Housing: Leasehold Properties

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Monday 17th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

I am afraid I have no line into the Scottish Parliament but it does not seem a very good reflection on the way that party works.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

Does the Minister agree that many tenants in England would absolutely welcome a freeze on rents, as tenants are enjoying in Scotland?

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My Lords, we are continually looking at how we can support the rented sector through this particularly difficult time. On Section 21, as the noble Baroness probably knows, the Prime Minister has said that she will not change her decisions on that either.

New Homes Commitment

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Tuesday 21st June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

I think we need to find ways of coming up with new town projects but to do that we need the infrastructure, the transport, the roads and the rail, and that is why we recognise that a programme just to build homes is not enough. We need to get that in the round, and we are taking it forward as part of the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill in this Session.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I was very pleased to hear the Minister say enthusiastically last night that we need more affordable housing and social housing, and that the Government were happy to look at ideas. There are currently 500 projects for community land trust homes, creating 7,000 new homes around the country. Will the Government look at how they can encourage further this model of providing homes in perpetuity, of a structure and type decided by local communities for local communities?

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

I think there is quite a degree of interest in how community land trusts can operate; Coin Street is an example, and I believe there are other examples in Watford. We are happy to take all ideas, including how we can use community land trusts as a vehicle to deliver more affordable housing.

Private Rented Sector

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Monday 20th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

There are two parts to how the right reverend Prelate has put the question. The first is that we need to make sure that there is enough supply of social housing, otherwise people who should be in social housing rather than in private housing lose out. There is a real commitment in the affordable homes programme to deliver far more social rented homes: 32,000, which is double the amount of social rented homes in this period than in the previous one. On the cost of living, the best thing is to take action now, and there have been quite a few measures. Some are universal but some are aimed at pensioners; there is a separate one-off payment of £300 to 8 million pensioner households, and obviously there are the measures around people who require support around the costs of essentials. The Government have stepped in where there need to be specific measures, as well as universal measures around fuel bills. Equally, however, the right reverend Prelate is right that we need to ensure that we continue to build more homes and especially ensure that there are more social homes.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, tenants’ groups and campaigners say that they need three layers of foundation to give everyone the secure and stable home that they need. The first is decent structural condition, maintenance and repairs, and the second is not to be evicted unfairly. As other questioners have said, this White Paper makes considerable progress on both those areas. However, the third key part of the foundation according to renters’ groups is to have a home that you can afford. The Minister said that the Government were looking at rent controls and pointed back to the kind of rent controls that we had in the 1970s. However, are the Government prepared to consider different, more flexible, smarter forms of rent control? In Scotland, the Green Tenants’ Rights Minister is looking at ways in which rent controls can deliver what people actually need, which is rental costs that are not more than 25% of their income. Another way of looking at this might be that powers for rent control are given to mayors, like the Mayor of London and other regional and city mayors around the country. That would be a way of experimenting and working. How can the Government ensure that people can afford to rent, which is an essential foundation?

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

It is fair to say that we raised the local housing allowance and maintained that raise. What the noble Baroness is saying is that we have not increased it further. Let us give the Government credit for having raised it in the first place and having maintained it. The reality is that it goes back to getting the balance of tenures right. We have far too many people who cannot afford to live in market-rate accommodation and therefore they need taxpayer support. The housing benefit bill has effectively ballooned from when I was first a council leader from around £7 billion to around £30 billion, I think—or at least, that is what the projections are. That is completely unsustainable. We need more affordable housing and social housing to mitigate the unintended consequences of getting the taxpayer to fund these very high-cost homes for people who cannot afford to live in them. That is why there is a need to look at other ways of answering that point.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I join the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, on the Minister’s celebration of social and genuinely affordable housing. In that case, why are we looking at extending the right to buy instead of ending that great privatisation of social and affordable housing?

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

I can answer that very sincerely, having been a local authority leader in an area where one-third of the housing was social housing. It had very high levels of council and housing association housing. I start with a definition that social housing should be a springboard to home ownership, for those who want it to be. It should not just be a destination. The issue is that once you have got the receipt, it gets pocketed by the Treasury and not reinvested in social housing—something that the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, has raised before now. The Government are putting more flexibility in and allowing more money to go back into supply. There are strong arguments that all that money should go back in; therefore, you allow mobility and fluidity and create a springboard for those people who can afford to own their own homes. That is a great thing, which should be available to both council tenants and housing association tenants.

