Net-Zero Emissions: Planning and Building Regulations
Baroness Blake of Leeds Excerpts(2 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord Greenhalgh (Con)
My noble friend is an inveterate champion of sustainable urban drainage, which is far better than the use of grey infrastructure. Of course, we will reflect the desire to see sustainable planning and urban drainage solutions where practicable.
Baroness Blake of Leeds (Lab)
My Lords, I declare my interests as set out in the register. Last month, the i newspaper reported that homes in the UK heat up twice as fast as the European average during heatwaves. As a result, demand for air conditioning units has increased, which in turn uses energy and increases emissions. Can the Minister outline what steps the Government are taking to address this, especially considering that temperatures are expected to rise in the coming decades?
Lord Greenhalgh (Con)
My Lords, above all, we recognise the need to move away from fossil fuel heating to meet our commitment to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. We are approaching that by continuing to set performance-based standards rather than mandating a solution. We are making progress to achieve that and we will continue to come up with ideas that drive progress in this area.
Council Tax
Baroness Blake of Leeds Excerpts(2 years, 9 months ago)
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Lord Greenhalgh (Con)
My Lords, I note that my noble friend again calls for a new, higher band of property. If that higher band were based on 1991 values, the Valuation Office Agency would need to revalue all properties in the current top band. That would certainly be cheaper than a full revaluation.
Baroness Blake of Leeds (Lab)
I refer noble Lords to my registered interests. The impact of the pandemic has led to the worst recession of any major economy. With the virus still not under control, local councillors will again be forced to raise council tax this year to protect vital local services, just when many families are struggling to make ends meet. Will the Government remove the necessity for planned council tax rises by giving councils the resources they need and stand by their pledge, so far not honoured, to do whatever is necessary to support councils?
Lord Greenhalgh (Con)
My Lords, I do not recognise the picture that the noble Baroness paints. Throughout the pandemic, we have provided considerable additional funding for local authorities. Local authorities received £3.8 billion in social care grant funding through the social care grant and the improved better care fund. We continue to support councils throughout this very difficult period.
Business and Planning Act 2020 (Pavement Licences) (Coronavirus) (Amendment) Regulations 2021
Baroness Blake of Leeds Excerpts(2 years, 9 months ago)
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Baroness Northover (LD)
My Lords, I strongly support the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, which he very effectively introduced. The Government claim that they want the UK to be smoke free by 2030, but they have a funny way of going about this.
Years back, despite the efforts of the tobacco industry, working cross party we introduced into the United Kingdom the provision that public places such as pubs and restaurants should be smoke free. Was that not a transformation? It made sense during the pandemic that pavement licences should be granted, as people needed to be more distant from each other. Most people welcomed these new arrangements. Pavements were often widened to accommodate them. Does the Minister agree that the key thing to remember here is that these areas are simply extensions of the areas inside and need to be smoke free as well—for people’s health, for them to be family-friendly and to move closer to the smoke-free aim that the Government apparently have?
We ran into all the usual tobacco industry-briefed objections last year and—surprise, surprise—it turned out that the noble Lord’s department had not properly consulted the Department of Health on the matter and had to scurry to do so. Has it fully done so this time?
The objections from the tobacco industry are so familiar to the Department of Health. The noble Lord, Lord Young, took these objections apart last week. I wish we had a stronger weapon than an amendment to an SI that was going to be just slipped through, having been debated in Grand Committee, where noble Lords cannot vote and would knock out the whole SI if we did. This SI will barely have been registered by most in your Lordships’ House. Thank goodness the noble Lord, Lord Young, noticed and flagged it to the rest of us.
If this amendment is lost, the Minister should not take that as the will of this House. I am fully confident that if and when we debate this in legislation, there will be overwhelming cross-party support in this House for helping to tackle the terrible scourge of smoking. The department should be very wary of the briefings and influential lobbies that push it in another direction. I hope I do not hear very familiar objections voiced by the Minister in a minute. On these Benches we strongly support this amendment and are very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, for tabling it. I hope he calls a vote.
Baroness Blake of Leeds (Lab)
My Lords, I pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Faulkner for bringing this really important issue into the Chamber. His very well-informed and passionate speech does not need too much adding to.
