pattern of repeated terror attacks from Pakistan accompanied by repeated denials … Pakistan didn’t know allegedly where Osama bin Laden was until he was found in a Pakistani safe house right next to an army camp in a cantonment city … Mumbai attacks, they denied having anything to do with it; one of the terrorists was captured alive, his name, his identity, his address in Pakistan, everything was revealed under interrogation. He told us where he was trained, what was done. The US intelligence as well as ours recorded the chilling voice of the Pakistani handler giving minute by minute instructions to the killers in Mumbai, telling them where to go and they were monitoring Indian TV and saying there are people hiding on the third floor of that hotel, go and shoot them there … they will deny, they did so until they are actually caught red handed”.
He went on to say that, secondly,
“within 45 minutes or so”
of this attack happening,
“a group called the Resistance Front claimed credit … It is a well-known proxy front of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, a banned terror organisation listed by the United Nations, listed by the US State Department”.
The third reason he gave was that,
“when the first strikes happened on the terrorist camps … funerals were conducted, including for members of some of the key … organisations, the Jaish-e-Mohammed in particular and the Lashkar-e-Taiba. The funerals were conducted and photographs emerged on social media showing Pakistani generals and police officers in uniform attending these funerals, being conducted by relatives of these terrorists. So we are looking at three concrete pieces of evidence as far as India is concerned”.
On 12 May, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said:
“During Operation Sindoor the world has again seen the ugly face of Pakistan, when top Pakistani army officers came to bid farewell to the slain terrorists. This is strong evidence of state-sponsored terrorism … The way the Pakistani army and Pakistan government are encouraging terrorism, it will destroy Pakistan one day … Terror and talks cannot go together”.
Climate change-driven water scarcity and sweltering summers have deepened resentment in Kashmir over the Indus Waters Treaty, with increasing support locally in Kashmir for its suspension. For example, Kashmir’s famed saffron, which depends on rains, has shrunk due to inadequate irrigation facilities. In Gulmarg, there was hardly any snow last year, when 70% of the Kashmiri population depends on farming and its mountain cultivators depend on water. China has gotten involved in this as well, and interventions from Beijing over the Indus Waters Treaty risk stirring up regional tensions. Does the Minister agree with this?
To conclude, India is now the largest south Asian country in the world by population. It is an oasis of democratic stability: since its independence in 1947, it has never had a coup and never had its Armed Forces interfering in its politics, unlike many of its neighbours. It has a robust democracy where people speak. It is now the fastest-growing major economy in the world, growing at over 6% a year, and is the fourth-largest economy in the world. I predict that, by 2060, it will be the largest economy in the world. It is not in India’s interests to have conflict with its neighbours, including Pakistan. India wants peace with its neighbours. It wants to get on with growing its economy, bettering the livelihood of its people and making a huge, positive contribution to the global community.
Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)
My Lords, I commend my noble friend Lord Hussain on securing this short but significant debate. I have been struck by the expertise and knowledge of all those who have contributed so far; I most certainly will not be able to do the debate justice in the few moments I have to speak for my party.
As a result of the reprehensible terrorist attacks that took place, for which there should be no impunity, we saw the most intense use of violence in more than 50 years between two nations that are friendly to the United Kingdom and have populations of more than 1.25 billion. As my noble friend Lord Hussain said, it was the first time that the two countries had engaged in drone warfare.
However, as my noble friend Lord Mohammed said, there is also concern over the 65 year-old Indus Waters Treaty and the consequences that that may bring—and not just because of the potential, as the noble Baroness, Lady Gohir, said, for wider humanitarian catastrophe. There are other areas of the world where we see the potential for conflict over water. I have made many visits to the Nile area, and I agree with my noble friend that we should be extremely cautious when we see breakdowns of dialogue and diplomacy when it comes to sources of water and irrigation. The ramifications are wider, which is why the breakdown of the India-Pakistan Indus commission is also a significant worry—especially given the fragility in the area, which is, as we have just heard, being exacerbated by climate change.
All bilateral treaties between the two nations are now vulnerable but I hope that the degree of stability since might be the basis, as we have heard in this debate, for building some degree of trust. I hope that the UK can support organisations that do the work, quietly and behind the scenes, to start building trust and dialogue on a community basis.
We have also heard about the concerns shared by my party with regards to the decision in 2019 by the Government of India on the revocation of Article 370 of the Indian constitution. Notwithstanding the 2024 elections that took place in Kashmir, it should be recognised that Kashmir continues to have less autonomy than India states. I want to ask the Minister about the views of Human Rights Watch when it comes to the denial of freedom of speech and association in that area, as well as the restrictions on broadcasting in India as a whole; the relationship with the BBC has been raised as a matter of particular concern.
As my noble friend Lord Hussain and others have said, this may be an opportunity for engagement and, ultimately, mediation. Is it the view of His Majesty’s Government that there is an opportunity ahead for the UK to play a part with two of our allies, who are Commonwealth members and with whom we have such deep and profound diaspora community relationships? Is it not in our interests to support them and the wider humanitarian need for there to be dialogue, understanding and mediation so that we do not see a repeat of the tensions from just a few weeks ago? As the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, said, we might be able to see a different future for the whole community in this important part of the world.
Lord Callanan (Con)
My Lords, I join in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Hussain, for securing this important debate. He is rightly concerned about the importance of restoring peace to the region.
With more than 3 million British nationals of Pakistani and Indian origin, of course the UK shares strong and long-standing ties with the region. Those ties are rooted not only in modern migration patterns but in a deep, shared history—from our intertwined legacies as Commonwealth nations to our enduring cultural, economic and familial ties. The UK has long valued its partnerships with both India and Pakistan, forged through decades of diplomacy, trade and shared values. These relationships continue to shape our society and contribute meaningfully to our national life. We recognise that rising tensions between the two countries inevitably cause concern and anxiety among those communities.
The UK is a close partner to both India and Pakistan, and we on these Benches rightly welcome commitments from both nations to end further military action. We back efforts to support both nations on their path to establishing a lasting ceasefire to restore regional stability and help safeguard civilians in the longer term. We all know that the path to peace is rarely smooth, and these developments, however incremental, are to be welcomed. My colleagues and I remain hopeful that these steps can be built on and that further confidence-building measures can lead to a more stable and secure relationship between these two important states.
However, we cannot speak of peace without addressing the horrific act of terrorism that took place in April in the town of Pahalgam, where 26 innocent lives were taken in a brutal and deliberate attack. This was an act of terrorism, and we should call it out clearly and unequivocally as such. Terrorists and their networks are not bound by national borders; they pose a threat to peace and stability far beyond that region. That is why, in my view, the UK should work with the Governments of both India and Pakistan to tackle these threats head on through robust counterterrorism co-operation, intelligence sharing and support for initiatives that promote peace and deradicalisation.
It is in the interests of the international community that this conflict does not escalate and that we take meaningful steps now to reduce the chance of future surges in tensions, which would have serious ramifications not only in Kashmir but in this country and the rest of the world. My colleagues and I have long recognised this, and we welcome the fact that the UK has for a long time maintained a deep and historic security relationship with India.
Our counterterrorism co-operation stretches back decades, from the New Delhi declaration of 2002 to the India-UK strategic partnership of 2016 and the comprehensive strategic partnership of 2022. These agreements—many of which were reached under successive Conservative Governments, I am pleased to say—have enshrined our commitment to India’s security and our shared interest in combating extremism. We must continue to strengthen those ties under the 2030 road map, ensuring that they remain watertight and fit for today’s security challenges. I hope that the Minister will take this opportunity to set out what further steps the Government are taking to further this partnership and, specifically, how she is working with counterparts in India to limit the spread of radical nationalism, which directly pertains to this debate.
Of course, we must also retain dialogue and co-operation with Pakistan. We are rightly concerned by the continuing presence of terrorist infrastructure within its borders. That is why we support calls for the Government to obtain secure, firm and verifiable commitments from Pakistan to dismantle those networks. The shadow Foreign Secretary has raised this issue directly and forcefully, and we will continue to monitor closely the Government’s efforts, to ensure that they are not just rhetoric but backed by practical steps.
The Minister of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Baroness Chapman of Darlington) (Lab)
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hussain, for securing and introducing this important discussion. We focused particularly on issues around water and Kashmir, and I will do my best to set out the representations that the Government have made to the Governments of India and Pakistan to bring about peace between the two countries. I will specifically make sure that I include Kashmir and the suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty, as he asked me to do.
I begin by reaffirming the United Kingdom’s long-standing commitment to peace, stability and prosperity in south Asia. Both India and Pakistan are valued and long-standing friends of the United Kingdom. We enjoy deep and historic ties with both countries, underpinned by vibrant diaspora communities, strong economic links and shared democratic values.
The recent terrorist attack in Indian-administered Kashmir on 22 April, which many noble Lords referred to, was a horrific reminder of the fragility of peace in the region. This Government condemned the attack in the strongest possible terms, including directly from the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary, and I am sure that all our thoughts remain with the victims, their families and the people of India. Both the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary have expressed their condolences and we continue to endorse efforts to bring the perpetrators to justice.
In the days following the attack, tensions between India and Pakistan escalated significantly. The military exchanges that followed between 6 and 10 May raised serious concerns about the risk of escalating conflict between two states armed with nuclear weapons. Against this backdrop, the agreement reached on 10 May to cease further military action was a welcome development. Indeed, we commend both Governments for taking this important step and urge them to continue along the path of de-escalation.
The Government have made clear representations to both New Delhi and Islamabad at all levels. The Foreign Secretary visited Pakistan on 16 May and India on 7 June to convey our strong support for a continued cessation of hostilities. In both capitals, the Foreign Secretary engaged directly with senior leaders to convey the UK’s strong support for regional stability and encourage continued dialogue. In Islamabad, he met the chief of army staff, the Prime Minister, Foreign Minister Dar and the Interior Minister. In New Delhi, he met Prime Minister Modi, the External Affairs Minister and NSA Doval. These visits were not only timely but essential in reinforcing our message that peace is in the shared interests of both nations and indeed the wider international community.
On the matter of Kashmir, the UK’s position remains unchanged. We regard the status of Kashmir as a bilateral issue to be resolved between India and Pakistan, taking into account the wishes of the Kashmiri people. We do not prescribe solutions, neither do we seek to mediate. However, we continue to encourage both sides to engage in meaningful dialogue and avoid actions that could further inflame tensions. We are acutely aware of the sensitivities surrounding this issue and our goal is to support a peaceful and lasting resolution that respects the rights and aspirations of all communities.
Turning to the Indus Waters Treaty, we recognise its importance as a cornerstone of co-operation between India and Pakistan. Since its signing in 1960, the treaty has withstood numerous political and military crises. The treaty has served as a rare example of sustained bilateral engagement even during periods of heightened tension. Through our diplomatic engagements, the Government have made clear the importance of both countries finding a way to share water resources. This is critical, as noble Lords have said, both for regional stability and sustainable livelihoods. We have urged both parties to uphold their commitment and resolve any disputes through the established mechanisms under the treaty.
Water security is an increasingly pressing issue in south Asia, particularly in the context of climate change and growing demand. The UK is supporting efforts to improve water governance through our water resources accountability programme in Pakistan. This initiative is helping both federal and provincial governments make decisions about water use more fairly and efficiently. We continue to engage with international partners to support peacebuilding efforts in the region as well. We are in regular contact with our partners in the United States, the European Union and the Gulf states and believe that a co-ordinated consistent international approach is essential to encouraging dialogue and reducing the risk of further escalation.
In conclusion, His Majesty’s Government remain committed to supporting peace and stability in south Asia. As noble Lords have suggested, we will continue to use our diplomatic channels to encourage dialogue, promote co-operation and support efforts to address the underlying causes of conflict and, with sustained political will, work to build mutual trust and a commitment to dialogue from all parties involved. We believe that a peaceful and prosperous future for the region is possible. I express my thanks to noble Lords for their continued engagement on this important issue and I commend this debate to the Committee.
European Convention on Human Rights
(1 day, 11 hours ago)
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Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
To ask His Majesty’s Government what plans they have to propose amendments to the European Convention on Human Rights.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede) (Lab)
My Lords, this Government are fully committed to the protection of human rights, domestically and internationally, and remain unequivocally committed to the international human rights framework. As the Lord Chancellor set out in a speech to the Council of Europe, we encourage a constructive dialogue between contracting parties to the European Convention on Human Rights on how the convention can respond to developments in our societies.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab Co-op)
I am grateful to my noble friend. Will he confirm that a Labour Government will never withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights? Will he say that, instead, we will discuss with our partners how it can evolve, through new protocols, new rights and new interpretations—not to weaken rights but to update and strengthen them?
Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede (Lab)
I agree with the sentiments behind my noble friend’s question. The ECHR has achieved 75 years of success, but we cannot shy away from developments in our societies. The ECHR and our relationship with it need to change. We are committed to engaging constructively with our friends within the ECHR.
Lord Lilley (Con)
Does the Minister accept that the Government’s proposal, spelled out in its immigration White Paper, to legislate to tell the courts how to interpret the European Convention on Human Rights as it affects immigrants destroys the whole rationale for the ECHR? That rationale is based on the belief that only judges—unaffected by political considerations and unaccountable to Parliament or the electorate—can determine the true meaning in detail of the vague, abstract rights listed in the convention. Once Parliament takes back control of spelling out our rights in statute—as it should, as it did for 700 years and as the Government now propose it will in future—the original case for adhering to the ECHR will evaporate.
Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede (Lab)
As the noble Lord rightly points out, there has been an immigration White Paper. In it, we have said that we will look to deliver a new framework to consider Article 8—the right to family life—and will bring forward legislation to clarify Article 8 rules so that fewer cases are treated as exceptional. This is a modification that we have committed to taking forth within our own domestic legislation. However, the more general point that the noble Lord makes is fundamentally misguided. We have hugely benefited from the ECHR in the 75 years of its existence. It needs to evolve. Of course, there are issues, which we acknowledge, but one point that many European and domestic judges have made to me is that the margin of appreciation, the latitude that individual states have within the existing rules, is wider than many of the states acknowledge themselves.
Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames (LD)
My Lords, in our view, trying to change the ECHR, which would require unanimity, would be as futile as it would be undesirable. However, on the Government’s immigration White Paper, particularly the Article 8 right to respect for private and family life, the margin of appreciation does, as the Minister mentioned, enable states to differ in how they implement the convention. Will the Minister confirm that UK legislation will seek to curtail reliance on exceptional circumstances only for legitimate and recognised convention aims such as national security, crime prevention, economic and social interests or protecting democracy?
Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede (Lab)
Yes, I can give the confirmation that the noble Lord seeks. He sets out the case, as I think I did in answer to the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, but the reality is that this is just one aspect—it is the relationship with the ECHR that we are talking about—but there need to be a number of ways of tackling irregular immigration, which is a profound and difficult issue. We are doing that in parallel, as well as addressing the Article 8 issue.
Lord Walney (CB)
My Lords, it is helpful that the Minister acknowledges that the convention needs to evolve and that there are issues with it. However, given the truth of what was just said about the difficulty and slowness of achieving unanimity in any negotiation, and if the Minister accepts that there is a significant problem, should not the Government reserve the right to withdraw if a negotiation cannot achieve what is needed for the country?
Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede (Lab)
I just do not think we are in that position at present. We can amend our own legislation regarding Article 8. There is the margin of appreciation which noble Lord, Lord Marks, referred to. As I said earlier, there is more discretion within that than is widely acknowledged or used—within not just the UK but Europe as a whole.
Lord Anderson of Swansea (Lab)
My Lords, there have been gross distortions in the right-wing press in this country with respect to the right-to-family-life decisions. Nevertheless, some of those decisions have been astonishing. Is the remedy therefore not in our own tribunal’s interpretation, which perhaps needs some form of clarification, rather than in the difficult process of amending the convention?
Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede (Lab)
My noble friend makes a good point and is right. I think that we are repeating the same question in different ways, if I may say so. We have committed to addressing Article 8 rules within our own domestic legislation and there is the issue about the margin of appreciation, which I have referred to in answer to earlier questions.
Lord Sandhurst (Con)
My Lords, the Minister has acknowledged today that the convention on human rights needs to evolve. Nine EU member states recently called for reform of the European Court of Human Rights—not the convention—and the court’s approach to the application of the convention. Will the Minister confirm that the United Kingdom will join those states in calling for such reform of the court’s operations? If not, why not?
Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede (Lab)
I can quote from my right honourable friend the Lord Chancellor’s speech in Strasbourg in June, where she acknowledged the letter—which was of course signed by EU members; the UK Government were not invited to sign that. Nevertheless, my right honourable friend said that there should indeed be an
“open conversation about the future of the Convention”
and that the UK wants to play its full part in that.
Baroness Foster of Aghadrumsee (Non-Afl)
My Lords, are His Majesty’s Government at all concerned about the diversion of interpretation of ECHR rights between the courts in Northern Ireland the rest of the United Kingdom—particularly in relation to Article 2 rights concerning veterans?
Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede (Lab)
My right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland has laid a draft proposal for a draft remedial order to set out his intention to introduce primary legislation when parliamentary time allows. The Government are engaging with victims of the Troubles in Northern Ireland and all interested parties to fulfil the commitment to repeal and replace the legacy Act.
Captain of the King’s Bodyguard of the Yeomen of the Guard and Deputy Chief Whip (Baroness Wheeler) (Lab)
My Lords, we will hear from the noble Baroness, Lady Winterton.
Baroness Winterton of Doncaster (Lab)
My Lords, does my noble friend the Minister agree that because the ECHR is committed to upholding the right to free and fair elections, those who advocate leaving the convention should understand that it would send a strong negative signal about the UK’s commitment to strengthening democracy and would undermine the work of election monitoring by international bodies such as the Council of Europe and the OSCE?
Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede (Lab)
I thank my noble friend Lady Winterton for that question. As she said, she has been an election monitor with the OSCE. I have been an election monitor with the Council of Europe and the OSCE. Both bodies do extremely valuable work, and it would be wrong to undermine that work in any way.
Train Operators’ Revenue Protection Practices Review
(1 day, 11 hours ago)
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Lord Beith
To ask His Majesty’s Government, following the independent review of train operators’ revenue protection practices published by the Office of Rail and Road on 4 June, whether they intend to modify systems of issuing rail tickets to improve their interavailability.
The Minister of State, Department for Transport (Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill) (Lab)
My Lords, deliberate fare-dodging has no place on our railways and is being tackled, but it is vital that passengers are treated fairly and consistently. We are urgently considering the helpful and comprehensive Office of Rail and Road report, with its sensible recommendations, and will respond to it as soon as possible. In the meantime, we continue to make it easier for passengers to buy the right fare, to make tickets on an increasingly unified publicly owned railway more inter-available, and to develop plans for Great British Railways to sell tickets online.
Lord Beith (LD)
My Lords, the Minister knows that, under the new east coast main line timetable, many more passengers will rely on connecting services run by different train operators, but when they board the train, as happens when they board a train now, they are quite likely to hear an announcement saying that other operators’ tickets are not valid on this service and that they may face a penalty fare of £100. Indeed, the report to which my Question refers reveals many instances of passengers who inadvertently had the wrong ticket and were penalised. Does he recognise that this is a mess? Has he got people at work in his department trying to sort it out?
Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)
The noble Lord knows as much about the December east coast main line timetable as I do now. I compliment him because he asked the flexible public sector operators to add a stop at Berwick to the weekday 1900 train to Edinburgh from King’s Cross, and they have agreed. I think that is a great thing. On a more general point, the announcements are confusing because the ticketing system is confusing. In the particular circumstances of the east coast, where LNER has made arrangements for tickets to be inter-available so that passengers at stations such as Berwick can enjoy a similar level of train service, with a change, as they do now, we will make sure that the announcements are clear enough that people are not put off making the best journey.
Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)
The Minister will be aware that the first iteration of the timetable for the LNER services in question was withdrawn. As a result, as the noble Lord, Lord Beith, has identified, there are fewer direct services serving stations such as Darlington, Northallerton and others, meaning that more changes are to be made. Is there a role for his department to ensure, particularly given the special anniversary of the Darlington to Stockton line, that this could be revisited so that the original direct services are reinstated?
Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)
The new east coast main line timetable includes several big improvements, such as knocking over a quarter of an hour off the direct journey to Edinburgh and a service to Newcastle of three trains an hour, which is considerably in excess of the service on the Metropolitan line to Amersham. That is the objective of a railway timetable which is to serve the biggest flows with the best train service. In respect of Darlington and Northallerton, the noble Baroness knows that, in fact, Darlington will have more through-trains to London in December than it does now, as will Northallerton. Some of the other journeys will need a change, and the timetable is arranged to make the best of all those journeys while producing the benefits that I described.
Baroness Pidgeon (LD)
My Lords, passengers are fed up with the complexity of rail fares and of the terms and conditions of tickets. When will passengers see a simpler, transparent new range of tickets ahead of Great British Railways coming into operation?
Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)
The noble Baroness is right to describe it as a mess. We are not waiting for Great British Railways. LNER’s changes to long-distance fares, which have been introduced progressively, have resulted in considerably greater passenger satisfaction with the way in which the fares are arranged now compared with before. I am expecting to see similar arrangements on the west coast main line and on Great Western in due course. I think the noble Baroness knows that we are rolling out pay-as-you-go in urban areas, as well as in London and the south-east. It is a long and complex job, and it is not helped by the fact that, fundamentally, the fares system has not changed since the railways were privatised. We are on it, and we are working hard at it.
Lord Berkeley (Lab)
On the west coast main line and on other routes, when Great British Railways actually happens, will it have control over the fares issued by open-access operators, or will they still be able to charge what they like for their own services?
Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)
My noble friend probably knows the answer, but I am happy to give it anyway. Open-access operators can charge what they like, and no doubt will continue to do so.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
My Lords, I am sure this House would be reassured if the Minister himself was involved in these new practices. Can he give us an assurance that he is heavily involved and that all these new practices will mean less ticketless travel?
Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)
The long-term answer is that the railway deserves to be run by competent, professional people. The involvement of Ministers in decisions about timetables and fares is extremely unusual in world railways outside North Korea. I am doing what I am doing now because I think that changes need to be made, and we need to make them faster than we can bring in the legislation on Great British Railways. In the long term, the railways should be run by competent people to an overall government policy. That is the Government’s aim, and mine too.
Lord Moylan (Con)
My Lords, concerning those changes, the report referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Beith, from the ORR, a highly respected regulator, is a valuable piece of work on behalf of passengers. Does the Minister accept that, under the new arrangements for the railway, consulted on by the Government earlier this year, the ORR would lose those functions, vindicating the rights of passengers to a toothless passenger watchdog, and be stripped of its independent decision-making powers as to who has access to the track and what charges they pay? These decisions will be made by Great British Railways, an interested party. Is this not regulatory vandalism on the railways?
Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)
The noble Lord has a point of view, but I do not agree with it. Currently, the ORR is independent. In the future, the Government’s proposals will leave it independent. It will have a slightly different role in respect of access; it will be an appeal body. Fundamentally, somebody has to be in charge of the railway and somebody has to be in charge of the timetable. He will know, because we have discussed it here before, that it is mad that a Government Minister in the end has to decide to implement a railway timetable because nobody in the railway itself has the authority to do so. He is also wrong about describing the new arrangements for passengers. In due course he will see that the passenger standards authority will have real teeth and will represent passengers’ interests.
Baroness Wheatcroft (CB)
My Lords, many stations do not seem to have properly functioning electronic gates, particularly at weekends, and people just walk through. I wonder whether it is possible to do an audit of that. While the Minister is improving the lot of travellers, could he do away with “See It. Say It. Sorted”?
Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)
Ticketless travel is a real problem. Operators have to be on their toes, because leaving gates open at times when people travel means that they will just walk through them. It is not necessarily the case that those passengers do not have tickets, but it is certainly no deterrent to people who do not have tickets. “See It. Say It. Sorted”—oh dear, I have said that now—is actually a good deterrent. We have to be mindful of the safety of people, including women and girls, on the railway. We are going to refresh it, but I am sorry to tell the noble Baroness that we are going to carry on with it, because it is the right thing to do to make everybody travelling by train feel safe.
Lord Brennan of Canton (Lab)
My Lords, Trainline tells me that, if I get the 15.16 pm train home to Cardiff from London Paddington this afternoon, I could save 5p by splitting my ticket. Will my noble friend the Minister’s reforms get rid of this sort of nonsense? Can he sort that?
Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)
It needs to be sorted and it will have to be sorted, over time. I refer to my experience at Transport for London, where we radically changed the fare system and introduced pay-as-you-go and Oyster, which took several years of incremental change. Fundamentally, the noble Lord is right: if you have enough time and effort, finding a cheaper way to travel through buying multiple tickets is not the way to market an effective railway or public transport service. We need to get to a stage when that nonsense is no longer prevalent.
Tackling Unsustainable Debt
(1 day, 11 hours ago)
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Baroness Brown of Silvertown
To ask His Majesty’s Government what progress they have made towards tackling unsustainable debt in cooperation with partners in the global South, as set out in the Labour Party Manifesto 2024.
The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Lord Livermore) (Lab)
My Lords, as set out in our manifesto, tackling unsustainable debt in low-income countries is a key development priority for this Government. We are working closely with partners to strengthen and speed up the G20 common framework to enhance debt transparency for debtor and creditors. We have set up the new London Coalition on Sustainable Sovereign Debt, co-chaired by my honourable friend the Economic Secretary, to promote contractual innovations for increased resilience and to make restructurings quicker.
Baroness Brown of Silvertown (Lab)
My Lords, the UK High Court has ordered South Sudan, one of the world’s poorest countries, to pay $657 million in debt servicing to a for-profit bank. That is half its annual income. Surely we have the power and moral responsibility to prevent this happening. The previous Government passed Andrew Gwynne’s debt relief Act, so will this Government consider introducing an updated law to support millions of people in debt-distressed countries?
Lord Livermore (Lab)
I am very grateful to my noble friend for her question and I pay tribute to her considerable expertise on these issues; I know she served as shadow Minister for Africa for several years. The Government fully agree that private creditors must play their part in debt restructurings. The Paris Club and now the G20, as part of its commitment to co-ordinate on debt treatments under the common framework, are clear on our collective expectation that private creditors must participate in restructurings on terms at least as favourable as those provided by official creditors. Overall, we have seen evidence of private creditors’ willingness to engage and provide debt treatments where needed.
While the Government appreciate the intentions of those proposing legislation in this area, we are concerned about the potential negative impacts that such legislation could have, specifically on the cost of finance for developing countries. As such, the UK is not currently pursuing legislation, given the existing lack of evidence to justify such an approach and the potentially adverse wider consequences. We will, of course, continue to keep the evidence and our position under review.
My noble friend specifically mentioned South Sudan. As I understand the complex situation with Afreximbank—an African financial institution based in Cairo—South Sudan is not undergoing a multilateral restructuring with official creditors, so it is not clear that legislation would improve that situation.
Lord Oates (LD)
My Lords, does the Minister recognise that the concerns he just expressed about the legislation referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Brown, are exactly the sorts of concerns that were issued in advance of Andrew Gwynne’s Act in 2010 and that were found, on review, to be without merit? Does he recognise that, for over 3 billion people living in countries that spend more on debt servicing than on public services such as health and education, the risk of action is far less than the devastating impact of inaction?
Lord Livermore (Lab)
I absolutely recognise what the noble Lord says. It is important to recognise that the debt relief Act was different in scope and scale. It targeted a small, ring-fenced amount of historical debt. Current proposals for legislation would impact all future debt contracts written under English law. We have significant concerns about the impacts of that on the cost of capital at a time when global liquidity is constrained.
That is not to say—as the noble Lord rightly advises—that we are not taking action. We are absolutely taking action and we believe that multilateral action is the right way forward, predominantly through the common framework established by the G20. The Chancellor has also established the London coalition, which was launched on 23 June and provides exactly what is needed: a formal avenue to engage with private creditors to ensure long-term stable flows of capital to emerging markets.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
My Lords, the global South has suffered for decades, trapped under an ideology imposed from the outside of privatisation, austerity and deregulation. Will the Minister and the Government ensure that future arrangements allow an escape from that ideology towards investment in the essential systems of health, education and democratic engagement?
Lord Livermore (Lab)
That is exactly what our approach is designed to do. As I have said, multilateral action is the right way forward. The G20 common framework remains the best available tool for us to tackle debt vulnerabilities, bringing together traditional and newer creditors to co-ordinate on debt treatment, which is critical given the more diverse creditor landscape that we currently face.
Lord Blunkett (Lab)
My Lords, reinforcing the point that global co-operation and international institutions need to be not only defended but promoted in dealing with world debt and poverty, it is exactly 20 years since the Gleneagles agreement, which was reached in 2005 after the Make Poverty History campaign—one of the most successful democratic campaigns ever. Does my noble friend agree that we should celebrate that and see off those who would destroy those international conventions and institutions, and destroy how we can use our democracy to bring about change?
Lord Livermore (Lab)
I absolutely agree with my noble friend and thank him for what he says. He and I were part of the last Labour Government who saw such historic action on debt relief, and I agree that we should celebrate that and remind the world of it. Of course, the world is a different place now; the creditor landscape is very different. Previously, most of the debt was held by Paris Club members and multilateral institutions. Now, borrowers increasingly rely on non-Paris Club members, specifically China and the commercial sector. So the action that we need to take now is different from that which was taken before. My noble friend rightly says that multilateral institutions are important; the onus is on us to strengthen those institutions, speed them up and ensure that they work better than they do currently.
The Lord Bishop of Leicester
My Lords, this year marks the 25th anniversary of the Jubilee 2000 campaign—a remarkable coming together of tens of millions of people from around the world, which led to around $130 billion of debt being cancelled across 36 countries. It allowed those countries to reinvest in education, healthcare and poverty alleviation. The Pope has also declared this year a year of Jubilee and set up a commission to look at international debt relief. What are the Government doing to learn from the Jubilee 2000 campaign and to engage with faith communities and charities working in this sector?
Lord Livermore (Lab)
My noble friend Lady Chapman tells me that we are doing exactly as the right reverend Prelate seeks. I completely agree with him on the history of the Jubilee movement. The UK wants to see effective solutions to those debt challenges. We strongly support the IMF’s three-pillar approach to providing support to countries facing immediate liquidity pressures. Where a country needs to restructure its debt, as I have said before, the common framework remains the best available tool to do so. We are focused on ensuring that the common framework delivers more timely, orderly and co-ordinated restructuring.
Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)
My Lords, further to my noble friend’s question on the scale of the debt servicing costs as related to health and education costs, we know from Center for Global Development information that, as a result of western countries cutting development partnership support—the UK is cutting this by up to 40%—many of the least developed nations are borrowing more to fill the gap for the very programmes we are cutting. What assessment are His Majesty’s Government making of the countries for which we have cut development partnership support, which are borrowing more to fill the gap that we have created?
Lord Livermore (Lab)
I do not know the specific answer to the noble Lord’s question, I am afraid. I am very happy to write to him to fill that in. As I have said, the action we are taking at a multilateral level is proven to be the most effective route that we can take to tackle these issues.
Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)
My Lords, does the Minister agree that many countries themselves now need to focus on tackling their debt, which can so easily become unsustainable? That obviously includes countries in the global South and, indeed, much closer to home, where a tick back up in inflation risks increasing debt servicing costs. We have a debt problem on a wide scale.
Lord Livermore (Lab)
The noble Baroness is correct in saying that debt sustainability is the primary responsibility of borrowing countries, but I think lending countries such as the UK also have an important role to play in supporting these efforts through providing capacity-building support, following best practice in sustainable lending and pressing for reform of internationally agreed frameworks on assessing debt sustainability. In line with the UK’s commitment to the OECD sustainable lending practices, the UK considers debt sustainability when providing financing, particularly in cases of lending to countries deemed at high risk of debt distress.
Commission on Antisemitism Report
(1 day, 11 hours ago)
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Baroness Deech
To ask His Majesty’s Government what steps they will take to implement the recommendations in the report of the Commission on Antisemitism by Lord Mann and Dame Penny Mordaunt published on 15 July.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (Baroness Taylor of Stevenage) (Lab)
My Lords, before I answer the Question asked by the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, I start by wishing the extraordinary survivor from the Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, a very happy 100th birthday today. I repeat her advice to young people, which was broadcast this morning. She told them:
“Hate is a poison and in the end you poison yourself … Talk to each other before you kill each other”.
I think that is wonderful advice.
Antisemitism has absolutely no place in our society, which is why our Government are taking a strong lead in tackling it in all its forms. We will carefully consider the recommendations of the report. The Government continue to work closely with their Independent Adviser on Antisemitism, my noble friend Lord Mann, and their Antisemitism Working Group, on the best methods to effectively tackle antisemitism and engage Jewish communities around international, national and local events affecting British Jews. I thank my noble friend Lord Mann and Dame Penny Mordaunt for their work on this report and their wider contribution.
Baroness Deech (CB)
My Lords, I echo the Minister’s thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Mann, for all the work he has done fighting antisemitism and for producing this really rather shocking report. Antisemitism, he says, did not increase because of Gaza. It was released from underground by 7 October and, sadly, was nurtured by the BBC being economical with the truth. It is rooted in the unfortunate myths still taught in school religion classes, which need to be tackled, and it is not dispelled by Holocaust education. Most shocking is the NHS, where Jewish patients cannot feel confident of fair treatment: there were more than 400 complaints since 7 October, most of them closed or not processed. Will the Government place the NHS at the forefront of their actions?
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
My Lords, the evidence that my noble friend Lord Mann and Dame Penny Mordaunt quoted in the report and in the subsequent article published by my noble friend relating to the specific unaddressed issue of antisemitism within the NHS was shocking. They made two recommendations: a summit for NHS leaders across the UK and basic training across every NHS trust. I am sure that my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care will take those recommendations very seriously and look into them.
Lord Austin of Dudley (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I am afraid that, contrary to what the Minister said, as the shocking increase in antisemitism shows, there is, sadly, obviously a place in Britain for antisemitism. That is what is happening. I am afraid that one of the main causes is the BBC. If you suggest, as it does, with its disproportionate, unbalanced and biased coverage, that Israel is committing uniquely evil crimes, that is obviously going to drive hostility towards people in the UK who identify with Israel, which is the vast majority of the Jewish community. This is why the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport was completely right to demand changes at the top. Is it not a disgrace that, only yesterday, the BBC’s head of current affairs, Deborah Turness, suggested that there was no difference between Hamas’s Ministers and its military wing? I have to ask the Minister: when are the Government finally going to get a grip?
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
I know that my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport is looking very closely at all issues. I am sure she will have taken comments yesterday into consideration as she considers how to address these issues. The noble Lord is quite right that, as we saw an increase of 113% in the UK of hate crimes targeting Jews in the last year compared with the previous year, we need to make sure that that underlying current of antisemitism is tackled wherever it appears.
Lord Pickles (Con)
My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Mann, and Dame Penny Mordaunt on this excellent report. Its strength is that it is practical, and it gives a very clear steer to the Government on things that could be achieved relatively quickly. I will concentrate on recommendation 5, on the teaching of antisemitism and dealing with antisemitism in schools. A lot of teachers are, frankly, frightened of dealing with this. They feel intimidated and unsupported, and those who have been prepared to try have often been shouted down by hotheads in the community. There are a number of really good studies out there, and I commend the work of UCL and Education Scotland to the Minister. If they took those practical things, I think it would be possible. I ask for the Government to do their best to roll out those reforms in the coming academic year.
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
The noble Lord is quite right that education sits right at the heart of this. To noble Lords who may not have had time to read the report yet, I commend these examples: Maccabi GB delivering training on contemporary antisemitism across the entirety of English football, which I think is a very clear example; and the agreement between the diocese of Winchester and the local Jewish community to teach primary school teachers how to avoid passing on antisemitism and anti-Jewish tropes in their lessons. These are wonderful examples, as are those quoted by the noble Lord. I am sure that my noble friend the Minister for Education will take those on board and think about how we address this in future. There is also a role for local government here, of course, in promoting this issue, in training and support to schools.
Baroness Burt of Solihull (LD)
My Lords, as has been said, we are now suffering historically high levels of antisemitism since 7 October, despite the fact that British Jews have nothing to do with the actions of foreign organisations such as the IDF. As the noble Lord, Lord Pickles, said, one theme of the report is to call for more consistency and capacity in the training of people who train others in tackling antisemitism, particularly in schools—which, of course, is where it all begins. How far are the Government considering adopting these recommendations in the report and, if they are, could we have some details, please?
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
The report contains a number of very clear recommendations. Of course, all of those will be reviewed, and I hope that that will take place right across government. Certainly, I will make sure that my department looks at all the recommendations. As with any report, it takes a little while to assess the recommendations and how they need to be considered and implemented, but I reassure the noble Baroness that, right from the heart of government—I know the Prime Minister was asked about this yesterday—we consider this an important contribution to discussing how we tackle antisemitism in this country. We will take the recommendations seriously and act on them as appropriate.
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
My Lords, the report found evidence, particularly in its education-focused findings, that some Christian primary school teachers “inadvertently use antisemitic tropes” in lessons, especially religious studies. What urgent steps—they need to be urgent—will the Government take to ensure that these harmful tropes are rooted out of our schools? Will the Minister and her Government set out very quickly how they intend to achieve this?
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
As I said in answer to the previous question about education, we communicate the examples of good practice that we have seen—for example, in Winchester—across the whole schools community. I am sure that my noble friend the Education Minister will take those on board. I agree with the noble Baroness that urgent action here is necessary. We must not let the passing on of these tropes go on any longer. I hope that we can take urgent action to make sure that good practice is rolled out across our schools as quickly as possible.
Lord Mann (Lab)
My Lords, I commend the brilliance of the contribution of Dame Penny Mordaunt to this report. This is a report for the United Kingdom. Does not this cross-party collaboration, which the UK has long been the world leader in, re-emphasise the importance of every party getting involved in playing its role in tackling antisemitism, and that when we work together, cross-party, we are far more effective in not just giving a message but delivering outcomes which mean that communities, such as the Jewish community, can play their part in this country without any hassle or barriers?
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
I cannot express strongly enough my agreement with my noble friend Lord Mann on that point. This is absolutely a cross-party issue and we must work together at the national level. There is also a clear role for mayors, council leaders and councillors in supporting Jewish communities, in education and in commemorating the Holocaust, so that the crimes against Jews in Europe are never forgotten. They can also facilitate the conversations and education and the work that needs to be done across communities and civil society. This is a role for all of us, not just one political party.
Syria: Druze Community
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the situation in Syria, and in particular the impact of recent events upon the Druze community and the wider Middle East.
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)
My Lords, I beg leave to ask a Question of which I have given private notice. In doing so, I draw attention to my entry in the register as chair of the International Communities Organisation’s advisory board and adviser to the Arab Ambassadors Council.
The Minister of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Baroness Chapman of Darlington) (Lab)
My Lords, the Government are deeply concerned by the recent violence in southern Syria and welcome the announcement yesterday of a ceasefire. We want to see civilians protected and the ceasefire upheld, with those responsible for violence held to account. These events risk destabilising Syria and its fragile political transition. We have been clear that Syria’s sovereignty must be respected and that the Syrian Government must protect the rights of all civilians.
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)
My Lords, I thank the Minister, and I know how much she has been personally engaged in the region, particularly on the humanitarian elements of the ongoing and wider conflict. That is where I wish to focus my supplementary question. What assessment has she made of the impact on the minority communities specifically in the areas that I know she is looking at very closely, not just in Syria but across the region? This morning, we have heard of further escalations in southern Syria by Israel. This, of course, impacts those who are most vulnerable: women, children and minorities. I seek the Minister’s reassurance that that is a specific focus and priority for His Majesty’s Government.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
I am very happy to confirm that. These actions are destabilising and present great risk to the fragile, emerging peace that we hope can hold. There is a ceasefire from 3 am this morning; we welcome that and commend all those involved in bringing that about. But this is a very precarious situation we now find ourselves in. We are involved with the provision of humanitarian support.
I have met many Syrians who are refugees in the region. I understand their wish to return and their concerns about doing so. We are working to support them directly and also to support Governments in the region who have a role to play in supporting Syria as it goes through this very difficult period.
Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)
My Lords, I commend the Arab and Turkish efforts in the most immediate ceasefire, and I agree with the most recent comments of Secretary of State Rubio from the United States. Are we co-ordinating with all three of those parties with regard to this?
The Minister will recall that, when in Grand Committee we debated the wider exceptions to the sanctions on Syria, I voiced a degree of caution with regard to the UK lifting our sanctions in a very broad way, primarily because of the continuing sectarian violence, the conflict and the lack of territorial integrity that the Minister referred to. Can the Minister reassure the House that the UK is not providing funds or capability to any parts of the military of the Syrian Government that are currently, in effect, part of a belligerent force?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
I welcomed the noble Lord’s concerns at the time; he was right to raise them. We were at the forefront of lifting sanctions at that point. I still think that was the right decision, because in order to get the stability and security that Syria needs and that we all want to see, it is important that the Government of Syria are able to do what is necessary to rebuild the economy there and support the strengthening of the state. That was the right decision at that point but, clearly, we keep all these issues under very close review. I confirm to the noble Lord that we work as closely as possible with our international partners, because, as he suggests, the stability of Syria is so important to the entire region.
Lord Hain (Lab)
My Lords, I welcome what my noble friend the Minister has said, including on sanctions, and emphasise what she has also indicated, that this is a very complex situation. The portrayal of the Syrian conflict by the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, when he was Prime Minister, as being between an evil dictator, which Assad was, and the people, was too simplistic. This is a divided society with all sorts of divisions and proxies—Sunni proxies and Shia proxies—and Turkey playing a distinct and sometimes malevolent role. Therefore, this needs to be approached in a very careful way, which I hope she will do.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
I completely agree with my noble friend. He has been following these events and has himself been involved at various points over the years. With regard to what he said about Assad, we were all glad to see him go. We now face a situation where a nascent Government have formed a Cabinet that is pluralistic; we welcome that, but we need a Government who are properly representative of Syria. They need to be able to strengthen their provision of public services to achieve security for their population. To do that, they need their population to return, and we are helping with that as well. There is a great deal to do. My noble friend’s point about the complexity, and the long-term commitments that will be required to ensure the future for Syria that we all want, is a point very well made.
Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)
My Lords, the Minister will have seen the recent reports of the murder of 25 believers who were assembled in a Greek Orthodox church in Damascus. She will know also about the shocking reports of the rape and violence perpetrated against Alawite women. Can she tell us anything further about her reference to holding to account those responsible for these depredations? How will that be done? Does she agree that the treatment of minorities and vulnerable people is a real test of whether a country can call itself both civilised and one that the rest of the world can do business with?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
It is completely wrong in any context for somebody to be harmed or persecuted purely on the basis of what they happen to believe. When the Foreign Secretary was in Damascus recently speaking to the Government of Syria and the President, he expressed our concern about the persecution of religious minorities and offered our support in any way that can be helpful in making sure that, whatever religion or background you have in Syria, you are able to be part of society and part of the leadership of the country as it goes forward.
The Earl of Courtown (Con)
My Lords, as the Minister said, we are clear that de-escalation and stability have to be an urgent and immediate priority for all those involved. The Syrian Government are in the early stages of establishing themselves following the collapse of the Assad regime. It is vital that we facilitate the development of a stable, democratic and peaceful regime in Syria. Following on from what the noble Lord, Lord Alton, was saying about holding to account, can the Minister tell the House what steps His Majesty’s Government are taking to ensure accountability for crimes committed under the Assad regime?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
We are working very closely with actors on the ground, not least civil society organisations, and support all the things that need to be done in order to achieve accountability. That does matter. I thank the noble Lord opposite for the cross-party nature of our position on this. That is incredibly helpful and something that I hope can continue.
Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick (Lab)
My Lords, watching the scenes as they unfold in Syria, I suggest that it is important that we provide support and solidarity to underpin the very fragile democracy that is now in place there. Will the Minister comment on the possibility of the UK Government working with other countries within the G7 to establish an international fund to underpin that democracy, rebuild human relationships and reconciliation and address famine and starvation in Syria and the wider Middle East?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
It is vital that the international community comes together to support emerging stability in Syria. We are very willing to do that, and we are engaged in that process, but we need to support the Governments of countries that have been supporting Syrians away from their home for very many years now, at great cost to themselves and with great pressure, sometimes, on their societies. Jordan has done a huge amount over very many years. We work closely with the Government of Jordan. This truly is a moment when the international community, beyond some of the usual actors, needs to come together, co-ordinate and make sure that we do everything we possibly can to secure the future of Syria.
Lord Stirrup (CB)
My Lords, what assessment do the Government make of continuing Russian involvement in Syria post the fall of the Assad regime? Will they work with partners to ensure that Russia is unable to exploit this current crisis to spread further its malign and destabilising influence?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
That is a very good question, and it is very important. We are deeply concerned at the attempts of external actors to exploit instability, spread misinformation and destabilise the situation in Syria. It is something that we need to be mindful of. We need to take steps as and when we can, and we do. We are working with the Government of Syria to ensure that those sorts of issues are not able to have the impact that those who do not wish to see a strong Syria would wish.
Lord Hunt of Wirral (Con)
Many of us were seriously concerned yesterday to hear about the military attack on the national hospital in Suwayda. As we all know, the Druze minority is to be found in the Suwayda province. Is the Minister persuaded that this ceasefire is holding? Is it now possible to restore electricity and water to that hospital and open humanitarian corridors to allow safe and secure passage for civilians?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
In order to achieve the last two things that the noble Lord advocated, we need that ceasefire to hold. It is very early in the ceasefire; it is only a matter of hours. We will do whatever we need to do to encourage that to happen, but it is vital that that ceasefire continues. As many noble Lords have said, there are several international actors involved in brokering this; we commend them, we will support them and we will do whatever we can to play our part to ensure that peace can continue.
Lord Austin of Dudley (Non-Afl)
My Lords, the Minister and the noble Lords, Lord Ahmad and Lord Alton, are right to draw attention to the threat posed to minority communities in Syria. In addition to the Christians and the Alawites, as mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, members of the Druze community were killed in their hundreds this week. What practical steps can the UK and our international partners take to protect minority communities? In the absence of anybody else doing anything, is Israel not to be commended for protecting the Druze community in Syria?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
One of Syria’s strengths is the richness and diversity of its population. I think the best thing that we can all do is to strengthen the Government of Syria and support them in their efforts to maintain peace. We are concerned at the actions of Israel, and we are not persuaded that they are conducive to bringing about peace and stability; they are destabilising, and we have made that view clear. From where we are now, as of 3 am this morning, what we want to see is an end to violence of all kinds, including that of other states, and the strengthening of stability and security in Syria. We think that is the right way to proceed.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)
My Lords, does the Minister recognise that the history of many centuries shows that Syria is crucial to the stability of not only its own country but the whole region, and that when there is instability in Syria, there is very often instability more widely? It surely behoves anyone within or outside Syria to avoid inflicting instability on a country that has just emerged from an appalling experience. Does the Minister believe that we have enough presence on the ground in Damascus to inform us clearly about what is going on and to talk with others who are working for stability in Syria to that end?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
I agree with the noble Lord’s point of view. Do we have enough presence on the ground? My very sincere hope is that our presence there can grow, and I know that is what the noble Lord wishes to see. We want Syria and the UK to have the strongest possible relationship, because that is in the interests of both our countries. Having a fully-fledged diplomatic presence in Syria would be a wonderful thing for us to be able to do, I hope in the near future.
Transport Act 2000 (Air Traffic Services) (Prescribed Terms) Regulations 2025
(1 day, 11 hours ago)
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Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill
That the draft Regulations laid before the House on 3 June be approved.
Relevant document: 28th Report from the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee. Considered in Grand Committee on 14 July.
Sudan
The Earl of Courtown (Con)
My Lords, the situation in Sudan, as we have heard, is now a catastrophe. No part of the country or indeed any neighbouring country has been unaffected. Some 11 million people are displaced inside Sudan and millions more have fled to neighbouring countries. What actions are the Government taking to support countries bordering Sudan to provide for those displaced by the conflict and humanitarian crisis in the country?
The Minister of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Baroness Chapman of Darlington) (Lab)
We are working closely with countries that neighbour Sudan, for reasons that the noble Earl will understand. There has been enormous displacement of people. I went to Adré, on the border with Chad, and some of the accounts, particularly of sexual violence experienced by women who have walked many miles unaided to reach safety, will stay with me for ever.
We are working bilaterally with the Government of Chad and in South Sudan to support those populations. We have pooled funds and we are working alongside the international community to do what we can. The Foreign Secretary held a conference a couple of months ago now to try to move this forward. It is incredibly frustrating and difficult. Until there is some semblance of peace in Sudan, I fear we are going to continue to see incredible hardship and devastation meted out on the innocent civilian population of that country.
Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)
My Lords, I declare my interest in my continuing active involvement with the Sumoud civilian network, which is seeking an end to the war and a future civilian Government of Sudan. I too commend the work of the diaspora community here in the UK, including groups such as Humanitarian Action for Sudan, chaired by Zeinab Badawi, whom I met yesterday. It is providing invaluable support that is desperately needed, especially to the emergency rooms.
My question to the Minister relates to the most recent violence in El Fasher. It is now over a year since the UK successfully proposed United Nations Security Council Resolution 2736 on the protection of civilians. Notwithstanding the Secretary-General’s most recent call for ceasefires, we have seen the breaking of that, along with the most recent violence and the continuing persecution of civilians. What are the Government doing to ensure the enforcement of that resolution? There is no point in having Security Council resolutions unless they are enforced.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
I often find myself asking what the point is of many of these declarations and resolutions in these situations. We need to fully understand this context, and I am sure the noble Lord does: enforcement would be great, but who is going to do it and how would it happen? We clearly need to see civilians protected, along with aid workers, who are being deliberately targeted. The targeting of refugee camps is abhorrent, but one of the most frustrating aspects of this situation is the unwillingness of the armed groups to enter into any kind of meaningful process that could bring about peace. We talk about peacekeeping and so on, but there is no peace to keep. At the moment, this is the worst situation on the planet from a humanitarian point of view, and my great fear is that, until those leaders decide it is in their best interests to enter into a process, it will get worse.
Baroness Uddin (Non-Afl)
I express my gratitude to the Minister for describing what must have been a heart-rending nightmare, speaking to the innocent people, particularly the women and children, who have been suffering so dreadfully. I declare my interest as a member of the all-party parliamentary group. I have visited Sudan, and it is one of my favourite countries. It breaks my heart to see the utter devastation and the ruins in which it lies.
My question follows on from the discussions many noble Lords and Members in the other place have had with representatives of the diaspora community, who say that Britain is best placed to discuss with its international partners, including in the Arab world, how to ensure that women and children are not raped and pillaged in the numbers that are happening right now. Can the Minister say something about any discussions she may be having about this dreadful situation and how we can work together with other nations to ensure that it comes to an end? A ceasefire is an absolute must now. I hear what she says about enforcing our will on others, but we have a lot more to do in ensuring that the message is powerful and clear that we will not stand for it.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
The noble Baroness is right. I should have talked in response to an earlier comment about the strength of the diaspora community here in the UK and their fierce desire to see peace return to their beloved country.
We are working closely with others to try, and that was the purpose of the conference we held earlier this year: to bring together Gulf states and others from across the world who want to see this situation improve, to consider what we can do together that would have an impact on the ground in Sudan. There are those who have more influence than others in this situation, and we are talking to them, as well as doing what we can ourselves, in the hope that at some point arms do not find their way into the hands of people who are using them against civilians, refugees and aid workers. My fear is that, until that happens, we will see the violence continue. As ever, the devastating consequences are felt most hard by women and the populations least able to protect themselves in Sudan.
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)
My Lords, the Minister will know of my interest in the issue of preventing sexual violence in conflict, as I led on that and have visited Sudan. What engagement has taken place with SRSG Patten at the UN? There should be a refocusing of support for survivors at the heart of this. Let us not forget that this is not just about two warring parties; unfortunately, a lot of the women who take refuge in places like Darfur, tragically, sadly and abhorrently, have to suffer the same consequences again and again.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
The noble Lord is right, and we are deeply concerned about that. I also commend the Duchess of Edinburgh for the work she has done; she has visited the border too and heard for herself the traumatic accounts that he alluded to in his question. My noble friend Lord Collins works through the UN on the issues that he is talking about, and we are working with our multilateral partners to provide the support that he is right to remind us will be needed for a long time for the women he has referred to.
Lord Oates (LD)
My Lords, I declare my interest as chief executive of United Against Malnutrition and Hunger. We heard last night from diaspora representatives from Sudan about the devastating impact that malnutrition is having particularly on people suffering from diseases that would normally be minor, but who are dying of them because of malnourishment. What assessment have the Government made of using different and smaller agencies to ensure access on the ground, and are they prepared to take greater risks to reach people?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
Yes, in short. We need to use a variety of agencies in order to reach people. The noble Lord is also right in what he says about nutrition: we see people who are badly malnourished, and that has other impacts. Cholera is now present, for example. Even the work that we do on the border in refugee camps is hampered by the condition that people find themselves in. Vaccinations become difficult because they are less effective when a child is malnourished. I fear that the impact of this is going to be very long lasting.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, referred to the extreme levels of sexual violence happening in Sudan, particularly against women and girls. As a result of a lack of funding, the UNFPA—the sexual and reproductive health agency—has been forced to withdraw from more than half of the 93 health facilities that it had been supporting in Sudan, meaning that women, girls and men who were victims of sexual violence are not getting the support that they were previously. Does the Minister agree that that is both a tragedy and a huge failure of the international community?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
Yes, I am happy to agree with that; it is dreadful, and if there is a way that we can address this, then we should be doing it. We are doing what we can to support women and girls who have been through the most hideous of experiences. I have sat with them, looked them in the eye and heard what they have had to say. Where support can be provided, it is being provided, but the difficulty for any agency of operating in that context cannot be overestimated. It is incredibly challenging. I commend all those who are doing so, because they are putting their lives at risk every day. We see attacks on aid workers and the deliberate targeting of the delivery of food, including in camps. There is currently nowhere on earth that is as difficult as Sudan to operate in.
Post Office Horizon Inquiry: Volume 1
(1 day, 11 hours ago)
Lords ChamberRead Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)
My Lords, I will respond to the Government’s Statement and the accompanying Green Paper, Future of Post Office. This marks the first comprehensive review of the network in over 15 years—one that, I must say at the outset, raises as many questions as it seeks to answer. We on these Benches recognise, as I believe all noble Lords do, the vital social and economic role of the Post Office in every corner of our country. Whether it serves as the last shop in a rural village, a banking hub for the digitally excluded or a trusted lifeline for elderly customers, the Post Office is far more than just a delivery counter; it is part of the national fabric. Yet as we examine this Green Paper, we are confronted with proposals that suggest the Government are focused more on loosening their obligations than on strengthening the network’s future.
I begin with the most glaring concern: the proposed removal of the long-standing requirement for 11,500 branches. The Government say that this figure is arbitrary, yet it is one that has long underpinned public and parliamentary confidence in the reach of the Post Office network. So I ask the Minister directly: will the Government replace this minimum with a new commitment? The Green Paper claims that some branches exist solely to meet the 11,500 target, rather than community need. If that is the case, how many such branches are there and where are they? These are not academic questions; they go to the heart of rural and community access. Does the Minister expect that the current network access criteria will be changed within the timeframe of this Parliament? Do the Government accept that we have to ask these questions, otherwise there may be the suspicion that we are entering a phase of managed decline by stealth?
The Government also assure us that 99% of the population will remain within three miles of a branch. How will that promise be maintained without a firm floor on the number of branches? Is the Minister suggesting that we should accept consolidation in urban centres at the cost of village branches? We do not feel that we should replace geographic equity with mere spreadsheet logic.
The Government’s preferred path for the future ownership of the Post Office appears to be mutualisation—a model that has long had appeal—but the fine print of the Green Paper tells a different story. It seems that mutualisation has been pushed well beyond the current Parliament and will not be delivered before 2030, and then only after a further three years of implementation, if it happens at all. For many postmasters who have already endured over a decade of uncertainty and the profound trauma of the Horizon scandal, the proposed timeline may well feel like a further deferral—an important reform pushed into the distant future rather than a commitment delivered in the present. Moreover, the Green Paper offers no clarity on what constitutes financial and operational stability. What are the benchmarks for profitability or branch sustainability that would trigger mutualisation? Can the Minister please provide a definition?
We are told that the Post Office must modernise to embrace technological change, and indeed a major and welcome focus of the Green Paper is on future-proofing—quite so—but after the Horizon scandal, no one in this House needs reminding that technology alone does not ensure progress, particularly when its implementation is opaque and accountability is absent. In the wake of the Horizon scandal, it is vital that any new technologies introduced across the Post Office network are subject to rigorous, independent testing and transparent auditing. Staff and postmasters must be assured of clear, protected channels to raise concerns, free from fear or reprisal. We cannot afford the emergence of another Horizon.
There is also the curious matter of Royal Mail. The Green Paper mentions the possibility of closer working, but says that currently
“a re-merger is not under consideration”.
Is it off the table entirely or merely on pause?
The Green Paper calls itself the start of “an honest conversation”. We are happy to believe that, but, if it is so, then the Government must begin by answering the questions that we have put before them today. We on these Benches will continue to hold Ministers to account on the future of access, ownership, technological governance and the true role of the Post Office in national life. After everything the postmasters have endured and all that the Horizon scandal laid bare, this moment must not be about withdrawing responsibility but restoring trust. I urge the Government to match any consultation with clarity, ambition and integrity.
Baroness Brinton (LD)
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Sharpe of Epsom, has spoken about the Green Paper, but I understood that we were responding only to the Post Office Horizon inquiry’s first report. I apologise if we are meant to cover the Green Paper, but, having had that instruction, I have rewritten my speech accordingly.
We need time to consider the inquiry’s first report. The Statement expresses many of the sentiments that we often hear at the Dispatch Box: admiration for the fearless and diligent work of Sir Wyn Williams, the bravery of the postmasters, and descriptions of what the Post Office, and through it, Governments, have done over a number of years. All that is true, but the problem is that, once again, a judge leading an inquiry has had to call out the lack of delivery and transparency, and, frankly, the re-victimisation of the postmasters and their families. It is just unacceptable. It is close to the old-fashioned saying about cheques: “words and figures do not agree”.
My first question to the Minister is: will the Government review all Sir Wyn’s recommendations, and, as importantly, the evidence of poor delivery in the compensation scheme that he cites, and report back to Parliament in three months? This cannot go on. Some postmasters are dying; until all have realistic offers of compensation, they remain in a financial limbo created by the Post Office and Whitehall.
To give the House an example from the report, page 48 sets out the design of the scheme, which was meant to be “user friendly”. Sir Wyn says that it was so chaotically delivered that, as described in paragraph 4.23, a postmaster’s eligibility criteria were
“determined by employees of the Post Office”
and not by people independent of it. Employees then decided whether the postmaster had suffered a shortfall. Assessors from the Post Office’s solicitors would value that and then write a recommendation for the independent panel. The independent panel’s overriding priority, set by the Post Office, was speed and to assess via its terms of reference, created by the Post Office.
That is just one example from Sir Wyn’s excellent report, but it demonstrates once again why such compensation schemes must be run truly independently from the body that caused the damage. He recommends a truly independent body and not one at arm’s length like the Infected Blood Compensation Authority, because not even that is truly independent. Are the Government going to consider this seriously? From what was said in the Statement, it does not sound like it.
I ask the Minister what it will take to change this. We now have or have had problems with the Post Office Horizon scheme, the Windrush scheme and the IBCA scheme. The government approach to redress and remedy, regardless of the Government, fails time and again; even worse, the problems last longer because there is no real desire to change.
Then there is the issue of Fujitsu. Sir Wyn says that the Post Office and the Government must start discussions with Fujitsu on its contribution to this scheme. Will the Minister provide a timetable for those discussions? There is also another Fujitsu issue: it is now clear from the evidence heard at the public inquiry that it was complicit at the very least, and proactive at worst, in helping the Post Office in its cases in court against postmasters over many years. We know the police are now investigating this, including for perjury and other very serious crimes.
There is a further question. Why does government continue to recontract Fujitsu in other areas? Can the Minister reassure your Lordships’ House that the Government are completely confident that Fujitsu meets the high standard of probity required of large IT contracts?
It is good that it is proposed that the family members of postmasters who suffered because of the scandal will receive redress. But before the Government copy the arrangements for the infected blood scandal, will they please look at the very large problems that the affected victims’ scheme already has? It still has 18 months before it offers its first compensation.
