Women and Men: Pay Gap

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

Wednesday 8th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Trefgarne (Con)]

My Lords—

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

Women!

[Noble Lords]

Oh!

Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 22nd February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Foster of Bath (LD)]

My Lords, I want to talk briefly about the granularity of data, the choice of data and its use, and the need for independent assessment and evaluation of the use of that data in judging the success or otherwise of attempts to level up. On Monday, I raised the need for granularity of data, particularly in relation to my concern about the disparities between urban and rural areas. I am very pleased to see that Amendment 10—I support my noble friend, and my name is on the amendment—proposes that the granularity could be done perhaps at local authority level and even, where possible, at postcode level. The noble Baroness’s Amendment 58 talks about data collection at the level of

“regions, counties, councils and council wards”.

We should all be thankful to the Minister, because she has already very helpfully responded to many of these concerns in a response on Monday to my request for granularity. She agreed with the sentiments but then went on to provide rather more detail, which she said was very complicated. I promised to go away and put a wet towel on my head and look at it in detail afterwards, as she promised she would—I suspect we both now have. It is very interesting to read. She told us what is happening within government to better identify geographical disparities, and talked about

“data visualisation and experimentation techniques”

and

“a transformative data analysis strategy at subnational level.”

I still do not really know what that all is, which is the point of what I want to say, but crucially, the Minister said that:

“The spatial data unit will also consider the differences between geographical areas, such as regions, counties, councils, and even down to council wards, according to the needs and objectives of specific missions or policy areas.”—[Official Report, 20/2/23; col. 1482.]


We should be enormously grateful that that is on the record.

However, the problem is that we also have to be very clear about how the data is going to be used. We might collect it at a granular level but I hope we will also be able to have more detail about how the data is going to be used. Why? Because, sadly, there have been examples where this Government claim to have collected and used data but that does not really seem to follow.

I note, for example, that the current Prime Minister, when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced a tranche of the levelling-up fund allocations. In the press conference that followed, when he was asked how this money had been allocated, he said it was

“based on an index of economic need which is transparently published”.

However, when people went to look for this transparently published documentation, they could not find any. The Treasury had to come up with a statement afterwards to say that the information was coming “shortly” but was unable to say when that would be. When at a later stage people questioned how this all worked, the Treasury spokesman, in explaining the bandings which had apparently been used to allocate how the money was spent, went on to say:

“The bandings do not represent eligibility criteria—and money will be allocated to the areas most in need. Further technical details will be published by the government in due course.”


When, in due course, it eventually came out, and there were queries about all this, the Treasury announced that the factors used included

“strategic alignment with government priorities”,

whatever that may mean.

My point is that it is really good that we are going to have granular data, and I think we should specify in the Bill how that is going to be done. But we also need openness and honesty about how the data is going to be used. That is why the other amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, is so important, talking as it does about the independent body that will analyse this information.

My final point is simply that I absolutely accept what the Minister says about her concern about putting all the missions on the face of the Bill. But it seems to me that the public have a right to know the key areas of concern that we will use to judge whether levelling up between the various areas of the country has taken place or not. My noble friend on the Front Bench used a very good phrase: she said we should have it in “headline form”. That is really what my noble friend’s Amendment 10 does. It makes a suggestion; I am sure he would accept it is a starter for ten. Other issues have been raised; I could raise, for instance, the issue of home insulation, which is a hobby-horse of mine. In any case, we have time, as my noble friend said, between now and Report to actually get consensus across the House on what the key headline issues are that we are keen to tackle. We can then have separate debates elsewhere about the details. So I think all three amendments in this group cover these three crucial areas of having granularity of data, having a clear understanding of how the data is going to be used and independently evaluated, and what the data is actually going to cover: what are the key issues of concern that we have in the whole effort to level up?