I want to bring in a slightly different dimension. My noble friend and the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, both referenced the speeches in Grand Committee, which were really well put together; I recommend that everyone have a look at them in Hansard. We should also look at what we have learned over the last 18 months of the devastating impact of the coronavirus. We have been on an incredibly steep learning curve in understanding how the virus has impacted on the people who live in our communities. We have a duty, surely, to look at all the evidence before us.
Covid-19 is often described as a cruel virus and it has exposed health inequalities in the most vicious way. Surely we must learn from the knowledge that those suffering from underlying health conditions have been disproportionately affected by the virus. Smoking is a major contributory factor to those health conditions. Do we not have a responsibility to do everything in our power to reduce exposure to the impact of smoke inhalation? I am referring to both the customers and the staff in the premises we are talking about.
I would also like to emphasise the points that the noble Lord, Lord Young, made in Grand Committee about the lack of evidence and the lack of consultation with local authorities, which would have demonstrated that there has just not been the evidence that we should be concerned about the impact on the businesses we are talking about.
We have an opportunity to make an improvement to the provisions in the Building and Planning Act 2020. Of course, the irony is that the Act was brought in specifically to deal with the impact of coronavirus. I hope we will recognise the public health improvement outlined in my noble friend Lord Faulkner’s amendment and that we will all come together to show our support accordingly.
Lord Greenhalgh (Con)
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, for tabling this amendment and I thank noble Lords for an interesting debate on this matter. I will take this opportunity to respond to the noble Lord’s amendment. In Grand Committee I was not able to answer fully all the questions noble Lords raised on smoking issues relating to the temporary—I emphasise that—pavement licence extension regulations. I welcome the opportunity to address these issues in greater detail.
In Grand Committee, the noble Lords, Lord Faulkner, Lord Bradshaw and Lord Shipley, and the noble Baroness Lady Wheatcroft, all challenged me on the passing of these regulations and the potential passive smoking impacts. The impacts of passive smoking are very much a key concern and a top priority for this Government, which is why we should look to tackle this issue strategically. We will be a publishing a new tobacco control plan later this year, setting out our ambitious plans for England to be smoke free by 2030. The tobacco control plan will consider areas of regulation to strengthen in support of this aim.
In the very short term, it is right that we act to support hard-hit hospitality businesses to boost their capacity and continue their recovery. For this 12-month extension of the pavement licence provisions, the Government consider local and business-led discretion over implementing smoke-free policies to be the most appropriate approach. Businesses are able to introduce their own smoke-free policies if they wish to go further than the regulations require.
As the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, mentioned, local authorities are also able to set their own local smoking conditions where appropriate and where local decision-makers believe it is reasonable to do so. A number of local authorities have already implemented such local smoking ban conditions within outdoor seating; these include the city of Manchester, as mentioned by a number of noble Lords, Newcastle, North Tyneside, Durham and Northumberland. This makes it clear that local conditions can be implemented where it is appropriate and desired locally.
I also remind noble Lords that the pavement licence guidance sets out ways in which the requirement for provision for seated and non-seated smokers could be met, such as displaying clear no smoking signs, the removal of ashtrays from smoke-free areas, and a minimum two-metre distance between smoking and non-smoking areas wherever possible.
The noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, referenced international comparisons. I emphasise that the UK is a world leader in tobacco control, and it is important that we share our learnings on the journey towards a smoke-free 2030. We must also learn from the successes of other countries. We will be closely monitoring the outcome of the Canadian approach. International studies of smoke-free parks and beaches, including in New Zealand and Canada, have found evidence through litter collections of continued smoking, suggesting that successfully enforcing any restrictions will involve considerable resource, including training people, such as park staff, in enforcing new policies.
I hope noble Lords will recognise that there is a real commitment in government to a smoke-free United Kingdom, but at this stage we are looking for an extension for a year. This is a temporary pavement licence extension of provisions that have worked incredibly well, as many noble Lords commented in Grand Committee. I emphasise that this Government are committed to reducing the smoking impacts of outdoor eating and drinking, both in terms of these regulations and, importantly, in future policy. Therefore, I ask the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, to withdraw his amendment.
Business and Planning Act 2020 (Pavement Licences) (Coronavirus) (Amendment) Regulations 2021
Baroness Blake of Leeds Excerpts(2 years, 10 months ago)
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Baroness Blake of Leeds (Lab)
I have listened carefully to the debate so far, and very interesting points have been raised. Personally, I am very supportive of the principle of pavement licences. One of the first jobs I had as a local councillor was to introduce cafe culture into Leeds way back in the 1990s, which was not a concept that was greeted with great enthusiasm at the time. We have moved on now to dedicating whole streets and removing traffic from them so that cafés can spill out, which has proved to be incredibly successful. Obviously, the changes due to Covid have proved an enormous bonus to businesses that have been struggling.