Constitutional Commission

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 9th June 2022 Grand Committee

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I feel I should declare some positions: the England and Wales Green Party has long championed a Cornwall assembly, a Yorkshire assembly or parliament and similar around the rest of England; the Welsh Green Party has said it will campaign for independence should a referendum be called; and the Scottish Greens have long been pro-independence.

Having put those cards on the table, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, both for securing this debate and for his creative, positive introduction to it. I particularly thank him for the chance to celebrate the local election results, which were truly spectacular for the Green Party. One of the outcomes is that there are now 18 councils, as well as the one council we run, in which we are part of some form of rainbow coalition—groupings of a number of parties working together co-operatively for the common good.

These are usually classified as councils under “no overall control”. One thing I would like to highlight is that we really need to rephrase that terminology and look at these as councils in co-operative operation, where people are working together to govern. This is a very different model from the traditional model of British governance and, I argue, demonstrably a far better one. To suggest some of the places I happen to know about where this is working well, Lewes is a particular highlight. In diverse places such as Herefordshire and Sheffield, this is working well.

Of course, in Scotland we have Green Party Ministers. I will pick up a point from the noble Baroness, Lady Fraser, who suggested that there was perhaps an exclusionary model of Scottish nationalism. The nationalism championed by the Green Party is very much a civic, inclusive nationalism—one that acknowledges that the Syrian refugee who arrived last week is as much a part of the community as anybody else. Maybe England could learn from that form of nationalism.

It is clear from this debate that pretty well everyone agrees that what we have now is broken. Indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Jones, just mentioned the Economist, the Government promised in their manifesto to have a commission, and the Labour Party would have a commission. We have heard a lot of suggestions, but even the commission, which would be a positive step forward, is still very much the establishment rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic: the great and the good sit in a room like this, possibly under some dreadful art like in this room, and decide how to rearrange things.

I have an alternative proposal. Let us have a people’s constitutional convention, an assembly that represents all the peoples of these isles—of course, we could have them at different levels in the nations as well—and collectively allow the people to democratically decide how we should change, start from scratch and redraw our currently totally outdated, dysfunctional, unworkable constitutional arrangements between the nations and, indeed, in this House and the other place et cetera. We need change. Let us not draw up the changes; let us let the people decide.

Building Safety Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments
Tuesday 26th April 2022 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Lytton (CB)]

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Baronesses, Lady Neville-Rolfe and Lady Fox. I pay tribute to the efforts of the Secretary of State and the Minister to achieve significant changes in the face of a very difficult situation. That should never be understated. If it has been too slow for some seriously challenged individual households, the Bill is undoubtedly immeasurably better than when we started. Obviously it was a disappointment to me that several key elements were rejected in the House of Commons, and I remain concerned by the sub- 11 metre exclusion, buy to lets, enfranchised blocks and orphan buildings, about which so much has been spoken. Although the point that the perpetrator should pay was not before the House of Commons, the problem remains a real one: the problem of funding does not go away.

On the 11-metre cut-off, it has been consistently said that with the measured and proportionate response that the Government say they have adopted, there is no systemic risk for low-rise properties. I do not know whether this means that other mitigations, such as alarms, smoke detectors or sprinklers, may be appropriate, but the claim seems to lack a basis in data. The point was well made in the seventh report of the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee of the other place and followed by an Answer to a Question for Written Answer of mine: without data, assertions regarding risk, mitigation options and cost-benefit lack foundation and create doubt.

If the Government are saying that adding sprinklers, smoke detectors and alarms to such buildings is an acceptable means of overcoming an initial failure in construction, I ask the Minister to be aware that there is a reputational and moral hazard here. If those are seen as workarounds to deal with essential, original compartmentation in buildings, I would really worry about how that will be taken forward and potentially abused in the future. I just do not want to go there; this one has been bad enough. So we rely heavily on government assertions that they will have the powers to deal with these issues.

I acknowledge that the Secretary of State has made considerable progress on the developer pledge but, as the British Property Federation observes, it does not cover sub-11 metre buildings and, in several aspects, as the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, said, it may be inconsistent with the Bill. But if, as I am led to understand, this will be enforced by denying developers planning consent, apart from the questionable basic legality of such an intervention in planning and development laws, it should be noted, as I have said to the Minister before, that planning consent runs with the land, not with the applicant, and even less with whoever happens to be the current owner. That is a matter of law, not of debate.

