Brexit: Food Standards Regulations
Debate between Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville and Lord O'Shaughnessy(6 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord O'Shaughnessy
The noble Lord raises an important point. This is a good opportunity to clarify what we are proposing. At the moment risk assessment takes place through the European Food Standards Agency. Risk management decisions are made by the Commission and the Council. Following Brexit, we would look to replicate that split with risk assessment taking place in the independent agency and risk management decisions being made by Ministers.
Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville (LD)
I am grateful for the Minister’s response. Given that food related ill health is a major source of premature death in the UK and that the FSA was set up specifically to prevent harm occurring from safety weaknesses in food preparation, what specific measures have the Government put in place to ensure that the FSA can cope in keeping the population safe if no deal is the only deal?
Lord O'Shaughnessy
I should like to clarify that, in the case of food safety, Ministers in the Department of Health would make risk management decisions on the basis of a risk assessment. This is one way in which any concerns about conflict of interest would be overcome. Clearly, we will be making technical changes to the role of the FSA to make sure that the regime is operable following our exit from the European Union. These will reaffirm the FSA’s independence and its role in providing that consumer protection.
Brexit: Food Standards Agency
Debate between Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville and Lord O'Shaughnessy(6 years, 7 months ago)
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Lord O’Shaughnessy
The noble Lord raises an important issue. However, it is important to distinguish what the Food Standards Agency is responsible for and what it is not. It is responsible for making sure that food is safe. Nutritional value is a different responsibility that accrues to the department and to Public Health England, and we have taken many significant actions, including reducing sugar content in drinks and food, to make sure that precisely the issues he is talking about are dealt with.
Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville (LD)
My Lords, given the increased monitoring at slaughterhouses, both through CCTV and the presence of meat inspectors, is the Minister confident that the FSA has the capacity to train sufficient inspectors to ensure that the meat which arrives on supermarket and butchers’ shelves is fit for human consumption so that we can avoid the CJD and salmonella outbreaks of the past?
Lord O’Shaughnessy
The Food Standards Agency has the resources, the expertise and the powers it needs to make sure that it can guarantee safety, as the noble Baroness has described.
Housing and Planning Bill
Debate between Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville and Lord O'Shaughnessy
Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville
If, having lived in hope, the noble Lord, Lord Porter, is disappointed and wishes to test the opinion of the House, I will support him.
Lord O'Shaughnessy
My Lords, I was not intending to get involved in this debate but the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, spotted me slinking out. Having been singled out, I will respond briefly. Unfortunately my notes have been whisked away, but my point was that there is a certain set of assets—council and social homes—and we all think the number of them should be increased. But we have to think about the distribution of those assets to the most needy households. That is a reasonable principle on which to found a welfare state. If a tenant is about to leave after a short tenancy they are, by definition, in less need than somebody who is on a waiting list.
Secondly, I checked the question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, and the response to it stated:
“Local authorities do not receive subsidy from the Exchequer”.
That is a very important distinction. The new houses are being funded not by a grant from the Exchequer but by revenue from other council and social homes, coming via local authorities. I consider this to be public money. So again it is a question about the distribution of public money and how the asset that has been created is used for the benefit of the neediest.
Housing and Planning Bill
Debate between Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville and Lord O'Shaughnessy
Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville (LD)
My Lords, I support the amendment and I hope that I will not disappoint the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, in making the debate too long. Unlike other sections, this section of the Bill has not yet exercised the Committee. I visited Exmoor National Park in the recess as it was taking part in a vanguard project on self-build. As part of that project, the park set up, as indicated by the Government, a self-build register, and there was surprise when 84 people registered. However, on further investigation, most of those people were found not to be in housing need at all and were living outside the park area. For example, one person living in Southampton with £350,000 to spare indicated that they would very much like to build in the park. On further investigation, only 15 of the 84 people were identified as being both local and having a housing need, but so far only one is coming forward for self-build who both works and has a rural connection, and therefore fulfils the local tie.
