Pesticides (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019

Debate between Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen and Lord Stunell

Wednesday 16th October 2019 Grand Committee

[Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Stunell, and the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, for their questions. They both asked what the process will be. Collectively, our EU exit SIs will put in place a stand-alone, independent regulatory regime under which we will make our own decisions. This gives effect to them in our own national register. We will make our own decisions and be able to take account of other regulatory assessments to inform our decision-making.

[Lord Stunell]

I understand this that there will be new processes here, but equally, the Minister will recognise that for our agricultural products to be exportable, they will need to comply, or at least be very closely aligned, with the regulations of the receiving country—or, in this case, the European Union. Will she comment on whether we will require ourselves to keep in a parallel regulatory system in some way and to some extent?

[Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen]

We will have our own regime, obviously. Basically, producers will have to meet the requirements of their market. We will have our national register and make up our own minds about what we want to do. It will go from there. Does that answer the question? Would you like more?

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen]

Part of that comes from the fact that the SI is basically talking about a no-deal Brexit. Those other questions and queries will presumably come with there being a deal of some kind, when those issues will be discussed further. This SI is basically dealing, as we know, with a no-deal Brexit. Inspiration has come over my right shoulder, but I do not know whether it will be any help. Industry already produces different standards—for example, the supermarkets and their regulations—but the main answer is that this SI is basically for a no-deal Brexit. Any future conversations will stem from what is decided with the deal, when presumably we will have the transition period and carry on talking about this.

[Lord Stunell]

I thank the Minister for being as helpful as she possibly can. Perhaps she might agree that this is another illustration of why it would be a really good idea if a deal were reached.

[Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen]

I could not agree more. Let us hope that when we leave this Room we will discover that there are bright lights and that something has occurred.

The noble Baroness, Lady Jones, talked about capacity and the funding of UK scientists to do necessary work post Brexit. As we know, we already have significant expertise and capacity in our expert national regulator, the HSE, which already does a large proportion of the scientific work with the EU regime, so we are well-placed to run our own regime. We are working closely with the HSE to ensure that the transition is as smooth as possible. Additional capacity will be required in the event of a no-deal exit. That is not required immediately on exit day but will be developed over the next few years.

Extra resources will be required and extra people will need to be hired. The additional cost will broadly be in the region of £5 million per year, and money will be there to help with that. On exit day there will not be an immediate necessity to hire people but there will be as time goes on, and that money will be available.

Increased resources will be put in place for the Expert Committee on Pesticides, reflecting the increase in its responsibilities and need for additional work. We will also explore how we can collaborate internationally on the science, including with the EU, to minimise any burdens.

On the question of whether there will be a shared register with the EU for pesticides, the earlier EU exit SIs, along with this one, will provide us with a fully independent UK regulatory regime in the event that we leave the EU without a deal. Leaving without a deal would be a definition not included in a shared register with the EU. We would have our own statutory register of approved active substances with the MRLs, although at the point of departure the content would be the same as in the EU. Alternatively, if there is a deal, obviously the future arrangement would depend on the nature of that deal.

The noble Baroness, Lady Jones, talked about “shall” or “may”. Scientific assessment will remain the fundamental basis for decision-making, as it is now. These assessments shall be undertaken by our expert national regulator, the HSE, including additional independent expert advice from the Expert Committee on Pesticides, where needed. The FSA’s statutory functions are being retained and repatriated to a national regime, where they remain relevant in a national context. Those will be delegated to the HSE and carried out by them: for example, undertaking public consultations on active substances and producing the conclusion report of the active substance assessment process. There will no longer be a need to separate these functions into a separate EU layer of activity to ensure consistency between the many EU member states’ regulatory bodies. That has been understood by some as weakening the requirement, but it will not. Where appropriate, it is felt that “shall” is the right word, because we will carry on doing everything that is necessary. This is a straightforward conversion of the current statutory requirement into our national law.

Have I covered everything? I thank noble Lords for their queries and hope that I have answered them satisfactorily.

Housing: Availability and Affordability

Debate between Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen and Lord Stunell

Thursday 12th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

My Lords, I welcome this debate and thank the noble Lord, Lord Smith, for introducing it. There have been some very good contributions, not least from the noble Baroness, Lady Young, and my noble friend Lord Greaves. I am strongly tempted to follow some of the tracks they set out, but I want to pick out one or two specific points and try to take a more strategic look at some of the questions that we are facing.

