Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Debate between Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle and Baroness Pinnock

Committee stage
Tuesday 18th April 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I rise to offer Green support for all these amendments. On the amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, it is worth reflecting that if you design a space, a community or a building that is accessible and welcoming to everybody, that will be a really good building for any person to enjoy. This is the same principle that applies to accessible public transport and many other areas.

I mostly want to speak to Amendment 222 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lansley. I commend him both on tabling this amendment and on his excellent introduction to it. He was perhaps reading the mind of the Committee on Climate Change, because he must have tabled this amendment before its report about three weeks ago, which really stressed the nation’s utter failure to prepare for the climate reality that is now already locked in—what is now known in shorthand as adaptation. Another Member of your Lordships’ House, the noble Baroness, Lady Brown, said:

“This has been a lost decade in preparing for and adapting to the known risks that we face from climate change”.


It is very clear that what we should be doing now is making sure that we design, build and deliver buildings, infrastructure and communities that are actually fit for—as the noble Lord said—the next century. To take a practical example of this, the APPG on Wetlands has done a great deal of work and spread the word about how crucial wetlands are. We think about all the issues the Government keep facing all the time on sewage and what is spilling into our rivers and oceans. Sustainable urban drainage systems and just the smallest-scale wetlands—something that I have seen NGOs presenting with—can be a way of enriching biodiversity and addressing the kind of issues that this amendment does. They also create a much more pleasant environment for people and do something to tackle all the issues we have with water distribution in our country.

It is not just the Committee on Climate Change. Yesterday your Lordships’ House gave strong support for the amendment to the Energy Bill saying that we absolutely have to deal with retrofitting—with the adaptation that is necessary for existing homes. That very much addresses this amendment as well.

I will offer one constructive suggestion to the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, and something to think about. We have now got to the stage where pretty much everyone, including the Government, is talking about the climate emergency and about biodiversity in nature. These are just two of the very big issues we face in terms of the planetary boundaries. A year or so back, the Stockholm institute concluded that we have exceeded the planetary boundary for novel entities, which is shorthand for pesticides, plastics and pharmaceuticals. I suggest that the next step—which everyone will be talking about in a few years, but we can get ahead of the curve now—is to say that we need design codes that ensure we are living within all the planetary boundaries, which includes things such as geochemical flows and protecting fresh water: a whole range of issues that come under the planetary boundaries model. If we are indeed to be able to survive and thrive on this poor, battered planet, we have to design to live within those planetary boundaries.

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, is quite right to raise the issue of accessible and inclusive design. Everyone benefits where design is accessible and inclusive for everyone, so all planners and all local plan strategies should bear that in mind as a prior consideration. The noble Lord has our complete support.

We must say two things to the Government that the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, has said several times today. We need the content of both the National Planning Policy Framework and the national development management plan before we get to Report, otherwise we will have to include in the Bill content that may later appear in either of those two important plans. We cannot operate in this vacuum of lack of knowledge and information about the content of two absolutely fundamental building blocks of strategic planning. We need to keep raising that—I think it was also raised today by the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Stevenage—and I hope the Minister has heard the pleas from across the Committee.

Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Debate between Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle and Baroness Pinnock

Committee stage
Monday 20th February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Earl, Lord Devon, and to echo his concern about the lack of environmental ambitions expressed in the Bill, which I think we will also discuss in the next group. In my first contribution in Committee, I declare my position as a vice-president of the Local Government Association, to cover my other contributions in Committee.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Foster, for his powerful and expert introduction to this group. I will speak briefly to offer Green group support for the general direction of all these amendments. I will focus in particular on Amendment 5, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, which was ably introduced by the noble Duke, the Duke of Montrose, and talks about looking at

“the disparities between rural and urban areas”.

The noble Lord, Lord Foster, talked about the different needs of different areas, but it is really important that, when we think about levelling up, we actually see ambitions for equal services for people all across these islands.

I will reflect on some of the experiences I have had in some small communities. Clun is a tiny, picture-perfect postcard village in south-west Shropshire near the Wales border. When I visited a decade ago, the locals believed that it was the smallest place in the UK with a food bank, which was operating out of the church. One of the volunteers working at that food bank told me that, until he got involved in that food bank, he never believed that anyone would need a food bank in Clun. He was absolutely and deeply shocked by the level of need and the experiences he encountered. There is a desperate need for essential support services. While I do not think that we should rest until the last food bank closes because of a lack of demand, we need to put other services in place to help the people who are now reliant on those food banks.