I was also led to believe that one of the reasons why the perpetrator-pays approach would not stand the test is that it means backdating to a previous era, beyond what would normally be covered by the provisions of the Limitation Act. If I am right and a fundamental failure to meet the mandatory provisions of building regulations from 1965 and at all times since is, in fact, an offence, time cannot run against the commission of an offence in favour of the perpetrator. I am a bit fearful that aspects of the Bill could be regarded as arbitrary and discriminatory as between classes of owner and the nature of liabilities, touched on by other noble Lords. In a sense, that might lead to its own legal trajectory in another area.

I hope the Government have a constant process of rolling review of what is going on here, because if we do not deal with ongoing market turbulence, lack of confidence, economic attrition and the victims in all this simply concluding that they have been hung out to dry in some way, that will really be a system failure and we will not have delivered on the promise given by Ministers in the other place and here that leaseholders should be kept free of these costs, for which they were entirely blameless. I am absolutely sure that the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, will say just that in a minute.

I finish by paying tribute to noble colleagues with whom I have worked and particularly to the many leaseholders and their groups. They have campaigned for justice and proper defect remediation. My arguments here have been fuelled by their plight, and I intend to keep reminding the Government that this matter, until it is all put to bed, will have to remain in their line of sight.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, and to hear that he intends to keep a close eye on this, because that will clearly be needed well into the future.

I rise to offer Green support for Motions D1 and H1 and to make a single point about how I see these fitting together. The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, and others said that the leaseholders are the absolutely innocent parties here—but, more than that, it is important to say that they are the injured parties. They have been injured over years and years of stress and worry, both financial and about their physical safety, given where they are forced to live. Think about going to bed every night fearful about what is going to happen. They are the victims of the policies of successive Governments who have allowed the building industry to act as a cash cow rather than a provider of secure, affordable, decent homes.

There are still a lot of steps down the road, but if we pass Motions D1 and H1 we give those leaseholders and owners the clarity and certainty that they will be looked after, whether or not their building is under 11 metres, and that they will not be hit with a bill that they still cannot afford to pay, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, said.

I was tempted to say that your Lordships’ House should put one last heave behind the Building Safety Bill, but then I thought that was a slightly unfortunate metaphor in the context we are talking about. I will pick up what the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, said: the campaigners have done so much work and have fought so long and hard on this. Let us buttress that and put in the final supports they need to get the Bill we should have.

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

My Lords, it is good to recognise that the Bill has indeed been transformed during its passage through Parliament, but the major transformation point was initiated by the Secretary of State, Michael Gove, when he said that

“leaseholders are shouldering a desperately unfair burden. They are blameless, and it is morally wrong that they should be the ones asked to pay the price.”—[Official Report, Commons, 10/1/22; col. 283.]

I agree, as many others across the House will. Unfortunately, however, the Bill currently does expect some leaseholders to pay. My colleagues and I are asking the Government today to think again.

The Government argue that Article 1 of Protocol 1 of the European Convention on Human Rights ensures a balance of rights between property owners and leaseholders, which in their view means that leaseholders have to pay towards the costs. That is the basis of the Government’s argument for the cap of £10,000 and £15,000. However, that view was comprehensively challenged by my noble friend Lord Marks, whose argument was endorsed fully by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, on Report. Senior legal minds in this House agree that it is possible within the ECHR for innocent leaseholders to pay nothing.

This legitimately opens up the opportunity, which must be grasped, for the Government to accept that leaseholders must not pay a penny whatever the height of the building, hence Motion D1 in my name to include buildings under 11 metres so that leaseholders in those buildings do not pay. As the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, rightly reminded us, a building under 11 metres has been destroyed by fire in under 11 minutes. We really need to think again about those buildings under 11 metres. However, I thank the Minister for the assurances he has given to those leaseholders in buildings under 11 metres at the Dispatch Box today and for urging them to get directly in contact with him if they get any invoices for remediation works. I am sure I will be holding him to account on that one, as will the leaseholders, and I am sure they will get in touch with us across the House to make sure that they do not pay. They must not.

What I do know is that the Government need to think again about the leaseholder cap. My Motion H2 reduces the cap back to zero, where it should be. I remind the House of the commitment by Secretary of State Michael Gove that leaseholders should not be paying the cost incurred as the result of the sometimes deliberate actions of others. The Minister himself has acknowledged tonight that some leaseholders will still pay, when we agreed in January at the very start of this great transformation that they are blameless and it is morally wrong that they should have to be the ones to pay the price. We have looked after many leaseholders but not all.

Obduracy in the face of moral right is a failure of political leadership. We on the Liberal Democrat Benches will support the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, in her Motion H1 to achieve a degree of improvement to the lot of leaseholders, who have shouldered the burden of anxiety and fear for too long and whose campaigning efforts have achieved so much.