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I am beginning to think that eight days is not enough for Committee. I am sorry about that, but it is such an exciting Bill and we all have so much to say. The point about which data to collect is interesting, because, of course, there is data that is extremely negative and it would be difficult, perhaps, to find a category for it. For example, so far, a huge amount of money has been wasted by the levelling-up funds, because local authorities have often used a lot of time and energy putting together bids that have failed. Are the Government going to collect the data on that waste of money, which obviously —in these days of 13 years of underinvestment in councils and the loss of EU structural funds—means a lot to councils and will affect the service that they can give to their residents? There has been a failure of levelling up already and perhaps we are not measuring everything we should be measuring.

There are a couple of dozen local authorities run by Greens as part of the administration. Many Green councillors have expressed their dismay to me at the level of waste in the levelling-up fund, and it very much concerns me. Instead of taking a long-term view of what is needed, the Government sought quick wins, quite understandably; I can entirely support that idea. However, they demanded submission of “shovel-ready projects”, combined with tight deadlines for submissions, so local authorities had to quickly piece together bids, rather than taking the time to develop what they might have thought were the most impactful and valuable project proposals for their areas. Personally, I see this as a continuation of Boris Johnson’s natural urge—which I saw quite a lot of when he was Mayor of London—to splash money around on grand ideas that grabbed headlines but often failed to come to any sort of fruition.

So far, I do not think the levelling-up fund has been value for money, and it has not been targeted at areas that need it most. There has been a lot of political decision-making about where the funds go, and it is alleged that they have disproportionately benefited Conservative-voting areas. The Government now need to give local authorities a long-term view of what is needed and let them put together long-term proposals. They need capital funds that will be made available over a period of years and support them to dig deep into what would benefit their own areas, because they will know best. I can see a lot of late nights in my future with this Bill, and I do hope that the Government will listen to what we are saying.

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 10 in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Shipley and Lord Foster of Bath, and Amendment 58 in the name of my noble friend Lady Hayman of Ullock. The work on this Bill needs to take a very careful approach to geographic disparities. It can be typified as a north/south issue or even as an inter-authority issue, but disparities do not just exist at regional or local authority level but operate in small, distinct areas of multiple deprivation that are embedded in even the most affluent areas of this country. This is so in rural areas and in urban areas as well.

For eight years, I ran health services for Kensington and Chelsea, where areas of tremendous wealth and privilege sit cheek by jowl with pockets of the most extreme poverty in England. I remember taking a new Conservative Minister of Health around the patch, and he expressed extreme doubt about the value of health visitors visiting newborn children and their mothers to check on their progress. He said, “I don’t think my daughter needed that. That’s what the nanny was for”. I took him around an area about 200 yards north of where his daughter and said nanny lived in Ladbroke Grove, to a squat with a single-parent 16 year- old new mum living in a single room with no electricity, with the loos purposely blocked with concrete by the landlord, who wanted them out. There was slime running down the walls. I think at that point he did see the value of health visitors, but that degree of poverty was within a 200-yard strip of pretty wealthy—certainly comfortable—living. It is also the case in rural areas. Rural poverty is often hidden in small pockets in dispersed communities, and in small communities where everybody knows about it but it is not very visible to anybody in authority.

I am afraid that I was not here on Monday, but the Minister must have said then that the tools do exist for looking at data on levelling-up issues at a very fine-grain level. That has been enhanced in the last few years by modern mapping and big-data analysis techniques, which is the shortform for the thing that got the noble Lord, Lord Foster’s, towel around his head. I am proud of the fact that it was the Labour Government who set up the Neighbourhood Statistics Unit in the early 2000s. As a result, we have a long history of fine-grain, small-area statistics based on what is snappily known as “lower-layer super-output areas”. There are almost 33,000 of those that are mapped on a continuous basis for a whole range of parameters across the country. It is that kind of level of statistics that we need to use to track levelling up within and between neighbourhoods.

If you read the White Paper, you see that it talks about that sort of issue. It talks about being able to differentiate and to have data as one of its five pillars. However, that really does not reflect in other measures in the Bill. We may have the data, we may have the commitment to small-area identification and levelling up on that basis, but I am not sure that we have anything in the Bill that then takes that forward.

