Water (Special Measures) Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness McIntosh of Pickering and Baroness Pinnock

Committee stage
Monday 28th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak also to Amendment 8 in my name. These amendments are in a group looking at exemptions from the rules under Clause 1. My particular concern relates to the obligations being imposed by Clause 1, and indeed the rest of the Bill, on water companies where they may not and could not possibly be held responsible for the activities they are undertaking because the fault lies with others who are not currently within the remit of the Bill.

The purpose of these amendments is to reflect the fact that water companies should be held responsible under the terms of the Bill, in particular Clause 1, only for those activities within their specific responsibility. Clearly, for example, where there are missed connections between wastewater pipes and major developments, water companies should not be held responsible if they are obliged to fit these new connections into inadequate, antiquated pipes that simply cannot take the amount of waste coming.

The background to this very simple measure follows from the Pitt review—the noble Baroness will recall that I raised this at Second Reading—following the severe floods of 2007. I think it is worthy of note that Sir Michael Pitt is from East Yorkshire, which is more vulnerable to coastal flooding than just about any other part of the country. His 2007 review identified, for the first time, surface water flooding as well.

In connection with surface water flooding, the two most consequential amendments set out that mandatory construction of sustainable drainage systems in major developments should take place so as to contain floodwater and prevent it mixing with sewage through overflows into the combined sewers.

Further, and this is where the developers should have a responsibility and not the water companies, I ask the Minister to look favourably at ending the automatic right to connect, which has so far never happened. That one measure alone would mean that misconnections—whereby the existing infrastructure is deemed to fit the amount of wastewater coming from major new developments—would simply not happen in the future. Most of these developments are made up of four or five-bedroom homes with, dare I say, four or five times the amount of sewage coming out of them into inadequate Victorian pipes. Currently, under the planning rules, developers and local authorities deem those connections to be safe and refuse to put in appropriate infrastructure to ensure that a safe connection can be made. Were the water companies to be recognised in the planning application process as statutory consultees, on the same basis as the Environment Agency comparatively recently has been, those misconnections could be averted. The simple measure of making water companies statutory consultees, on the same basis as the Environment Agency, would help in that regard.

When she looks at these amendments in summing up, would the Minister agree to obliging developers to have sustainable drains fitted to take excess rainwater into a soakaway, pond or culvert to prevent it mixing with sewage water in combined sewers, which is currently leading to sewage overflows? It is not fair to make the water companies responsible for that. Were they to be statutory consultees, they would probably argue that the wastewater will not fit the pipes currently in place.

This has led to some very perverse sewage spills. I remember when I was in the other place there was a school in Filey that suffered £1 million-worth of damage to its swimming pool and, I think, the maths department. Existing developments had to be evacuated for six to nine months because of the public health aspect of sewage coming in. Precisely because a small development of only 30 houses was pumping out so much sewage, the rainwater when mixed with it had nowhere else to go and it went into the school and the existing developments. I am sure noble Lords could give other examples of this.

I ask the Minister to review the way in which highways currently contribute to pollution through rainwater running off the road surface, taking with it oil, brake fluid and other pollutants. When this combines with floodwater, it enters the combined sewers and then often goes into homes, causing huge damage and a public health disaster.

I hope the Minister will agree that water companies should be held responsible for those activities within their control but cannot be held responsible for circumstances which are outwith their control. These two small, tightly-drawn amendments would fit that purpose.

I conclude by asking the Minister this. If these amendments are not added to the Bill, what mechanism do the Government intend to use to ensure that water companies will be held responsible under the Bill only for activities under their direct control and not those under the control of others, such as developers and highways authorities, which are currently excluded from the remit of the Bill? I beg to move.

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

My Lords, I broadly agree with the amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh. She raised some important issues, about, first of all, the way that surface water drainage is treated. As the Minister will know, surface water is combined with sewage water in the same pipes in many of our towns and cities, and increasing rainfall and development is putting pressure on that combined drainage system.

The other issue to consider, which the noble Baroness raised, is the pressure put on local authority planning services to agree to housing developments where the existing infrastructure is not appropriate to support them, with developers reluctant to fork out huge sums of money to pay for the additional drainage systems needed. The answer lies in empowering local authorities’ planning services to put conditions on planning consent which specifically require developers to build the appropriate infrastructure to support the development that they wish to build.

There is a related point. I am a local councillor; in my experience, where there is an issue of surface water, the planning services require underwater attenuation tanks to be built to hold that water until it can be released to the natural drainage systems, such as streams. However, the developers are very reluctant to do that, and are seeking to get around it in other ways. Surface water drainage issues and local authorities’ inability to enforce this is something that the Minister may wish to raise with her colleagues in local government when it comes to reforms of the planning system, as it will affect the Minister’s environment responsibilities. I agree with the amendments tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh.

Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Debate between Baroness McIntosh of Pickering and Baroness Pinnock

Report stage
Wednesday 13th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering]

My Lords, I hate to dampen the overall enthusiasm, but I would just like to put in a word for the countryside and those who live and work in national parks and areas of outstanding natural beauty. They sometimes feel that their interests are overlooked. I am grateful to my noble friend the Minister in being mindful of their interests when he comes to draft his amendment, if he would do so.

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

My Lords, this is a good day. I thank all noble Lords who have worked hard with the Government to get to a place where there is landscape protection for those areas of outstanding natural beauty and national parks. I am fortunate to live in a place where I can easily get to three great national parks—the Yorkshire Dales, the North York Moors and the Peak District—so I particularly welcome, from a selfish point of view, what has been achieved here.

Turning to government Amendment 230A, I am pleased that the Government have closed a loophole here in the way that biodiversity net gain is measured. That is very positive. I applaud the whole biodiversity net gain approach.

I will make one comment about an issue which constantly concerns me when dealing with local planning applications: applicants trying to wriggle out of their responsibilities in biodiversity net gain. As the Minister will know, there is a hierarchy of how applicants can achieve biodiversity net gain—on site, close to, by, or as near as possible. If you live in a built-up area like me, “as near as possible” can be a big distance away. The town where I live—I guess this happens to small towns all across the place—will often see its biodiversity further depleted because the hierarchy allows applicants to put their biodiversity net gain at some distance away. I wonder whether the Minister could perhaps address that and enhance what I believe is a very positive approach adopted by the Government.

Business and Planning Act 2020 (Pavement Licences) (Coronavirus) (Amendment) Regulations 2023

Debate between Baroness McIntosh of Pickering and Baroness Pinnock

Wednesday 12th July 2023 Grand Committee

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

My Lords, I warmly support these regulations and congratulate my noble friend on bringing them forward. My only concern is about the ability to reach out and consult organisations representing the disabled, which I will come to in a moment.

In her introductory remarks, my noble friend mentioned what this will mean for the hospitality sector, and I warmly support that for the reasons she gave. The sector suffered heavy losses during the Covid pandemic, and it is gratifying that tourists are now returning to areas such as London—and North Yorkshire, to a certain extent—in waves that we have not seen since the pre-pandemic days of 2019. That is very welcome.

I had the good fortune and honour to chair the ad hoc Select Committee on the Licensing Act 2003 and, similarly, the follow-up committee. I was delighted that the Liaison Committee allowed us to conduct a further, follow-up inquiry. One of the issues that struck us during that inquiry was how to reach out to interested affected groups, such as organisations and groups representing the disabled, and how best to catch their attention if there was a licensing application that may be of interest or concern to them.

Can my noble friend put my mind at rest in that regard? I think she said that each individual licence is subject to a seven-day consultation, so I would like to know what mechanism local authorities use in that regard.

I note that paragraph 10.1 of the Explanatory Memorandum attached to the regulations says:

“No formal consultation has taken place on this measure”.


Perhaps one would not have expected a consultation for the reasons that my noble friend gave, that this is a continuation and a renewal. This is my main concern here. We all know disabled people and partially sighted people—they are represented in both Houses of Parliament. One error of these regulations, or any licensing application applied under them, would be if those people were not reached out to under each individual licensing application.

On a lighter note—this is not really about a pavement application—when coming back down St Martin’s Lane in the daytime today, I passed Stringfellows, which is a well-known restaurant establishment, and I was rather struck by an orange leaflet that had great prominence on two of its doors. It has applied for a renewal of a sex establishment licence as a sexual entertainment venue. I realise that this is without the remit of today’s debate, but I will write to my noble friend with a copy of the notice. We spent hours looking line by line through the Licencing Act 2003; I like to think that I am fairly interested in licensing, but it was news to me that we have any sexual entertainment venue licensed in London or any other part of this country.

I look forward to my noble friend’s response on the consultation, not just of these regulations but of each individual licence application under the regulations before us.

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

My Lords, that conjures up a new image of a pavement licence for Stringfellows.

I had better remind the Committee of my relevant interests in this regard as a councillor and as a vice-president of the Local Government Association.

The pavement licencing regulations are very positive and I am pleased that they will be rolled over. I have one or two questions. Even in my less-than-warm part of Yorkshire, this has been a positive move—that is the good news. However, I wonder why, when these regulations were first considered, there was no thought about an automatic rollover for businesses that had made an application and had fulfilled their obligations under the licence, and about which there had been no complaints. For businesses there is now additional bureaucracy every year when they have to make an application to the local authority. That is my first point.