Building Safety Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Lords Hansard - Part 2 & Report stage
Tuesday 29th March 2022 Lords Chamber

I agreed to appropriate review clauses when I was on the Front Bench, and I believe strongly that they can help to oil the wheels of urgent legislation such as this, so I hope that my noble friend the Minister and the Secretary of State may come to see this as a speedy way of securing agreement to this important Bill, particularly if it proceeds to ping-pong.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I rise with pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe. I agree with almost everything she said and very strongly back her amendment. The political spread we have just achieved across the House in that regard is interesting.

I sat through the previous group, and I am indebted to the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, for counting the 70 amendments in it. I listened to the detailed and informative contributions, particularly from the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, and the noble Earl, Lord Lytton. I learned a great deal about waterfalls. I am still not entirely convinced that there is a solution to the “if no one’s left to pay who’s going to pay?” problem. None the less, it is very clear that this is an unusual Bill and that we have very broad agreement on what we are trying to achieve; that is, that the perpetrator pays to ensure that innocent leaseholders and home owners who through no fault of their own have found themselves trapped in awful, incredibly stressful, dangerous circumstances are not the ones who ultimately suffer and that the people who create the problem pay for it.

However, given the complexity of everything we have just done, we cannot be sure that the Bill will deliver and that there will not be unexpected hitches and problems along the way. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, that five years is just too long. The noble Baroness, Lady Fox, spoke about the personal experience of being stuck out of a home, and some people are stuck in homes in awful situations. Two years is the right time to look at this in the round.

This may be where I slightly part company with two earlier speakers. I think there is broad agreement that we have a huge cultural problem in the building industry. I should perhaps declare a historic interest as the daughter of a builder. I knew quite a bit about the Australian building industry and lots of the problems that I saw in that situation have been magnified and intensified by economic developments over the past few decades. We have mass housebuilders that are far better at being cash cows than at producing homes. We are trying to change this situation and the whole culture of the industry. We are trying to get homes that are produced so that people have a secure, stable, affordable place to live. It is such an enormous change that we cannot wait five years to review this, so I commend the amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe.

[The Earl of Lytton (CB)]

I, too, commend the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, on this amendment. Given the circumstances of the Bill, the number of variations in it and the sheer number of moving parts involved, a review is essential for precisely the reasons she said, and I support the amendment.

Building Safety Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Lords Hansard - Part 1 & Report stage
Tuesday 29th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Prashar (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, support the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Crisp. In so doing, I declare that I am a trustee of the Nationwide Foundation, which supports the TCPA’s Healthy Homes Act campaign. I shall not detain the House for too long other than to reiterate the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, who introduced the amendment admirably. This is a simple but profound amendment that should be taken note of. As we have heard, we already have a great deal of evidence about the impact of housing on both health and education—Covid highlighted all of that—and how that contributes to inequalities in health. For all those reasons, it is important that we take note of the amendment and make sure that it is incorporated, whether into this Bill or a planning Bill, as the noble Lord, Lord Young, said. One cannot fault the logic of what has been recommended, so I strongly support the amendment and look forward to the Minister’s response. I also urge him to agree to meet some of us to see how this issue can be taken forward.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I offer Green support for all these amendments, which have been so powerfully and comprehensively introduced. I am not going to go over any of the same ground but shall focus particularly on Amendment 2 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, with full cross-party backing, particularly the wording,

“‘safety’ means the risk of harm arising from the location … of buildings”.

In some ways that might be seen to deliver the aims of two amendments that I tabled in Committee but have not brought back on Report, Amendments 132A and 132B, which would have delivered what has been called Zane’s law, targeting the issue of contaminated land and the risks that such land may represent to residents and others in nearby buildings. For those who do not know, Zane’s law refers to the tragic child Zane Gbangbola, who died and whose father was disabled when flooding carried contaminants from nearby land into their home.

If we had a safe location for every building, that would seem to deal with the issue. However, looking at our debate in Committee, I note that the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, kindly offered support for amendments in this direction. What she said then clearly sets out the problem:

“If we can identify the size and scale in every part of the country where contamination is, that would be a very logical starting point to prevent future risk to life and support local authorities in tackling the whole issue of contamination”.


In responding, the Minister suggested that the Building Safety Bill was not the right place to bring in Zane’s law because it would take the focus away from the environment and put it only on buildings. I think that she was right in that supposition, which is why I have not brought the amendments back now; the planning Bill, if indeed we see one, may well be the place to do that. However, where I disagree with the Minister—she was responding to my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, who kindly introduced these amendments as I could not be present—is where she noted that Section 143 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990

“was repealed, but it was replaced by Part IIA of the Environmental Protection Act 1990”.—[Official Report, 2/3/22; cols. GC 333-34.]