First, I want to give credit to the Government. I am sure that they actually believe that we need 1 million homes; I am sure that they want 300,000 homes a year, as their manifesto stated—I have heard spokesmen over the years as diverse as Michael Gove, Grant Shapps, Gavin Barwell and of course the Minister say so repeatedly—but the fact is that it has not happened. I do not think that the Government do not get the problem that we need more homes: rather, they have not spotted the problem with the solutions that they are offering.

The most important problem, which never seems to get a proper airing, is that there is an absolute ceiling on the number of private homes which will be built by developers without subsidy. It has never exceeded 180,000 homes a year since 1945 and it has usually been significantly lower than that: you cannot get builders to build homes that they do not believe they can sell and they will not do it unless you pay them to do so. That has very little to do with planning. There are 600,000 or more planning permissions lying waiting to be built. It is much more to do with economics.

I remember, as a very junior Minister in the Department for Communities and Local Government, how much joy there was when planning permission was given for the Ebbsfleet development in Kent: 20,000 homes. Out went the press releases and the spads went wild in the media—“Another 20,000 homes for our glorious Government”. I was at the back saying, “Hang on a minute—how soon are we due to get these 20,000 homes in Ebbsfleet?” I do not know whether the Minister has the current number; I think we may have got up to 1,000 having been built so far: perhaps he can confirm that. The reason the other 19,000 have not been built despite the planning permission is that if they had been built, 19,000 empty homes would be sitting in Ebbsfleet without people buying them. We need to reflect on the fact that planning is not the bottleneck. Incidentally, I support my noble friend Lord Greaves in saying that if instead of 20,000 homes at Ebbsfleet there had been 200 sites with 100 homes on them we would have had far more homes built by now because we would have had small numbers on 200 sites rather than small numbers on one.

My second point is that affordability is very double-edged. Who actually wants cheaper homes? Do existing owners want cheaper homes? Do builders want cheaper homes? Do developers want cheaper homes? Will any party have a policy objective or a manifesto commitment to halve the value of your home? I do not think so. So the private sector will deliver what the private sector will deliver—and after that, someone else has to pay. If this Government or any Government want more houses, more homes, they have to pay.

The policy issue therefore is surely, what is the cheapest way of buying those extra homes? The Government have tried Help to Buy, which is a very good way of inflating house prices. It is, of course, a demand and not a supply-side issue and it was described quite correctly at the Tory conference as “economically illiterate” by Steve Norris. Help to Buy is not the way to go. Affordable rents have been explored—but, of course, as affordable rents become higher and higher, so the local housing allowance cost balloons as well. We now have a £30 billion LHA budget. The least central government cost looks therefore to be the lowest rent that can be managed—which would lead, of course, to a lower local housing allowance payment.

The Government followed that by putting a cap on housing association rents, which means they can no longer invest in building homes through that route. So some of these things have unintended consequences which totally defeat the purpose of the game and you come to the view very quickly that the way to go is to get local authorities to invest in council housing in the traditional way. It is not ideological; it is value for money. The Tory brand of competence and the efficient management of money may have taken a few knocks recently, but surely this point cannot have escaped them.

I make a further point about this. We talk about the housing pipeline; it is not a pipeline, it is a hosepipe. At the moment we have a model where the Government and successive Housing Ministers stand at the kitchen door like a five year-old, manipulating the tap to the hosepipe, and the construction industry stands at the far end—the business end—of the hosepipe, sometimes trying to direct an empty hose on wilting seedlings and sometimes looking down the pipe to see what is happening and getting a splash of water in its face. The fact is that we need steady, consistent investment in public sector housing in order to reach the targets we need.

Finally, I raise a different and more immediate point. Whether the target is 200,000, 250,000 or any number we care to choose, who exactly is going to build these houses? The biggest demand for homes, the most acute housing pressure, is in London and the south-east. Barratt gave evidence to the all-party group last Session that 54% of its workers in London working on its housing programme were from the EU 27. The RIBA reports that 25% of registered architects in London are from the EU 27. Estimates vary from trade to trade and function to function, but at least 30% of the construction force in London is from the EU 27—so what exactly is going to happen? Delivery of housing and of every other kind of infrastructure depends on that labour force, and I urgently say to the Government that they must give an assurance to those EU 27 workers, and to their successors, that they will be there to build the housing we need. Talk of targets and objectives—

[Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Lord’s time is up, I am afraid.