Leaseholders: Costs

Baroness Thornhill Excerpts

Thursday 18th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

We will move from principle into practice in a matter of months, but this problem has occurred over decades. Sadly, every decade, there has been a significant fire in a high-rise where there was a loss of life: Garnock Court in 1999, Lakanal House in Southwark in 2009 and the tragedy of Grenfell in 2017. Governments knew that cladding was often the cause, as it was in Garnock Court, and the regulations were actually dampened down under a previous Labour Government, who inserted the word “adequately”. It is a mess that took decades; give us months to sort it out.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

Notwithstanding the Minister’s earlier comments, housing associations and councils too face a challenging situation. Both the LGA and the National Housing Federation have evidenced the double whammy of the financial burden to remedy the fire safety issues for the tenants and, consequently, less money to invest in their existing stock—in particular, to build new social and affordable homes. In the recent rethinking, please will the Minister agree to look specifically at the situation faced by housing associations and councils and consider widening the criteria for support for any money that is available? This is their tenants’ rent money, after all, and they too should not have to pay for 20 years of industry failure.

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

Of course we want to protect leaseholders and ensure that social landlords can build new homes of high quality but, far too often, they as developers were in charge of building homes of poor quality, and they need to fix those homes. The figures are that, as of 31 October, £97.3 million has been approved from the building safety fund, and there is the £200 million to remove cladding of aluminium composite material. We are doing what we can to protect leaseholders, but we recognise the challenges faced by registered providers.

Levelling Up White Paper

Baroness Thornhill Excerpts

Monday 15th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

I agree entirely with my noble friend. We do not want anyone to have to leave somewhere they love in order to have a truly fulfilling career. That is why we are investing £3.8 billion in skills by 2024-25 and have just set up our new adult numeracy programme, Multiply, to get hundreds of thousands more adults with functional numeracy skills across the United Kingdom.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

Minister, successive Governments have grappled with this one under various names and the consensus is that they have largely failed. Do the Government recognise that the fragmented system of funding and bidding is part of this failure? Recently, the LGA found evidence that £23 billion of public funds aimed at regeneration were fragmented across 70 different funding streams and managed by 22 different departments or agencies. Are there any signs that the Government will change this scattergun approach?

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, just because previous Governments have failed does not mean that this Government will not succeed. However, I take on board the importance of ensuring that there is appropriate streamlining and that we do not have a scattergun approach to funding. The point is well made.

Council Tax: Second Homes

Baroness Thornhill Excerpts

Thursday 4th November 2021 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Thornhill]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have to introduce legislation prohibiting second homes advertised as holiday rentals from avoiding council tax by registering for business rates and thereby qualifying for small business rate relief.

[The Minister of State, Home Office and Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities (Lord Greenhalgh) (Con)]

I recognise the noble Baroness’s interest in this issue. The Government have confirmed that we will legislate to require that holiday rentals meet an actual letting threshold before being assessed for business rates. This will ensure that only genuine holiday businesses can access the rate relief for small businesses. We will set out further details shortly in the Government’s consultation response.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

Minister, this at last is a Cornish/Cumbrian Lib Dem campaign success—I can see the leaflets now. Can he explain why it has taken so long and say when we will get a timetable and conclusions of the 2018 consultation that was never actually published? Does he agree that salt has been rubbed into the wound, given that unscrupulous second-home owners have also received £104 million from Cornwall’s Covid aid pot, thus reducing the amount available to legitimate businesses?

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, I should have registered my residential and commercial property interests, although I have not tried to use this loophole. The Government announced in March that we will legislate, and we have been working very closely with the Treasury and the Valuation Office Agency to finalise the details of how and when this will be implemented. This of course takes time and we will publish our consultation response shortly.

Land Use Framework

Baroness Thornhill Excerpts

Thursday 28th October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

I thank the noble Baroness for bringing forward this debate. If Thursday afternoon debates were a novel, they would certainly not be a bodice-ripper or an edge-of-the-seat thriller, but more a literary heavyweight: challenging, sometimes difficult to get to grips with, but always an opportunity to learn and to explore difficult issues. The noble Baroness’s subject matter today is very much in the latter category, and I have to say that I admire her staying power. I also look forward to the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Harlech.

As a former elected mayor and a vice-president of the LGA, I will be looking at this issue through the lens of local government and from the planning perspective, while being confident that other noble Lords will be sharing their considerable expertise on the environmental and broader issues.

What has surprised me in my reading for this debate is that there has been a fairly steady and consistent appeal for a land use framework over many years and, indeed, several reports with recommendations to adopt one or something similar. Indeed, such a tool exists in all the devolved Governments. Can the Minister say whether there has yet been any capture of the benefits or otherwise of the Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish experiences, each of which appear to have involved slightly different approaches? I believe we should be looking to learn from them.