In opposition, Labour repeatedly promised that a duty of candour would be one of its priorities to ensure that discussions start at an early stage as it becomes clear that there are problems somewhere. But the Government have delayed the introduction of the Bill. Can the Minister say when that legislation will be presented to Parliament?
From these Lib Dem Benches, we believe that is not enough. It is essential that whistleblowers have a safe place to air their concerns. We believe that, given the repeated slapping down of anyone expressing concerns—which, by the way, delayed so many truths coming out—an independent office of the whistleblower must be set up. The decades of wrongdoing are a shameful episode in this country’s history. We need mechanisms in place to ensure that this never happens again.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business and Trade and Department for Science, Information and Technology (Baroness Jones of Whitchurch) (Lab)
My Lords, I thank both noble Lords for their comments. The inquiry under Sir Wyn Williams has asked some wise and penetrating questions and has scrutinised more than 2 million pages of evidence. I extend my thanks to Sir Wyn and his team for their commitment to confronting the impact of this terrible scandal. I also thank the Horizon advisory board, including the noble Lords, Lord Beamish and Lord Arbuthnot, for its hard work in helping to improve the delivery of redress. We will continue to seek its guidance on how we can continue to improve delivery, particularly in light of the recommendations made in Sir Wyn’s report.
The volume published last Tuesday is only the first volume of Sir Wyn’s final report. It focuses on the human impact of the Horizon IT scandal and the redress delivered to its victims, and we look forward to receiving the subsequent volume from the inquiry when it is published in due course. Sir Wyn’s report lays bare the wide-ranging suffering endured by victims of this scandal—the distress and severe disruption experienced so acutely. Victims lost money, their health and their liberty, and in the most tragic cases they lost their lives. We owe it to them to have proper redress for all crimes that have been committed.
Sir Wyn’s report focuses on the redress scheme set up by this and the previous Government, with 19 recommendations made for the Government to consider. The Government welcome these recommendations, which we have committed to respond to by 10 October. In answer to the noble Baroness, we will of course review all the recommendations and the evidence behind them in detail. I hope to be back here at the Dispatch Box in October to update Parliament on the progress we are making.
We have already announced that we will accept three of Sir Wyn’s recommendations, which include extending redress to the most severely affected family members and introducing a best offer approach in the GLO scheme. The Government are keen to ensure that we get redress to those affected as soon as possible. We recognise that delays have been unacceptable and that some sub-postmasters have found the schemes adversarial and difficult to navigate. Over the past year, we have made improvements that have significantly sped up the process of claims. In the last 12 months, this Government have more than quadrupled the total amount of redress paid, which now stands at nearly £1.1 billion. But we recognise that there is more to do.
Horizon, which sparked this whole scandal, should have gone long ago, but the task of replacing it is hugely complex and cannot be done overnight. In the meantime, it remains critical to the delivery of the essential Post Office services on which people depend. We are determined to end the use of Horizon and so draw a line under Fujitsu’s involvement with the Post Office. As part of over £500 million of investment during this Parliament, we have committed up to £136 million this financial year to invest in new technology and replace Horizon.
I turn to some of the questions. The noble Lord, Lord Sharpe, asked about the Green Paper. Twelve months ago we inherited a Post Office in crisis, with declining financial sustainability, unstable leadership, a network struggling to maintain services and a reputation shattered by the Horizon scandal and its appalling treatment of sub-postmasters, as Sir Wyn Williams’s report has underlined. The Green Paper published this week begins a national dialogue on the future of the Post Office so that we can create a modern, resilient and financially sustainable organisation.
Although we recognise the Post Office’s history, this Green Paper is about looking forwards, not backwards. We also need to recognise the serious cultural issues of the past and ensure that, going forwards, the Post Office has a positive postmaster-focused culture and is run in an accountable and transparent way. We also of course recognise the points raised by the noble Lord about the important role that post offices can play in rural areas and as banking hubs, particularly in disadvantaged areas.
The noble Lord asked about the progress and possible changes of governance. No decision on changes to governance will be made by the Government until the inquiry’s final report, to allow the Government to consider the inquiry’s recommendations on governance issues together with the Green Paper responses.
The noble Baroness asked about Fujitsu and the technology. The Post Office is committed to moving away from Fujitsu and the Horizon system. Post Office has a plan to introduce a new IT system in stages for postmasters and strategic partners. Post Office’s future technology portfolio is designed to transform technology and data across the Post Office while supporting the transition of Horizon out of Fujitsu. As I said, the Government have confirmed that they will provide up to £136 million for this project in the financial year. The noble Baroness wanted to see some speed in this. This is a complex programme of work that cannot be completed overnight, given the range of transactions that the IT system needs to support. Nevertheless, we will move at pace to try to bring those changes about.
The noble Baroness also asked about Fujitsu’s continued involvement. The first thing to say is that Fujitsu has acknowledged its moral obligation to contribute to the cost of the scandal, and the Government welcome this. The extent of Fujitsu’s culpability for the scandal will not be clear until all parts of Sir Wyn Williams’s inquiry report are published. In the meantime, Fujitsu has begun talks with the Department for Business and Trade on the company’s contribution to the cost of the scandal. That includes whether any interim payments should be made.
The noble Baroness asked about the progress on redress. We share the postmasters’ frustration that redress has been too slow. However, we have massively increased the pace. We have paid out nearly £1.1 billion—four times what had been paid when we took office. We have already made some other positive interventions, including introducing the £75,000 fixed offer for the HSS claimants; launching the HCRS and merging Post Office’s redress for convicted claimants into it; launching the HSS appeals scheme; and promising redress for Capture victims. We will continue to look at Sir Wyn Williams’s recommendations to see what more we can do.
It remains the mission of this Government to bring the victims of the Horizon scandal the justice they wholly deserve and to make sure that a miscarriage of justice does not happen again. But as well as fixing the past, we must build on the future. As I say, the Green Paper published earlier this week begins a national dialogue on the future of the Post Office. Our priority now is building a modern and financially sustainable Post Office that is run in an accountable and postmaster-focused way, and I hope noble Lords will support those objectives.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab Co-op)
My Lords, I was astonished by the contribution from the Opposition Front Bench, not just because, as the noble Baroness from the Liberal Democrats said, I had assumed this was specifically on the report and not on the Green Paper, but because the noble Lord was talking about the future of the Post Office, and indeed mentioned Royal Mail, without acknowledging that the demise of the Post Office and the Royal Mail has been under the Tory party over the last 14 years. It has. If we look at other countries, we see a much better system continuing in most of our competitors.
I want to raise two points, the first of which was raised by the noble Baroness from the Liberal Democrats. The Minister said that the Government expect Fujitsu to contribute and that discussions are under way, but has Fujitsu been given a deadline by which this must be agreed, and how much do we expect it to contribute? It needs to be a great deal; otherwise, the taxpayer is undertaking the cost again, as we have done with so many things, and as we are going to have to do with the Afghan compensation, and it should not be the taxpayer in this case—it should be Fujitsu.
My second question is about prosecutions. Everyone seems to get away without any prosecutions in these kinds of things. Will the Minister talk to the Attorney-General and ask when some of the people who were responsible for the terrible tragedy that so many sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses suffered will be held to account? It is about time that they were.
Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)
I thank my noble friend. He is quite right that this scandal occurred over many years, and it has taken a long time for both the previous Government and now this one to really get to grips with the action that needs to be taken. That is why the report from Sir Wyn is so important to provide extra clarity on the further actions that we need to take. My noble friend talked about Fujitsu. As I have said, the Government are having active discussions with Fujitsu about its contribution. We are still awaiting Sir Wyn’s second report to get a better sense of the complete culpability of Fujitsu, and we cannot pre-empt that, but I think Fujitsu recognises that it has a role in making amends, and we are in active discussions with it.
My noble friend asked about criminal prosecutions and accountability. I think everybody shares his frustration that this is taking so long, but the action on accountability must await the conclusions of the second part of the Williams inquiry—obviously, we all await those with interest. He will know as well that the Metropolitan Police investigation, which is independent of government, is ongoing. The Met is a core participant in the Williams inquiry, but it also has around 100 staff engaged on Horizon matters, looking at whether there are any criminal issues that need further following up, and I know that it will be doing that in a very active way.
Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom (Con)
My Lords, the Minister is quite right that this matter has taken place over many years, under Labour, Lib Dem and Conservative Ministers. We should all, frankly, hang our heads in shame. I went along to the Oval last week to listen to Sir Wyn give his excellent report, and he used a telling phrase about Fujitsu; namely, that it was kicking the can down the road. That is exactly what it is doing. The longer it thinks it can stave off paying a single penny towards the victims of this matter, the less it thinks it will have to pay. Do the Government recognise that the only way we can change that behaviour is to stop giving it contracts?
Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)
First, I pay tribute to the noble Lord for all his involvement in this running scandal over many years and for helping to bring the scandal to light. He asked about Fujitsu. As I say, we are in active dialogue with Fujitsu. He will know that Fujitsu has announced that it will not voluntarily bid for new contracts, unless requested by the Government, and we welcome that as the right course of action. The extent of Fujitsu’s role in the scandal is not fully known and therefore we feel it would be inappropriate to take further action until we have all the parts of the inquiry before us. At the moment, Fujitsu has not been found guilty of any wrongdoing and as such it continues to deliver government contracts where these are already in place. However, as I say, it has announced that it will not voluntarily bid for new contracts, but I share the noble Lord’s frustration with the current situation.
Lord Berkeley of Knighton (CB)
My Lords, I will not repeat everything that we have heard. I agree very much with the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, but on one point she brought up, surely one way that we could allay the suspicions of the general public, which are mighty at the moment, to do with infected blood and this scandal, would be to get on with interim payments. That would at last begin to give these poor victims, and the general public, some confidence that we all mean what we say and that money is going to be forthcoming before some of these victims die.
Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)
The noble Lord is right that we need to speed up the payments and, as I set out earlier, we are taking steps to do that. The Government have already taken major steps to improve the delivery of redress, leading to nearly £1.1 billion having been paid to more than 7,900 victims, more than four times the total amount paid before last year. We need to continue to work on this issue. We have taken a variety of measures to speed up redress, including the introduction of the £75,000 fixed offer for HSS claimants, and we recently announced that we are introducing facilitated discussions in the GLO scheme, as requested by claimants’ lawyers. We will not rest until all those affected have received redress. That is absolutely the determination of the Post Office Minister and it is absolutely our determination. It is very frustrating when these things get held up, and we are trying to unblock any blockages that still exist. It is an absolute determination of this Government that individuals and their close family members receive the redress that they are due.
Lord Weir of Ballyholme (DUP)
My Lords, I join others in welcoming the first stage of this very important report into an appalling scandal which has blighted so many lives and which we know has, sadly, actually cost lives as well. Sometimes we are faced with a scandal, such as we debated yesterday, that has been caused by a single cock-up. That is not the case here. There have been years, if not decades, of conscious decisions leading to culpability. It is right, as we move ahead with this inquiry, that those who are culpable are held directly to account, so I welcome the Government’s opening of discussions with Fujitsu.
While we cannot, at this stage, work out the quantum of the compensation Fujitsu owes, will the Government give an assurance that should Fujitsu, or indeed anyone else that is culpable in this situation, either not produce compensation or offer an inadequate compensation package, they are prepared to take action to compel those who are culpable to provide compensation? Further, will the Government give an assurance that whatever sum of compensation is provided by Fujitsu or anyone else, it will not be at the expense of calling off criminal prosecutions? Will they ensure that those who have committed criminal acts are ultimately held responsible for their behaviour?
Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)
My Lords, as I say, the extent of Fujitsu’s role in the scandal is not yet fully known, so we await the second stage of Sir Wyn Williams’ inquiry report. I very much hope that that will lay down some very clear rules for how we should proceed on this issue. Fujitsu has not been found guilty of any wrongdoing; nevertheless, the Government are in constructive discussions with Fujitsu, and I think it understands its responsibility to make amends when the final recommendations come out. I do not detect any sense from Fujitsu that it will not comply with the desire for proper redress.
Lord McNicol of West Kilbride (Lab)
My Lords, like others across the House, I welcome Wyn Williams’s first report into this IT scandal, and it is an IT scandal. It is clear from looking at the Green Paper that there are huge historical failings across the Post Office’s management and board—serious cultural failings. How do His Majesty’s Government see this Green Paper redressing those failings and setting up new structures for the future of the Post Office so that no sub-postmasters or sub-postmistresses are ever left to face these appalling situations again?
Every speaker in this debate has touched on the financial compensation, and I add my weight to that. The Statement made in the other place on 14 July said that £500 million of taxpayers’ money will be committed to bringing in and supporting a new IT system. That is before we even touch on the compensation packages. The Minister said that Fujitsu has a moral obligation. I think Fujitsu has far more than a moral obligation when we look at the situation that far too many of those sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses were put into. They were ostracised within their communities, some took their own lives, and they were treated to years of not being believed and a legal system that believed a computer over their word in far too many cases. Fujitsu is on the hook for more than a moral obligation. It has a financial obligation to deal with both the redress and the implementation of a new and fairer IT system.
Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)
I thank my noble friend for those questions. He asked first about the cultural issues, and we all understand just how poorly the Post Office has been run over many years to allow this scandal to appear and not be addressed, given the increasing amount of evidence that was presented to the leadership in the Post Office. We are taking steps to address this. There is now, as my noble friend will know, a new leadership in the Post Office. The Green Paper gives us an opportunity to revisit what we want from the Post Office, which ought to remain a vital part of UK life in our communities and on our high streets, providing small business opportunities for many people. It is potentially a huge reset that will take place in the Post Office.
We are committed to maintaining it as a strong, accessible network. The noble Lord, Lord Sharpe, asked about the size. It is our preferred option that the overall size and shape of that network would remain the same. My noble friend is right about the cultural issues. For us, there are other issues about governance going forward, but the key thing is to make sure that postmasters and postmistresses play a critical role in shaping and designing the future of the Post Office, because they know what works, they know their communities and, as we know, we really have not listened to them sufficiently in the past. I am confident that they will very much be part of shaping the future of the Post Office as the consultation goes forward, and it will be all the better for that.
My noble friend asked about the technology. We are working to replace Fujitsu as quickly as we can. The development of the technology is based on a test and learn approach, so we are working to make sure that the replacement of Fujitsu is done right in a robust system. Post Office Ltd’s IT transformation is ensuring that the hardware that was purchased for NBIT will now be used to refresh counter devices across the network and that the software that was developed will still be used for drop and collect services. We need to get the technology right and there is money going into it, but the important thing here is that we really listen to those people at the heart of it, the postmasters and postmistresses.
Lord Mawson (CB)
My Lords, this is a very sad story about the failures of a very large business, the Post Office—which many years ago I used to work for—and its culture, and about the failure of the machinery of the state, which has had very serious impacts on the lives of many human beings and their families. It has cost us all hundreds of millions of pounds, is still costing us all large amounts of money and is still affecting these people, despite all that has happened. What are the Government intending to do to drill into and come to terms with those failures in the machinery of the state and what the real lessons learned might be? Some of us in our working life have seen these same kinds of failures in other areas of public life, in the NHS and in the public sector. What lessons are going to be learned from this, given the human tragedies that we can all clearly see in this set of affairs in plain sight?
Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)
The noble Lord is right. From the top down, we all bear some responsibility for this, although I pay tribute to the MPs and the Members of this House who used their positions to highlight and eventually bring to account some of the individuals involved in this scandal. The Green Paper is attempting to address exactly those issues about the machinery of state and whether the Post Office should be reconfigured and run in a different way. We want to make sure that it is financially viable on a longer-term basis. This is an opportunity for us to make sure that the future of the Post Office is robust and that we learn the lessons from previous scandals for how government listens and flags issues going wrong at the kind of level that occurred with the Horizon scandal. We will look at whether there are any crossover lessons from other scandals that we can take forward. I understand that the second volume of Sir Wyn Williams’s report will also look at some of those wider issues.
Planning and Infrastructure Bill
Thursday 17th July 2025
(1 day, 11 hours ago)
Lords ChamberPlanning and Infrastructure Bill 2024-26 View all Planning and Infrastructure Bill 2024-26 Debates Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 110-I(b) Amendments for Committee (Supplementary to the Marshalled List) - (17 Jul 2025)
Baroness Pinnock
“Purpose of this ActThe purpose of this Act is to—(a) accelerate the delivery of new homes and critical infrastructure,(b) improve the planning and consenting processes,(c) support nature recovery through more effective development and restoration, and(d) increase community acceptability of infrastructure and development.”
Baroness Pinnock (LD)
My Lords, on the opening day in Committee it is always good to start with a discussion about the basis of the Bill—the principles that form the fundamentals of the Planning and Infrastructure Bill. The reason for this amendment is just that. The policy drivers for the Bill are described in the preamble to the Explanatory Notes, which says that critical infrastructure must have “faster and more certain” consenting orders; that local planning committees are to be modernised to provide more certainty; that nature recovery requires “a more strategic approach”; and, finally, that the Bill
“intends to speed up and streamline the delivery of new homes and … infrastructure”.
It is accepted—certainly by those of us on these Benches—that our country has failed to build vital infrastructure in a timely and cost-effective way. All accept the urgent need for more housing, especially for housing with a social rent. However, what is seen as “streamlining” by the Government may be seen as “steamrolling” by communities. What are seen as modernising planning committees may well be seen as the removal of democratic decision-making and accountability. What is seen as a strategic approach to nature recovery may well be seen as the unacceptable relegation of the value and importance of nature to our community. Hence this amendment in my name, which seeks to clarify the purpose of the Bill by careful definition of the language used.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, for her amendment. Although I am seeking to amend her amendment, I echo the point she raised; it is very useful to have a debate about the principles. As the noble Baroness inferred, the scope of the Bill, which is set out at the beginning, is very dry. It does not give the sense of what this is all about. I commend her perseverance in tabling this amendment and allowing us to debate this. I know that the House seems to frown on these “in principle” debates at the beginning of Committee, as I found in trying to amend her amendment.
The noble Baroness is right to identify that there are a lot of tensions and challenges in taking forward this agenda. They are not easily solved, and sometimes we have to accept that there are going to be some trade-offs. My main concern is to speed up energy infrastructure to get us to clean power and, as rapidly as possible, to net zero. I agree that balancing the need for new homes and critical infrastructure with a planning consent process that commands public confidence and supports nature recovery is absolutely right. One of the big problems is that many well-meaning agencies, regulators, planning committees and campaigners have made it almost impossible to get the kind of investment we need in our energy infrastructure. Clearly, it would be perverse for me to say we should disregard the whole issue of nature preservation and environmental issues in the charge for net zero. Equally, many of those organisations concerned about the environment have impeded our real efforts to achieve net zero. Somehow, we have to find a way through.
My noble friend the Minister will be aware of media speculation that her department is about to announce some concessions in relation to Part 3. There are many Labour MPs committed to the growth agenda who would be concerned if Part 3 is watered down and so impedes progress on the growth agenda. Whatever agreement may have been reached with some of the environmental organisations about the actions they are going to take as a result of what the media are certainly talking about as an agreement, it is my experience of the Lords that it will always pocket concessions given at an early stage and come back for more. Discussion of Part 3 is going to be very important. Many Labour MPs will be taking a close interest in the Government’s continued commitment to the growth agenda.
I do not need to say much more about the issues of energy infrastructure. The Commons Environmental Audit Committee in 2024 concluded that many planned renewable energy projects were hampered by persistent problems accessing the electricity grid. National Grid wants to spend £30 billion over the next few years to upgrade our electricity network, and it needs to have confidence that the system is not going to obstruct it in the way that it has for so many years in the past.
It is not just energy. A recent report by Dr Mann Virdee for the Council on Geostrategy basically indicated that:
“Britain’s planning system is one of the primary barriers to efficient infrastructure delivery”.
It is characterised by an
“overly complex and burdensome framework. … Developers face extensive requirements for documentation. The planning application for the Lower Thames Crossing … ran to almost 360,000 pages”—
what a waste of energy. Does anyone think that this is anything other than a risk-averse box-ticking exercise by the myriad regulators we have, who seem to have lost any sense of common sense when it comes to consideration?
Even in the case of Sizewell C, which I have a great affection for—the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, will know that—had an impact assessment that ran to 44,260 pages. You also then have to go through a justification process as well. This is all a complete waste of time and effort. We need to have confidence, as the Bill goes through, that we are going to see a really streamlined impact.
Following the OBR’s recent report, there has been a lot of comment about the public finances, but for me one of the most significant points in that report is its reference to this legislation and the housebuilding ambitions of the Government—which I applaud—and reckon that GDP will grow by 0.2% as a result of these planning reforms. In the current situation of the public finances, that is something to hold on to.
My amendment merely takes all of the characteristics that the noble Baroness put forward but puts growth at the top of the agenda. We need to send a very powerful message to the regulators, and to all the agencies that have obstructed progress in this country for so long, that they need to get that growth is the number one aim of this. I beg to move.
Amendment 3 (to Amendment 2)
Baroness Scott of Bybrook
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
My Lords, I first declare my interest as a vice-president of the Local Government Association. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, for bringing forward a purpose clause which, as we have said, allows us to focus on the Government’s stated intent, specifically its overarching vision to enable housebuilding and support the development of critical infrastructure.
While we welcome the amendment, we on these Benches believe it can and must be strengthened. The Government have committed to building 1.5 million new homes, but as things currently stand, that target is undeliverable. The Bill in its present form does little to change that fundamental reality; it does not move the dial in enhancing development across the country.
In 2019, the Conservative Party pledged to deliver 1 million additional homes over the course of that Parliament. By 2024, before the general election, we delivered on that promise. If this legislation is truly intended to unlock housebuilding, then that ambition must be explicit in the purpose of this clause. Only by doing so can we measure the Bill’s effectiveness against the Government’s target and hold them to account, both in your Lordships’ House and in the other place. That is precisely why I have tabled an amendment to Amendment 2, to include the Government’s goal of delivering 1.5 million homes in the Bill.
In this House, we are united in the view that this country needs more homes. Housing unlocks opportunity, enables labour market mobility, allows young people to move forward with their lives and removes the key barrier to productivity. However, quantity must be matched by quality. New homes must be well designed and sensitive to local character, and I trust the Minister will agree with that point.
If the Bill is the Government’s legislative vehicle for delivering this, then that ambition must be stated clearly and unambiguously. We must support the Government’s stated aim, but the ambition must be backed by a credible plan, meaningful partnerships and, as we have heard, the active involvement of local communities.
Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)
My Lords, I am delighted that we have reached Committee, and I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, on having tabled the first amendment for debate. I echo many of her comments and those of my noble friend Lady Scott. I greatly enjoyed the contribution from the noble Lord, Lord Hunt; it is great to see him in his new position. We very much enjoyed working with him when he was on the Front Bench, and we look forward to working with him in his new place.
My concern is not that I do not want to see the critical infrastructure and housing that we need—particularly, as the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, said, in rural areas. In fact, I would propose to add a little “subsection (e)” to her existing Amendment 1, to protect the countryside from overdevelopment, as well as to protect and promote food security; those issues should be at the heart of the Bill.
I was delighted to hear on “Farming Today” this morning—I obviously had an early start—the CPRE mention the protection it would like to see for affordable homes. It mentioned in its briefing that the current definition of affordable homes is not accurate and should be revisited. Can the Minister—with whom I look forward to collaborating through the passage of the Bill—say whether the Government are minded to do that? The plea from the CPRE—which I believe is appropriate to Amendment 1, and particularly to a hypothetical “subsection (e)”, which I may bring forward on Report if the amendment is brought back—is that, to protect the countryside, it would like a commitment from the Government to use brownfield land first. I wonder whether the Minister would agree to that. In the CPRE’s view:
“England has space for 1.2 million homes on previously developed land”.
The benefit of building in this type of area is:
“These homes would: be close to jobs, schools, and transport connections; regenerate town centres and urban communities; protect green spaces and farmland from development”.
My concern is that, without an amendment such as a hypothetical little “subsection (e)” to protect the countryside and food security, we risk trampling over the countryside and greenfield in a mad dash to build houses at pace.
The CPRE also says, quite rightly, that there is a role for planning. As a one-time Member of the other place, if there were a development in my constituency that looked as though it was going to be wildly unpopular with a village or rural community, I would always urge the developers to meet at the earliest opportunity with parish councils before the development got into the public domain. I believe that there should be—this view is also shared by the CPRE—a clear role for local planning committees in the context of the Bill and that the role of parish councils should be cherished and strengthened. Without that, we would remove grass-roots democracy.
I very much enjoyed the remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, on the environmental recovery programme, which is often at some distance from the damage being done. If Part 3 is to remain, I hope that it will cover the issues that were addressed successfully in the pilot project in rural North Yorkshire—the Slowing the Flow at Pickering flood scheme—where we have effectively protected the development downstream by having not a major reservoir but a small reservoir. The construction of bunds, alongside other projects such as chopping down trees and growing trees in appropriate places, has allowed us to slow the flow. It is that type of imaginative nature solution—working with nature by, for example, planting trees in appropriate places—that can achieve flood resilience and flood defences, while also not contributing to flooding going forward. I hope that the Government might be mindful of protecting the countryside and farmland for the food security that is urgently needed, while also strengthening grass-roots democracy in the way I have suggested.
Lord Mawson (CB)
My Lords, I am sympathetic to these amendments, but I am also very sympathetic to what the Government are trying to achieve in getting things built.
My colleagues and I have been at the other end of this telescope in communities trying to build things and get things done. We are now at year 41 and probably nearly a thousand projects in—some have been very small; others, such as the Olympics, became quite big. You get a perspective from practice on all that, which might be helpful to this discussion. Many years ago, we came across the challenge of what we call the two Ds: democracy and delivery. What I discovered many years ago with an East End group of people, on a failing group of housing estates where everything was failing constantly, was that local people were fed up to the back teeth with endless chatter and endless promises by councillors, when nothing seemed to happen. We only really became credible in Bromley-by-Bow, and trust began to emerge, when we delivered our first nursery with local parents and their children, which made a difference to their lives, and began to take over a derelict park where people were injecting every day in a completely dysfunctional situation.
It might be just worth me sharing the reasons why we made certain long-term choices. When I arrived in Tower Hamlets in the early 1980s, it was profoundly dysfunctional. The schools did not succeed, and the roads did not get swept. Some 97% of everything was run by the state, and it was a terrible mess. I was a local clergyman arriving in a rundown church; 12 old people sat where they had always sat in a 200-seater church, and it looked as though the dead had been carried out and no one had noticed. I had £400 in the bank. The little problem for me was to ask myself: what on earth can I do about this? The answer was: I do not have the faintest idea. As a Yorkshireman, my initial instinct was to do a runner; it is all too much for me. Phillip, the Jewish headteacher across the road at the primary school, was retiring early because it had become too much for him, so I thought, “This is me in a few years’ time, falling off my trolley”—I was 29 then.
Lord Banner (Con)
My Lords, I declare my interest as a practising Silk in planning and environmental law, with a range of clients affected by planning regulation in various ways. I am a non-executive director of SAV Group, a property developer, and of Crossman Special Projects, a land promoter. I am the author of the independent review into legal challenges against NSIPs, which I will speak more on later in these proceedings.
I like purpose clauses in legislation. They are helpful because, in time, the courts will have to interpret the provisions of what will become the Act in due course, and if we do not spell out what the purpose is then the courts will have to define that. Surely it is far better to have a degree of parliamentary control in specifying what the purposes are. If that is to be done—it is not essential, but it is certainly nice to have—I certainly cannot improve on the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, as proposed to be amended by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, and my noble friend Lady Scott.
I have a degree of nervousness, however, about the Bill having its own purpose without there being an overall statutory purpose of planning, as is advocated by the Royal Town Planning Institute and proposed in Amendment 132 from the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett. I do not agree with all the wording of that, but that is not the point for today’s purposes.
The Bill, once enacted, will be part of the wider framework of planning Acts, of which there are many. If it has its own stated purpose but the purpose of planning is not stated, there is a risk of a potential mismatch. That could be remedied by having an overall purpose of planning, which would have a number of advantages. For example, in the context of the increased role of planning officers, they would have that guiding beacon, which may avoid undue pressure being placed on planning officers by elected members—something that does happen, and there is a risk that it may happen to a greater extent if some of the other provisions of the Bill find their way into law. I would advocate consideration of the RTPI proposal, as outlined in Amendment 132.
I emphatically agree with the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, about the need for proportionality. We have to put an end to the days of environmental statements being delivered by vans. No one will read them apart from the people who paid huge fees to produce them and review them—I declare a kind of interest in that respect too, of course. The EIA process is largely intended to help the public understand the environmental effects—it is consultation and taking into account the fruits of the consultation. No member of the public is going to read a lorry full of documents; it is simply not going to happen. Proportionality would be hugely helpful in that respect. There are recent instances of DCO examining inspectors asking 2,000-plus questions. I am sure that was with the best of intentions, but if we aim for perfection, we will not achieve anything.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, from the noble Lord’s experience, does he think it possible to legislate for regulators to use their common sense?
Lord Banner (Con)
I tried with my proportionality clause, which we will come to later in the proceedings. That is the best I can do so far; I am toying with tweaking it so that if it were to find its way on to the statute book, the Secretary of State would have the ability to publish statutory guidance on how to give effect to it. But, to echo what the noble Lord said before, if proportionality was spelled out in neon lights in legislation, it would send a message to everybody—consultees, consultants, applicants, decision-makers, the courts and the public—that less can be more. To my mind, that is a fundamental way of furthering the objectives of the Bill.
Lord Ravensdale (CB)
My Lords, I declare my interest as a chief engineer working for AtkinsRéalis.
I support what the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, and the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, have set out around the purposes of the Bill, and in particular what the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, said about putting growth front and centre.
It is important to set out a bit of broader context here, because this goes all the way back to 2008. In the decades before 2008, we had that consistent 2.3% labour productivity growth over many years, but since then, that productivity growth has fallen off a cliff, with only around 0.5% per annum growth since then. That then feeds through into flat real wages. Again, there was a 2% growth in real wages for decades, but they have been flat since 2008, which has led to all those problems with debt, tax take, the NHS, and even the political problems—the frustrations of those who have been left behind.
Of course, growth is a complex picture, as are the reasons behind that slowdown in growth, but our inability to build enough productive infrastructure to invest in that is very high up on that list, whether that is new infrastructure to bring down the price of electricity; new transport infrastructure, with all the agglomeration benefits that come with that; or new digital infrastructure.