I very much welcome the expansion proposed by these amendments to what is basically the index of multiple deprivation, which is the current most-used official measure of relative deprivation in England. I would have liked to have seen environmental poverty and quality of environment added. People in poorer areas tend to be landed with a poor-quality environment. In Victorian days, as you got richer, you moved up the hill to get further away from the smog. That is still the case now in terms of people’s aspirations to get out of the crap environments they often live in as soon as they have got the money to be able to do so. We simply cannot continue with that. Will the Minister say how the Government intend to ensure that levelling up focuses on this fine grain of geography in both rural and urban areas, in order to be effective and to ensure that they do not miss out in higher-level aggregate monitoring of the levelling-up process?

There is, rightly, much focus on the role of local authorities and local institutions in this. However, the Government need to show how we will monitor that that work is happening within local authorities in an effective way if levelling up is to become a reality for many of these people, who spend their lives in pretty poor circumstances, watching their rich neighbours nearby.

Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 20th February 2023 Lords Chamber

I would find it very helpful indeed to know what the Government’s thinking is. Is it their intention, through this Bill, to define the outcomes and the assessments that are going to be made which will demonstrate whether levelling up across the whole country in terms of geographical disparities is being delivered? How will the Government ensure that they are passing legislation which assists us to deliver the outcomes that the public have been led to expect?

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, on a brilliant opening speech that leaves hardly anything else to be discussed.

I completely agree about the disparity between rich and poor and that that must be addressed. However, there are things that do not depend quite so much on wealth, such as health and happiness, and access to green spaces. All these things are part of what levelling up ought to include. I am quite keen to see this Government understand that health is about not only improving the NHS—which, clearly, they have given up on completely—but how people see themselves and the opportunities that they have locally. So I am looking forward to this Bill. It will be a long slog for the Minister; I am sorry about that.

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, for bringing forward this probing amendment. When we look at the Bill, we need to consider what the Government mean by “levelling up” and whether the beginning of the Bill is sufficient to support the aims that were laid out in the White Paper. As we heard at Second Reading, much of what was in the White Paper is not here—including, as we have heard, the actual missions, which seems to me quite remarkable.

As we have previously discussed, the Bill does not really look like a levelling-up Bill. It looks more like a planning and devolution Bill, and planning and devolution on their own will not deliver the kinds of levelling up that our country needs. So we support this amendment for doing what needs to be done—probing exactly what the Government are intending. The noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, reminded us of the words of our former Prime Minister and of the Secretary of State, and of the ambitions of the White Paper, which we need to be discussing in future amendments that we will have in Committee. That context is very important.

So how do we define levelling up? It can mean an awful lot of different things to different people. It will also take an accumulation of good understanding and good investment if we are to come close to meeting the different agendas laid out by the Government in the White Paper. For example, social infrastructure has to be equally invested in, alongside physical infrastructure, if we are to make a positive and sustainable impact.

Is levelling up a genuine policy or just a catchphrase—which is sometimes what it feels like? As the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, asked, is this just a branding exercise? We need confidence that the Government are serious about this: if it is a genuine policy that they want to make a reality, it will need an awful lot more cash than currently seems to be on offer.

The noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, talked about funding. The Centre for Inequality and Levelling Up is based at the University of West London. It calculated that the levelling-up funds total £20 billion, but clearer criteria for defining what constitutes a levelling-up fund are needed. The centre suggests that this should include only funding allocated after 2019, which is four years ago. Of the funds specified in June 2022 by the department, three were allocated before 2019. We really need much more clarity about the new investment that will come in from the Government to support what they are intending to achieve through this Bill.

Another thing I want to talk about is the relationship between funding and the missions. The levelling-up funds have only a tangential relationship with the 12 missions. Out of the 10 funds available, only one, the shared prosperity fund, mentions the missions directly, and the levelling-up fund itself just references the missions’ metrics.

While the Government continue to insist that areas have to bid against each other—with mounting evidence that this is an inefficient way of delivering funding—how can the Government ensure that all areas that need funding for levelling up receive adequate support with the bidding process and subsequently receive adequate funding?