Another issue for so many of these areas is the fact that policies designed for cities and urban areas get imposed on rural areas. This makes me think about the time I visited a school in north Norfolk. The schools in that area had had imposed on them the idea of specialist schools: “Isn’t it great if pupils can choose to go to a sports academy or a language-specialising school?” However, as each village only had one bus service, pupils had no choice about which school they went to; they went only to the school that the bus went to. If you were really good at and fancied sports, but you ended up in the language school, that was just tough luck. That was because of policies imposed on rural areas which are just inappropriate.

I return to the issue of buses, because it is very close to the heart of the Green Party, having announced this week our policy for a fare that would be available to everyone in the country on local buses, “A One Pound Fare to Take You There”. When I talk about local buses in rural areas, I often get reactions such as, “Well, you can’t expect a bus in a rural area; it just won’t work.” However, I have been to Finland, where I caught a bus that went right into the middle of a national park. I went for a walk, I came back and stood at the bus stop, and I waited for the next bus service, which came every half an hour, all day, in the middle of that national park. So, when thinking about levelling up in an absolute and real sense, we should not be saying, “Oh, it’s a rural area; they can’t expect this or that.” In particular, we should not say that they cannot expect the foundation of a bus service so that people can get around. For that reason, I think that Amendment 3, about reducing disparities, is crucial.

My final point is about the little bit of discussion we have had on the Government’s vision for rural areas. Over the decades, the direction of travel in rural areas has been that landholdings and farms will have to get bigger and bigger, with fewer and fewer people working on them. However, I suggest that levelling up for rural areas means restoring small businesses and small farms which employ quite a lot of people. That then means that there are children to go to the local school, that there are people to get on the bus, and that the bus is there for the older people who need it, perhaps because they cannot drive any more. Restoring communities is about a lot more than asking, “Oh, what’s there and what can we support?”; it is about a vision.

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Foster of Bath for raising this very important issue and for providing an evidence base and powerful argument in support of rural communities in particular. This short but important debate has cast a focus on the confusion at the heart of levelling up, which the debate on Amendment 1 was trying to resolve: what do we mean by levelling up and spatial disparities? What do we mean by improving the lives of people who live in different parts of the country, where for some there is low pay, low skills and poor health and for others there is a lack of connectivity or a lack of opportunities? Because we have not resolved that confusion, we will, throughout the passage of the Bill, get arguments of different natures in support of communities which need levelling up, whatever we mean by it. I hope that levelling up will not mean, or be defined by the Government as, either “rural levelling up” or “urban levelling up”, or that we will level up coastal, rural or urban areas separately. The levelling-up agenda must have a clear definition—which is in the White Paper, as I keep pointing out, but is not in the Bill—about the geographical disparities across this country, be they rural, coastal or urban, that result in people’s lives and the country being poorer. The levelling-up Bill ought to address that, but it unfortunately fails to do so.

I was struck by a really good phrase used by the noble Earl, Lord Devon, about levelling up: we do not want levelling-up ambitions to “blow in the political wind”. That is one of the reasons why I support having both the broad mission statements and the broad metrics for those mission statements in the Bill, so that we can say to whatever Government we have, “This is what we have agreed to, and this is what we are going to demand that you address.” Otherwise, we will come back again to the debate about the difficulties for people who live in rural areas. While noble Lords might think that West Yorkshire, where I live, is a big urban area, surprisingly, the upper Colne Valley could not be more rural; there are scattered farm settlements across the hillsides going up to the top of the Pennines. Its residents understand what it means to not have access to public transport, mobile networks or broadband connectivity.

Let us not go down the route of it being one or the other. I hope the Government will, even if I have to encourage them again, eventually closely define what they mean by “geographical disparities” and then address them through the missions and metrics that I hope we will put on the face of the Bill.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter. I share the disappointment of the noble Lord, Lord Young, that we will not hear from the noble Lord, Lord Holmes. As someone who also knows that problem of running between the Chamber and the Moses Room all too well, I sympathise.

I do not feel that I need to add anything to the child poverty point made in the three powerful initial speeches. All one can say is that we hope that the Government in both Chambers were listening to those three speeches or will at least read them, because, really, how could they not act on the basis of them?