We can contrast what is going on elsewhere in the world—to expand on what the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, said—with electricity. China has gone from 6,000 to 10,000 terawatt hours of electricity generation in the past 10 years, whereas our electricity generation has been flat or even declining slightly, at only around 300 terawatt hours. That of course has many other implications: the cost of our electricity, which is around four times that of the United States; the knock-on effects of that to inward investment; and circling back to growth as well. Even if we look at the Government’s targets, such as the 2030 target for clean electricity generation, the amount of electricity infrastructure that we need to build to hit that target is far below what we need to hit to get to 2030, and of course that will have effects on net zero and on energy security as well.
The planning system is at the heart of this, with the key issues of judicial review and environmental regulation, which are being addressed to some extent in the Bill. But, circling back to growth, that needs to be front and centre. It is vital that the Bill delivers for critical infrastructure as well as houses, so that purpose clause which sets that out front and centre in the Bill is vital, with all the benefits it will bring for net zero, the environment, and energy security, and resolving those broader issues of net debt, government spending and quality of life.
Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)
My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 1 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, and I thank her for explaining the basis of her approach so clearly. I was not able to speak at Second Reading but I have an interest in planning, going back to the 1980s, both in government and in business, and one of my most rewarding experiences was as chair of the Built Environment Committee before I joined the Front Bench.
I am not sure it is strictly relevant, but I am the joint owner with my brother and sister of a cottage and a couple of fields in agricultural use in an AONB in Wiltshire, this is declared in the register.
Lord Porter of Spalding (Con)
My Lords, I will speak briefly, mainly to declare my registered interests before we get to the meat of Committee. I am a director and beneficial owner of Porter and Verrells, which builds one-off bespoke homes, among other functions. I am a non-executive director of Elixr.Earth, which builds through digital twinning and finance, place-shaping at scale. I am also a non-executive director of Rentplus Homes and a strategic adviser to Inspired Solutions, both of which deliver affordable housing without any recourse to public funds.
My noble friend Lord Fuller would not forgive me if I did not mention that all the worthy things that have been discussed are not functions of the Bill. They are consequential on the Bill being pushed through. The function of the Bill is to regulate between private property ownership and perceived public good or public harm.
Baroness Coffey (Con)
My Lords, I am delighted to be in Committee. I agree with the impact of these clauses in consideration of future judicial decisions. It matters because there has been a trend in aspects of case law that then make other aspects of complying with the law rather complicated, leading to some of the adjustments that the Government are seeking to secure. When we talk about judicial review and what the Government are intending, the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, has tabled some rather drastic amendments. I am not surprised. Mr Robbie Owen gave evidence in the other House that my noble friend Lord Banner’s review did not go far enough. My noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe hit the nail on the head. What is going to change?
The amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, is right. At the moment nothing in the Bill ties everything together to make sure that we get more homes built and improve the natural environment. We have to make sure that happens.
In her closing speech at Second Reading, the Minister said that councils have a lot of powers. I would be interested to understand what amendments may come in at this stage to achieve the objectives that the Government say the Bill is trying to achieve. Why are we not seeing certain powers being granted to the Government to speed up housing—not just planning permission but completion? The Town and Country Planning Act allows councils to issue completion notices. As the Whip in the Commons on the Infrastructure Act 2015, I had to deal with four Ministers, so good luck to the Whips here on the Front Bench in co-ordinating all that. The Government took powers there for when councils were being slow. It was not necessarily call-in, but if they were not keeping to timetables, the decisions could be made by Ministers. I do not think that happened very often under the previous Conservative Administration, but here we seem to be going with a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Why are Ministers not using the powers they already have to achieve what they want this to do and instead putting this legislation in place? That is why I welcome the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock. It gives us an opportunity to ask, “What is this Bill going to do? Will it achieve the aims of what is there?”
I make a plea through the Minister for Bill managers to update the parliamentary website with all the different things that they said that they would write on. The Minister in the other place promised on 29 April to write about one of the clauses that we are debating today, but Parliament is still waiting. To my knowledge, no letter has been issued. It is certainly not on the Bill website, and it certainly has not been deposited in the House. That is a further plea about process.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (Baroness Taylor of Stevenage) (Lab)
The letter went out yesterday on some of the issues that were raised at the drop-in. The noble Baroness may have missed that in her inbox, but it did go out yesterday.
Baroness Coffey (Con)
I appreciate that, and I have not seen it in my inbox, but I am referring to Minister Pennycook making a pledge to write in Committee in the Commons. I am not aware that has ever been issued. It is certainly not available to Members of this House. It would be great, as a general approach, if we could try to make sure that is there.
Overall, this Bill needs to be massively strengthened to make sure—to quote Ronseal—that it “does exactly what it says on the tin”, that we will get the outcome that my noble friend Lady Scott on the Front Bench has put forward in Amendment 3 and that we will get on with making sure more homes are delivered for the people of this country, as well as other aspects of infrastructure that I recognise this country desperately needs.
Captain of the King’s Bodyguard of the Yeomen of the Guard and Deputy Chief Whip (Baroness Wheeler) (Lab)
My Lords, we need to move to consider the Statement, as the Minister delivering it must attend Grand Committee for a debate which will commence before this group finishes. While unusual, I therefore beg to move that the debate on this amendment do adjourn, and we will return to it after the Statement.
UK-France Migration: Co-operation
(1 day, 11 hours ago)
Lords ChamberRead Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Davies of Gower (Con)
My Lords, illegal migration is one of the most challenging issues we face today. More than 21,000 people have used small boat crossings to illegally breach our borders this year so far. That number is up 56% from the same period last year. Some 78% of people polled by YouGov think that the Government’s handling of it is bad. As of 7 July, 51% of polled voters said that immigration and asylum was the single most important issue facing the country.
It is against this that the Government have to act. We disagree with the Government on many aspects of their approach to illegal migration and small boat crossings, as we are making very clear in our discussions on the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill, but it would be remiss of me not to welcome to some extent this step from the Government, which is a reflection of the fact that they appreciate the gravity of the situation and are making an attempt to deal with it. We on these Benches want to stop small boat crossings, and we must recognise that this is at least a small step in the right direction.
However, it would be remiss of me to let the Government get away with their Statement without some questions from our side. It may be that the intention behind this agreement is to create some sort of deterrent, and I am sure that the Minister will be able to confirm that this indeed is the Government’s intention. I do not wish to be condescending, but I assume that the plan, with such a low rate of return, is not itself designed to get the numbers down in any meaningful sense—the Minister said last week in Committee on the Bill that it takes time, and I agree with that—but I am afraid it is obvious to me that what we have before us is not a deterrent. If noble Lords permit me, I will run through the numbers which will explain why this is the case.
Under the agreement, the Government will return one in every 17 illegal immigrants arriving in the UK. Some 44,000 illegal migrants have arrived in the UK by small boats since Labour took power last year, and this year alone more than 21,117 migrants have crossed the channel—a 56% rise on the same period in 2024. Under this plan, the Government will still allow 94% of these illegal immigrants to stay in the United Kingdom. If you were in Calais considering making the crossing over to the UK in a small boat, would a 94% success rate be a deterrent to you?
I put it to the Minister that, with these odds, the overwhelming likelihood is that people will bank on being in the 94% and not in the 6% of people who face being returned to France. Then, of course, there is the question of what happens to those in the very unlucky 6% who return to France. What is to stop them from simply trying again? Can the Minister confirm to us now that no one coming over in a small boat will be one of the 6% who were returned previously? If people are simply able to try again, what is the point in returning them at all? Can the Minister tell us what the French will do with those who have been returned? I cannot imagine that the French taxpayer will want to foot the bill for housing them.
Finally, can the Minister clear up the question of whether the European Union will approve this plan? There is no certainty that the French can fulfil their side of the bargain without EU consent. It is obvious that several southern European states are getting ready to push back hard against this agreement as proposed. This discussion is entirely academic unless there is some clarity about whether it will come to fruition.
It is clear to us that the only way to properly address this problem is to remove every single illegal arrival as soon as they get here, either to their country of origin or to a third country. That would be a real deterrent. We saw that approach work in Australia about 10 years ago. Indeed, the Government inherited a deterrent of this magnitude when they came into office. We, when in government, did all the heavy lifting. The plan was ready to go. All the Home Secretary had to do was press “go”, but she and the Prime Minister cancelled the scheme just days before it was due to start. As a result, we now see record numbers crossing.
This side recognises some fundamental truths that the Government seem intent on ignoring. The first is that supply in this matter is driven by demand. The second is that supply will always try to meet demand, even under absolute prohibition. As I mentioned last week in a Bill Committee, the 18th Amendment to the US Constitution was—I am sure noble Lords agree—quite a bit stronger than anything the Government are proposing, yet that failed.
The third and final truth is that, if you want to stop supply, you need to stop demand. The simple fact of the matter is that, while there are thousands of people willing to pay massive sums of money to come to the UK illegally, there will be criminal gangs ready to take the money and get them here. Unless we deter them from coming, the gangs will not be smashed and the numbers will continue to rise. That 6% simply will not cut it; we need 100% removals as a deterrent.
Beyond the fundamental criticism of the Government’s plan, many further procedural issues arise from the agreement as it has been set out by the Government. For one thing, it is clear that every one of the 50 people selected to be returned to France would have the opportunity to launch lengthy, costly legal challenges against this decision. It is also clear that the French—after all the legal challenges and hoops have been jumped through—could simply refuse to accept whoever we try to send back.
I have said that this is a step in the right direction and, for all my criticism of the Government today, I mean that, but, most of all, we cannot afford to be ambiguous at this stage. If we have a system that sends back one in 17 people and allows them all to launch a legal challenge against this for—let us not forget—being returned to a safe third country 21 miles away, does it not send the message that the Government are not particularly serious about addressing this issue?
I believe that the Government and many noble Lords across the House recognise the seriousness of the situation. The numbers we have seen this year are, in short, totally out of control. This issue overwhelmingly concerns people in the United Kingdom, and I am pleased that the Government are trying to get a handle on it. Indeed, getting the French to do anything after the £770 million that we have given them is welcome. However, I do not believe that this plan will achieve what the Government intend. It is simply too soft; it sends back far too few people and is ripe for delay and vexatious claims—all at the taxpayers’ expense. The numbers simply do not add up. We cannot cheer in support of a plan that sends back 6% of arrivals as a success, when the numbers this year are up 56%.
The noble Lord faces a serious issue and we appreciate that but, in doing so, he and his Government need to introduce a serious solution. I am afraid that what is before us today will not cut the mustard, and I think the noble Lord and the Government are aware of that.
Lord German (LD)
My Lords, I start by giving my registered interests. I am supported by the RAMP organisation. These Benches welcome the principle lying behind this deal for two reasons: first, it undermines the model that the smugglers use and, secondly, it creates an additional safe route. These Benches commend the Government for introducing this as a pilot, because it tests a new policy and develops it to make sure that it works, based upon experience, evidence and bringing the public with you, rather than upon making huge promises on an untested novel policy that loses public trust, spends a lot of taxpayers’ money, and exhausts Civil Service and parliamentary time. We can think of such a scheme, of course, in referring to the Conservatives’ Rwanda policy.
There are clearly many questions that sit behind the proposal before us but, since the Government are working at pace to implement it, the answers should now be available. I am hoping the noble Lord will tell me. First, as I have said, as the pilot will initially be quite limited in numbers to ensure that it works operationally, does the Minister agree that, to provide both a viable alternative for asylum seekers as well as a deterrent to small boats crossing, the scheme would need to be scaled up quickly? Those not in the pilot initially will add to the backlog of asylum claims, and the process by which they are judged will need to be speeded up. What progress has been made on the backlog of asylum claims in this country?
Secondly, there will undoubtedly have to be a process of screening and selection of those to be returned to France on arrival. Can the Minister confirm whether immigration detention will be used prior to removal to France and, if so, will it be for the whole or part of the period when they are in the United Kingdom? Thirdly, can the Minister confirm which aspects of existing legislation will be used to operate this pilot? For example, will elements of the Illegal Migration Act be used? Fourthly, the returns of migrants to France will need to be swift to provide a real deterrent. Will migrants who are to be returned to France be able to challenge this decision? Will adequate legal advice be available, as well as judicial time, to ensure that the process is swift while also ensuring people can have their position considered prior to removal? Fifthly, how will the Government ensure that migrants in northern France are informed about this scheme from trusted sources so that they are well aware of it in advance of choosing, perhaps, not to make a dangerous crossing? Sixthly and finally, the process of accessing safe routes to the United Kingdom is one that must be trusted by migrants. What have the Government learned from schemes elsewhere in the world, where providing a safe route significantly changed migrant behaviour and diverted them from irregular to safe routes?
Undoubtedly, there will be many more questions as the pilot expands and moves forward but, critically, at this point, I think behind these questions lies an acceptance that this has the potential to work. We wish it every success in that movement forward, which is why it is so important to answer these questions at this stage.
The Minister of State, Home Office (Lord Hanson of Flint) (Lab)
My Lords, I am grateful for the welcome, in broad terms, from the Liberal Democrat Benches and for the cautious, guarded welcome from His Majesty’s loyal Opposition—who, it must be remembered, had 400 crossings in 2018 and 40,000 in 2023. This is a challenge and a problem for which the previous Government relied on the Rwanda scheme. This delivered £700 million of costs, with further costs of hundreds of millions projected. Precisely four people were returned under the scheme, whom the shadow Home Secretary would not even acknowledge now, because they volunteered to return and were not forced to go accordingly.
In the border security Bill we are considering in this House, I am very pleased to have supported the cancellation and scrapping of the Rwanda scheme and its replacement with positive, constructive, concrete efforts. These include the Border Security Command posts that the Bill brings in and the impact that they are having—we are using the money from the failed Rwanda scheme to support the development of that scheme. There is also the international co-operation visible through the arrangements with France covered in this Statement, and indeed—hot off the press—the new engagement with the German republic to ensure that we co-operate with the German Government on similar issues accordingly.
I say to the noble Lord that the agreement is not on just the transfer of 50 people in this pilot—which is a pilot, as I, and the noble Lord, Lord German, acknowledge—but of 50 people from a date in the very near future, on a return basis, with a proper return to the French authorities. The Opposition asked what the French authorities will do with them. France is an independent country and it will process them itself. I understand that the intention is to do so away from the northern French coast. That will, again, assist in that particular challenge and, I hope, provide the deterrent that the Rwanda scheme evidently did not, given that thousands of people still crossed when it was in germination and operation. It is not just about the 50 people per week we are anticipating—which, even if operated for only one week, would see 46 more people returned than the Rwanda scheme. It also involves establishing a new French barque, Compagnie de Marché, of specialist enforcement officers with stronger public order powers to deal with action on the French beaches; the French authorities agreeing to prevent boat launches before they reach the water; training for additional drone pilots to intercept boat launches; and support for a maritime review instigated by the French.
That is alongside today’s agreement with the Germans, which is worth putting on the record as well. Today, a treaty has been signed with the Germans which increases co-operation against migrant smuggling, strengthens law enforcement and judicial co-operation, and steps up efforts on returns. Germany is introducing a clarification to German legislation on facilitating irregular migration to the UK, which will be brought to cabinet with a view to be adopted by the German parliament before the end of this year. There will be a stronger framework for law enforcement policy and the prosecution of organised criminal gangs. The regional partners of the Calais Group—Belgium, Holland, France and the UK—will develop joint approaches with Germany upstream to deal with these issues.
I put those matters on the record only because not a single one of those things happened when the peak numbers of boat crossings occurred under the previous Government. They did not happen partly because of the euroscepticism of the then Government and partly because the drive to do it was not there and they put all their biscuits in the Rwanda tin, which proved fruitless.
By all means, the noble Lord can be sceptical, critical and quizzical and ask questions. But he will have a record hanging around his neck for a while yet that he will have to defend and which is not improved by his seeming criticism of these actions as being limited actions. These are strong actions from a strong Government.
The noble Lord asked a number of questions. The European Union will make a judgment but we believe we have a legal basis for the agreement. If it is going to be tested by anybody, the French and British authorities are on the same page. The French will deal with the returns accordingly. We will view that pilot in an appropriate way. With the deterrents we have put in place, we will be accountable for the performance on these issues.
After one year in office, the actions of this Government that I have mentioned today are now bearing fruit. We will have to continue to press down on these matters over the next few years, because the legacy we received was one of easy crossings, no action on criminal gangs and allowing the figures to go up, while at the same time—this goes to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord German—not dealing speedily with asylum assessments and removals.
If we are going to talk about the record of the noble Lord’s Government and ours, in the year since the election, 35,052 returns were recorded by this Government. That is a 13% increase on the same period under the previous Government. That includes 9,115 enforced returns, which is an increase of 24%. The total returns since 5 July last year of 5,179 foreign national offenders is an increase of 14%. The figure of 10,191 asylum-related returns is an increase of 28% on the previous year under the previous Government. Those figures are going in the right direction. We are dealing with the issue. There are lots of challenges—I will never ignore that fact—but the push by the Government on all those issues is one that should be welcomed by this House.
The noble Lord, Lord German, raised a number of questions, which I will try to answer as best I can. First, he is absolutely right to say that this undermines the criminal gangs’ model—that is the purpose of it. I welcome his support and thank him for it. Imaginative suggestions from all sides of this House to help undermine the criminal gangs are very much welcome. It is a pilot, which we will monitor. Self-evidently, a pilot is designed to be expanded. In the event of expansion, we will look at both the continuing analysis of the people arriving and being returned to France, and the safe and legal routes from France that will now be open. This limited pilot will be monitored and looked at in due course.
Again, some of the savings from the Rwanda scheme have been put into recruiting nearly 1,000 additional asylum officers to speed up the claims for asylum and to ensure that people move through the system much more quickly. That means that once their asylum claim is approved, they can be accepted as asylum seekers or refugees. If their asylum claim is refused, they can be returned, as we are currently doing.
The noble Lord asked about detention. We operate a policy of ensuring that we have detention because that is important until claims are assessed. I will examine that point in detail and get back to him in due course.
Safe and legal routes are important, as the noble Lord mentioned. Because of the time limit on our discussion, I will leave the other questions and come back to him in writing, but they are important points. I am just conscious that 20 minutes is up, and therefore I want to allow Back-Benchers to have their say.
Baroness Falkner of Margravine (CB)
I declare an interest as chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, but I am speaking in a personal capacity today.
The Minister has given a spirited defence of all the international actions that the Government are taking to try to battle this pernicious trade. Closer to home, in terms of our internal domestic actions, he has been remarkably silent on President Macron’s exhortation to our Government to do more in domestic law to challenge what happens here, not least our very lax labour standards in the large grey market, which is the pull factor that brings so many people to come here in such treacherous journeys.
Will the Government contemplate looking at two things proposed by Sir Trevor Phillips, a member of the Minister’s own party? One is digital ID cards, also proposed by former Prime Minister Tony Blair, and rolling them out. The objections of 2006—I remember them well—are no longer as palpable as they were then on the part of the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives because you can design the system very differently with technology now.
The second thing would be to tax remittances because the whole point of someone coming and trying to work here is so that they can improve things at home. Remittances have apparently gone up from £6 billion to £9 billion, so that would be a lucrative way of filling the black hole. I wonder whether the Minister would comment on those things.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
The noble Baroness raises a very important point on some of the pull factors and the illegal grey market and black market in employment. She will know that we spent a lot of time last night on the Employment Rights Bill. That is partly to ensure that we undertake those standards. At the Home Office, we have been engaged over the past six months in an active programme of cracking down on illegal working, removing people who are found to be working illegally and taking action against individuals who have been involved in providing that illegal work. I can supply figures to her after this discussion on the success rates of those actions.
The noble Baroness mentions ID cards. I have said many times in this House that I was a Minister in the Home Office when we had ID cards. They were scrapped by the coalition Government. There are no plans to return to ID cards, but, self-evidently, we want to ensure that we have biometric and other data for people arriving in this country, and that data is collected at a local level. The question of remittances is one that I will reflect on after this discussion, but we have to ensure, from my perspective, that the pull factors are dealt with. The key focus of the Government is to get international co-operation to smash the gangs that are dealing with the aftermath of some big worldwide problems, exploiting people, selling them false promises, putting their lives in danger and allowing people to enter illegally. We believe that on an international basis, we should have that co-operation to manage those pressures in a more positive and constructive way.
Lord Harper (Con)
My Lords, I do not blame the Minister for slightly having a bit of fun at our expense at this stage in the political cycle. However, I caution him, given that in this Government’s first year the number of people crossing the channel has gone up by 40%, that when he eventually has to return to a proper deterrent scheme it will be on these Benches that he receives the support that he needs, not from elsewhere in the House. I suspect he may need our support later in the Parliament.
I have some specific questions about this scheme. First, in her Statement to the House of Commons, the Home Secretary said:
“The Prime Minister and French President have set out their expectation that that pilot will be operationalised”—
ghastly word—
“in the coming weeks”.
She was very unspecific about how many weeks—there is clearly a large difference between four weeks and 52 weeks, for example. Can the Minister give us a bit of clarity about the sort of timescale they are thinking about? Is it a month’s time or more like six months’ time?
Secondly, as the Minister referred to, the Home Secretary said that the Government will be trying a number of approaches—very sensible—and seeing what works, and then they will want to scale up the numbers. What sort of timescale are they thinking about for running the pilots? My noble friend Lord Davies of Gower was right: if the numbers remain low—I noticed that the Minister sort of confirmed the figure of 50 a week, or at least he did not resile from it—for several years then that will be no deterrent at all. Unless the Government are going to start the pilots quickly and ramp them up quickly, this has no chance at all of deterring anyone.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I am grateful to the noble Lord. Let me put him at ease. I am not having a bit of fun with the previous Government; I am imploring the House to understand what the pressures were under the previous Government, the lack of action—that is a political opinion and my view—and how, as well as the borders and security Bill, the measures that we have taken with Belgium, Holland, Germany and, in this last week, France, in the agreement between President Macron and the Prime Minister, are designed to do what the whole House has a shared objective on, which is to reduce the crossings, hold those criminals to account and break their business model. That is what we are trying to do.
The noble Lord asks when the scheme will come into play. We plan to do the scheme by the summer, which is a definitive date. I suspect that the proposal is for the next five to six weeks, but the summer is our aim. We have not yet set a date to monitor and evaluate the pilots, but, self-evidently, it is in the interests of France, the UK and the people who are being trafficked to smash the gangs as soon as possible and ensure that we provide an upscaling of the scheme as soon as possible. I hope the noble Lord will give a fair wind to what I think will still be a deterrent. We will return to that after the Recess, to be questioned and subject to scrutiny in September, which I regard as the early autumn and late summer.
Lord Empey (UUP)
My Lords, the Minister referred to a number of his international engagements, but one thing the Government are stubbornly refusing to look at is discussing with our allies a revision of the 1951 European refugee convention. I have asked Parliamentary Questions twice and both have come back with a negative response. It seems to me that talking to allies about something that was done after World War II which is relevant to all this is worth doing, and I hope the Government will do that.
While in broad terms I do not resile from the fact that the Minister is having a go at all this, and I am quite supportive of that, I am far from convinced that the European Union will be happy with it, for a variety of reasons. I hope it works, but it will have no impact whatever on the total increase in our population, which is the thing that we are studiously ignoring in this Parliament and have been for 20 years. Even in a good week, we are still increasing our population by 10,000 people per week. In 2023, we were increasing our population by 23,000 people a week, but no one in the Government or Parliament seems to join the dots between that and the housing shortage, health waiting lists and a stagnant economy.
I will support the Minister in all the measures he has taken with our European allies because I think they can be small contributing parts, and of course the Rwanda scheme never got off the ground and so we will never know whether it would have worked. The fact is that the gangs are not smashed; they are still trading well and they have weeks of good weather ahead of them. I hope that, when we come back after the Summer Recess, we are not sitting here talking about numbers still being 56% up. This scheme must be designed as a deterrent but there are many other pull factors, including our legal approach to all this and how we are dealing with it, subsidising legal actions against our own Government. That in and of itself creates a pull factor.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
The noble Lord raises a number of key points. As a Government, we are committed to our international obligations. The noble Lord mentioned the 1951 convention. As he knows, a letter has been circulated by some European Union member states calling for that to be examined. We want to maintain our international obligations, and it is important that we do so. In doing that, we still have to undertake the actions mentioned—I am thankful for the noble Lord’s support on those today—as well as other actions.
The noble Lord mentioned the EU’s interests. On 30 March and 1 April this year, we had a border security summit on organised crime that brought together 50 countries that are impacted by this, including key members of the European Union such as Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain, and other countries such as Turkey, Tunisia, Bulgaria, Albania, Nigeria and Pakistan. It is very important that those longer-term issues are addressed.
The people who arrive in northern France have usually entered the European Union via southern Italy or Greece, and sometimes via the borders of Poland and eastern Europe. It is in the EU’s interests to examine the French-British scheme and to ensure, if there are positive lessons to be learned, that it is expanded. It is in nobody’s interest to have criminal gangs operating throughout the EU and in the United Kingdom and the channel. As well as the challenges of that movement, the profits those criminal gangs make are going into drugs, guns and other activity that fuels further crime. I hope that the noble Lord’s fears will not be realised and that we can take action.
The noble Lord said that a large number of people are arriving here. I point him to the figure of 10,191 asylum-related returns that took place last year because of the speeding-up of the asylum-claim process. We are speeding up the asylum-claim process and weeding out those people who have paid for a small boat trip and arrived in the UK but have no legitimate asylum claim whatever, having arrived as economic migrants who did not go through a legal route. Those people are being removed.
Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)
My Lords, I remind the Minister very gently that his Government have a duty and responsibility to the tax-paying, law-abiding citizens of this country, not just to supranational legal entities such as the European Court of Human Rights.
On the specific issues, other jurisdictions consider this to be close to a crisis and have actively considered the derogation of Article 15 of the European Convention on Human Rights. This Government are not even looking at that. Why is this the case? If Spain, Italy, Germany and other countries can do it, why is it impossible for the UK to at least review the situation? The noble Lord, Lord Empey, is quite right that the 1951 convention is out of date, and it is apposite and totally proper for the Government to review it and how it works for Britain.
The other issue is asylum accommodation. Six months ago, when I raised the issue of the Dragonfly Hotel in Peterborough, which has 146 male asylum seekers, the Minister reassured me that his department would improve its communication with local authorities and other key agencies where new asylum facilities and hotels were being opened. Is that the case? Has there been a demonstrable improvement?
My final question comes in the wake of the rather humiliating rebuff that the Prime Minister received in Albania in May. The House will know that the Government are not in principle against a third-country processing facility. What progress has the Government made to date in identifying an alternative to the Rwanda scheme to facilitate the processing of asylum seeker applications?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I am grateful, as ever, to the noble Lord for his questions. I reassure him that the taxpayer is at the forefront of this Government’s thinking about the costs of this illegal migration and the criminal gangs that drive it. It is for those very reasons that we are taking action, not just to secure our borders but also to secure taxpayers’ resource. That is why, this time last year when we inherited the positions we proudly hold now, we were paying roughly £8 million a day in hotel fees: because the then Government were not processing asylum seekers and were not taking the actions we have taken in the last year to have a deterrent effect, in our view, against the criminal gangs. We have managed to reduce those hotel costs to around £6 million a day, saving the taxpayer £2 million a day so far, and we intend to drive it down further.
So I hope I can reassure the noble Lord that border control, dealing with asylum and dealing with the impact of people being returned have a cost to the taxpayer. That is why, as I said—without repeating the figures—we are upping returns, upping processing and making sure that we are taking foreign national prisoners out. We are doing that to reduce the illegal pressure on the United Kingdom’s borders.
The noble Lord asked a very fair question about consultation with local authorities. It is the Government’s intent that we consult with local authorities and, if possible, with elected representatives outside those local authorities—Members of Parliament and others—to ensure that they have an understanding of where that dispersal accommodation goes. If he wants to supply any examples of where that is not working, I will certainly look at them with my ministerial colleagues. It is important that we get that right so that there is consent.
On the international agreements the noble Lord mentioned, as I said, it is the Government’s intention to support our international agreements. Any change from that will be done on an international co-operation basis. We keep everything under review. As the noble Lord knows, in the immigration White Paper we have said we want to redefine Article 8 and how that is interpreted by the judges. We will keep things under review, but this Government will not move from our international obligations. Also, it is not a foreign court; it was established with UK support after the Second World War.
Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)
My Lords, I congratulate the Government on reaching an agreement with Germany. My understanding is that the German law has to change before Germany can prosecute smuggling gangs operating on German soil. How confident is the noble Lord that the agreement to change German law will be reached this year?
The noble Lord mentioned the importance of the EU agreement. The EU normally operates by reaching an agreement among the 27. We have reached an agreement with France and now Germany, but surely, he would wish to reach an agreement with the whole EU to make sure that the smuggling gangs can be tackled at source: Greece and Italy, where most of the people are entering the EU.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
The noble Baroness is absolutely right. It is extremely important that we reach out to our European partners—they are still partners, although we are not members of the community—to ensure that we tackle this issue across the board. That means the flow through the Mediterranean into Italy and Greece in particular, the flow from eastern Europe into Poland, and the flow from France across the channel, accordingly. As I have said, the Calais group operates with Belgium, France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, looking at the particular pressures there.
On the agreement with Germany announced today, I say again that Germany remains an independent nation, so it is responsible for its law change. But we have an agreement in the treaty that says that the German Government are
“introducing a clarification in German legislation concerning the facilitation of irregular migration to the UK (to be brought to Cabinet with a view to be adopted by Parliament as soon as possible, within 2025)”.
The Germans are responsible for the Germans, but in the treaty we have signed today, they indicate that they are hoping to make that change and—as any UK Government would—going back to their parliament and securing parliamentary support by the end of 2025. But it is entirely right that we deal with this issue on a cross-Europe basis because it is a cross-Europe challenge.
Planning and Infrastructure Bill
Thursday 17th July 2025
(1 day, 11 hours ago)
Lords ChamberPlanning and Infrastructure Bill 2024-26 View all Planning and Infrastructure Bill 2024-26 Debates Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 110-I(b) Amendments for Committee (Supplementary to the Marshalled List) - (17 Jul 2025)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (Baroness Taylor of Stevenage) (Lab)
My Lords, I thank all noble Lords for their engagement both at Second Reading and at our subsequent drop-in sessions and meetings. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, for Amendment 1, and my noble friend Lord Hunt and the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Bybrook, for Amendments 2 to 7, making minor changes to the amendment. As these amendments all endeavour to insert a purpose clause at the start of the Bill, I will consider them together. I just add, following the debate we had earlier today, that I have some sympathy with those who do not want to have purpose clauses as the first amendment—we had 63 speakers at Second Reading, and we have covered some of the same ground—but I understand the noble Baroness’s wish to have one. I will keep my response to Amendments 1 to 7 short, as the purpose and aims of the Bill were debated very fully at Second Reading.