I have raised my second question before. Businesses now have the opportunity to trade on the public highway. The public highway is owned by the public and must be maintained by the public. One wonders whether there ought to be a rental income for the local authority from the business for the use of the highway. Local authorities are cash-strapped as it is, and any form of additional income would be welcome. I say that because I think the licence income is very small; I think I heard the Minister say it was £100 maximum. Some establishments use quite a lot of their highway if they have a good frontage, and there ought to be some income there for the local authority.

Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Debate between Baroness McIntosh of Pickering and Baroness Pinnock

Committee stage
Wednesday 22nd March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

As a Scot by birth living in England, I support my noble friend the Duke of Montrose in his Amendment 181. It is good that in this clause, as my noble friend said, the Government are committed to consulting in specific circumstances. However, too frequently we are not seeing the results of the consultations in a timely fashion, particularly before any regulations under this part of the Bill may be drafted and come before the House. Therefore, I lend this amendment my strongest support.

My noble friend also raised collaborating with the Scottish Parliament with a view to obtaining legislative consent. We have had two recent regrettable circumstances where the Scottish Parliament—and in one case, the Senedd—withheld their consent. This could be avoided if discussions took place with the relevant committees of the Scottish Parliament at the earliest stage and throughout the course of the Bill. I am thinking particularly of the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill, which has exercised the House at quite some length, and the recent Trade (Australia and New Zealand) Bill. The withholding of legislative consent could have been avoided by the Scottish Parliament if the Government had liaised with them and the relevant committees at a much earlier stage.

With those remarks, I support all the amendments in this group, particularly that in the name of my noble friend the Duke of Montrose.

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

My Lords, Part 3, Chapter 1 of the Bill, entitled “Planning Data”, asks more questions than it answers. I will be grateful if the Minister can answer some of them.

First, what is the purpose of requiring an approved national planning software? Is it so that the Government can more readily access planning data from across the country? If so, to what purpose do they want to put the data that they acquire in that way?

Secondly, how many different planning software systems are in operation at the moment? Digitising planning is a complicated operation, so you would not expect that many but, if there are, have local planning authorities already expressed a clear preference to use a single system? This takes me to the questions asked by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, in that, if the Government are requiring a single approved planning software, there would be considerable costs attached to local planning authorities transitioning to a new software system. You would want to balance those costs against the benefits. The Bill makes no obvious benefit of using a single system. Another issue is about compatibility. If the current software systems are compatible, is this a solution seeking a problem? There may not be a problem if they can already speak to each other.

My third concern with Clause 79, and the stand part question expressed by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, is that planning applications have to be retained for a long time. I cannot remember for how long; I think it is 30 years, but it may be longer. If that is the case, all previous planning applications going back a certain length of time would have to be put on to a new system, so that the systems could talk to each other. As all noble Lords know, there are planning applications made on the same place time and again and in different forms. I want to understand the purpose of this: why and who benefits?

Another of my concerns is this. I am in favour of digitising; I think it has huge benefits for many people, particularly planning professionals, in this case. It would be much easier to have it all online. However, if it is going to be a digital-only system, as seems to be the thrust of this group of clauses, the Government will be guilty of digital exclusion.

The Government must recognise two things. First, many people access all their digital needs only through a mobile phone. Accessing a planning application, with all its complexity, through a mobile platform will not provide the level of detail that they want. Secondly, many parts of the country still do not have either sufficiently good broadband or mobile signal. Digital exclusion could be a growing issue, especially in planning. People get involved in planning applications, big and small, and I am sure that the last thing the Government want is to exclude residents for different reasons—accessibility or knowledge of use.

I have asked many questions, but I hope the Minister is able to answer them. While digitising planning systems has many positives, they have to be weighed against some of the many negatives that exist.

Business and Planning Bill

Debate between Baroness McIntosh of Pickering and Baroness Pinnock

Committee stage & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 13th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering [V]]

My Lords, the amendments in this group have much to commend them. I support Amendment 42 in the name of my noble friend Lady Anelay in particular. It is important that the provisions before us today are carried out effectively and that the balance we all wish to achieve between the hospitality and tourism sector and the rights of residents and other users is maintained. By the end of January 2021 is a good reporting period. Amendment 78 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, also has much to commend it, but I fear that a monthly report is a very tall order. I look forward with interest to my noble friend the Minister’s response to this group.

[Baroness Pinnock [V]]

The amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, lays bare the deep concerns of the tourism sector. The Government’s response will be crucial. As my noble friend Lady Doocey said, the tourism sector is on a knife-edge. The example she gave from the Lake District is no doubt being felt elsewhere in regions dependent on tourism. In replying to the debate, I hope the Minister can give hope and help to these regions.