I want to focus on three amendments: Amendment 8, adding climate emergency as a mission, Amendment 18 on net zero, and Amendment 19, on the Environment Act. I broadly support what the noble Lord, Lord Stunell, said, but I slightly disagree with him because he said that he could not imagine a Government who did not have a net-zero-by-2050 target. I can imagine it: I know that we need a Government who have a target for net zero long before 2050, and indeed, who need to explore very closely that phrase “net zero” and what exactly it means. Perhaps I should add that that is a friendly disagreement,.

I am not quite sure that I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Stunell, that net zero should not be sitting there as a target on its own. As he was speaking, I could not help but think about the often-repeated phrase that what is not measured is not prioritised. If it is across all the targets—I very much agree that it applies across all the targets—is there a risk that it just disappears into the “Yes, we’ll put a few nice words in without really putting the counting in there”? We are seeing from local councils, so many of which have declared a climate emergency or, indeed, a nature crisis, that they are desperate to do that—to be able to show their own contribution.

A lot of our discussion about the climate emergency has focused on mitigation and the possibilities of mitigation. It is important to put that in the current global context, where we see both the United States and the European Union—particularly the US leading, with the EU trying to follow—putting massive sums of investment into what is loosely called the green economy. If we think about the Government and their often-expressed desire to be world-leading, there has been a real change in the global context just in the last few months. In that light, I want to pick up a point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter. Most of the talk has been on climate mitigation. When we are particularly talking about what are commonly described as “left-behind communities”, such as the rural and coastal communities which we were talking about in the last group, the issues of adaptation and resilience to the climate emergency really need to be highlighted.

Here, we speak in the week when the UN Security Council had its first ever debate on the impacts of sea-level rise, and in just the last day or so we have seen some truly terrifying research coming out about the weakness of ice sheets that have the potential to cause a massive sea-level rise. As I was sitting here thinking about this, I thought about a visit I made to a small rural village called Hemsby in 2014 after it had been hit by a storm and a number of homes had been swept away. I just looked up Hemsby and realised that this year, Hemsby has been hit by serious storms three times again, and the lifeboat has lost its ramp again and again. If we think about places that desperately need support in the climate emergency, communities such as Hemsby have to be at the forefront. We have not really heard much discussion about that in this debate. I am not sure whether this needs to be a separate mission. The issue of resilience needs to be across all of the missions, making sure that everything we are aiming to invest in and build can stand up to climate and other shocks when we live in this age of shocks.

A number of noble Lords made the point about the interaction of human health and well-being and the environment. I do not know whether the Minister is aware—I point this out to her as a constructive suggestion—of a UN project called the Healthy Urban Microbiome Initiative, known as HUMI. It focuses on how human well-being benefits from a healthy environment even in the most concentrated urban settings. A more biodiverse setting, even on the busiest urban street, is better for human well-being. That has to underpin everything the Government are doing and thinking about here.

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

My Lords, this has been an important and interesting debate about new missions to be added to the levelling-up agenda. Quite rightly, the Government have been thrown a challenge in four different ways. First, there was an absolutely vital challenge from the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, about reducing child poverty being absolutely at the heart of any levelling-up agenda. As she and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Gloucester said, currently 3.9 million children in our own country—nearly 4 million children—are living in poverty. If we do not use the Bill to address that scar on our country and our communities, we will not level up the lives of those communities in those localities.

The fundamentals that we have raised in this debate of child poverty, net zero, access to green spaces and protecting and enhancing our natural environment, are, for the reasons given, at the very heart of what the levelling-up ambitions ought to be achieving. As all the contributions have indicated, if we reduce those inequalities in those areas of spatial disparities, because we are focusing on those we will focus as a country on all child poverty. If we say that in the north-east people need access to green spaces, we focus on everybody’s access to green spaces. If we focus on reducing child poverty in some of the worst parts of our country, we improve the lives of every child because we are putting a spotlight on reducing those dreadful inequalities.

I thank the speakers, particularly my noble friends Lord Stunell and Lady Parminter, who drew the attention of the Minister and the House to the advantages of putting net zero and the environment at the very heart of all that we do. If we do not, we are missing a trick, as someone said. We have to will the means, said my noble friend Lady Parminter, not just express them. That is why on these Benches we will wholeheartedly support the amendment. If the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, wishes to bring this back on Report, she will have our support, as will those who raised the other issues with regard to the environment.

Building Safety Bill

Debate between Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle and Baroness Pinnock

Consideration of Commons amendments
Tuesday 26th April 2022 Lords Chamber

[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.