Regional disparities are deeply entrenched, and the Bill seems to see devolution as a way to crack this and solve the problems. But so much needs to be done to tackle inequalities: they will not be solved just by a few missions, some of which are not even in the Bill, and the somewhat confusing devolution proposals.

What about the challenges that our NHS is currently facing, with enormous waiting lists and staff going on strike because they are so desperate? Why are the Government refusing to properly engage with staff over their deep concerns, which are leading to even further strike action? Just today, Professor Farrar has warned that health workers’ morale and resilience are very thin, and of the vulnerabilities facing our health services if we have another crisis like the pandemic.

If the Government are serious about closing one of the worst gaps of inequality—the gap in life expectancy between rich and poor that my noble friend Lady Lister mentioned—they have to properly support and fund not just the NHS but social care. How will the Bill deliver this? How does levelling up properly relate to those huge challenges? This relates to the following mission in the White Paper:

“Narrow the gap of healthy life expectancy between the areas where it is lowest and highest”.


I cannot see how that will be achieved with what we have in front of us.

I will also look very quickly at mission 3:

“Eliminate illiteracy and innumeracy by refocusing education spending on the most disadvantaged parts of the country”.


Will part of this refocusing of education spending deal with the gap between real funding per head in state and private schools? This gap is widening and letting down our state-funded pupils.

We have heard that the Bill fails to meet the aspirations of the White Paper, but the existing missions will not, as currently drafted, properly solve many of the inequalities in our society. We will be debating the existing missions and the new missions in a future group, so I will not say anything further at this stage. At the moment, we feel that the Bill is lacking in many areas and there is much work to be done.

International Holocaust Memorial Day

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

Thursday 19th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Pickles, for bringing this very important and moving debate. I am not a Jew; I have no Romani or Traveller heritage. As far as I know, my family did not lose anybody in the Holocaust, but I still felt compelled to speak today. Anti-Semitism is on the rise, as are racism, homophobia and xenophobia. We have to be careful not to repeat past mistakes.

It is hard to speak of the Holocaust, simply because it was such a shameless and industrial-scale systematic perversion. My father was a cook in the RAF. He was based in Gütersloh in the summer of 1945. It was 78 years ago this month that Auschwitz was liberated by the allies. My father met servicemen who had been part of the liberation of concentration camps. He said that they were in a state of disbelief, distress and shock at the sights they had seen, which were so horrific they could barely talk about them.

As we have heard, Germany was a nation known for its cultural richness. It was a country that produced intellectuals, yet it conceived and operated a system of slavery and murder in the most horrific and distorted way. I do not want to be a bystander. I see that we have problems here in Britain, and globally, with all kinds of hatred. I want to speak up about them.

The Holocaust was a brutal manifestation of ethnonationalism—a form of identity politics built on normative and biological difference. We have to ensure that it must for ever exist as an exceptional event. But only last year our security services warned of a sharp rise in far-right extremism here in Britain. The far right in Britain shares some clear common political logic that underpinned 1930s Nazism. Dr Michelsen and Dr de Orellana of King’s College London, who are experts in international relations and nationalism, have demonstrated in their latest research that

“we are witnessing a resurgence of nationalist ideas globally—driven by online social media networks, and it fosters the same violent identity politics which enabled the Holocaust to happen”.

If we understand that the Holocaust must be an historical, appalling exception, never to be repeated, we have to watch for socially unhealthy indicators. Just last year, a young teenager committed suicide in a care home. She had been radicalised by a network of online far-right extremists from America and she had been charged with terror offences. The resurgence of global far-right networks poses a continuous and dangerous threat. We must endeavour to challenge racism and hold those who perpetuate it online to account.

Today is a day where we remember the victims of the Holocaust. We must never forget.

Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 17th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I have a few criticisms of the Bill, not least the fact that it does not mention climate change. As I have often mentioned, climate change is the biggest existential threat to all of humankind; it is not just about the north or the south but the whole world. The Government have been so deficient in mentioning it and putting it into a context that can make a difference.