The Government have been consistently clear about the purpose and aims of this Bill, and I am very pleased that the noble Baroness and the noble Lord have identified many of these in their amendments. As outlined at Second Reading and throughout its passage, the Bill is a key component of the Government’s mission and plan for change. It is intended to unblock the planning system and secure the infrastructure we need in this country. We have already delivered significant changes to our planning system through a revised pro-growth National Planning Policy Framework. Combined with these changes, the Bill will help us reach our ambitious plan for change milestones of building 1.5 million safe, decent and affordable homes in England and fast-tracking planning decisions on 150 major economic infrastructure projects in this Parliament.
The Bill will do this by delivering five key objectives. The first is a faster and more certain consenting process for nationally significant infrastructure projects, the focus of our debate today. My noble friend Lord Hunt is quite right to point to the importance of this to achieving growth. He spoke about grid connections. The fact that it can now take longer to get a grid connection than it did to build the whole A1 is a crazy factor of the way planning has blocked some of the growth we need to see. He spoke about the 360,000 pages of planning documents for the Lower Thames Crossing. I can tell him that when we embarked on the major redevelopment of Stevenage town centre, we had a great lorryload of documents turn up for the planning process, so I am very sympathetic to what he said.
The second aim is for a more strategic approach to nature recovery that will unlock a win-win for the economy and for nature. We are clear that this will support nature recovery, and I hope to be able to say a little more about it later this afternoon.
The third aim is to improve certainty and decision-making in the planning system, ensuring that local communities and politicians play their role while maximising the expertise of professional planners. The noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, referred to steamrolling; this is not steamrolling but engaging communities at the planning stage, when they can have the most influence in the planning process. Local communities and local people can do far more if they influence the plan at local plan stage than when trying to object to a particular application that is in accordance with that local plan.
The fourth aim is unlocking land and securing public value for large-scale investment, and the fifth is introducing effective new mechanisms for cross-boundary strategy planning. That is an important dimension that sits alongside our English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill, which is currently in the other place.
The Bill will also support delivery of the Government’s clean power 2030 target, ensuring clean energy projects can be built as quickly as possible, including through measures that will increase community acceptability, such as a bill discount scheme for those living closest to new electricity transmission infrastructure.
It is in the interest of our country to make our planning system better to ensure prosperity and sustained economic growth. Many noble Lords have spoken about that already in this debate, and I have no doubt that the Bill will help us to achieve this, along with the other package of measures that we have introduced. I am sure these objectives that I have outlined align with the purpose in the noble Baroness’s amendment and lie at the heart of all our current and future decision-making. I do not believe, therefore, that it is necessary to accept the amendment, as the measures within the Bill speak for themselves.
I will cover some of the points made by noble Lords earlier in the debate. The noble Baroness, Lady Scott, spoke about our ambitious target of 1.5 million safe, secure and affordable homes. This is a manifesto pledge, a pledge in our Plan for Change and a firm commitment from this Government.
The noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, mentioned councils being able to determine the need for social homes. I was keen to make this change in the National Planning Policy Framework to encourage councils to identify the number of social homes that they need, as distinguished from affordable homes—the definition of affordable homes is much wider—so that was a good step forward. Our policy on brownfield is that it must be brownfield first. I know she has a number of points to make around flooding and I am sure that we will discuss that later in the Bill’s progress. Her point on food production is well made; there is a Defra land use framework which we are hoping will be published any day now, and I think she will find there is some information in that on food production.
The noble Lord, Lord Mawson, referred to place-making. As someone with a new-town background, I agree with the points he made about the importance of the holistic nature of planning and how that makes for good planning.
The noble Lord, Lord Banner, spoke about an overall stated purpose of planning, and the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, raised this with me yesterday. I am sure we will consider all of that further during the course of the Bill.
The noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, rightly pointed to the link between infrastructure delivery and growth, and he makes a very important point. The purpose of the Bill is to make that connection much clearer and to make sure that the planning legislation supports the growth mission.
The noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, spoke about some of the things that can slow down planning and some of the things that we hope will speed up planning. We are introducing a whole package here, from the National Planning Policy Framework to the national development management policies recommended by the previous Government and the devolution package. I hope that, taken together, all those things will speed up the process and encourage the growth that we all want to see.
The noble Lord, Lord Porter, spoke about the functions of the Bill. He is not in his place, but he raised the same point that the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, raised with me about the overall objectives of planning, and the noble Lord, Lord Banner, mentioned this as well. I will give that further thought.
The noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, spoke about completion notices. There is a process, as she rightly identified, for completion notices. It might be helpful if I get some more information for her about how those are being used. There is definitely a power for local government to do that already. I hope that the combination of this Bill and other measures we have taken for local authorities to have the planning powers and the funding they need to move this agenda forward will mean that we see what we all want to see from this.
My noble friend Lord Hunt referred to the OBR report and the potential growth that can be unlocked by this Bill. I am sure that we will continue to debate the aims and impacts of the Bill as we make our way through the amendments tabled for debate. In the meantime, I kindly ask noble Lords to withdraw their amendments.
Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)
Before the Minister sits down, can I press her on the issue of delays? Saying that the whole package is going to be better and improve things, and therefore growth will come—which we all want—is an ambitious statement, but has any work been done on what the changes will be and what differences they will make? I am on her side and want to try to speed things up, but there seem to be quite a lot of things that are going to slow them down, particularly if we agree to the wrong sort of amendments. Has any academic work been done on this that I could reference? I am not yet clear that we are going to get the speed that we need in the system, particularly on things like the grid.
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
I asked the same questions myself, because I suspected I was going to be asked them as part of the debate on this Bill. I asked what work had been done, prior to the Bill, on consulting more widely with the sector, the academics involved in this area and a number of other bodies. I would read it all out, but it is a nearly six-page list of all the work that was done prior to the Bill being drafted. I am happy to circulate it to noble Lords, if that would be helpful.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, in asking your Lordships to agree, I will withdraw my amendment to the amendment tabled by the noble Baroness. I thank my noble friend for an excellent winding-up; she covered the ground comprehensively. I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, because it has been a real service to allow us—
Captain of the King’s Bodyguard of the Yeomen of the Guard and Deputy Chief Whip (Baroness Wheeler) (Lab)
Sorry, it is for the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, to deal with Amendment 3 first.
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
The noble Lord cannot withdraw his amendment until I have withdrawn mine.
My Lords, I thank the Minister for her replies and I look forward to continuing to work with her throughout the Bill. I again thank the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, for bringing this forward; it is a debate that is useful to have at the beginning of any Bill, just to set the tone.
I want to return to the central issue, which was raised repeatedly by nearly every noble Lord who spoke in this debate, and that is the future of local democracy under the provision of the Bill. At Second Reading and again today, the Minister insisted that this legislation does not represent an attack on local democracy. She reaffirmed the Government’s position that local decision-making remains central to the planning process. I fear we may be reading different Bills, because in clause after clause the principle of localism—the very foundation of community-led planning—is being eroded. We are witnessing the repeal of large sections of the Localism Act and seeing the introduction of powers that allow government-imposed national and significant infrastructure projects to bypass not only local consent but, in many cases, meaningful public engagement altogether. This Bill shifts power upwards, away from communities and towards the centre. That is why I believe that paragraph (d) of the purpose clause is not only helpful but essential. It reasserts a principle that should never have been up for negotiation: local voices must be heard and development should happen with communities, not to them. I thank all noble Lords who contributed to supporting this principle.
Finally, I turn back to paragraph (c) of the proposed purpose clause. This is clearly an emotive issue, and rightly so. It has drawn attention from across the Committee today, not least because of the direct relevance to Part 3 of the Bill, which risks weakening vital environmental protections at precisely the moment we should be strengthening them. It represents a step backwards, a regression from the hard-won safeguards enshrined in the Conservatives’ Environment Act. The problems do not stop there: there are gaps, inconsistencies and serious omissions. I urge the Minister to please step back, listen carefully and engage with these concerns, not just from the Committee but from a broad coalition outside it.
I hope the Committee will forgive me—it is quite personal—if I say that in my opinion it is bizarre that during the passage of LURB, noble Lords blocked reform of nutrient neutrality in this place. This leaves me curious to see whether they will raise the same concerns now that nutrient neutrality provisions are in their own Bill. We have wasted a number of years when up to 160,000 new homes could have been built in this country.
I conclude by reaffirming that we are committed to working constructively with the Government throughout Committee and in the remaining stages of the Bill. We want to deliver more homes and the important infrastructure that this country needs, but we need the process to get that right.
I had the privilege of working on the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill, and many noble Lords will recall the year I spent taking that legislation through this House. With the same level of commitment I had to that Bill, I look forward to engaging with the Minister to ensure that we get this Bill through and get it right. At this point, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, I apologise to the noble Baroness for interfering before she withdrew her amendment to my amendment. I will now withdraw my amendment to the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock.
It has been a really good debate in which we have fleshed out some of the key tensions contained in the Bill. We have to be realistic. It is easy to take all the principles that the noble Baroness mentioned and say that at the end of the day, they will all be fine, we will get on with infrastructure investment and building our 1.5 million homes and it is all going to be straightforward. We know it is not. In fact, there are real tensions here and some things will have to give. My argument is that the most important issue here, above all else, is to get the growth agenda going. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Baroness Pinnock (LD)
Amendments upon amendments upon amendments is a novel approach for me. I too thank everyone who has engaged with this debate; it has been a positive and constructive one that I hope will lay the foundations for the rest of the Bill. We are all anxious to get critical infrastructure built in this country. I particularly reference the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, and energy infrastructure. We have to find a way of doing that much more promptly than is currently the case.
My amendment is about not trying to prevent development and infrastructure being created but finding the right balance—the noble Lord, Lord Banner, used the word proportionality—between what the country desperately needs and how far local communities can influence those changes. The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, used the word tension, and that is where I think it lies.
It always strikes me that one of the responsibilities of those of us fortunate enough to be elected politicians is to make those arguments to people, to say that we need more homes and therefore this is how we are going to do it. I have done it in my own ward just lately. Making that case is one of the responsibilities put on us if we are fortunate enough to be elected.
I take issue with something the Minister said. She said that we do not need a purpose clause but then listed the five things that are the purpose. I listed only four but we could add the fifth, which is about strategic planning. That is why it is important to lay down these points before we enter the next stages of debate.
The Minister said that local communities can engage at the local planning stage. I have taken at least two—it could be three—local plans through the area that I represent. It is extraordinarily difficult to get folk to engage in theory, because all you have is a map when you say to them, “This is going to be a housing site and this is going to be a business site”. I have tried hard, but it is very difficult to engage people on that. I have no doubt that we will return to that point.
I will make two more points before I withdraw. First, we need a definition of affordable housing; we on these Benches will pursue that. Secondly, the amendment about building 1.5 million homes, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, would have been greatly enhanced if it had included the essential element of homes for social rent. On these Benches, we will keep pressing that we desperately need homes for social rent above almost anything else. I am tired and angry at some of the conditions that people in my area are living in. If we could have decent social homes for rent, it would greatly enhance their lives. With that anger, I thank everybody for their engagement and beg leave to withdraw.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
“(4B) The Secretary of State must ensure that in each review—(a) maximum deadlines are set for statutory consultations to be completed for proposed developments which are classified as Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects,(b) if no response is received from a statutory consultee within the period specified in paragraph (a), it must be taken to mean that the statutory consultee as consented to the proposal, and(c) benchmarking is published alongside the review to compare UK performance with other countries in relation to the cost and timing of developments classified as Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects encompassed within the review.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment seeks to provide further detail about the review of national policy statements with the intention of improving the clarity and speed of the planning process.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, I do not want to return to the previous debate, but there is a general view that the current arthritic planning and regulatory system is a barrier to efficient infrastructure delivery. In the previous debate I referred to the excellent report by Dr Mann Virdee for the Council on Geostrategy, which identified many of the problems. In essence, we have a system where doing nothing is safer than doing something, and where process has eclipsed purpose—that point was put across very well by the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, in our first debate.
Another signal of our problems is the cost of infrastructure investment. On projects such as rail and road, we have unacceptably high costs in comparison with comparable nations. HS2 was budgeted for £37.5 billion; it is now £110 billion. The Lower Thames Crossing was budgeted for £5.3 billion; it is now £9 billion. Hinkley Point C was budgeted for £18 billion; it is now £40 billion to £50 billion. There are many more examples. It is not all due to the planning and regulatory constraints, but they have certainly played their part.
I strongly welcome much of the Bill, particularly the intent to streamline the nationally significant infrastructure projects and the reduction of judicial review opportunities; I very much acknowledge the work of the noble Lord, Lord Banner, and his review on that. The Minister today sent us a letter setting out what further action will be taken in what I think is a very short space of time. I am also very interested in the Bill’s intent to scrap the specimen-by-specimen, site-by-site approach to protecting nature, and to replace it with the nature restoration fund.
I welcome the provisions on energy, partly because my old department wrote them and therefore I could not but applaud and welcome the work that DESNZ has done there. The provisions will make a real difference. The big question for us is: will this be sufficient?
From talking to developers, it is clear that they will have to navigate relevant national policy statements, the DCO regime, the EIAs, the dozens of secondary licences and consents from other regulators, judicial reviews, and the various tiers of local authorities that will be involved. Indeed, in nuclear development, we have a parallel justification process, which is lengthy and expensive. I am very hopeful that the current task force looking at nuclear regulation will come forward with recommendations on whether we can avoid that duplication.
We will come on to Part 3 at some point in September. But there are some real questions about whether EDPs can deliver for major infrastructure projects. I clearly see the benefits where you have lots of housing developments in a particular area. But there are some issues around major infrastructure developments. As Catherine Howard, head of planning at Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer, has written, there is a risk that developers will need to twin-track the EDP process by also going through the traditional habitats assessment regime because an EDP was not in place in time for the consent application. Clearly, that is going to be a real problem for developers.
Lord Mawson (CB)
My Lords, I wish to say something about the housing regulator, because it is absolutely as the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, is saying. As I explained earlier, in our practical experience, we have built a very successful housing company with local residents, which is trying to join the dots between housing, education, health and placemaking. We find that the housing regulator is constantly getting in the way of the innovation that we, with local residents, need to do, which has local support and a serious track record.
This particular regulator—and I have seen it in other areas as well—is a real problem. There needs to be real thought and reflection about whether these regulators are helping us innovate and find new ways of working—or are they just getting in the way? Of course, they need to ask challenging questions on using the money right, I get all of that. We need to address these issues, as the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, is telling us. It is stopping us in east London doing what we now need to do to take our work to the next stage.
Lord Banner (Con)
I want to say something about what the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, said about the default risk aversion, and how there is a significant risk of that with regulators. There is a lot of merit in those comments. Largely, that stems from the application of the precautionary principle in much of the field of law that we are discussing now. Materially diluting the precautionary principle in a substantial way would have all sorts of troublesome consequences, but, in my judgment, some kind of counterbalance, which is what the proportionality principle is seeking to do, would help temper the effects of that. There is a later amendment in the noble Lord’s name which would seek to modify the precautionary principle in quite a sensible way. But I agree that something needs to be done to ensure that that over-precautionism does not infect the application of these provisions.
Baroness Coffey (Con)
My Lords, my Amendments 10 to 16 are in this group. These are more about Clause 2, so the officials decided to group them together.
On Amendment 8, I respect the former Minister’s experience, and probably frustrations, but, candidly, having represented a part of the country where there are probably more NSIPs than in any other constituency, I am very concerned that trying to make sure that there are enough resources and even officials to sufficiently go through these combinations of NSIPs, which, of course, are all considered separately, is really quite a stretch. I am also conscious of what was mentioned earlier, about the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of pieces of paper that were generated to go with a variety of planning applications.
I remind the Committee that it is Parliament that has agreed to a lot of this legislation. Parliament has agreed for Natural England, for example, to be the regulator and, in effect, the decision-maker on a number of these matters. It is also usually Ministers who have designated many parts of our country to have these special areas of conservation, or whatever variety of designations there are, which bring in the extra challenge. I completely understand the point about the reasonableness test and proportionality—I completely get that—and that is why the last Administration tried to make some changes, particularly to unlock about 160,000 homes, but also placed various duties in terms of thinking about economic growth. So, as I say, I understand why there are concerns about timing but if we are going to adjust that, we need to make sure that the resourcing is there as well.
Clause 2 is all about the parliamentary scrutiny of national policy statements. I expect that certain elements of the process could be speeded up, but there are key points in here which actually remove accountability to Parliament by the Executive. I had not realised this when I tabled Amendment 13 but I then checked some of the procedures in the Commons, and on Report there, the Liaison Committee—the chair of every single Select Committee in the House of Commons—co-signed Amendment 87 in the other place to remove this so that the Government would have to continue to give a response to Parliament on any resolutions they passed. I find it extraordinary that the Government want to remove that. It is quite a simple thing to lay a Statement, or whatever it is.
The assessment of Minister Pennycook was, “Well, we have a variety of debates; we might ask the Select Committee to look at something”—by the way, he did not refer to the Select Committee in the Lords—“and, yeah, we have these sorts of Statements”. Statements are quite different at the other end, but still, they are not proper debates—they are not proper consideration—and I am concerned about that.
One of my other amendments in this group follows on from something that happened with the first national policy statement on nuclear that I was engaged in. There was a debate in the other House, and I suspect there may have been a debate at this end too. Along the way, something changed in the process. It relied entirely on the Liaison Committee getting a Select Committee to look at something and send it back, so that the Government would then respond to say that, as a consequence of that, they were making all these changes, but it then never came back to the House. There was a process where you could do something once the Secretary of State had laid it, but for Back-Benchers there was no mechanism to get a debate on the final national policy statement—it was impossible. It could have been done in the name of the Government, but it was not done—they were a Conservative Government, so do not worry; I had a pop at them at the time.
I do not understand why, given that the impact of national policy statements is so huge, the Government are going further in removing a key part of parliamentary scrutiny. I genuinely hope that the Government will think again. I would have no problem if the Government had other ways of dealing with the timing but we have to remember—we see it more in this House, where we have a wider range of not just parties but Cross-Benchers, and until this Parliament that has not been the same at the other end—that it is not fair on minority parties, particularly those representing constituencies where such NSIPs are being proposed, to remove their opportunity to stand up and represent their communities on what the future impact might be of a number of national policy statements.
My other amendments are somewhat technical, regarding not wanting the effects to be retrospective and so on. I will not cover every minutia, but that is what they intend to do, and to get some clarity from the Government on what they are planning to do with the timing.
On the wider point, Amendment 16 is where I am trying to pull together some of the threads of what this Bill should be about: improving nature, improving the speed of infrastructure and increasing the number of homes. In its recent report, the Office for Environmental Protection said that it would like the Government to make it standard practice that, when dealing with new policies, they routinely produce, publish and consider assessments within departments. That is necessary, because every Minister is legally required to consider the correlation between their policies and those in the environmental principles policy statement. That is in law. There is no way in this House to do that, apart from through trust, to see how it works together. It matters that we work together on making this happen.
There are frustrations that people might have. I appreciate that there is a legal case at the moment about whether what is in the Bill is compliant and whether it will reduce the impact of environmental law. I am not getting into that. However, one thing Ministers can experience is external bodies issuing legal action. They start off with a pre-action protocol letter. Under that, there is a duty of candour on the Government to release lots of information that the Minister will have considered on whether they were being compliant with the law in how they addressed the matter. That is not available to Parliament. I want to make it available to Parliament. I had a debate with the clerks about whether we should use the words “duty of candour” or similar. In essence, when we are trying to scrutinise not only the role of the Executive but how legislation is being applied, it is fair to this House and the other House to have a basis of information so that if, for whatever reason, the Minister decides, “We’re not going to worry about that bit, but we’re doing that consciously because we believe there’s a greater good under various articles”, we can accept that but be transparent about it.
This comes up in a similar principle later, under planning applications—based, by the way, on something that the chief executive of Natural England said in evidence to the Environmental Audit Committee in the other place. What I am trying to do is get the cards on the table. Let us make sure the Environment Act 2021 and the targets in primary legislation are not all of a sudden ditched because of the rush to do X, Y and Z without this House or the other House knowing about it, so it can be challenged and potentially revised, and, if necessary, we can come forward with other amendments to legislation to make the Government comply with the law without waiting until whatever deadline it is, only for them to say, sorry, but they have not managed to do it.
Lord Ravensdale (CB)
My Lords, I support Amendment 8, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, to which I have added my name. I emphasise the points he made, in that I think the biggest risk with this Bill is that it will not deliver for large infrastructure, in the sense that it will not address the concerns around environmental regulation.
Part 3 is very well set up for housebuilding, but if we look at the high-profile issues with environmental regulation that we have seen with some of our large projects, such as the HS2 bat tunnel or the acoustic fish deterrent—the fish disco, as it is called—we find that those were all habitats issues that were uncovered when the developers started to assess the site and figure out how they were going to operate their specific piece of infrastructure. Those are not the kind of things that would have been addressed through the proposed environmental delivery plan mechanism or the nature restoration fund. It simply does not match up with the timescales of how the EDP process would work. That is something that we will come back to later in Committee.
However, there are some welcome things that the Government are looking at, and I welcome the amendment from the Government to remove the statutory requirement for a pre-application process on NSIPs. What the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, has proposed sits alongside that really well, in setting out maximum deadlines and no-response provisions. This measure would be helpful to emphasise that and help speed large infrastructure through the system by making it a statutory requirement.
Lord Jamieson (Con)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, for leading this group on national policy and for his advocation for speed and simplicity, taking away two of the points that I was about to make. This goes to the heart of what our planning system needs to have: clarity and speed. Policy needs to be clear and consistently implemented, so that developers, planners and local councils understand what is required and how decisions will be made in a way that reduces risk and cost to all parties, while being clear and transparent to the public.
On timeliness, projects need to move through the system efficiently and effectively so that they are delivered on time and to avoid unnecessary, costly delays. How does the Minister intend to provide further detail about the review of national policy statements and ensure that clarity, consistency and timeliness are truly embedded in that process?
Amendment 9, to which I have added my name, seeks to probe the meaning of “exceptional circumstances” in the context of reviewing or amending national policy. Its aim is to clarify the intent behind the term, while still ensuring that Ministers retain the flexibility that they need for genuine national emergencies. My concern is that an amendment to the national policy statement, as required by new subsection (5A), could be delayed if the threshold for what constitutes “exceptional circumstances” is vague. I would be grateful if the Minister could set out what she considers would fall within the scope of that phrase and whether the current wording risks introducing unnecessary uncertainty or even a shift in overall approach.
We need to strike a careful balance, avoiding the risk of judicial review while maintaining sufficient ministerial flexibility in genuine emergencies. Governments must be able to act swiftly when needed yet, if a decision is justified solely on the basis of exceptional circumstances, it becomes difficult to test or challenge that rationale. Courts often defer to such open-ended terms, which can weaken accountability, and your Lordships’ House may find it difficult to challenge the use of powers in this area. I would welcome reassurance from the Minister that the wording achieves the right balance.
Finally, I thank my noble friend Lady Coffey for her carefully considered and valuable contribution to this group. Her insight and experience will be vital in improving this Bill. In particular, I highlight Amendment 13 tabled by my noble friend. This amendment is vital, because it would preserve parliamentary accountability by requiring the Government to formally respond to any resolutions or recommendations from Select Committees. That, in turn, would help to clarify policy direction early, reduce uncertainty for developers and ensure timely engagement with concerns before they can cause delay. Stronger scrutiny at this stage can help catch potential issues before they escalate.
I also thank other noble Lords who have spoken in this debate—the noble Lords, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, Lord Mawson and Lord Ravensdale—in particular on the continuing issue of EDPs and their fitness for purpose, and the role of Natural England, which is something that I am sure we will come back to again and, possibly, again.
The amendments we have just discussed are small but significant measures. I hope that the Minister can provide your Lordships with the answers to these questions and engage the knowledge the Committee brings to ensure that we get this right.
Baroness Pinnock (LD)
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, began this group in talking about the tensions that are to be found in creating the balance between getting the critical infrastructure that this country desperately needs and how we go about doing it. He quite rightly reminded the Committee of the escalating costs of particular infrastructure developments and gave the reason that risk aversion leads to piles of paper being produced to make sure that nobody is caught out by any of the challenges to the decisions that have been made.
I agreed with that; that is right. But the national policy statements, which are the foundation stones of planning and infrastructure development in this country, are critical. The noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, is right to point out that any fundamental change to our national policy ought to have proper public accountability through your Lordships’ House and from the other place. She is quite right to do that, because accountability helps the process: it helps to maybe expose weaknesses in what is being proposed and maybe enhance the policy statement itself. In the rush for growth, we ought not to throw out the accountability that is essential in planning and infrastructure development—I think that that thread will run through discussions of the Bill. That is the dilemma and the tension we have: where do we have accountability, how much weight do we give to it and how much weight do we give to the urgent need for development? We are going to have to find our way through that.
Everybody here is, I think, anxious that the country is able to produce particularly critical infrastructure and housing without undue costs and delay. It is how we get there that is the problem. I am on board with the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, in wanting any changes to national policy statements at least to be brought before the House as affirmative resolutions. With that, I look forward to the Minister weaving her way through these dilemmas.
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
My Lords, a number of amendments tabled by my noble friend Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, and the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Bybrook—whose amendment was spoken to by the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson—seek to amend Clauses 1 and 2 of the Bill, which set out new expectations for the regular updating of national policy statements and also establish a streamlined procedure for updating national policy statements when select changes are made to them.
Amendment 8 was tabled by my noble friend Lord Hunt of Kings Heath. I thank him for the amount of thought that he has clearly put into improving the Bill—and some very radical thinking, which we will come to in later suggestions, but which is always welcome. His amendment was also signed by the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale. While I absolutely understand and share the desire to improve the speed and clarity of the planning process for nationally significant infrastructure projects and national policy statements, I believe that the amendment’s wholesale approach could potentially have unintended consequences.
First, the amendment proposes fixed time limits for statutory consultation. In the case of national policy statements, statutory consultation is not typically the cause of delay, unlike development consent orders, where we have removed the statutory requirement for pre-application consultation. For national policy statements, the time taken for statutory consultation varies significantly depending on the complexity of the policy area and the nature of the infrastructure involved. Imposing a uniform time limit risks undermining the quality and thoroughness of consultation, especially for those more complex or contentious sectors and projects. The Government’s own consultation principles make it clear that consultation should be proportionate—I think we will hear that word a lot during our debates—to the potential impacts of the proposal.
Secondly, the amendment attempts to tackle concerns about the timeliness of responses by statutory consultees to national policy statement consultations and requests for further information on development consent order applications. Our experience on national policy statements is that statutory consultees respond adequately and without too much delay. We appreciate that there is evidence of slower responses from statutory consultees on live development consent order applications. However, the idea that statutory consultees should completely lose their right to comment on an NPS if they do not respond within a set timeframe may be a step too far or too rigid.
Statutory consultees such as the Health and Safety Executive play a critical role in safeguarding public welfare. Their input is not optional but essential. Instead of removing their critical role in the process, the Government are actively reforming how they prioritise and resource their work across the planning system. This includes measures in the Bill that enable statutory consultees to fund their services across the broader planning system more sustainably and requires them to have regard to government-issued guidance on their role in the NSIP regime.
For the first time, this provides a statutory mechanism to ensure that consultees engage appropriately and in a timely manner, without compromising the integrity of the process. National policy statements are the cornerstone of the NSIP consenting process. I recognise that the spirit of these amendments is in keeping with wider approaches taken to make the system more productive and streamlined. However, the issues faced by national policy statements manifest themselves differently. In practice, these amendments would have unintended consequences that risk damaging how the NSIP system operates.
Baroness Coffey (Con)
The reason I know so much about this and there was a debate on the national networks is that I kicked off a hell of a fuss and the Leader of the House then pledged that the Government, despite it not being in the law, would do these resolutions. My concern is about the fact that so much depends on what the Front Bench decides to do with time. That is why I am concerned about it, but I appreciate what the Minister has said.
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
I thank the noble Baroness, and I understand her expertise in these matters. If she still has concerns, I am happy to have another conversation with her.
Amendment 16 would require the environmental principles policy statement to be considered in the development of national policy statements. The environmental principles policy statement is a statutory document that aids policymakers in how to interpret and proportionately apply the five environmental principles. Policymakers are assisted in assessing the environmental impact of policy, but this is not a replication of the environmental impact assessment process. The principles are not rules and do not dictate policy outcomes. Ministers are under a statutory duty to have due regard to the environmental principles policy statement when developing policy, including NPSs. This is a matter of legal compliance and is embedded in the policy-making process.
Furthermore, national policy statements are also required by statute to be accompanied by an appraisal of sustainability which incorporates the sustainability appraisal as well as the strategic environmental assessment and ensures that environmental considerations are fully integrated. A habitat regulation assessment must be undertaken for a national policy statement to comply with the requirements of the Conservation of Habitats and Species Regulations 2017. The preparation of an assessment of sustainability is a comprehensive process and includes an examination of the likely environmental effects of designating a national policy statement and the reasonable alternatives to a national policy statement. It also requires the Government to set out measures to mitigate any significant negative effects identified and any enhancement measures.
The assessment of sustainability is an iterative process done in conjunction with the updating of a national policy statement. For example, I encourage Members to read the assessment of sustainability that was published alongside the National Networks National Policy Statement, which I am sure the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, will already have done. It sets out a clear methodology of all the above and the environmental principles considered when developing the policy and potential alternatives.
I know that has been quite a long explanation, but I felt that the detailed nature of the amendments warranted going into some detail. For those reasons, I do not believe that a separate written assessment within each national policy statement is necessary.
I turn to some of the points raised by other noble Lords. My noble friend Lord Hunt referred to the capability and capacity of Natural England. That issue has been raised many times—it was raised in the other place and has been raised again here—and we will come to it when we start to debate Part 3 of the Bill.