However, that was a significant downgrading of the protection and the powers offered by local authorities. It is worth looking at what was known as, perhaps rather unfortunately, the Red Tape Challenge: Environment Theme Proposals from March 2012, which effectively downgraded three-quarters of environmental regulation. Those changes to the guidelines said that they were

“anticipated to save business £140 million a year by reducing uncertainty about when land needs to be remediated”.

“Reducing uncertainty” is a phrase that needs to be re-examined and reconsidered.

I commend all the amendments, particularly Amendment 2, which focuses on the issue of the safe location of buildings. A great deal of regulatory work would have to be done to deliver that, which would include Zane’s law. If this becomes part of the Bill, the Government would have to look at that, but it would be a big step forward if we focused adequately on ensuring that—in this age of the Anthropocene and the climate emergency, in which new risks are emerging that were not present before—no one has a home or building in a place that is dangerous.

[Lord Best (CB)]

My Lords, I will briefly speak to support the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, and declare an interest as chair of Oxford University’s Commission on Creating Healthy Cities. I also declare my interest as a vice-president of the Town and Country Planning Association.

An obvious case of building safety impacting on health and well-being is surely the permitted development rights regime. Submissions to the Oxford Commission on Creating Healthy Cities have revealed widespread condemnation of the appalling building standards allowed via permitted development rights, which permit conversions of commercial and industrial buildings into accommodation without the need for normal planning consents. This has led to the creation of some ghastly, substandard new slums often on non-residential business parks full of safety hazards, with no facilities, no play areas for children and danger from traffic. Research at University College London reveals that a very large proportion of the well over 100,000 homes delivered through these permitted development rights have been substandard.

I am pleased that there has now been some regulatory change and requirements for at least some natural light and minimum space standards. However, this controversy has highlighted the importance of adequate space, sufficient daylight, protection from noise and a surrounding environment that is not hostile and unhealthy. That underlines the need for bringing together housing and health issues under the banner of minimum standards that recognise the broader definition of safety in the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Crisp. This would engage the new regulator in the process and require attention to be paid to health and well-being as essential aspects of the homes that we build and the places that we make. I support Amendment 2.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 264 in my name and that of my noble friend Lady Pinnock, which would require a report on the built environment industry workforce that takes into account various factors. I assure the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, that this is very much a probing amendment; we certainly do not intend to press it today.

However, we need to give this issue an airing. The whole pyramid on which this Bill is constructed depends on that bottom level: the workforce who will deliver it. We know that there is a grievous shortage of fire risk assessors, not least because the fire risk assessor who assessed Grenfell Tower was an unqualified, off-duty firefighter who made up the qualification letters that he put after his name when he applied for the job with the tenant management organisation. That evidence was given in phase 1 of the Grenfell inquiry.

We know that the Government have made strenuous efforts to get fire assessment training going but there is every indication that there is not enough and that, when this regime comes into force—we all want to see this as soon as possible—there will be a shortage of fire risk assessors. Earlier today, wearing his fire responsibilities hat via the Home Office, the Minister made the point that one of the jobs in the fire and rescue service is to upskill staff to gain the competences they need to fulfil their functions of realistically assessing risks and remedies in the duties they undertake. We think that there needs to be a clear plan for developing training for and upskilling the people taking on the new roles in this Bill. There is a whole series of new posts, including accountable persons and responsible persons—not to mention the safety regulator staffing itself—and we need some assurance that the Government are clear on all of them and have a laser-like focus on producing the answers that are needed. This is against the background of an industry that employs 2 million people, has 90,000 sole traders operating on the ground and in many ways, as we have discussed, has a dysfunctional contracting model. It certainly has low productivity and very poor standards of delivery of outcome.

The amendment may or may not be over-elaborate. I hope that it would be a work plan that someone is working on, even if it should not be in the Bill. I really want to hear the Minister give an account of how a work plan such as this is in fact going forward. If not, we will certainly be snapping at his heels over the coming months. Much more seriously than that, he will find that there will be the gravest difficulty in implementing the Bill, which is what we all want to see, on the shortest possible timescale.

I am the resident pointing at the hole in the road and saying to the contractor, “Please come and fill in this hole”. That is what this amendment is about.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I want briefly, having just had a signal on those lines, to offer Green support for all the amendments. I will speak only to Amendment 261 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath. I commend him on his long work in this area.