It is now three years since the Conservatives won an election. They promised to level up the country. You would have thought that, finally, the levelling up Bill might give us an idea of what levelling up actually means. Voters might have thought that they would have been levelled up before the next election was due, but apparently not. It has been three years of economic decline and mismanagement, and the Government concede in this Bill that we have not levelled up yet, and fail to set any timescale for when we will be levelled up. Perhaps the Minister could give us an indication of that timetable.

Moving from the intangible levelling up to very real regeneration, I note that the Bill is another missed opportunity to make the planning system fit for the 21st century. The Green Party now has hundreds of dedicated councillors across the country, and one of the things that infuriates them most is the planning system. Whether they are a lone ward councillor trying to interact with the system or the chair of a planning committee who has their hands tied by national planning policy, making it impossible to make the best decisions for their local community, what is obvious is that we have a centralised bureaucracy that does not work. The planning system should unlock our transition to a clean, green country with warm, insulated homes and beautiful, human-scale communities. It should give communities a strong voice in shaping their own local environment, while protecting the global environment by design.

We need to move away from the current system, where there is a shadow banking system of developers buying land, obtaining planning permission and then selling the land for a huge amount of profit for very little work. Around one million new homes that have been granted planning permission are not being built, so we need to unblock the system and get those homes built. If the developers will not do it, it should be opened up to communities, councils and social housing providers to build the homes instead.

The Bill should unlock more social and affordable housing. People do not necessarily need to own their homes, but nor should they be condemned to a lifetime of spending extortionate amounts of money renting poor-quality homes from private landlords. More than one million people are on waiting lists for housing while we lose around 22,000 social rented homes each year. We have to turn that tide. The Bill is an opportunity, and it has failed.

It is difficult to put a finger on this Government’s biggest failings over the past 13 years as there are so many of them, but scrapping the zero-carbon homes standard has to be up there. To this day, people are buying newly built homes, expecting them to be built to modern standards, but they have got terrible insulation and cost a fortune to heat. The Bill is an opportunity to ensure that every new home is warm and green, and I look forward to bringing amendments on that.

Homes are just one part of the equation for building green communities. It is time to end the car dependence that is designed into the planning system. We can legislate for the creation of 20-minute neighbourhoods, where people can access key facilities such as schools, healthcare and public transport within a short walk from their homes. We can build walking and cycling networks into the planning system and ensure that key routes, such as old train lines, are protected and developed into safe cycling routes.

After a lost decade of austerity and starving councils of funds, it is no surprise that local planning departments are bursting at the seams. As we have heard, there is a huge shortage of planners who want to work in the public sector when the private sector is so much more lucrative. This is perhaps most apparent in planning enforcement, which is failing massively.

Finally, I have thought about democracy and public participation in this. We really have to look at what needs national oversight, participation and prescription, such as tackling the climate emergency, and what can be left to local councils and communities to decide. The Bill builds in more centralisation of key decisions and will force councillors to make more and more inappropriate decisions based on very poor rules set in Westminster.

Housebuilding: Government Targets

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

Monday 16th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

The noble Lord is absolutely right, but we are investing £11.5 billion through our affordable homes programme to deliver up to 180,000 more affordable homes. A large number of these will be available for social rent. Also, the Government have provided a range of tools to help councils deliver more homes, particularly in this sector. They include the councils’ freedom on how to spend the money received from the right-to-buy sales. The Government also abolished the housing revenue account borrowing cap in 2018, allowing councils to borrow more money to build more homes.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, do the Government appreciate the value of community land trusts? To follow on from the last question, they actually build homes that are affordable, but affordable in perpetuity because they are not sold on at vast increases in cost. Have the Government evaluated that?

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

Yes. Many local authorities in the country certainly work closely with community land trusts. I do not have an update on what is happening nationally, but I will certainly get an answer to the noble Baroness.