I wonder whether the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, meant the building safety regulator. I was not quite sure which regulator he was talking about but am happy to answer any questions about that. We have done significant work with the building safety regulator to try to speed up the process. We have increased its resources and changed the chief executive. Things are moving much more quickly already, and the development industry is already seeing a change.
The noble Lord, Lord Banner, spoke about the precautionary principle. We have already had discussions about that today. We have to look out for the proportionate use of precautionary principles without going over the top and gold-plating everything, which I am afraid has been too much of a feature of the planning system in the past.
I thank the noble Lords, Lord Ravensdale and Lord Jamieson, and the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, for their contribution to the debate. With all that said, I kindly ask noble Lords not to press their amendments at this stage.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend. I thought she gave a very comprehensive and helpful response, and obviously I will withdraw my amendment.
It seemed to me that there were a number of threads, but a particular one is the relationship between what the legislation is seeking to achieve, the role of regulators and planners and the interface with the democratic process. The noble Baronesses, Lady Coffey and Lady Pinnock, had some important points to raise here. In the end, we have collectively created—and Parliament is guilty of this—a whole panoply of quangos and regulators, and I suspect that those who have been Ministers are all guilty of that. Some of that seems to be entirely justified; for instance, you want the Office for Nuclear Regulation to be robust and independent. As a Health Minister, far too many years ago, I was part of the team that created independent reconfiguration panels because Ministers were not able to take decisions on the closure of hospitals as it was all too difficult, so sometimes there is a justification for offshoring. But I agree that we have gone too far and that we need to draw a distinction between the independence of regulators in making judgments and our role as parliamentarians and as Ministers in being tough about their performance, which is what lies behind my amendment.
I understand what the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, means about the issue, particularly in her patch, where a number of different NCOs go through under different NSIP regimes—the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, could talk about cumulative impacts, which I understand—where regulators seem unable to work together, and the box ticking and the judgments they make mean that a collaborative enterprise becomes very difficult. I suspect that is what the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, was talking about in the East End. He, with a fantastic track record in doing this, has a scheme that is partly about improved NHS primary care provision, with housing attached and maybe even commercial development. We are dealing with a host of different bodies, all of which deal with these things in a compartmentalised way, and somehow we have to get through it.
This is partly about the work that the noble Lord, Lord Banner, is doing on the relationship between the proportionate and precautionary principles, and it is also partly about making sure—as the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, said—that the new system we introduce asks whether EDPs fit with major infrastructure projects.
Parliamentary oversight, in one way or another, is one way we can overcome some of the barriers, and I have later amendments that put forward some ideas about that. If the democratic process can legitimise the speed-up of what we seek to do, that would be a very helpful move forward. Having said that, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Baroness Coffey
Member’s explanatory statement
This is to probe why it is necessary for Government-imposed NSIPs to have no planning consent or public engagement.
Baroness Coffey (Con)
With Amendment 17 I will also debate Amendments 18 to 23 in my name. These have been described as a “redirection”; I am not exactly sure what that means, but there is a theme that I hope will become clear. I thank my noble friends on the Front Bench for adding their names to Amendments 17 and 23.
As the Explanatory Notes and various bits of memoranda make clear, this clause is designed to try to speed up aspects of planning, and I understand that flexibility may be wanted. I was a bit surprised when Minister Pennycook in the other place suggested in Committee, talking about offshore generation, that perhaps the MMO could become the planning authority in that regard. The MMO is simply not big enough to get into that.
The theme through my amendments is the fact that a Secretary of State has some literally very special powers, called special development orders. That is why I have tabled some quite detailed amendments. While the narrative, including in Committee and in various memoranda, has been that it can go to an alternative consenting authority, the reason I have tabled these amendments is that there is an alternative consenting authority: the Secretary of State himself or herself.
Amendment 17 tries to probe why the Bill refers to Section 59. You do not need to go through the NSIP and DCO process because the Secretary of State could, more or less, just authorise this tomorrow, without any public consultation, engagement and all sorts of things. The Secretary of State already has the power to do that. I expect that it is usually used for things such as MoD land, so the reasons may be somewhat related to national security infrastructure and so on, but I am concerned that this hands a heck of a lot of power to the Secretary of State, and we should at least be considering that carefully.
That is particularly true when thinking about nuclear and other energy generation, which my Amendment 23 covers. The amount of land taken by most energy projects is pretty significant, not just land for the station itself or the transmission network but the preparation land. That is why I would like to see a commitment, ideally in law, that this will never apply to where a Secretary of State themselves can, on request, give planning permission to something from a developer.
I turn to another aspect of my amendments. This is a novel process—I think that is the explanation in various memoranda—and it will be done by regulations. Putting in the Bill three months for the Secretary of State to make a particular decision seems reasonable if the whole point of this is that it be done quicker. By the way, that is just considering whether something should go through the DCO process or an alternative consenting authority.
In the debate on the first group, I clumsily mentioned the Minister’s commitment to write. It was actually Minister Pennycook, in the House of Commons Committee where this was considered, who pledged several times in the debate on this clause to write to the Committee. That letter may have been sent to the members of the Committee, but it certainly has never appeared on the Bill website or been deposited in the Libraries of either House. He pledged to give more examples of how this would work in practice. The reason for me probing this today is that we could end up with some kind of Stalinist Secretary of State who is determined to build whatever they like anywhere and everywhere. As it stands, through this amendment and this new clause, we will give them the powers to do that, and I do not think we should. That is why I wanted to look at this clause.
I turn to Article 6 of the convention on human rights. Again, a back-up memorandum says:
“These alternative consenting regimes are likely to be … the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, Highways Act 1980, Transport and Works Act 1992 and the Harbours Act 1964”.
But it does not say that it will be only that, which, again, is part of my concern.
So, in a variety of ways, this is probing to see whether we can properly get, in effect, a commitment from the Government on the Floor of this House or through a letter from the Minister—if it is not in legislation—that can candidly be used in a future court case when somebody might want to oppose the Secretary of State doing something so draconian. It would show that it was made clear to this House and this Parliament that that would never happen. So far, none of the back-up memoranda or Explanatory Notes makes that explicit, and that is what I hope to achieve today.
I am particularly concerned about energy projects. The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, is no longer in his place, but I explained on the previous group that I have extensive experience of trying to handle NSIPs as a Member of Parliament and now as a Peer in this place, and I am still very concerned about my local community and what is happening in that regard. With that, I beg to move.
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Coffey for explaining this group. That leaves me no need to go through it again, but I am pleased to support her Amendments 17 and 23. I will be brief, but I wanted to say something about both of them, especially Amendment 17. This amendment is vital because it probes the fundamental issue of democratic accountability and local consent. If the government-imposed national significant infrastructure projects can proceed without planning consent or public engagement, we risk undermining public trust by excluding communities from decisions that directly affect them. This also weakens local accountability by sidelining local authorities and stakeholders, and it increases the risks of legal and political challenges, as the lack of consultation may well lead to resistance or even to judicial review.
Probing this issue is essential to ensure that any such powers are used only when they are truly justified—when they are proportionate to the situation and exercised with true transparency. I raised this concern in the opening group today, and it is one on which we really need some clear answers. I ask again, why is it necessary for government-imposed NSIPs to bypass both planning consent and public engagement? How is this consistent with the Government’s continued claims that localism is protected?
Baroness Pinnock (LD)
My Lords, I apologise for not preceding the noble Baroness, Lady Scott.
Amendment 17 would remove the required consent for the construction of or extensions to a generating station for electricity. Can the Minister explain why, in this instance, the government proposal is that it be disapplied from the existing requirements for going through a proper process? It is important to understand the reason. If it is for timeliness, what causes the delays? If it is for reasons of cost, is that related to timeliness? Is there another way to have accountability and public discourse without creating delays and cost pressures? Otherwise, why would we want to disapply the current requirements for consent? Again, there is a thread of accountability running through this: there is a tension, as the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, mentioned, between getting things done and accountability for local communities.
With those few comments, I look forward to a detailed answer from the Minister.
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, for tabling these amendments. As she said, they are probing amendments, and I hope to be able to give her an explanation. She again mentioned the letter that Minister Pennycook promised. I have asked to be informed whether that letter was sent. If it was, I will provide the noble Baroness with a copy, but it would not be usual, I suspect, for copies of letters that were circulated to a committee in the other place to be automatically circulated here. If that letter exists, I will send it to her.
All the amendments in this group, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, seek to amend the operation of the redirection process as set out in Clause 3, including the replacement of regulation-making powers with time limits or statutory guidance. I recognise that Amendment 17 is probing, so I will first seek to explain how the redirection process has been designed before addressing some of her concerns head on and then turning to Amendment 23. I apologise if these explanations seem very detailed, but it is important to take the time to explain properly.
The NSIP regime was designed to provide a single route through which to consent all types of large-scale infrastructure schemes. As we know, on occasion this one-size-fits-all approach is not proportionate for specific developments. Clause 3 seeks to address this by creating a new power for the Secretary of State to issue a direction disapplying the requirement for schemes above the NSIP thresholds to seek development consent. Clause 3 sets out the circumstances in which a request for a direction may arise, what a request may contain and the steps the Secretary of State must follow in responding. Crucially, the Secretary of State may direct development out of the NSIP regime only if they consider an alternative consenting route to be appropriate given the particular circumstances of the development in question. Enhancing the flexibility of the planning system in this way should reduce burdens on applicants which are otherwise disproportionate and support the Government’s ambitions to have a streamlined planning system. This level of flexibility already exists under the Planning Act.
Section 35 enables the Secretary of State to direct into the NSIP regime those projects which fall outside of the statutory thresholds but which have none the less requested to follow the process for nationally significant infrastructure schemes. This has been invaluable, as we know, for enabling numerous water schemes to progress.
Clause 3 provides that flexibility but in the other direction. It may be that a transport scheme is located in an area with a supportive local authority and does not require the acquisition of land. Instead of requiring the entire scheme to become an NSIP, an applicant could now request to follow the route that is most appropriate to their project. As the Government’s working paper on proposals to streamline the consenting process for infrastructure acknowledged, the existing thresholds have not kept pace with technological advancements. This has held back projects from coming forward—for example, medium-sized schemes—because the process of obtaining development consent was out of kilter with the relatively straightforward nature of the scheme.
Baroness Coffey (Con)
I thank the Minister for her comprehensive response. On Amendment 19, I gently say that it would be “within” three months, so ideally it could be within a day—however, I do not want to quibble unduly.
There is definitely concern about what sort of development orders could be in place. The Government are currently publishing in the Bill, and elsewhere, all sorts of things about devolution, and there is still some anxiety about whether local development orders or simplified planning zones could become part of this when they would not necessarily be suitable. Perhaps I will write to the Minister and we can have nice cup of tea and chat further. With that, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Baroness Pinnock
Baroness Pinnock (LD)
My Lords, Amendments 24 and 25, in my name, relate to Clause 4, in which the Government seek to remove certain pre-application requirements. I am concerned about two of these. The first omits the duty to consult and the second omits the duty to consult the local community. These are very significant changes to pre-application requirements that were introduced in the Planning Act 2008. In my experience, pre-application is an extremely helpful part of the process, as it enables information to be shared and discussed by the communities that will be affected and their elected representatives—councillors and Members of Parliament.
The value of a pre-application duty to consult seems to me to be vital, particularly in relation to infrastructure schemes. The opportunity for communities that are affected to understand the proposals and their impact is much reduced by the process that is followed for large-scale infrastructure applications. For example, the process for large-scale infrastructure is set out very well in the Explanatory Notes, which talks about the pre-application process followed by the submission and acceptance of the application, then the pre-examination stage where members of the public can register as interested parties—although that is subject to some change—and then the examination in public. The opportunities for the general public, as opposed to those who feel they are able to take part in an examination in public, are extremely limited. Therefore, the pre-application stage becomes even more important in relation to large-scale infrastructure applications.
In my experience, the importance of the pre-application process is that it can be invaluable to both the developer and the local community. I will refer to an example not of a large-scale infrastructure application but for 400 homes on a site near where I live. There was a pre-application consultation stage with members of the public. The application was for a site that was known to have been used for coal workings, and the official coal board documents did not identify precisely where all the mine shafts were—they actually did not even know how many there were. However, residents whose families had lived in the area for a long time knew where the mine shafts were and shared that local knowledge with the developer. They were also able to share information, which did not seem to exist formally at all, of the shallow tunnelling on the site.
In this instance, the housing developer gained considerably from the pre-application process in knowing where the mine shafts were that would have to be capped off, and knowing where the shallow tunnels for the coal workings were, which could require attention during the construction phase. The local residents benefited because it enabled them to understand and be provided with factual information by the applicant.
In my view, the changes proposed in the Bill to remove the duty to consult with the local community would be totally counterproductive. Members of the community will get information about the proposals which may not be accurate if there is not a pre-application opportunity. I know from experience that, once inaccurate information is shared on social media sites, it is very difficult to counter and to get the actual situation accepted. The climate in which development takes place these days is for the public to believe that the worst is going to happen.
If the pre-application stage for large-scale infrastructure is believed to be too lengthy with too many parts to it, it seems to me that the best way forward would be to retain the principle of pre-application but to reform the process so that it was not so time-consuming and did not delay the construction processes. That is why the pre-application process is absolutely vital. Removing the duty will simply make the process more challenging for the developer and resentment and frustration will grow, both against the development and at the failure of the democratic process. Living in a democracy involves making time for debate and challenge; it is the price we on these Benches are willing to pay. I beg to move.
Baroness Coffey (Con)
My Lords, I will speak to this group of amendments. My noble friend Lady McIntosh of Pickering degrouped some of her amendments. Because I signed some of them, there is a risk that I might end up duplicating my words in the next debate, but that is not my intention.
Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)
My Lords, as it is Committee stage, I have some simple questions about pre-application with a view to trying to move this important conversation forward. First, are the pre-application arrangements different if a use is already in the local plan? On the coal mine example and water extraction, those should be in the local plan. We have a big problem, because more than half of local plans are not up to date, which was certainly a big concern of mine when I was sitting on the committee.
Secondly, presumably, a developer can do a voluntary pre-application process, or is that not practical? A lot of my experience was in large retail developments. We did a lot of this sort of stuff because we wanted to get local consent. It is a question of what you can do which is voluntary and what is required.
Thirdly, what are the biggest delay factors in the pre-application process? Is it transport objections, heritage, environment features—such as nutrient neutrality or bats—or lawyers going around in circles? Have the Government had a look at what the problem is?
Fourthly, is there an alternative route where you have a much shorter process, perhaps with a deadline and only for the big schemes and not for a small house? This is an important area in local communities, but we want to get the delays down.
Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer (LD)
My Lords, I support my noble friend Lady Pinnock’s amendment. Pre-application consultation, as she correctly said, not only gives communities a chance to shape proposals but can speed up things further down the line. It is not necessarily a delaying factor.
The noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, just raised an interesting issue in that we do not know what the delaying factor is. Is it the statutory consultees, far more than the communities, for example, that are part of the delaying factor? Given the scale of the Government’s ambition, quite rightly, to develop housing and the accompanying infrastructure, and to make master plans to do that, it is much better to take the community along with you. If the community already feels left behind because it is cut out at the very first stage, which is what the Bill does, then however many nice words may be said later by the development corporations or so on, that is not really going to cut much ice. Therefore, the amendments tabled by my noble friend are particularly important.
I also really do not like the fact that, even if communities and the public have made some responses, there is no requirement for the people doing the development to take that into account. Again, that is a very disempowering issue, which undermines the whole democratic basis of our planning system.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
My Lords, I offer my strong support for the entire presentation from the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, and her amendments. I cannot top her example of unknown mines underground, but the example that I was thinking of is on a much smaller scale, and it addresses the point raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe. She said that those mines, et cetera—the physical infrastructure—should be on the record; I think we all know that very often they are not.
However, there is also the question of the local community and how it works, which is never going to be written down. The example that I was thinking of comes from central London, from Camden borough. I was at a meeting where the council came along very excitedly with the idea that it was going to knock down a community centre, build housing, and build a new community centre on what most people from the outside thought were some pretty unpleasant, small, raggedy corner shops—a little row of shops which you get typically in suburban areas. The council officers and the local councillors were visibly astonished when local people, mostly elderly, were up in arms and horrified about the idea of those shops being demolished. They said, “We’re not mobile enough to get to Camden High Street and we’re scared of the traffic on Camden High Street and the speed at which it goes. Even though these shops are probably both very expensive and don’t have a great range of goods, et cetera, we hugely value them”. That is just a small-scale example of how only communities themselves know the way in which they work. If they had had input earlier on, there would not have been lots of very angry pensioners at that meeting, as we saw.
Amendment 107 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, is really important and picks up the use of technology, and potentially its positive use, and sets out rules for it. Again, I am afraid that my next example is also from Camden, because that is where lots of my planning stories come from. The Crick centre was imposed on the local community—I declare a retrospective interest in that I was the chair of the St Pancras and Somers Town Planning Action committee that opposed it, a long time ago. When it was finally built, people said, “But that doesn’t look anything like what the pictures looked like”. I think that is something that we are all extremely familiar with. The idea of creating some standards and rules—they already exist, but we should put them into statute—seems an extremely good one.
Lord Jamieson (Con)
My Lords, first, my apologies: I should have mentioned my interest as a councillor in central Bedfordshire earlier in the debate.
I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, for her leadership on this important group of amendments. Clause 4 systematically removes several pre-application requirements. I will focus first on Amendment 25, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock. This amendment seeks to retain Section 47 of the Planning Act: the duty to consult the local community. Can the Minister clarify the Government’s position? Ministers have previously stated that the Bill does not in any way reduce local democratic input. If that is the case, can the Minister explain why the duty to consult communities is being removed? How did the Government arrive at the decision to remove Section 47 of the Planning Act, as my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe raised, and what are the specific problems they are trying to resolve in doing so?
We know from experience that when local communities are given genuine influence over planning through mechanisms such as neighbourhood plans, they are often more supportive of new housing and infrastructure—we have heard cases from the noble Baronesses, Lady Pinnock and Lady Bennett, where the local input added significant value—especially when it reflects local needs such as affordable housing, safeguards green space or comes with vital local infrastructure improvements. Indeed, neighbourhood plans introduced under the Localism Act 2011 have in many cases led to more housing being approved rather than less. This suggests that working with communities delivers better outcomes.
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
I thank the noble Baronesses, Lady Coffey, Lady Pinnock, Lady Scott of Bybrook—the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, spoke to her amendments—and Lady Miller of Chilthorne Domer, for their amendments to Clauses 4 and 5. I am also grateful to Members across the Committee for the way in which they have engaged with these amendments and what we in government recognise as a significant evolution to the nationally significant infrastructure projects regime.
I am sure we all have experiences of the best in consultation—with a developer that not only consults but truly engages with communities over a period of time to get a better development—and those at the opposite end that carry out a half-hearted tick-box exercise and then crack on without changing anything, keeping a laser focus on their bottom line. We want to encourage the former, not the latter.
All the amendments in this group seek, in one way or another, to reverse changes made by the Government in the other place. Those changes will remove the statutory duty for applicants to consult during the preparation of an application for a development consent order. These are significant reforms to the NSIP regime and therefore deserve our attention. It may be helpful to revisit the rationale behind the Government’s decision to amend the Planning Act in this way.
As I outlined in my Written Ministerial Statement on 23 April, the Government are committed to driving economic growth and taking decisions on 150 major economic infrastructure projects before the end of the Parliament. The level of ambition here is high, as indeed it should be. The UK suffers from outdated and inadequate infrastructure, which is holding us back, not only in economic but in social terms. To deliver new roads, low-carbon energy infrastructure and reservoirs, the UK and its communities need to prosper. We must be open to change, and we are willing to do things differently. I sense a change in public perception on this as well. I think people are beginning to realise that if we want cheaper electricity, and if we want water available for housing and general use, we need to move more quickly to develop the infrastructure we need.
The Government will meet our critical infrastructure commitments only if we take this opportunity to address the inefficiencies that have crept into the NSIP regime over time. One of the most pressing issues is the growing duration of the pre-application phase for projects. In 2021, the average time to secure consent had risen to 4.2 years—up from 2.6 years in 2012. Over this same period, average pre-application timescales doubled. We all recognise that that trend is just not sustainable.
In response to the question from the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, over the past year, the Government have listened to feedback from the bodies and stakeholders most familiar with the development consent order process. That includes developers and practitioners, legal experts, local authorities, statutory bodies and a range of other interested bodies that play very important roles in the process. Through those discussions, it has become clear that the statutory consultation requirements under the Planning Act, though well intended, are now driving perverse outcomes and unintended consequences.
To answer the point from the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, there are a number of reasons why that is the case, including those that she stated and others. The legislative requirements are too prescriptive; rather than fostering the meaningful dialogue that we all want to see, the process has become overly procedural, encouraging risk aversion, excessive documentation—we have already heard about this—and a reluctance on the part of applicants even to adapt proposals for fear of triggering further rounds of consultation. That has led to confusion for communities and delays for developers.
In responding to the point from the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, where there is consultation, an application would normally include key elements of that consultation in the report to the planning body. Although developers have to state their responses to that, even now they do not need to do anything about what the consultation said; they just have to say why they are not doing whatever they have been asked to do. There will often be mitigations in place, but there do not have to be.
Given all these concerns, it is clear that the statutory consultation requirements—uncommon in other planning regimes—are now acting as an absolute brake on progress. The Bill therefore proposes to align the NSIP regime more closely with other planning frameworks by removing these statutory obligations at the pre-application stage. This change is expected to reduce the average time taken to submit applications by around a year and deliver savings of more than £1 billion across the current project pipeline. In the long term, faster delivery will also help reduce household bills.
As set out in my Statement of 23 April, the Government remain firmly committed to a planning system that supports high-quality applications and delivers benefits for both the nation and local communities. We all recognise that the best applications are those shaped through early and constructive engagement. As the Housing Minister emphasised in the other place, we still expect the NSIP regime to operate on a front-loaded basis, with well-developed proposals entering the system and progressing to predictable timescales. In answer to the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, I do not think there is any objection to voluntary pre-consultation if that is what developers choose to do.
Experience from other planning regimes shows that meaningful engagement can and does take place without statutory compulsion, and that developers are best placed to judge how to take a proportionate approach to consult on their applications, which vary in relation to their scale, location and circumstances.
The development consent order process also incentivises high-quality submissions. In order to proceed through examination within statutory timescales, we are confident that developers will continue to engage proactively so that they are well prepared. As well as any consultation and engagement during the early stages of an application’s development, interested parties will still have the opportunity to raise objections, contribute views and present evidence through participation in the examination process.
To support and inform the implementation of these changes, the Government will launch a consultation about guidance later this summer, which will set out that best practice involves developers undertaking consultation and engagement prior to submitting an application. This will help to ensure that applications remain robust and responsive to local concerns.
The NSIP regime relies on developers bringing projects forward to deliver national policy and meet the UK need for infrastructure. We know that the industry has responded positively to the removal of the statutory requirement, with many major developers reaffirming their commitment to meaningful engagement. They are committed to exploring new and better ways to engage with communities.
If these amendments were accepted, we would risk undermining the very purpose of the Bill and the will of Members in the other place, who requested this change to deliver lasting and transformative improvements to the NSIP regime. The current system would remain burdened by unnecessary delays, risk-averse behaviours and a lack of clarity for communities. For these reasons, I respectfully urge noble Lords not to press these amendments.
I turn to Clause 5 and the amendments tabled to it. However, given the importance of Clause 5, I hope noble Lords will allow me briefly to set out the intended impact of the clause before turning to the amendments in question. The clause contains important changes which will enable the Government to deliver on the policy intent of the changes through Clause 4, which, as we have discussed today, removes statutory consultation requirements at the pre-application stage.
Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer (LD)
I apologise for interrupting the Minister, but it might be useful for the Committee to know that I had asked for my amendment to be degrouped. I am not sure what has happened here, but it is my intention to move the amendment in its place after Clause 51.
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
Okay, I will not go into the detail on that amendment now but come back to it. It was originally listed as being in this group. I apologise for the misunderstanding. I would just say to the noble Baroness that I am a big fan of digital twinning, so I look forward to the debate on that subject.
I ask noble Lords who have amendments in this group not to press them and I ask the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, to withdraw her amendment.
Baroness Pinnock (LD)
My Lords, first of all, I thank the noble Baronesses, Lady Coffey and Lady Bennett, my noble friend Lady Miller and the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, for their supportive words on my amendments. My noble friend Lady Miller summed it up when she said that it is very important to take the community with you. That is the message to developers. The Minister’s response was: it will be the developers’ decision as to whether they will engage in pre-application consultation. I do not know about other people’s experience of developers, but mine is that if you give them an inch, they will take at least a mile. Not requiring a statutory pre-application consultation will mean that communities do not understand or know the detail or broad-brush approach of a development that, for better or for worse, will have an impact on them.
If the issues that the Minister spelled out very clearly about the delays and costs of pre-application consultations are the problem, as she has stated, then surely the approach should be to reform what is required in a pre-application. I have just had experience of a pre-application process that involved a change to a major highways route of about 15 miles long through the area in which I live. We have had three or possibly four levels of public consultation, and in the end nobody was satisfied because nothing had substantially changed from the first one in which changes were made. The pre-application process should be reformed so that people’s voices are heard, changes are made where appropriate and then there are tweaks as the process goes on.
There is no legitimate reason for not allowing people’s voices to be heard. I feel very strongly about this and no doubt the Minister will hear from me again on Report. With that, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
“Applications for development consent: consultation with Category 3 persons(1) In the Planning Act 2008—(a) in section 44 (categories of persons to be consulted), omit subsections (4) to (6);(b) in section 56 of the Planning Act 2008 (notifying persons of accepted application), after subsection (9) insert—“(10) The Secretary of State must issue guidance to applicants about how to identify persons within Category 3 (within the meaning of section 57) for the purposes of complying with their duty under subsection (2)(d) so far as relating to such persons.(11) The guidance must be published in such manner as the Secretary of State considers appropriate.”;(c) in Schedule 12 (application of Act to Scotland: modifications), omit 30 paragraph 5(c).(2) In the Localism Act 2011, omit section 135(8).”Member’s explanatory statement
This reinstates the requirement to consult with category 1 and 2 persons.
Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)
My Lords, I am delighted to speak to the amendments in this group, and I thank my noble friend Lady Coffey for signing a number of them. The reason I asked for this group to stand alone is to have an opportunity for a short debate relating to the changes in Clauses 4 and 5 that the Government have brought in at quite a late stage and to understand the background to those changes.
In summing up on the previous group, the Minister referred to the guidance and perhaps she might be able to elaborate on that, subject to what I am going to say. The Bill removes the requirement on a developer under the Planning Act 2008 to carry out pre-application consultation on a proposed project. That will, I understand, remove category 1 and 2 persons—that is, the owners and occupiers of the land. While I understand the Government’s need and desire to speed up the delivery of infrastructure, removing the duty to consult raises major concerns among the agricultural community. As we have established in previous debates on earlier groups, the consultation process is essential and can speed up the process. It is essential for both landowners and occupiers directly impacted by any project and for the developer. This process enables the developer to gain essential feedback from landowners and occupiers who will be directly impacted.
I am sure the Minister would agree that the earliest possible consultation and dialogue would allow a landowner or occupier to understand how they might be impacted by a project and to seek changes at the earliest opportunity to mitigate that impact, such as changing the location of a pylon. As my noble friend Lady Coffey stated, pylons and other major critical infrastructure impacted by this Bill will have a big impact on the farming community. Once you are at the stage of a statutory consultation, when the application for the scheme goes to PINS, it is too late to get any change to the scheme.
The Government have included an amendment, I understand, to replace pre-application consultation with guidance to developers around consultation, and the Minister referred to it in summing up the previous debate. Among others, the National Farmers’ Union is deeply concerned that if the guidance is not detailed and prescriptive enough, landowners and occupiers will not be provided with details about schemes and their intended location, and it will not, therefore, be possible to seek changes with the developer to reduce the impact of a scheme on a farm business. Pre-application consultation should be mandatory, not just guidance. As the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, remarked in the previous group, if you give a developer an inch, they will take more than a mile.
I understand that Clause 4 was added at a late stage in the proceedings in the other place by the Government in Committee. I am trying to understand why the Government and the department brought in these changes, particularly as farming organisations, such as the National Farmers’ Union, would have supported the original drafting of the Bill in respect of pre-application requirements. In their view, it would have struck a better balance between speeding up infrastructure and adequately consulting impacted parties.
Baroness Coffey (Con)
My Lords, I put my name to several of my noble friend’s amendments and I agree pretty much with every word she just said. I made my main points in the previous group.
Baroness Pinnock (LD)
My Lords, this is a further iteration of the debate we had on the previous group about pre-application consultation, but this time with the specific purpose of consultation with owners and occupiers of land. I still hope that we can get to the point where the Government have a rethink about reforming the pre-application process without removing it altogether.
We are in danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater with Clause 4. I have listened carefully to the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, and, as with the previous group, there are important points to be made. Informing people about an application is important, along with the community on which it impacts, particularly with regard to information to owners and occupiers of land. It is just rude not to, quite apart from the legal responsibility. Even with an ordinary application, though not an infrastructure one, the requirement is to notify the owner of the land that something is being proposed—even if you do not own the land, as we heard earlier from the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey. I urge the Minister to think about reviewing and reforming pre-application rather than removing it.
Lord Jamieson (Con)
My Lords, the amendments in this group, tabled by my noble friend Lady McIntosh of Pickering and supported variously by my noble friend Lady Coffey, speak to the important principle of consulting those who will be affected by changes, who are often best placed to provide information about development ahead of time. I appreciated the Minister’s comments on consultation in the previous group. The Government themselves are going to a consultation on providing the optimum guidance for consultation in the future. That is a positive, despite the multiple consultations.
At this stage in our deliberations, it is important to consider what “consultation” means. We are not talking about wreckers or blockers. These Houses of Parliament—indeed, your Lordships’ House itself—are constitutionally tasked with consultation and review. That is what we are doing at this very moment: reviewing the Government’s proposal in detail and providing feedback with the intention of making a proposal better and more workable in practice.
As we have heard, category 1 and 2 persons are definitions that refer to persons with significant interests in affected land. They know, literally, the lay of the land, the conditions, the constraints and the opportunities that could be faced by any development in advance of a project being started. The benefit of the knowledge and experience that these parties have must not be understated. One obvious way to prevent bad development is to promote good consultation.