I am perhaps a little less charitable to the Government than him about where things are now. Just this afternoon, while we were debating the second group of amendments, the Green Alliance put out a new report, Cutting the Cost of Living with a Green Economy. It has some figures that are interesting and helpful for this debate. It points out that the cuts to energy efficiency subsidies and the scrapping of the zero-carbon homes policy over the past decade saw the installation rate of home insulation and energy measures go from 2.3 million in 2012 to 230,000 in 2013—a rate that has continued since.

This addresses the question that the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, just asked about what we can do and whether it is possible to step up again. We have done this in the past; we can do this in future. The noble Baroness expressed concern about a lack of costing for that. The Green Alliance report points out that, if we followed Amendment 261, through insulating 15.3 million homes, it would save them all £511 a year after the April price cap rise. For the country, that is £7.8 billion a year, mostly in fossil fuel.

Looking again at the costing, the Great Homes Upgrade plan, put together by the New Economics Foundation along with 28 organisations, shows that spending £11.7 billion over this Parliament could raise 7 million homes up to this standard by 2025. As the noble Lord, Lord Foster, said, this is very much a health and safety issue. We have set the standard of zero carbon by 2050. That is a target for the environment; this is a target for people’s health. Surely we can have both health and environment targets that so crucially fit together.

[The Earl of Courtown (Con)]

My Lords, taking the time into consideration, I beg to move that we adjourn the debate on this amendment and that consideration on Report be adjourned until after the Urgent Question.

Building Safety Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 2nd February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I believe I can make this a full cross-House welcome for the Bill—rather a rare occurrence. I join others in warmly welcoming the tone of the Minister’s speech. With its regular repeats of the campaigners’ hashtag “polluter pays” and the promise to take on board proposed amendments from your Lordships’ House, it truly is a breath of fresh air. I can only congratulate the Minister and the Government.

I note how this shows that campaigning works. After uncountable long hours of effort from affected residents, petitioning, marching, letter-writing and social media campaigning, the people who, through no fault of their own, find themselves in unsafe, faulty, terrible standard buildings are today being heard in your Lordships’ House. I hope that they will get some sense of repayment from that. If only the residents of Grenfell —who before the terrible tragedy tried so hard to get officialdom to listen to their safety concerns—had been listened to, then 72 people might be alive today. There is a lesson there that I hope Ministers will take note off. Experts by experience are indeed experts about their lives and environment and need to be listened to.

As so many speeches thus far have demonstrated, there is much to do in improving the Bill, ensuring that it covers all the dangerous buildings that it should, particularly those occupied by vulnerable residents, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, highlighted, as well as the crucial issue of fire doors, as highlighted by the noble Lord, Lord Stunell, and many others. What could be more basic and surely solvable than that? As many other noble Lords have noted, a lot of the focus has been specifically on cladding, but there are so many other issues, and it is crucial that the Bill does not become overly focused on cladding at the cost of those other issues. Following on from the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, who talked about fire suppression systems, there has often been an ideological resistance in the UK to sprinklers, but we really need to rethink that for many types of buildings. On the structure of the Bill, the idea that housebuilders will just hand over their ill-gotten gains to cover the damages at the Government’s request is surely a fantasy. The Bill needs to demand full, complete recompense.

However, rather than running down the already well-travelled list of the ways in which this Bill needs to be improved, I will briefly take a broader view. I cannot help thinking that the Bill Office was perhaps demonstrating a better quality of engineering than many buildings in putting me after the noble Lord, Lord Foster, given the point he made about building safety more broadly and cold homes—I would add to that homes that overheat, given the increasing number of heatwaves that we will experience in the climate emergency—being a risk to life which should be covered in this Bill.

We have the poorest quality housing in western Europe—draughty, poorly insulated and expensively relying on gas for heating and cooking, which has, as we increasingly understand, significant health impacts as well. I foresee long conversations with the Bill Office about scope, but a home that kills its vulnerable resident with excessive heat, or that sickens and kills them through biting cold, is one that is deadly. That has to be a building safety issue. This is an issue that the Government seem astonishingly reluctant to tackle after their green homes grant fiasco. I note that the big announcement today on levelling up fails to address this issue—astonishingly, given how much of a factor it is in the terrible quality of life and the poverty in so many of the areas in this country that the scheme is supposed to address.