However, I want to stress from a local authority’s perspective just how complex this can be. It involves consultation with the planning department, licensing, highways, community safety, and we heard from the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, who spoke eloquently about the shared space issues and the need to consult carefully with disability groups. This can lead to incredibly complex processes. I will come back to this, but we have to wonder whether we have given local authorities the required resource to deal with processing applications and, most importantly, assessing and monitoring their impact.
We have learned that, when introduced last year, this was going to be a temporary streamlining of the pavement licence application process and that it would be in place for only as long as social distancing was necessary. However, the Government are today legislating for the extension of the provisions until September 2022, despite legal requirements on social distancing coming to an end this month. I begin by asking the Minister to clarify whether this represents a change in policy by the Government, and is he certain that there will be no further extension beyond September 2022?
On a similar point, the Minister will be aware that under the Business and Planning Act, an extension is legally permissible only if it is for the purpose of mitigating an effect of the coronavirus. Can he detail how this extension meets that requirement? I understand that the temporary nature of the measure was due to concerns raised by local authorities, as well as by community and campaign groups. There was concern about the process leading to more anti-social behaviour and creating noise and nuisance for local residents, as well as the issues we raised about impaired mobility. Can the Minister confirm that the Government have assessed whether the increase in pavement licences has led to those issues, and will he outline exactly what consultation has taken place with those groups on extending the provision?
The reduced funding stream is significant. I must inform your Lordships that the fee cap of £100 is leading several local authorities into some difficulties. Before this cap, some licensees were paying up to £1,000 without complaint, because they recognised the significance of what they were being allowed to do and the resource required to make it successful for them. Given that it is now close to a year since pavement licence streamlining came into effect, it would also be helpful if the Minister could clarify whether there have been any issues with the practical application of the new streamlined process. Can he confirm how many pavement licences have been granted under the new process and how that compares to the previous year? Most importantly, under the provision, how many businesses will need to reapply, as well as those applying for the first time? Have local authorities reported any issues with the statutory framework for the pavement licence process? Do the Government collect information on the conditions which local authorities are imposing? For example, the short turnaround time presents issues for the proper due diligence that needs to be undertaken in assessing applications.
I was pleased to hear from my noble friend Lord Faulkner that he intends to table a regret Motion in relation to the fact that this instrument will not guarantee 100% smoke-free pavement licences. We on these Benches have a proud tradition of acting to reduce smoking and the harms it causes both smokers and those around them. Last year, my noble friend secured an amendment to the Business and Planning Bill which guaranteed protection to non-smokers by requiring all licensed premises to set aside a non-smoking area. Clearly, there is more discussion to be had on this area, and I look forward to the debate that will be generated in the week ahead.
When the Government introduced the new pavement licence process last year, they had the support of these Benches, but with concerns raised over how it would be implemented. Given that the process is being extended by another year, I hope the Minister can allay those concerns and confirm that the Government will work hand in hand with local authorities and all the relevant groups to monitor its further application.
Town and Country Planning (Fees for Applications, Deemed Applications, Requests and Site Visits) (England) (Amendment) Regulations 2021
Baroness Blake of Leeds Excerpts(2 years, 10 months ago)
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Baroness Blake of Leeds (Lab) [V]
My Lords, the Government’s planning overhaul represents a developers’ charter to remove powers from elected local representatives and hand them over to Whitehall-appointed boards of developers. I believe this legislation is a small part of that overhaul.
The instrument before the Committee introduces new application fees for permitted developments, as we have heard, such as projects to add additional storeys and convert shops to houses. While we can all accept that these charges must be part and parcel of the planning system, I still have huge concerns that these are enabling the Government’s decision to take away the ability of local communities to object formally to inappropriate developments. All the while, there is still nothing to solve the growing affordable housing crisis that our country faces.
I will focus on the specific provisions of this instrument. I would appreciate clarification from the Minister in three specific areas. First, on the question of commencement, the Minister will note that the provisions come into force on the 28th day after the day on which they are made. Can he explain the Government’s reason behind this? Have they taken steps to ensure that there is not a rush of applications immediately before the commencement?