We are keen to see spades in the ground and development starting to get under way, but there is no point if we get bad developments in the wrong place and where they are not appropriate. We have a duty to deliver, but we also have a duty to deliver responsibly. Removing requirements to consult key parties means that the Government increasingly run the risk of championing bad development.
There is also the question of buy-in. The Government will find that the public do not appreciate being done to, rather than being done with. Does this not strike to the heart of what the Government are trying to do with the Bill? The Government will find that if they do not undertake this policy programme carefully, with close reference to the very people they are intending to exclude from the consultation stage—I note the Minister’s previous comments, which are much appreciated—they will not be thanked for it. Consultation with stakeholders is, as noble Lords who are business-minded will know, an important way to build support, gain approval and deliver projects that work.
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
My Lords, Amendments 26, 27, 32, 35, 39 and 42 were tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh. I am grateful to her for her amendments, and I thank the noble Baronesses, Lady Coffey and Lady Pinnock, for their comments. The noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, referred to throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I am afraid that, in this instance, the baby has become so fat that it cannot even get out of the bath, never mind be thrown out.
As I have outlined over the course of this debate, these amendments seek to undo a number of amendments tabled by the Government in the other place to remove the statutory requirement for applicants to consult in the preparation of an application. Given that this significant change was introduced during the Bill’s passage—a point I accept from all noble Lords who have mentioned it—I will outline again the Government’s motivations for making the change.
A particular aspect of concern has been the increasing length of time spent at the pre-application stage, resulting from the way that statutory requirements are being complied with. As outlined, consultation has become a tick-box exercise—the very one I was referring to earlier—that encourages risk aversion and gold-plating. We have therefore concluded that these requirements are now serving to slow schemes down rather than speed them up, and that the consultation taking place is not meaningful to the people involved. It just becomes that tick-box exercise.
In bringing in these changes, we want to speed up the typical period taken to submit applications and further save money in this Parliament’s pipeline of projects. We are committed to sustaining a planning system that encourages high-quality applications and delivers benefits to the nation and local communities. We all know that high-quality applications are those that have been developed through early and meaningful engagement with those impacted, including local authorities, statutory consultees, communities and landowners. Affected individuals will, of course, still be able to object to applications, provide evidence of impacts on them and participate in the process through which applications are examined.
As I have explained, in making this change the Government are clear that this signifies not that consultation and engagement are no longer important but just that the current system is not working well for either developers or communities. Guidance will be forthcoming on how engagement can be undertaken so that applicants can produce high-quality applications. We look forward to engagement on this matter. I take the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, about consultation on consultation—he is right—but, in this case, it is necessary.
The Planning Inspectorate will continue to consider whether an application is suitable to proceed to examination and be examined under statutory timeframes. The guidance will outline best practice—to answer the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh. I cannot give her any absolute detail yet because, as we said, we are consulting on it, but it will outline the best practice, which will involve pre-application engagement. The Planning Inspectorate, on behalf of the Secretary of State, will continue to issue advice to applicants under Section 51 of the Act and have regard to the extent to which applicants have had regard to the advice. These changes will provide flexibility so that applicants can undertake engagement in the way they consider best for their proposed development in accordance with that guidance. I therefore kindly ask the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, to withdraw her amendment.
Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)
I am grateful to the Minister for her remarks, and to all who spoke. I meant to give a big shout-out to the clerks in the Public Bill Office. I know how hard our Front Bench and the Government Front Bench are working, but I understand that there are only four clerks in the Public Bill Office, who are assisting us with all our amendments, so I am deeply grateful to them for their assistance in this regard.
I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, and my noble friends Lady Coffey and Lord Jamieson for their support. The noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, made a good point about reforming, not removing. Together with the loss of hope value and the new provisions on the compulsory purchase of land that we will come to later, I find it staggering how shabbily treated farmers and landowners are by this Government. I am sure there will be plenty more opportunities to elaborate on those arguments.
I understand that the Government are consulting on the guidance at the moment, but it is regrettable that we are not in possession of the guidance before we are asked to remove Clause 4, or at least to reintroduce the consultation at pre-application stage of category 1 and category 2 persons. It seems profoundly undemocratic—profoundly rude, in the words of the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock—and I will consider whether or not to bring this back at a later stage. But, for the moment, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Baroness Scott of Bybrook
“(7A) Where the Secretary of State decides not to accept an application under subsection (2) and (5), the Secretary of State must publish the reasons for the decision and identify the relevant statutory or regulatory basis.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment seeks to increase transparency and protect developers from arbitrary rejection.
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
My Lords, Amendment 45 seeks to enhance transparency in the development consent order—DCO—acceptance process. It would require the Secretary of State to publish the reasons whenever an application is not accepted under the relevant subsections of Clause 6, along with the precise statutory or regulatory basis for such a decision. This is a simple yet crucial step towards ensuring accountability and transparency in the decision-making process.
By explicitly identifying the legal grounds on which an application is rejected, the amendment would help to eliminate ambiguity and to reinforce the rule of law within the planning system. Currently, developers face significant uncertainty and frustration when their applications are rejected without clear explanations. This can hinder timely resubmission by leaving applicants unsure of what issues need to be addressed or whether the rejection was based on procedural, technical or substantive grounds. The resulting delay not only increases the costs and administrative burden for developers but can stall projects that may be vital to meeting national infrastructure and environmental goals.
Lord Banner (Con)
My Lords, I shall say a few words in support of this amendment. I can see it reducing the risk of judicial review. Quite often, not just in the planning context but in other contexts, where there is no duty to give reasons for a decision that is judicially reviewable, judicial review is the only way of teasing out the reasoning, at least in the pre-action process. Quite often, when judicial review is then commenced, the disclosure generates release of the ministerial submission, or whatever the advice may have been, on which the decision was based. If there were a duty to publish the reasons for non-acceptance of an application, it would enable the aggrieved would-be applicant to understand and take advice on the reasons without litigating. I can see that additional advantage to this proposed amendment, alongside the advantages that my noble friend Lady Scott just outlined.
Baroness Pinnock (LD)
My Lords, this is a very interesting amendment. In domestic planning applications, and commercial planning applications that are outside the infrastructure process, applications that are refused get a decision notice with a list of the reasons for refusal, which gives the developer the opportunity to review those and resubmit with relevant changes. This goes to the heart of the way the infrastructure application process works, in that we are now going to have a reduction in the pre-application process, and restricted examination in public; consequently, as the noble Lord, Lord Banner, says, the only resort will be to judicial review. The whole process for infrastructure applications needs a real rethink, in my view, because the pre-application stage will throw up some of the problems that the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, referenced, in terms of what might be the causes of refusal. She is quite right that for big infrastructure applications, reasons ought to be given for a rejection of the proposals.
Again, everyone here is anxious that critical infrastructure gets the go-ahead, but it must be given the go-ahead within the right framework of openness, consultation and listening to communities. At the minute, it seems that some of that framework is being removed and is going to be in the hands of the developers, come what may. I hope the Minister will give us some clues that the Government are going to change the process.
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
My Lords, we are all optimists.
Clause 6 amends the acceptance stage for applications for development consent. The noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Bybrook, has tabled an amendment to this clause, seeking to ensure that the Secretary of State publishes the reasons for the decision and identifies the relevant statutory or regulatory basis. At the acceptance stage, the Planning Inspectorate, on behalf of the Secretary of State, will consider whether an application for a nationally significant infrastructure project should proceed to examination. This test grants acceptance to applications for the country’s largest and most complex schemes on the basis of whether they can be examined within the strict statutory timeframes set out in the Planning Act 2008. Let us not forget that these statutory timeframes are what applicants admire most about the regime. They provide much needed certainty and clarity.
In our Planning Reform Working Paper: Streamlining Infrastructure Consenting published in January, we indicated that applicants often take a risk-averse approach to the acceptance test, as a refusal or a withdrawal can delay projects and harm investor confidence. Applicants will often gold-plate their application by undertaking additional consultation, delaying applications from coming forward. Accordingly, Clause 6 updates the acceptance test, not just to account for the removal of consultation at the pre-application stage but to increase the flexibility of the acceptance stage, so that applicants are more likely to come forward sooner. In doing so, Clause 6 amends the test to be applied from a “satisfactory” standard to “suitable to proceed to examination”. This wording brings the test closer to the objective of this part of the process.
The amendment proposed would require the Secretary of State to publish the reasons why an application has been rejected, explaining where it has not complied with new Section 55A (2) and (5). It is rightly intended to increase transparency and to protect developers from arbitrary rejection. The Government fully agree with the intention behind this amendment, which is to prevent arbitrary rejections for applicants. That is in part what has motivated the Government to introduce Section 55A. We want to allow for corrective actions, where needed, to enable acceptance rather than outright rejections or the withdrawal of applications. However, for the reasons I will outline shortly, we do not think this amendment is necessary, as the existing provisions in the Planning Act 2008 and new Section 55A provide sufficient transparency and protection for applicants.
The Government expect that this new provision will be used where an application does not strictly comply with requirements but where the application could quickly address any deficiencies or gaps. For example, regulations under the Planning Act require plans and drawings to be of a specified size and scale, and this includes specific requirements where multiple sheets are provided. Where applications need revision to comply with these or other such requirements, this process will allow for changes to be made easily where an application would previously have been rejected. Subsections (2) and (5) of the new section also require the Secretary of State to inform the applicant of what changes are needed and when these are needed by.
Moreover, the NSIP regime is built around strong principles of transparency and fairness. The Secretary of State will still be required to provide the applicant with the reasons why an application has not been accepted. The Planning Inspectorate routinely provides advice to potential applicants under Section 51 of the Planning Act 2008 before an application is submitted and is required to publish such advice on its website. Therefore, advice to the applicant at the pre-application stage, which can be used to highlight any more significant concerns, is already made publicly available. Given that the Planning Act 2008 and new Section 55A already require an explanation to be provided to applicants for why an application has been rejected, we do not believe that these amendments are required.
The Government have committed to consult on guidance to support consultation and engagement for nationally significant infrastructure projects this summer, as I have already outlined. As part of this consultation, we would very much welcome views on the acceptance of applications and the guidance needed to support the changes in the Bill. In particular, we recognise the importance of ensuring that requests made to applicants to provide additional information are proportionate, and we will ensure that guidance sitting alongside this change makes that clear. I hope the noble Baroness is reassured and, for all these reasons, I ask her to withdraw her amendment.
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for her response, but I am not reassured. I am still not at all clear what the developers are being asked for, as we have heard from my noble friend Lord Banner, and we have heard from developers as well. There needs to be clarity not about what they should change but why they have been turned down. I hope the Minister and I can talk more about this, but I am considering bringing it back on Report if we do not get the reassurance that the clarity that developers need from the Secretary of State will be delivered by any changes that the Government are making. If not, we will press to make changes ourselves. At the moment, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Lord Ravensdale
“Applications for development consent: low carbon energy infrastructureAfter section 35A in the Planning Act 2008 (timetable for deciding request for direction under section 35) insert—“35B Representations by relevant authorities, net zero and sustainable development(1) In relation to relevant nationally significant infrastructure projects, relevant authorities should have special regard to the matters in subsection (5) when carrying out the activities in subsection (6).(2) The relevant nationally significant infrastructure projects are —(a) the construction or extension of a generating station within the meaning of section 14(1)(a) for the purpose of low carbon electricity generation, or(b) the installation of an electric line above ground within the meaning of section 14(1)(b) for the conveyance of electricity generated by a station in subsection (a).(3) For the purposes of subsection (2)(b) it does not matter whether the electric line is also used or intended for use in connection with the conveyance of electricity generated from other sources.(4) The relevant authorities are—(a) the conservation bodies in section 32 of the Natural Environment and Rural Communities Act 2006 (UK conservation bodies),(b) the Environment Agency, and(c) such other bodies as may be prescribed in regulation by the Secretary of State.(5) The matters referred to in subsection (1) are the need to contribute towards—(a) achieving compliance by the Secretary of State with part 1 of the Climate Change Act 2008 (Carbon target and budgeting),(b) the achievement of biodiversity targets under sections 1 to 3 of the Environment Act 2021,(c) adapting to any current or predicted impacts of climate change identified in the most recent report under section 56 of the Climate Change Act 2008, and(d) achieving sustainable development.(6) The activities referred to in subsection (1) are any representations under Part 5 and Part 6. (7) In discharging their duty under subsection (1), the relevant authorities must have regard to any guidance given from time to time by Secretary of State.(8) In this section “low carbon electricity generation” has the meaning given in section 6(3) of the Energy Act 2013.””
Lord Ravensdale (CB)
My Lords, I remind noble Lords of my interests as a chief engineer working for AtkinsRéalis, director of Peers for the Planet, and co-chair of Legislators for Nuclear.
We have had a number of discussions already in earlier groups about the tensions that potentially exist between competing objectives, such as growth, nature and net zero, and the issues with the regulators and the precautionary principle when it comes to large infrastructure. This has resulted in a regulatory system that is stopping large energy infrastructure being built—solar farms, wind farms, nuclear power stations—and is therefore destructive to our environment, not to mention the growth agenda.
Some of the well-known examples, such as bat tunnels and acoustic fish deterrents, have already come up in previous groups, but a lesser-known example is a worm called Sabellaria that builds and lives in tubes on the seabed—I hope noble Lords will bear with me for a minute. This information is courtesy of Catherine Howard, partner at HSF Kramer. For offshore wind projects, the conservation body advised compensation for impact to Sabellaria when placing rock on the seabed, even in areas where Sabellaria is not present—I repeat, even in areas where it is not present. That resulted in a two-year delay to offshore wind farms, including the trio of Norfolk offshore wind projects: Norfolk Vanguard East, Norfolk Vanguard West and Norfolk Boreas. These projects, consented to in 2021-2022 by Vattenfall and since sold to RWE, have been delayed by approximately two years due to the inability to satisfy seabed compensation requirements. This is holding up infrastructure that is a top priority for net zero and energy security for the UK.
Examples such as this are commonplace across our infrastructure, adding billions in cost and years in delay. The noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, mentioned the 44,000 pages of the Sizewell C environmental assessment: a stack of paper 5 metres high—taller than a double-decker bus. The planning application for the Lower Thames Crossing was 359,000 pages—if all that was laid end to end it would total 61 miles, five times the length of the crossing itself.
Part of the solution here comes later in the Bill, in Part 3. A really important piece of the puzzle is the regulators themselves and how they are set up. My Amendment 46 in effect would put duties on the relevant regulators, with a scope limited to electricity generation projects, to take account of the benefits as well as the local environmental impacts of projects. By putting a net-zero duty on the Environment Agency and the statutory nature conservation bodies, the regulators would be directed to consider the broader benefits of electrical generation infrastructure and balance these with the local environmental impacts. It is really that macro versus micro view.
At the moment, the regulators are concerned purely with the local environmental impact of a particular piece of infrastructure, not with the potential macro benefits that the piece of infrastructure may bring. There could be a number of different duties to consider here—for example, energy security—but a net-zero duty is easiest to define for coherence with government targets.
Baroness Coffey (Con)
My Lords, I will speak particularly to my Amendment 46A, which is a good example of trying to knit the Bill together. We are trying to speed up aspects of planning decisions on infrastructure, yet also—I will not go heavily into Part 3—create environmental improvement.
This is quite a simple, straightforward amendment. I am very grateful for the counsel of Alexa Culver, with whom I have been engaging through LinkedIn. She is counsel at RSK and is doing a very good job of seeing how this is coming together. In essence, in the Bill as it stands, Natural England is tasked with creating this environmental delivery plan—I am concerned about certain aspects of Part 3—which will hopefully, to paraphrase, improve the environment. That document will be created and approved by the Secretary of State for Defra to make sure that we see improvements.
Therefore, for me it is exceptionally logical that whenever a Secretary of State in another department makes a decision on NSIPs and considers where the national policy statement has effect, they should also, in effect, consider the environmental delivery plan as it is. Under Section 104 of the Planning Act 2008, the Secretary of State already has to consider national policy statements, marine policy documents if relevant, other aspects regarding local impacts and
“any other matters which the Secretary of State thinks are … important”.
That is absolutely critical. In all the changes, particularly in Part 3, the Government are saying that they can have the best of both by doing this. My amendment would make certain that they have to consider it and that it will actually get delivered. That is why I have tabled it at this stage of the Bill.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, I support the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, on his Amendment 46. On Amendment 46A, I would be very surprised if the Secretary of State did not take account of EDPs. From the provision that the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, read out, the Secretary of State clearly has the power to do so.
On Amendment 46, we partly return to the role of regulators. There is a perverse output of regulators making it difficult to achieve net-zero targets, which I find very difficult. Some regulators find it difficult to go wider than the very narrow remit that they seem to work under. One of the questions to the Government is: do they really think it will make a difference? It is easy to make fun of bats or acoustic fish deterrents, but it is fair to ask whether, as a result of this legislation, we will see an end to the ludicrous behaviour of regulators, which has cost so much money, delayed projects by so much time and, as we know, achieved absolutely zilch for conservation or nature preservation. Ultimately, that is the test.
It seems that the regulators do not come under enough challenge on their performance. Somehow, we need to put some mechanisms in the Bill to ensure that the regulators come under the microscope much more on how they behave and that they are held accountable. That is why the amendment is very well judged.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
My Lords, I will chiefly offer support to Amendment 46A from the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey.
In response to the challenge from the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, who said that of course the Government would not do this, I am afraid that we hear that very often in your Lordships’ House. The noble Lord may be speaking for his own Government, but we are making law for potential future Governments, and we cannot know how they will behave. That is a reason to put Amendment 46A in the Bill.
I respond to the speeches of the noble Lords, Lord Ravensdale and Lord Hunt, with a little reminder that we are one of the most nature-depleted corners of this battered planet. If our regulators have not succeeded in doing the job they should have done in protecting nature, the answer is not to take away more power from the regulators. By all means, make them work better. As the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, said, we will undoubtedly discuss this at great length in relation to Part 3, but the Bill currently takes away an enormous amount of protection for nature, which is a huge problem.
In talking about Amendments 46 and 46A, I will refer to Defra’s own words from a blog post in 2025 that, we can assume, represents the Government’s view. It starts with a statement with which I can only agree:
“Nature is the bedrock of our entire way of life”.
As I often put it, the economy is a complete subset of the environment; none of the economy exists without a healthy environment. That blog seeks to defend the nature restoration fund, the environment delivery plans and all the other steps that this Government are introducing. You might say that the blog post is a little too vehement for its own good and that its tone sounds extremely defensive. None the less, we can all think of examples of where the Government have, on the one hand, done something for nature, but, on the other, done enormous damage with other policies.
One of the obvious examples that comes to mind here is peat. Peatland is terribly important for nature and for climate. Large amounts of money are spent on restoring peatlands. We also have continued use of the land for driven grouse shooting and the burning of large amounts of peat causing great damage—and continual horticultural use of peat. So we have the Government trying to expensively restore something while continuing to allow the destruction of it. That is why this needs to be in the Bill. I could give many more examples, but given the hour I will not, of where the Government are, in essence, facing in two directions at once and nature is torn down the middle as a result.
Lord Berkeley (Lab)
My Lords, the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, is a very good amendment, but it refers only to low-carbon energy infrastructure. Of course, he is an expert in that, and that is fine. The comments made by him, my noble friend Lord Hunt and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, referred to a much wider subject: are regulators a good thing or not and are we controlling them? To say that we want to make changes to the regulations on low-carbon energy infrastructure without looking at others means we are missing something. We have big problems with many regulators, but it should be a consistent policy. It needs to be done on a much more scientific and level playing field rather than it being just something which relates to whether we think what they are doing is a good thing or a bad thing. I do not think that is the right way to look forward. Maybe when the noble Lord comes to wind up, he can explain why the amendment refers just to low-carbon energy infrastructure.
Lord Ravensdale (CB)
Perhaps I may answer the noble Lord now. I thank him for his comments. He is absolutely right that there is a broader point here, but the amendment took into account the scope limitations of the Bill, which is why we raised it in that way. He is right that there is a broader point on regulators, but that would take it outside the scope of this legislation.
Baroness Pinnock (LD)
My Lords, these have been two very interesting amendments to think about. The noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, quite rightly points to the fact that there are significant delays in wind farms in the North Sea because of demands by regulators in relation to Sabellaria. There is the tension that we started this Committee day with, which is if, as a country or as a world, we do not go down the net-zero route, there will not be nature to protect, because most of Norfolk and Suffolk will disappear under the waves of the North Sea. There has to be some balancing act between retention and restoration of nature, and not wilful destruction of it, but at the same time enabling the move towards net zero that we must do at speed. I am glad I am not in a ministerial position where I have got to do that balancing act, but that has to happen. We will not please everybody; that is also true.
The other issue that has come into this debate is, as the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, put it—I think I quote him correctly—“the egregious behaviour of regulators”. But it is this Parliament that provides the duties for regulators. A Parliament some time ago demanded that regulators look after the marine environment—or Natural England and all the rest of it.
It is about trying to pull all the moving parts together and understanding where we have to do the trade-offs. I have great sympathy with the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, but also with the emphasis on the importance of continuing to protect and preserve nature. That is what the Bill ought to be able to do, but I am not sure that it does—in fact, at the moment, I am convinced that it does not. I hope that by continual discussion we will find a route through if the Government are willing to listen.
Lord Jamieson (Con)
My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 46 in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Ravensdale and Lord Krebs. It is interesting, as mentioned by the noble Lord, Hunt of Kings Heath, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle and Lady Pinnock, that we keep coming back to this issue of prioritisation, hierarchy and the role of regulators. I particularly note the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, that we need to start resolving this issue. I am sure that on this side of the House we shall come back to it as we progress through the Bill, but I want to focus on this amendment.
There is no doubt that we have to address the issue of low-carbon energy and low-carbon infrastructure. It will be essential to hitting our zero-carbon targets and addressing the challenges of climate change. Although we support the efforts to advance clean energy, we must also guard against an unbalanced approach, particularly one that risks compromising the reliability and resilience of our energy systems. Low-carbon generation should not be considered in isolation, as I believe the noble Lord mentioned, or privileged above all other forms of infrastructure. The grid as we know it is undergoing rapid change; the Government’s ambition to rebuild it around renewable sources within just five years is rooted in ideology. Solar and wind are by nature intermittent. They cannot provide the stable backbone that the grid requires.
The stability of our electricity system depends on what is known as inertia, the capacity to resist sudden fluctuations in frequency. This essential property is delivered by turbines in energy-dense technologies such as nuclear, hydro and gas-fired power stations. It is not delivered by wind or solar farms. Without sufficient inertia, we run the risk of system destabilisation, leading to the worst case of failures and blackouts. We need a serious, detailed plan to safeguard the resilience and sovereignty of the UK’s energy supply. That means ensuring a mix of technologies, including those that deliver system stability and resilience, as well as decarbonisation.
On the amendment, we have a number of questions which we hope noble Lords can address. First, it refers to “sustainable development”, a term that invites interpretation. In planning, there is already a well understood definition of sustainable development in relation to planning applications for housing and commercial development, but I do not believe that that is intended here. What precisely is meant here and how is it to be applied in practice? How do we avoid confusion with the existing interpretation of sustainable development?
Secondly, on the list of regulators, why were these specific bodies selected and by what criteria? We welcome collaboration, but it must be clear and consistent.
Finally, there is the matter of the Secretary of State’s powers to prescribe other relevant bodies by regulation. That is a significant authority, and I would be grateful for clarity on how it would be exercised and scrutinised. Although we support the spirit of this amendment, we urge caution and a desire to have a balanced approach.
Briefly, on Amendment 46A tabled by my noble friend Lady Coffey, she raises an important point, so we will listen carefully to the Minister’s reply. Ensuring that planning consent has considered environmental protections is of course vital and must not be overlooked.
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
My Lords, Amendment 46, tabled by the noble Lords, Lords Ravensdale and Lord Krebs, seeks to ensure that in relation to nationally significant infrastructure projects for low-carbon energy, relevant authorities such as the Environment Agency should have special regard for the need to contribute to certain government environmental targets when making representations as interested parties under the Planning Act 2008.
The amendment refers specifically to compliance by the Secretary of State with carbon targets and budgeting; adapting to current or predicted climate change impacts under the Climate Change Act 2008; achievement of biodiversity targets under the Environment Act 2021; and achieving sustainable development. As we have heard throughout the debate today, and at earlier stages of the Bill, it is vital that we move forward and deliver the critical infrastructure that we need, not least to cut greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050. As my colleagues in the other place noted, the Bill can deliver a win-win for growth and nature. Developments such as clean energy infrastructure are key to tackling the climate crisis and supporting nature recovery.
To pick up on the point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, regarding the Corry review, which was important, the review recommended that the Government publish a refreshed set of outcomes and strategic policy statements for regulators, with the aim of restating the Government’s priorities and mandating regulators to use constrained discretion to deliver them. This might answer some of the noble Lord’s questions about this. The Government have accepted this recommendation, one of the nine Corry recommendations being fast-tracked. We are moving quickly to publish the first set of strategic policy statements. I hope that this is helpful.
I thank the noble Lords for their constructive and helpful proposals in this amendment, which seeks to ensure that input from specific statutory consultees is given with the wider context of government targets in mind. The Government agree with the intention behind the amendment. I reassure noble Lords that the Government already have the tools they need to guide public bodies in their engagement with the development consent order process.
The national policy statements for energy infrastructure take full account of the Government’s wider objectives for energy infrastructure to contribute to the achievement of sustainable development and to ensure that the UK can meet its decarbonisation targets. In particular, these national policy statements grant critical national priority status to low-carbon projects. This means that the types of projects that the noble Lord is most concerned with have additional weight in the planning balance. Through the Bill, the Government are introducing a duty on public bodies to have regard to guidance published by the Secretary of State in making those representations which are referred to in the noble Lords’ amendment.
The Government will consult later this summer on what guidance about consultation and engagement on the NSIP process should contain, as I have already outlined. As we review and develop guidance on all aspects of the NSIP process, we will consider, alongside government policy in national policy statements, how we can support the intent of this amendment. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, is reassured and will withdraw the amendment.
On the request from the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, about the definition of sustainability, I will consult further and come back to him.
Lord Jamieson (Con)
I was repeating the request from the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale.
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
I apologise. I took the liberty of popping out of the Chamber for five minutes. We will reply on that.
Amendment 46A, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, and supported by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, seeks to ensure that when determining whether planning consent should be granted for a nationally significant infrastructure project, the Secretary of State must take into account any environmental delivery plan applying to the land that will be developed. The Committee will be scrutinising Part 3 of the Bill in a later sitting. I look forward to that, but I am happy to speak to this amendment today.
The Planning and Infrastructure Bill creates a new type of plan: an environmental delivery plan—EDP. Within an area defined in an EDP, Natural England will identify the impact that relevant development is expected to have on a defined environmental feature or features. These can be features of protected sites or a protected species. Natural England will then set out a package of conservation measures that will outweigh the impacts of the development on the relevant environmental feature.
This process for developing EDPs and the wider set of safeguards across the NRF will be subject to further discussion under Part 3. However, in respect of this amendment, the crucial point is that once an EDP is approved by the Secretary of State that covers development of the type in question and in the location in question, developers will be able to make a payment through the nature restoration levy, which would discharge the relevant environmental obligation being addressed through the EDP. Where a developer chooses not to utilise an EDP, they will need to address these environmental obligations under the existing system. As a decision for the developer, it would not be necessary to require the Secretary of State, when considering a development consent order, to have regard to an EDP that the developer might choose not to use. In these circumstances, the decision would need to consider whether the application was in line with existing environmental obligations.
Further to this, mandating that the Secretary of State takes account of an EDP removes flexibility for the developer on how to discharge environmental obligations. This could impact on the viability of a scheme and would undermine the Government’s commitment to decide 150 infrastructure planning consents during this Parliament, as well as wider growth objectives. I appreciate that there are still some questions in there about how EDPs will work, but that is not the subject of today’s discussion—we will cover that under Part 3.
Furthermore, while the content of an EDP is not intended to be relevant to the planning merits of a determination, if the Secretary of State determines that an applicable EDP is material, they can have regard to it. That is already the case: under Section 104(2)(d) of the Planning Act 2008, the Secretary of State must have regard to any other matters which they think are both important and relevant to their decision. This could include any relevant EDP. I hope that that reassures the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey.
Lord Ravensdale (CB)
My Lords, I thank the Minister very much for that response. I will address some of the questions that noble Lords raised. I take the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Jameson, about sustainable development, but he mentioned the specific list of bodies. When we started out with this amendment, we had a long list of bodies and agencies that would be considered within the amendment, but we were informed by the Public Bill Office that that would present hybridity concerns, which is why we limited it to the subset that noble Lords can see in the amendment today. The reason we have gone with those is that most of the issues we have had with regulation of large infrastructure have been to do with the Environment Agency and the statutory nature of conservation bodies, but we have given that power for other bodies to be prescribed in regulations by the Secretary of State.
As I said, I thank the Minister. I am very encouraged by what she said. I note that she talked about the strategic priority statements in terms of duties on regulators, but I would note the strength of a statutory duty, which I think is quite important here in pinning down the objectives of regulators. There will be a lot of benefit in doing that within statutes. I look forward to seeing that in further detail, and I would welcome further engagement with the Minister on this point between now and Report. But, for now, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Baroness Coffey
“(4A) In section 104(2)(b) of the Planning Act 2008 (decisions in cases where national policy statement has effect) at end insert—“(ba) any Environmental Delivery Plan made under the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 which has effect in relation to development of the description to which the application relates,””Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment seeks to ensure that when determining whether planning consent should be granted for a Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project, the Secretary of State must take into account any EDP applying to the land which will be developed.
Baroness Coffey (Con)
I am not moving Amendment 46A, although I would like to speak to the Minister about this, because I am not overly satisfied and may seek to bring the amendment back on Report.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
Member's explanatory statement
This amendment removes the requirement for all planning appeals to be considered at a hearing.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, we come to another interesting clause. In essence, I am trying to find ways to identify those infrastructure developments that are of critical national importance to see whether there is a way in which we can streamline the process of approvals that they have to go through. Also, in picking up the points from the noble Baronesses, Lady Coffey and Lady Pinnock, about the need for democratic legitimacy, I am seeing whether we can use parliamentary processes to help.
I am moving Amendment 47 and speaking to Amendments 48, 49, 52, 53 and 65. The two substantive amendments are Amendments 52 and 65. I have two on judicial review which, because of the mystique of groupings for the first day, should really be grouped with a number of other JR amendments that we will come to later, so I will be brief in speaking on those.