Exmoor is not an easy place to identify flat sites for development. Builders often complain about the difficulties of the terrain and the inaccessibility for their workforces. Nevertheless, the park authority has identified 250 home sites but accepts that not all will come forward for a variety of reasons. It has set up housing ambassadors in the community who are the first confidential point of contact. They will help identify people with housing need and they expect custom-build to come out of this initiative. Exmoor National Park is aware that self-build in the park area will usually require a larger plot, with a double garage. There are very serious concerns about how self-build will be financed as the local tie tends to put off banks and building societies. Even if there are people prepared and willing to engage in self-build, finance might not be available to them.
However, the real concern on Exmoor is that national parks are planning authorities but not housing authorities. They will have a duty to provide serviced plots of land, as listed in the Bill, but they are very concerned about how they will get money back from the investment in the infrastructure. Nowhere is that made clear. The amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, adding the words “and without unreasonable cost”, is vital for the deep rural areas that national parks cover. National parks appear caught in an unrealistic position and do not have the resources to underwrite this policy. I suggest that the wording of “without unreasonable cost” ought to be “at no additional cost” and I support Amendment 54.
Lord O'Shaughnessy (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, for moving this amendment—not, unfortunately for him, because I support it, but for the opportunity to spend a little time, I hope not too long, considering an underappreciated and potentially very important part of the Bill. I am also grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, for giving us an example about how it might work in practice.
In previous sittings of the Committee, my noble friend Lord Horam said that what we always need to remember in this debate is that this is a housing crisis caused by lack of supply, and it is through that lens I am thinking of how custom and self-build could contribute to solving that problem. This is an area of great potential. According to the impact assessment, only 8% of English homes—just 5,000 to 8,000 a year—were built under custom or self-build under the current regime compared with about 30% in the US and 50% in some parts of Europe and Scandinavia. At the moment, it is a cottage industry, but, as other countries show, it could be a game-changer. It could be the biggest deliverer of housing in the country. Critically, it offers an opportunity for a diversity of design that is much more sympathetic to local surroundings than perhaps is the case with some of the big builders, which produce houses to a template. One of the main reasons that people object to local housing is because it does not fit into the local vernacular.
According to Ipsos MORI, around 1 million people would like to take action to build their own homes. That might be a little optimistic, but it is an indication that there is a real groundswell out there. Indeed, the housing vanguards that the Government have established seem to have been quite popular, with an average of 80 people signing up to the registers of land to build on within the first four months of their opening, which I think coheres with what the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, was saying. Some interesting examples are given of what that has meant.
If this is what we want to see happen, we have to will the means as well as the ends. The truth is that the crash has been brutal to SME housebuilders who will ultimately deliver many of these houses. They declined by 49% between 2006 and 2013, and as the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, said, they find it difficult to access finance because they are undercapitalised. This is a really critical aspect which I think is underappreciated. There is also the factor of planning delay. The FMB 2015 House Builders’ Survey of the Federation of Master Builders showed that 68% of respondents said that planning delay was significantly impacting on their ability to deliver houses. So that is the backdrop against which we are looking at this part of the Bill.
Turning to the amendment, I feel that at best it is not necessary because there are provisions for making sure that serviced plots are made available with the costs recovered by the local authority. That is my reading of it, but it would be useful to have clarification from the Minister. At worst it could become another barrier, and I think we need to be very conscious of building extra barriers into the process when we are trying to liberalise the system. We need to make it easy for local authorities to embrace the idea, and indeed make it easy for potential homeowners to take this opportunity.
My one concern with where we are in the Bill is about the timetable for compliance by local authorities, or rather the lack of it. I would like us at least to consider whether the timetable ought to be on the face of the Bill, but we have been told that it will be set out in secondary legislation. It would be useful to understand what the timetable might look like so that we know that local authorities will be held to account for their performance in delivery. If the timetable is not tough enough, I am sure that is something noble Lords will want to consider while we are looking at the primary legislation. It would also be interesting to hear about what the Government are doing to provide capital support for SME builders. When we talk about self-build, it is not literally self-build. While there will be a few handy people who can build their own walls, most will commission a local architect and builder, but as we know, there are not enough of them. A variety of schemes are available to help the big builders capitalise, but not enough for the smaller ones. What will the Government do in that area?
As I say, the Government are providing the right mechanisms, but we need to will the means for this to happen. There is a right for citizens, which is fantastic, but we need a time-bound obligation to be put on local authorities as well as some financial support or at least underwriting to help the builders. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s comments.