Secondly, on the exact fees, it appears that two of the fees being introduced are £96 while a third is £100. Can the Minister explain this discrepancy? As other contributors have asked, is the Minister certain that they have been set at the right level? Will they adequately provide funds that local authorities need to deliver this important area of work? I add my voice to the request that they be kept under review.
Finally, on the broader issue of implementation, can the Minister confirm whether the department has estimated how many applications these fees will apply to and how much revenue will be generated as a result?
As I said, the Government’s planning overhaul is a developers’ charter. We can all see that this is only another part of their strategy to do away with the normal scrutiny and oversight provided by local authorities and communities. I look forward to the Minister’s response to my questions.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Duncan of Springbank) (Con)
The noble Baroness will shortly be rewarded. I call the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Greenhalgh.
Flood Plains: Housing Development
Baroness Blake of Leeds Excerpts(2 years, 10 months ago)
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Baroness Blake of Leeds (Lab)
My Lords, I add my appreciation to the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, for creating the opportunity for us to take part in this debate, which is extremely close to my heart. My first crisis as leader of Leeds City Council was dealing with the impact of Storm Eva around Christmas 2015—the worst storm to hit Leeds since the mid-19th century.
It is hard to really get across just how much the impact of these events hits at the time, but the lasting effects are truly devastating. When he is able to do so, I recommend that the Minister visits Leeds to see the work that we have done since that time. Our flood alleviation scheme brings together a combination of the most advanced technology in Europe with natural flood alleviation measures, which we have heard so much about today, and the Pickering model for Leeds, going right up into the Yorkshire Dales, with extensive tree planting and other land-use management measures. The issue remains that so many people are still at real risk of flooding in future. It is not an accident that there are so many voices from Yorkshire here today. One thing that we have managed to do in Yorkshire is to bring together a whole range of different constituencies to look at all the measures that we can take to address this issue.
It is now over a year ago that the chief executive of the Environment Agency, Sir James Bevan, gave a very stark warning about the risks of housebuilding on flood plains. We are very disturbed to see that the Government have failed to take any action that we can see up to this point. All the comments today go further to get across just how serious the situation is. We have heard about the number of properties at risk of flooding, which equates to one in six properties, and the projections into the future are very stark indeed, if serious action is not taken. One thing that we do know is that, combined with sea levels on the rise, more extreme weather events are likely to take place. So why are the Government still allowing completely inappropriate buildings on flood plains? It simply has to stop—and it is my firm belief that the power to do so is within the Government’s hands.
Could the Government equip local authorities, as the local planning authorities, with the necessary funding and powers to resist unsuitable development on flood plains? They must also include the powers to consider flood-resilient design in all areas at risk of flooding. We have a real problem with repeated cuts to funding for local government across the board, which has led to planning departments across the country with too scarce a resource to be able properly to consider all the complexities of these applications. According to the LGA, what we know is that councils have lost 60 pence out of every pound from central government funding over the last 10 or 11 years. Can the Minister confirm what recent engagement he has had with local authority leaders over the funding of planning departments? Can we insist on future funding flexibility to local government and reflect the increases in line with inflation?
On top of this, the Government’s own National Planning Policy Framework and planning practice guidance on flood risk and coastal change do not even mandate councils not to build on flood plains—they merely request it. Those are the Government’s principal documents giving guidance to councils on flooding and flood plain areas. Can the Minister confirm whether the Government intend to update those documents? This issue is urgent and the Government’s action must be, too. I hope that the Minister can assure the Committee that change will be forthcoming.
Housing: New Developments
Baroness Blake of Leeds Excerpts(2 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Greenhalgh (Con)
My Lords, I point out that permitted development rights have enabled us to deliver a net additional 72,000 homes in the last five years and make an important contribution to the planning system. Our planning reforms are all designed to get effective community engagement at the front end of the process.
Baroness Blake of Leeds (Lab)
The expansion of permitted development rights is taking away the voices of local communities in the planning process and handing them to Whitehall’s appointed boards of developers. Are the Government consulting local government representatives about these changes? If so, what representations have they received?
Lord Greenhalgh (Con)
My Lords, at this stage of the planning reform process we have had 44,000 responses and have continued engagement with the Local Government Association and other important stakeholders, and we will be responding to those responses in due course.