My Amendment 52, in essence, creates a short, abridged parliamentary process to confirm Ministers’ decisions to give development consent for infrastructure projects as a critical national priority. Apparently, until the late 1990s, we had a system of provisional order confirmation Bills, whereby Parliament could confirm orders made by UK Ministers for various proposals, including infrastructure projects. There are many of these on the statute book so it is, in fact, a tried and tested approach that we could use for some projects where we need to speed up delivery but we need to have parliamentary approval as well.
This kind of approach, using a development consent order confirmation Bill, could take only four to six months to go through Parliament, which is nothing like the complexity of the hybrid Bill. We have seen that with HS2, which ultimately failed to satisfy anybody and built in huge delays. We are where we are with HS2. Having said that, the station being built in Birmingham looks pretty good; we can only hope that, one day, a train is actually able to arrive there.
The point about this amendment is to give Parliament a vote. I have very much accepted this point about the need for Parliament to have a say in some of these matters. In a sense, this is another trade-off; I am saying that some projects need to be dealt with in a special way—nationally, by being taken by Ministers, by going through the necessary procedures to ensure that they are appropriate and in being given legitimacy by parliamentary vote. It would give businesses and developers much greater certainty about investment decisions and, as I have said, ensure that we have a proper democratic say in these very important decisions.
Amendment 53 is related to Amendment 52 and would repeal Section 150 of the Planning Act 2008. I well recall our debates on that regime, because I was a Minister involved in it. The NSIP regime was designed with the intention of being a one-stop shop for major infrastructure projects, in terms of the consents required. However, the effect of Section 150 of the 2008 Act has been to stop development consent orders from being as much of a one-stop shop as they could be, because certain regulators have a veto on whether a DCO can roll consents into it that would otherwise have to be obtained separately from regulators. We have already debated the problem of having multiple regulators involved; they do not seem to be able to work together and co-ordinate their response.
I know that there was a debate on a similarly worded amendment that was proposed in the other place. The Government had some concerns about it but promised guidance on how to wrap up other consents in a DCO. However, the problem with that is that the regulators’ veto remains, which is why I argue that it should be moved.
My Amendment 65 can be seen in parallel: I seek to enable the Secretary of State to designate certain classes of development as critical national developments; establish an expert critical national developments task force to advise on each application; and provide that planning permission and any other regulatory consent for such development is deemed to be granted six months after the application is made, unless the Secretary of State issues a written objection within that period or extends the period. Of course, here, I am anticipating the response of my noble friend, because I noted that she was not very keen on my earlier amendment on timelines because different infrastructure developments have different requirements and probably different timelines. This amendment allows the Government to be able to sort of flex the timeline according to circumstances.
I would argue that, at the moment, Ministers lack a coherent mechanism to prioritise and accelerate delivery of critical infrastructure projects. The DCO regime has not really, in the end, delivered what we hoped it would when we took it through Parliament. I hesitate again to mention Sizewell C, but eight years from application to consent is just hopeless, and I must say that on Heathrow too. I support the third runway at Heathrow, because I think that, as the Government have said, this will take place within carbon budgets, but it is just an example of how decisions here can be stuck for decades, and we really have to move on from that.
The amendment I am proposing here would centralise accountability with the Secretary of State. I would align it to my earlier amendment in relation to parliamentary consent. It would bring consents under a single process, introduce a statutory determination deadline and de-risk major investments.
There is international precedent for it. The Canadian Government have also faced great delays in major national infrastructure from fragmented approval systems, environmental litigation and federal/provincial conflicts. Recently, the Parliament of Canada has produced a law with very much the same principles as my amendment, which allows the Canadian Cabinet to designate nation-building projects, as they are called, via Orders in Council.
I refer to my other three amendments. Amendment 47 seeks to remove the requirement for any planning appeals to be considered at an actual hearing. That, in my view, is a streamlining process.
Amendments 48 and 49 are around judicial reviews. I really welcome Clause 12(1), which would restrict judicial review appeals to the Court of Appeal where the High Court decides the application for permission to apply for judicial review is totally without merit. Now, I have already paid tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Banner, for his review; this clause follows that review. We received a very helpful letter from my noble friend the Minister this morning, which gives details about how the Government are going to follow up; that is very welcome indeed, but I just want to probe whether we can go further.
Amendment 48 relates to the reviews of NPSs at least every five years, which I warmly welcome. I take my noble friend’s point about the issue with NPSs that have not been subject to a review and therefore could be considered to be out of date. I just want to make sure that judicial reviews are not used in a way which unreasonably might block progress, so my amendment would remove the possibility of JR in two circumstances: in between the five-yearly reviews, by repealing Section 13(2) of the Planning Act 2008, and in relation to any revisions to NPSs that are solely non-material or are reflective changes—in other words, reflective of published government policy change legislation or court judgments which the Bill is providing for.
I am a strong believer in the judicial review process. My background is mainly in the health service, and the fact is that NHS bodies are sometimes fast and loose with legislation and guidance, particularly when it comes to the outsourcing of services, changes of use, closures of hospitals and the like. There is no doubt that the judicial review process has been necessary to ensure proper transparency. My problem with judicial review is when it is used, essentially, to try to block progress—hence the amendment.
Amendment 49 would bring legal consistency to the Planning Act so that it is the High Court where applications for JR would be made. It is not a substantive change but it would make sure that, in any future event, civil procedure rules cannot be made to divert planning appeals to any court other than the High Court. There is already precedent in Section 63 of the listed buildings Act, which makes it clear that appeals are to be made to the High Court. I think that could flow across the Planning Act.
I hesitate to talk about judicial review when the noble Lord, Lord Banner, is present, but it would be good to have at least some debate as to whether, in the light of his review, we could go further. I beg to move.
Viscount Hanworth (Lab)
My Lords, Amendment 52 is of prime importance. Our planning system has become sclerotic. According to the Explanatory Notes that accompany the Bill, the time that it takes on average to secure a development consent order, or DCO, for major infrastructure projects has more than doubled in the last decade to more than four years. The development consent system is beset by objections and pleas and by judicial reviews, with several judicial reviews sometimes besetting the same project. The effects of the delay may be to cause an otherwise viable project to become uneconomic or unaffordable. Nowadays, such delays are often envisaged as a means of defeating a project. The conjunction of lawyers and protesters, which has given rise to a veritable industry, is a modern and unprecedented phenomenon.
Recently, I had good cause to consider such developments. I made a trip by car from London to Ilfracombe in Devon. I had intended to travel on the M4 motorway, which is a major arterial route. However, in consequence of its blockage, I was diverted, on the advice of the Google satnav system, on to the A303. In doing so, I remembered that 303 is the calibre of a rifle bullet. I had hoped to travel at the maximum legal speed, if not at the speed of a bullet. I was pleased to be able to do so until I was brought to a halt. I was then constrained to travel at a snail’s pace for a prolonged period, while passing an ancient stone monument on a single-lane road. I saw the ancient megaliths of Stonehenge on the brow of a hill, which were surrounded by a gathering of druids. I was reminded of their campaign, which has prevented the building of the Stonehenge bypass. They regret the presence of the road and resist the building of a bypass that would encroach upon Salisbury Plain. Some might regard their campaign as a worthy attempt to preserve the dignity of an ancient monument. However, there is another side to the story, which concerns the objections of residents in the neighbouring villages to the diversion of traffic on to their streets. They contend that their villages have an equal claim to preservation.
The legal wrangling has been interminable. The first grant of development consent for a bypass, in 2020, was quashed by the High Court in July 2021. It was then given the green light again, by the Department for Transport, which reissued a development consent two years later, in July 2023. The project was put on hold again, because of another series of judicial reviews, which were dismissed by the High Court in February 2024 and by the Court of Appeal in October 2024. Undeterred by those two defeats, the claimants asked the Supreme Court if they could appeal to it. On 29 January this year, the Supreme Court refused permission to appeal, on the grounds that the challenge did not raise an arguable point of law.
However, this decision was immaterial since, within weeks of taking office last July, the Labour Government had scrapped the plans for a two-mile tunnel that would bypass the monument on the grounds that the cost of the project had become unaffordable. The decision to cancel the project was taken some three and a half years after the development consent order had been issued and after a full and detailed examination of all the issues. In this case, it might be said that the campaigners had won not by virtue of the strength of their case but by dint of endless legal chicanery and delay. However, the same recourse is available to many other parties who, for various reasons, wish to stand in the way of important development projects.
Lord Berkeley (Lab)
My Lords, my noble friend spent a lot of time complaining about the A303. The simple solution is to go by train.
My noble friend is quite right that the planning process takes a very long time. I spent many years trying to do it in relation to building the Channel Tunnel. It is a long time ago now, but we still had to go through the hybrid Bill process, which took quite a long time. My French opposite number kept asking me, “Why the hell are you taking so long to get permission?” I said that we had to go through Parliament and have several debates, Select Committees and things like that. I asked him how they did it so quickly in France, where they were taking six weeks and we were taking three years. He said, “Well, it’s quite simple. It’s a bit like Canada. If you want to go quickly, you don’t consult the frogs if you are draining the pond”. That sums it up.
My worry about these amendments is that the hybrid Bill process needs reviewing. There is a lot of work to be done to make sure that, whatever goes in its place, including my noble friend’s excellent amendments, achieves what it is trying to do, which is to balance the needs of not just the Government and industry but the public who they serve. We need much more information about how that would work before we can form a view.
Something that has not been mentioned much so far in this debate is the question of a business case and viability. It is fine pushing ahead with all these things, such as Sizewell B—or is it C?—because the Government have said they are a good idea, but they have not actually said they are going to fund them. The same could have applied to HS2, but that has gone further and got into a bigger mess. A proper business case needs to be produced for any of these projects, alongside the planning regime, so that we can all form a view about whether it is likely that these projects will go ahead or whether they will fall flat on their face, which would be the worst of all worlds.
I will be interested to hear what my noble friend the Minister says. Maybe there is something in these amendments that is worth looking at, but we have to accept that there are many people in this country who do not like change and who want to do JRs or some other way of opposing what is planned, and we have to respect them as well. I look forward to my noble friend’s comments.
Lord Banner (Con)
My Lords, it will probably already be apparent that in many respects the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, and I are in agreement about how the Bill can be made more effective, but on this group we are not yet quite aligned. I have a lot of sympathy with the intention behind Amendments 52 and 65 in particular, and I have immense respect for those behind the drafting. I myself wanted to go further when I was undertaking the review of legal challenges to M6, and I think it is important that I explain why I felt I could not, while I still need some convincing that it would be possible or sensible to go further.
When I did the review, I concluded that the evidence demonstrated that the overwhelming majority of judicial reviews of the M6 failed. It follows from this that the problem is not with the law, nor is it about “activist judges”, the term often used by some people about judges. It is about the time it takes for bad JRs to meet their doom. That is the problem, and to my mind the remedy for it is to shorten the judicial review process as much as possible. That is what my recommendations focused on, and I am told that Clause 12 in conjunction with the CPR changes—I have not been checking my emails so I still have not seen them—gives effect to those recommendations. That is what the changes would do.
To my mind, therefore, removing judicial review altogether, as things currently stand, would not achieve much more than a truncated JR process. For the really big stuff, the Heathrows and HS2s of this world, the system already allows for the JR process to be fast-tracked. The HS2 and Heathrow cases, both of which I was involved in, went from ground zero to the Supreme Court far quicker than normal cases—not much more than a year, in the HS2 case in particular.
The question then is: what are the downsides of going further, and does the relatively marginal benefit outweigh those downsides? In my view, the answer is no. There is a difficulty with ousters, whether done expressly through an ouster clause, which hardly ever works, or done in a more intelligent fashion than an express ouster, as the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, does, essentially asking Parliament to endorse a DCO and thus giving it the benefit of parliamentary sovereignty. Most DCOs involve the compulsory purchase of land and/or the acquisition of individual rights. There is a real danger, if that approach is undertaken, that there will come a point—whether because someone was denied a hearing because there was a mistake or because someone involved in the decision-making process inadvertently failed to disclose an interest—where something goes wrong in a CPO context. A person whose land, maybe their home, is to be acquired—or there is to be some other fundamental interference with their rights—is, it is said, denied any possibility of correcting an obvious legal error.
In that scenario, there is a real danger that the untested working assumption that Parliament is sovereign—for there is no written tablet of stone saying that the Supreme Court cannot quash legislation—will be tested, and we will not get the right answer. Pandora’s box would be opened and the Supreme Court would quash the legislation in question, and once opened you would never be able to put it back in the box. The lessons from the USA Supreme Court tell us that it would not stop there. This building would no longer be the most important on Parliament Square; it would be the Supreme Court building. That would clearly be a fundamental constitutional change, and most people would regard it as unwelcome to our democracy.
I also have a degree of discomfort about what is fundamentally an executive process being essentially laundered by Parliament, as opposed to it being a legislative process from start to finish, as the HS2 and Crossrail hybrid Bill processes were. I do not want to rain on the noble Lord’s parade, and that of those behind this. As I said, I see a lot of merit in trying to go further, but once you realise that the adverse delaying effects of JR can be cut down very substantially, the question is: does going further risk the constitutional crisis that it may very well facilitate, bearing in mind the very severe consequences and implications of that?
On Amendment 47, I recommended that the single shot for cases totally without merit be an oral hearing—as opposed to a written procedure, which is what Amendment 47 covers—because we are dealing with something that interferes with people’s property rights and can take away someone’s home. To my mind, given that degree of interference in fundamental rights, the individuals in question ought to have the right to at least one hearing, even if it is a 30-minute JR permission hearing that declares a case to be totally without merit. There ought to be at least one day in court—otherwise, fundamental constitutional principles and the legitimacy of the process could be undermined. There is no doubt that we need to sharpen up planning and infrastructure, but, if at all humanly possible, we need to do it in a way that carries people with us as opposed to alienating people; that is the way to make the system work.
I am yet to be convinced, but I am willing to be convinced. Ultimately, it is not me that the noble Lord needs to convince but the Minister and her colleagues. For the reasons I have given, I have a degree of nervousness about these amendments.
Lord Ravensdale (CB)
My Lords, I do not have a huge amount to add to the comprehensive introduction provided by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, but I want to pick up on a few things related to the nuclear industry.
The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, mentioned the eight years from application to consent for Sizewell C. The Government, of course, have big ambitions for the nuclear rollout. Tomorrow I am chairing a board meeting of Midlands Nuclear—a partnership organisation for nuclear across the Midlands region. We are looking at where we can site nuclear power stations within the Midlands, and at small modular reactors and advanced reactors, all in coherence with the Government’s plans through EN-7—the new national policy statement for a more flexible siting approach for nuclear.
There are big ambitions for nuclear and for the industry, but, given the experience we have had with Hinkley, Sizewell and other large infrastructure, we have to be radical. We have to think of new ideas that are going to help speed infrastructure through the system. That is why the Government should take these suggestions from the noble Lord, Hunt of Kings Heath, very seriously. I note that a lot of the principles in Amendment 52—the noble Lord mentioned the tried and tested process within that—and Amendment 65 are similar to those in a law that is being rolled out in Canada. The Government should consider these amendments very seriously.
Baroness Coffey (Con)
My Lords, I was astonished when I saw Amendment 52, but I will start briefly with Amendment 47. As my noble friend Lord Banner pointed out, this is just about being fair to people. As has been mentioned, effectively not allowing people to have hearings and an opportunity to speak when their livelihoods, homes or whatever it is are being ripped away is difficult.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
My Lords, briefly, I feel that the discussion of this potentially extraordinarily far-reaching group of amendments has a different perspective from that of those I often work with—the environmental groups, human rights groups and groups representing disadvantaged communities that are bringing judicial reviews. The perspective I approach this from is how incredibly expensive and difficult judicial reviews are and how often they fail, even when, according to measures of common sense at least, they should have succeeded. That is very much where I come from.
The Committee does not just have to listen to me on this. We saw, particularly after the judicial review over the Prorogation of Parliament, a great deal of debate about judicial review. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Reed of Allermuir, the President of the Supreme Court, was quoted in the Law Society Gazette of March 2020:
“Judges are very well aware of the risk of challenges being brought in what are political rather than legal grounds. They are repelling them and are careful to avoid straying into what are genuine political matters. When this is a matter that is to be considered it should not start from the premise that judges are eager to pronounce on political issues. The true position is actually quite the opposite”.
We have a system of judicial review that very often does not work to defend the powerless in our society, and that of course includes nature as well as people. Yet it is there as a final backstop, and sometimes it works—sometimes it does protect those people—and so it is crucial that we maintain it.
I commend the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, for his ingenuity. This single amendment has possibly the largest legal consequences I have ever seen, as I think the noble Lord, Lord Banner, set out for us very clearly and with vastly more expertise than I can offer.
I say to the noble Lord, Lord Banner, that if we are thinking about trying to speed up judicial review, which in principle is not something that I have any problem with, one thing that undoubtedly slows it down is inequality of arms. Small community groups and environmental groups face a massive inequality of arms; it is very hard for them to go fast, because they just do not have the resources. They have to wait until the crowdfunder has raised some more money before they can keep going. Perhaps dealing with that inequality of arms would be good for the efficiency of decision-making in our society.
None the less, it is fairly self-evident, but, for the avoidance of doubt, I will say that I am strongly opposed to the approach being taken in this group of amendments.
Baroness Pinnock (LD)
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, has brought before us his own Bill. It is worthy to stand alone and provoke a significant discussion about how different procedures could deal with large-scale infrastructure applications. I am not in a position to know whether it would work or not. It is an attempt to provide an alternative, and I am looking forward to the Minister, with all the civil servants behind her, being able to explain why it will or will not work.
I always start from a different starting point, which is that, first, we are a small island. Comparing us with Canada and its vast expanse, or even with France, which is significantly geographically larger than the United Kingdom with a similar population, makes for poor comparisons.
That is the first of the challenges anyone in this country has with large-scale infrastructure. The second is this. No case was made to people about the benefits to them from either of the large-scale infrastructure projects that have been mentioned, HS2 and the A303. HS2 was never about shaving 10 minutes off a journey between London and Birmingham or 20 minutes off a journey to Leeds—though it will never get there. It was never about that. It was about congestion on the railways, but that case was never made. So it is no surprise when the public do not respond to the project in that way. Why are we going through the destruction of our villages and favoured landscapes for the sake of 20 minutes? That was the argument. You have to make the case and the case is not being made. It was the same with the A303 and various other major projects. That seems to me to be a difficulty.
I take issue with the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, using the word “radical”. That word is always used by developers when they want something that the rest of us do not want. We might want its outcome, but we do not like what it is going to do to our environment. I think we have to try harder.
As for the noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth, calling planning “sclerotic”, this element of infrastructure planning is very difficult, but let us not label the whole of the planning process as sclerotic. Local planning authorities do not hold up development; the statistics demonstrate that. The issue is with infrastructure planning. That is why the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, has brought forward his alternative procedure for it. Whether or not that would work, I will leave to others with more detailed backing from the civil servants to decide.
The issue with planning applications, big or small, is always that if you do not involve the public and tell them what it is for, what it will do and what the downsides are, you set yourself up for a big fight, and that is what happens. As for the judicial review, what do I know about it except that it seems to go on for ever and achieve nothing—and costs a lot of money as well. If you resort to the legal process to resolve applications which should be decided between elected people and the community, you are never going to get an answer. I look forward to the reply and a judgment on this one.
Lord Jamieson (Con)
My Lords, I will speak briefly on this group of amendments, all tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of King’s Heath. The amendments in this group all relate to the role of appeals and the judicial processes involved in national policy statements. As many noble Lords have said, the current system for critical national infrastructure does not work. We need to get a move on, but we also need to protect the environment and nature. I quite liked the comments of the noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth. He alluded to the absurdity that Stone Age man could build Stonehenge quicker than 21st-century man can build a bypass round it. This just does not make sense.
It is no secret that the court system is facing a severe backlog. This is a point we have made from this Dispatch Box on numerous occasions during the passage of the Renters’ Rights Bill. As we argued then, there is simply not enough capacity for courts to hear endless challenges. Continual judicial reviews of decisions made by planning bodies clog up the courts, causing significant delays to the planning and building process. If we are to have an effective programme of infrastructure development and housebuilding that will boost economic growth, we must ensure not only that vexatious legal delays are kept to a minimum but that the threat of these—which, as we have heard, cause delays and lorry-loads of paperwork—is avoided.
Amendment 52 seems to present a paradox. On the one hand, the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, is understandably seeking to speed up the planning process through his Amendment 48, which is, we believe, a somewhat reasonable proposal, although we do have concerns regarding the risk of the Secretary of State having even greater Henry VIII powers.
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
My Lords, it has been a very interesting debate on a critical issue and aspect of the Bill. My noble friend Lord Hunt of Kings Heath deserves a lot of credit for some interesting thinking around how we might unblock some of the serious issues that have been holding up the planning system. I thank all noble Lords who have spoken in this section of the debate: the noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth, the noble Lords, Lord Berkeley, Lord Ravensdale, Lord Jamieson and Lord Banner, whom I also thank for his work in this area, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Bennett, Lady Coffey and Lady Pinnock.
The noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth, spoke about the sclerotic planning system. We all know it is sclerotic. The noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, argued that that is not because of local government; I have a lot of sympathy with what she says, having spent a lot of time with local government. However, there is no doubt the system is blocked up. There are many reasons for that and I set out in one of my earlier speeches that that is why we require a whole package of measures to unblock the system. We require some new thinking as well, and that is why I am very grateful to my noble friend Lord Hunt.
These amendments seek to amend the various routes of appeal and rights to judicial review for both NSIPs and national policy statements, and a new designation of development called critical national infrastructure.
Amendment 47 seeks to remove the requirement for the determination of permission in judicial review cases concerning nationally significant infrastructure projects to be made at an oral hearing. At present, individuals and organisations seeking to challenge these projects have up to three attempts to gain permission from the court: a paper stage, an option to renew at an oral hearing, and, if unsuccessful, an appeal to the Court of Appeal. Each of these attempts can extend the duration of the claim by several weeks—which I think is the positive thing that the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, was talking about earlier—but in some cases, by several months. This is why we are making provision in Clause 12 to streamline this process.
As noted by the noble Lord, Lord Banner, and many stakeholders who responded to the call for evidence on this matter, the paper permission stage is not efficient with regard to challenges relating to nationally significant infrastructure projects. The majority of claims are refused permission at the paper stage; of these, most go on to renew their case at an oral hearing.
Removing the paper stage will allow any disputed question of permission to go straight to an oral hearing. This will help reduce the overall time it takes for a claim to reach a final decision, limiting the period of uncertainty for developers and local communities. This provision does not mean that all future applications will require a permission hearing as cases can still proceed directly to a substantive hearing if the question of granting permission is not disputed by the parties.
The other provision in Clause 12 will ensure that where a judge in an oral hearing at the High Court deems the case totally without merit—I presume that is a legal phrase because it has capital letters in my notes—it will not be possible to ask the Court of Appeal to reconsider. These changes are necessary to prevent meritless claims from holding up projects by exhausting the appeals process and will ensure that legitimate challenges are heard more quickly.
Amendment 48 seeks to amend the Planning Act 2008 to make certain decisions relating to national policy statements exempt from legal challenge. By seeking to remove the right to apply for a judicial review of the Secretary of State’s decision not to carry out a review of the relevant national policy statement, the first part of this amendment would undermine the requirement introduced in Clause 1.
Regarding the second part of this amendment, I recognise my noble friend’s intention to facilitate routine changes to national policy statements by making immaterial changes exempt from legal challenge. However, the public’s ability to challenge the lawfulness of government decisions is fundamental to the rule of law, and it is for the court to determine whether a decision has been taken lawfully.
It is for the court to decide whether a legal challenge ought to be considered, and there is already a mechanism for the court to deal with challenges concerning matters which are not likely to have a material impact. Section 31 of the Senior Courts Act 1981 requires the High Court to refuse permission for judicial review if it considers it
“highly likely that the outcome for the applicant would not have been substantially different if the conduct complained of had not occurred”
Amendment 49 seeks to clarify that legal challenges relating to development consent orders made under Section 118 of the Planning Act 2008 must be brought to the High Court. Section 118 stipulates that proceedings must be brought by a claim of judicial review. Details of the judicial review process are set out in Part 54 of the Civil Procedure Rules and in the relevant practice directions. Further guidance can be found in the Administrative Court’s Judicial Review Guide. It is made clear in the relevant rules, practice directions and guidance documents that applications for judicial review are to be made to the High Court. I trust that this reassures my noble friend that there is sufficient clarity about the process and that legislative change is not required in this regard.
I thank my noble friend for his Amendments 52 and 65, which I will consider together. As he knows, I agree entirely with the intent behind them. As noble Lords will have heard throughout this debate, it is one of this Government’s central objectives to speed up the consenting process for all major infrastructure projects. The reforms we are making to the NSIP regime through the Bill will help us go further in speeding up the consenting process for all the infrastructure this country needs.
As we have already debated, the current pre-application process is producing counterproductive outcomes and extending pre-application timeframes. That is why we are removing the statutory pre-application consultation requirements. We will issue guidance through the Bill to assist applicants, setting out what the Secretary of State considers to be best practice in terms of the steps they might take in relation to a proposed application, in readiness for submitting an actual application.
Doing so will give applicants flexibility in how they consult and engage key bodies, local authorities and individuals about their proposed development, leading to more meaningful and effective pre-application engagement and shorter pre-application timeframes. Through the Bill, we will also enable the Secretary of State to direct certain development out of the NSIP regime, where such development could be considered by an alternative regime that may be more appropriate. This has the potential to expedite the consenting process and deliver infrastructure more quickly.
I appreciate that my noble friend is motivated by a desire to ensure that highly critical and urgent infrastructure projects can progress more quickly. We all want to deliver these schemes as quickly as possible, but we need to make sure we can do so without unnecessary disruption and with sufficient certainty for both applicants and decision-makers. We need to weigh up whether the radical overhaul he proposes is the best way forward, given the changes that we are already making.
As my noble friend knows, a critical national priority status can already be applied to projects and sectors delivering essential infrastructure. Projects with this status are given priority in the planning process, and the CNP policy affects how certain residual impacts are considered in the planning balance. We are starting to see the positive impacts of CNP status on recent NSIP projects; for example, through the energy national policy statements, CNP status is applied to renewable and low-carbon energy projects. With the mandating of regular NPS updates, it will be easier than ever before to consider whether more or different projects should benefit from this status.
My noble friend offers two ways in which a critical status could be applied to projects, and I will speak about both in turn. He suggests introducing a specialist task force to provide independent advice to the Secretary of State. This is, in essence, the role that the independent examining authority fulfils under the NSIP regime. Under the Planning Act 2008, a panel of experts is appointed to examine each NSIP application and make recommendations to the Secretary of State on whether a project should be given consent. As setting up a specialist task force would likely draw from the same pool of planning and infrastructure experts, such a proposal risks disruption to the NSIP regime and slowing down the consenting of infrastructure.
Also in this amendment, my noble friend suggests granting deemed consent for critical national development. This is an interesting proposal, but it faces a number of challenges. First, deemed consent cannot be used to consent development that is required to be assessed under the environmental impact assessment and habitats regulations regimes. Most major infrastructure projects are EIA developments and must undergo a full EIA process, including the submission of an environmental statement and an assessment by the relevant authorities. Secondly, further questions would arise around the Government’s compliance with international law, notably the Aarhus convention. This requires signatories to enable concerns about the impacts of a project to be incorporated into the decision-making process. This is what the Planning Act 2008 already enables, through the examination stage and consideration of relevant representations. Failure to account for this is likely to increase the risk of legal challenge and make planning decisions more vulnerable to being overturned by the courts.
I now turn to my noble friend’s amendment that would introduce a power for the Secretary of State to designate certain classes of development as a critical national priority. Once designated, these projects would follow the normal process for a DCO but then be subject to additional parliamentary approval. A public Bill would be introduced, which given that it affects private interest, would then engage the petitioning process. Once petitions are resolved, the Bill would be fast-tracked through both Houses to Royal Assent. The objective of this process would be to protect the DCO from judicial reviews.
This proposal is, without doubt, interesting and thought-provoking. As we have already debated today, the Government are using the Bill to tackle meritless legal challenges that delay projects and increase costs. We have also demonstrated that we are willing to go further, if necessary, to speed up the planning system and get Britain building.
The amendment touches on complex issues around the role of the courts versus Parliament—as the noble Lord, Lord Banner, indicated—in managing the conflicts that arise between private and public interests on large-scale infrastructure projects. It has enabled us to debate novel solutions to the challenges we face in building the infrastructure we need. The measures in the Bill already make targeted and impactful interventions to the consenting system to ensure greater certainty to investors and applicants, which will speed up the delivery of national infrastructure priorities, including those of critical urgency. For those reasons, and because of the discussions we have already had, I hope that my noble friend will not press his amendments.
On the amendment which seeks to repeal Section 150 of the Planning Act 2008, with the aim of reducing post-consent delays to construction, I thank my noble friend for raising this matter. It is indeed something the Government have been considering. When applicants submit their DCO for a nationally significant infrastructure project, Section 150 enables them to include other prescribed necessary secondary consents as well. The intent behind this section was to ensure that the NSIP process could be a one-stop shop, with applicants securing all the permissions they need to build via a single process. This could save them precious time and avoid them having to seek these consents separately after they have secured development consent.
However, Section 150 is drafted so that for certain prescribed consents this may be done only with the permission of the relevant regulatory body. Repealing Section 150 means that securing permission from the relevant consenting body, such as the Environment Agency, would no longer be necessary.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, I am sure that the whole Committee would wish to thank my noble friend the Minister for her very comprehensive response, which has been replicated throughout today’s proceedings. I am very grateful to her for the attention that she has paid.
I cannot say that this set of amendments has enjoyed uniform support among your Lordships, but I hope they have provoked a debate. I welcome the Bill. It is definitely going in the right direction, but there are still some concerns that I and a number of colleagues have about whether it is really going to cut the cake in the end, hence we are looking at the issues about judicial review. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Banner, for his comments. I take his point about compulsory purchase and property rights in particular.
We need to come to an end. I will of course consider this very carefully. We still need to look at whether there are some supercharging approaches we can take to the really important infrastructure developments we need, with the benefit of parliamentary scrutiny and legitimacy. Having said that, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.