Voter Identification Regulations 2022

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

Tuesday 13th December 2022 Lords Chamber

According to openDemocracy, Ministers told the Electoral Commission that introducing photo ID in next year’s local elections has the advantage of providing a learning exercise. Certainly, it is to be hoped that the Government will be open to learning from the exercise. In that context, I welcome what the Minister said about independent review of the exercise in May, as far as it goes, and I hope that she can answer my noble friend’s questions adequately. However, the implication seems to be that, because only some authorities have elections next year—including my own authority of Nottingham—it is okay if some electors, particularly the most marginalised in those authorities, lose the right to vote because of the rushed implementation of voter photo ID. It is not okay, and I hope that, even at this late stage, the Government will think again.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, the noble Lord opposite—he is not a Minister, I think he used to be something in the Government—has got a real cheek to talk to this House about honouring conventions when his Government colleagues have trampled over dozens of them. They put in a masquerade of a Budget, which then tanked the economy. They have introduced a new Prime Minister every few weeks—another incompetent Prime Minister, I might point out—and have generally behaved like savages at a feast with taxpayers’ money. He should really not stand up and defend the sort of thing he just has when his Government colleagues do not do it anyway. This House, to some extent, is self-regulating and can make its own decisions.

[Lord Strathclyde (Con)]

My Lords, it might be worth saying that I was only commenting on the passage of the Motion that the House had carried in 1994 and I certainly do not oppose that position. I then explained the conventions by which we exist when we look at fatal Motions—none of the stuff mentioned by the noble Baroness.

Housing: Leasehold Properties

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

Monday 17th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

I obviously cannot comment on a particular instance. I would like to have more information; if the noble Baroness would like to write to me, we will meet and I will look into it. That is not what should be happening. Leaseholders should not be paying; it should be others who are paying. We made that very clear in the Building Safety Act.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, the Government promised to make this whole system fairer, faster, easier and cheaper, yet somehow it has absolutely stalled. It is fair enough to have meetings; that is wonderful and very fair of the Minister. At the same time, “before the next election” may be a rather difficult timetable to be sure of. Can the Minister please get some sort of date—some idea—of when this will happen? There is urgency; I ask as a leaseholder.

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

The noble Baroness is right, and I can assure her that I am talking about it almost daily in the department. I will continue to do so and hope that, the next time I come to the Dispatch Box on this issue, I will have a date.

Housebuilding: Target

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

Wednesday 30th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, I cannot give that particular statistic; what I can say is that we recognise the importance of getting these standards right. We have consulted very recently on options to raise the accessibility of new homes and we continue to focus on ensuring that we have homes that work for people of all ages and are suitable for older and disabled people.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords—

--- Later in debate ---

[The Lord Privy Seal (Baroness Evans of Bowes Park) (Con)]

My Lords, we will hear from the Green Party.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

Thank you. How many of the homes that have been built are net-zero carbon and, therefore, how many are left to be very expensively retrofitted for energy efficiency later?

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, we seem to be going around every type of housing that we could possibly build, but it is very important to recognise that we have a future homes standard, that we have set that to be in place by 2025 and that we continue to build homes that are reducing our carbon footprint—and, actually, modern methods of construction are precisely the way to do it.

Building and Fire Safety: Leaseholders

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

Monday 14th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, there is no doubt that £15,000, paid over five years, is a substantial sum, but the reality is that some poor leaseholders who are victims have paid far more than that on interim measures before a single bit of remediation has been done. Having a cap on leaseholder costs ensures that they are no longer fleeced through Section 20 notices to pay for mistakes for which they are not responsible. That is what that protection achieved and, through regulation, we can broaden the impact to protect those with the very narrowest of shoulders.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, we have a problem going forward, because cladding, if it is put in properly, can be an option to make older houses thermally efficient. Have the Government thought about reassurance measures so that cladding remains an option for, for example, all the thousands of pre-1930s buildings?

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

That is a very good point: cladding per se is not necessarily a bad thing. What we cannot do is wrap our buildings up in cladding where the effect on the spread of fire is a bit as if it had been coated in petrol. Cladding provides the warm homes that many people enjoy. If you carry out remediation in an insensitive way, it removes the protection for leaseholders in the insulation required to make the home liveable. Therefore, remediation needs to be done in a sensible and thoughtful manner with people who are living in their homes. Of course, we need to ensure that we promote good cladding systems and remove the bad.