The Bill also needs to at least start to address the enormous systems disaster that is the building sector. I have no doubt at all that, this morning, inadequately trained workers were putting the finishing touches on buildings that are dangerous and that will be moved into by unsuspecting residents—or possibly suspecting residents, who still have no choice in the matter. The CEOs of our mass housebuilders should be forced to have the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Best, embedded on their phones, playing morning and night, to show them what society thinks of them and their companies. They have operated for the profit of the few at the cost of the rest of us, as in so much of our society. That financialisation has to be challenged, treated as morally unacceptable and made legally impossible. I acknowledge that this is something that we cannot fix just with this Bill, however much your Lordships’ House improves it—and I am sure that we will improve it massively.

It is interesting to take a global perspective and see the other parts of the world with building safety crises similar to that in the UK. In the US, in Florida, there was the dramatic, awful, deadly Champlain Towers South collapse, which was recently explored in-depth by the New York Times. It demonstrated that in the building boom there in the 1980s, regulatory corners were not cut but rather bulldozed through, and now there is a legacy of incredibly dangerous buildings in an incredibly difficult and dangerous environment. In Australia, the University of New South Wales’s City Futures Research Centre looked at 635 apartment buildings in Sydney. Its report—called Cracks in the Compact City, if noble Lords want to look it up—found that 42% of blocks had water problems, 26% had cracking problems and 17% had fire safety issues. One building, built just six years ago, was in danger of immediate collapse.

What ties together these countries? Neoliberal politics and, attached to that, a particular ideology that “cutting red tape” is how to set societies on a better way forward. It is important to highlight that because, as we are here in your Lordships’ House today, we see the Government embracing the need for regulation, forced by tragic circumstances and dedicated campaigning. They are accepting the need for so-called red tape, which actually forms the rules that keep us and the environment safe.

At the same time, we have a press release from No. 10 that tells us that a

“‘Brexit Freedoms’ Bill will be brought forward to end the special status of EU law and ensure that it can be more easily amended or removed”.


It tells us there will be a

“Major cross-government drive to cut £1 billion of red tape for businesses”.


Applying that approach is what forces us to be here today, trying to rebuild essential systems of regulation that were slashed away in an orgy of deregulation. We can do much today to force the repair of walls, the replacement of fire doors and the renovation of dangerous balconies. Changing our economic and government system is a much bigger task that this Bill demonstrates is urgently needed.

Land Use Framework

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 28th October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I begin by welcoming the comments in the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Harlech, on the urgency of the climate emergency. I note that we are seeing a real change in the balance of the Benches opposite as more new and younger Members join them. I hope they will have an influence on the Government, particularly the Treasury.

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, for securing this absolutely crucial debate and for her clear, informative and powerful introduction. As she and other speakers have noted, Wales, Scotland and Ireland already have land use strategies. We often hear from the Government that we are “world leading”; here we are obviously trailing, even on these islands.

If we are thinking about a land use framework and, more broadly, regulation and management of our land, there are three sides to this triangle. One is a strategy, approach and plan for how we use land. Another is to encourage good use of the land, something we mostly hear about from the Government—the sustainable farming initiative, the local nature recovery scheme and the landscape recovery scheme, all of which come under the ELMS banner. The reality of these schemes is that they are all voluntary. They are trial schemes in which people can invest, but we do not know how many people and landowners will invest in them.

We hear a great deal less about, and undoubtedly need to hear a great deal more about, how we stop deeply detrimental, disastrous land uses and management. The noble Lord, Lord Whitty, referred to pesticides and nitrogen and phosphate runoff scarring our rivers and oceans. We have seen the impact of this, and a great deal of public concern. We need a strategy. We need to stop doing the things we should not be doing and to encourage the things we should be doing. That should be the Government’s overall approach.

I will pick up on a couple of issues that have been raised. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, who asked a good question: “Why not a national strategy”? However, I disagree with some of her comments about local management and decision-making. We have a national green-belt strategy, and we also have lots of communities who are desperate to defend their green spaces. I have visited quite a few communities who have good cause to question new “executive housing” being built. It is going into a very doubtful market and will not feed into the communities or be part of them. I am thinking in particular of a green-belt site in Sunderland which, at the time of my visit, was the only city in England that was losing population. Yet here was a patch of green land, hugely valued and much used by the public, on which executive homes were to be built for people who would commute on the motorway to work in other cities. I do not believe that that is a good use of valuable land.

It is worth looking at and trying to learn from what has been done elsewhere on these islands. Of course, as a number of noble Lords have referred to, Scotland has had two land use strategies since the Climate Change Act came into force there in 2009. They brought in a vision of sustainable land use, objectives and principles for decision-making. As the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, made clear, this is not saying, “We are going to allocate every piece of land to be used in a certain way”; it sets out certain principles.

I agree with pretty well every word that the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, said about food production, particularly healthy food production. I will add to that a little by looking at what is happening in Scotland, where the Scottish Land Rights and Responsibilities Statement takes a human rights-based approach to land use. It talks about the relationship between the people and the land. That is something that I do not think any noble Lord has really addressed yet. I am sure the Minister will be delighted to know that, should he be looking towards developing a land use strategy, the Green Party conference held just last weekend considered a draft land use strategy, an entire new chapter for the policy for a sustainable society. I would be delighted to share with the Minister the draft plans there, which set out our vision for land far more than I have time for today.

One thing I really want to focus on is that how we use land needs to address what I might call the other pressing issue. The maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Harlech, focused on climate; many other noble Lords have focused on biodiversity and the state of nature. I want to focus on poverty and inequality, and how we need a land use strategy that tackles those. The issue of the right to roam is something else we talked about at the Green Party conference. The noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, talked in her introduction about how there are multiple pressures. We need about 130% of the land we actually have for all the uses we need it for. One answer to that is very clearly multiple uses: using land to grow food, to store carbon or for nature but also making it available for recreation and public use is one way to double our use of the available land. In that way, the Scottish approach really does look forward.

Looking to Wales, as a number of noble Lords referred to the approach there is driven by its Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act—something that the noble Lord, Lord Bird, has been championing in your Lordships’ House and that we have seen a lot of support for. If we look to that, we can think about managing our land in ways that improve it for the future. We come back to the state of nature, but also, if we are thinking about the human rights approach, to improving the health and well-being of our population. That is where we come not just to issues of recreation and access of land, which we know are so crucial to human health and well-being, but to thinking about what kind of crops we are growing on that land. This is where I take issue, to some degree, with the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, and the idea that what we need to do with arable land is grow the kind of crops that we are growing on it now.

To take just one example, a large amount of some of our very best land is devoted to producing sugar beet, despite the fact that we consume vastly more sugar than we should be eating for public health and well-being. Were we growing fruit and vegetables on that land, perhaps in a mixed system that was managed in ways that were excellent for biodiversity and nature, then we would see a human rights approach, a nature-based approach, and an approach to land use that all fits together.

This comes back to the question of how we think about the ownership of land. Again, I refer back to the Green Party draft strategy. It talks about people in control of land being the stewards of that land. That is an approach that I believe we need to take forward and advance. It needs to be managed for the common good. That means profits can be made, certainly, and returns can be taken off, but we need to see all our land use managed under a strategy that works for the common good.

Finally, I come back to the noble Lord’s suggestion about energy generation. This is one of the great practical debates we are seeing now, particularly the issue of solar farms potentially being put on arable land and issues of biofuel crops. I have great concerns about those issues, but it is worth looking at the history. If we go back about 150 years, about one-third of our arable land was actually used for energy production. It grew hay and oats, producing, very literally, horsepower.

What we need is a land use strategy. We need rules that stop the damaging use of land. We need ELMS to be systems encouraging positive uses of land. It is really quite a challenge for the Government to fit those three sides of the triangle together into something that really works for people and nature, but that is the challenge that we need the land use strategy to cater to.

Public Services

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Tuesday 26th October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

I am not going to get into the use of consultants by a particular council, irrespective of the administration currently in control. A number of councils, both Conservative and Labour, have been subject to Secretary of State interventions because they have failed to fulfil their best-value duties. I point to the most recent intervention in Liverpool City Council, where, sadly, we have had to step in.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I declare my positions as a vice-president of the LGA and the NALC. Would the Minister agree that, in this age of shocks, when resilience is becoming more and more of a crucial issue—we addressed this in the last Question, on HGV drivers—eventually, if things go wrong and companies collapse, like Carillion, or fail to deliver services, as happened with the green homes grant, the Government have to step in and are always the final service of last resort? Surely we should stop pumping public money into private hands—taking all those risks of collapse that we have seen so often with private companies—cut out those extra costs and simply allow local governments to deliver services for local people?

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, it will not surprise you that I do not agree with that. Some £64 billion-worth of money is being spent by local government on the delivery of very efficient services through the private sector, but you have to be very careful about how you engage. There are plenty of examples where local authorities have not used competitive tendering but have chosen to enter into partnerships, which have had tragic consequences in the last year because of the pandemic. So I encourage local authorities to be judicious, fulfil the guidelines that are supplied around procurement, go through sensitive competitive tendering and check the creditworthiness of those whom they choose to bring on board.