It was, therefore, surprising to me that the Government are resisting this and, indeed, going further and saying it is not really needed as other policies and plans, in effect, do the job of such a strategy. Hearing the responses of the noble Lords, Lord Gardiner of Kimble and Lord Goldsmith, during consideration of the Environment Bill confirmed my belief. However, to judge by the evidence presented by these various reports and inquiries, it appears it is often not happening at all, and where it is it could be better.

In its recent study, Planning for a Better Future, the Royal Town Planning Institute points out that there are already many spatial instruments and plans in places, but—the “but” is important—they treat the environment in siloes, not connecting issues such as water availability and quality, social quality, flood mitigation, biodiversity and habitats. They are often administered and financed separately, with problems of single-issue streams of finance, and managed on short decision timescales, with notable gaps. They seem distant from and unaccountable to local people. Our current situation calls for something far more radical and potentially game-changing. This proposal will seek to address some fundamental key dilemmas and challenges of land use: will it be possible to grow enough food, restore biodiversity in nature, decarbonise the economy and adapt to climate change, while building all the homes, transport and infrastructure that the Government have promised over the next decade?

While such a framework would, by necessity, be very high level, it is also important to address the concerns of ordinary citizens. When I speak to residents, usually when they are bitterly complaining about development, I ask them, “What percentage of land do you believe is built on?” They always get it massively wrong and are shocked when you say, “Less than 20%, and half of that is parks and gardens”. In tight urban areas, it certainly feels that high city densities, while highly sustainable, are built to protect someone else’s view of a field that once grew food. So a fundamental question to us all is: how is it decided whose quality of life is more important? Is it the person in the tower block or the village dweller? Another question is: is that really the best use of the land? Could it not be used for something better? How could that be determined?

It is now generally accepted that we could never again build to the densities of, say, Milton Keynes or the garden cities, yet there has been no attempt at all to take the public with us on this challenging journey. At his party conference, our Prime Minister recently declared that there should be no need for houses to be built on green-belt land, to cheers from the party faithful living in the leafy shires. But what are the implications for those living in urban settings? Must the ever-growing numbers of tower blocks increase, not only in number but in storeys, to accommodate government targets for housing need? Where is the land-use discussion here? They are popping up now in suburbia and Metroland, not just in the city smoke. Do we need new settlements? Where, what type and when? Perhaps a land-use framework could usefully flush out these difficult issues and contradictions and provide a context for these conversations.

We have a Government determined to build 300,000 homes a year to meet an obvious housing crisis. Surely that aspiration needs some big thinking about land use. The Government’s own figures show that enough brownfield sites are available to build 1 million homes. That sounds like a lot, but it is really only three years’ supply. Even local authorities have to provide a five-year land supply. The Government have their disingenuous housing delivery test—it is disingenuous because it seeks to punish local government for the lack of delivery of homes, over which it has no power, and not over the number of planning applications granted, over which it has power. Perhaps the Government should revisit their own Letwin review.

Add to the pot the fact that we have a public who sometimes seem to have gone from nimbies to BANANAs —build absolutely nothing anywhere near anybody—as a glance at any local news media will prove. Yet, when knocking on doors and talking to people, once they have got their, “We don’t need any more flats, and no one can afford these homes anyway” off their chest, their heartfelt concerns are usually around the quality of the environment: “Too many cars. The traffic is a nightmare. Where will I be able to park?”, or “I can’t get my child into the local school” and, “My GP waiting times are far too long because they have so many patients on their books”. These are the soft infrastructure issues yet they are very important to the public, for obvious reasons.

From my local government perspective, the Motion calls for land-use planning to be integrated with other land-use activities. At the moment, we have no regional or sub-regional land-use planning, so there is nothing to integrate anything with. That might seem like a statement of the obvious, but the scaffolding that might support such a proposal has been lost to us over the last decade or longer, to the detriment of wider place shaping and planning across a much larger economic region. In short, we have become too parochial, which can work against changes for the greater good. There are too few opportunities for too few councillors to engage with these bigger and broader issues in their area.

It seems that many of the problems associated with planning have arisen because strategies have not been based on a wide enough area. This is most apparent in two-tier areas, where each council has its own local plan, yet the reality of issues and problems to be addressed can cover three or four, or even a whole county or wider economic region.

I still have the scars from trying, while I was mayor of Watford, to work across borders with several authorities around a wide range of issues, where the provision of new infrastructure needed to be built in one area to serve, as they saw it, the needs of another—I would say of the wider area. The recent emphasis on making efficient use of brownfield sites has pushed the level of housing growth in Watford upwards to the sky, so a new secondary school is needed, which cannot be met within the town’s narrow boundaries. We already have a primary school where there is no play space for the children, except on the roof. But when it is proposed in the neighbouring districts, there is opposition on the grounds that, “It’s Watford’s problem. It’s their children.”

There are ways to resolve this, and sometimes it works better than I have portrayed, which is why I am particularly interested in the outcome of the powers and freedoms given to regional mayors and city regions in this regard. I wonder whether there is any possibility of expansion and further development.

“What about the duty to co-operate with each other?”, you might ask. It is well documented that the duty to co-operate does not operate as effectively as it needs to in practice—or indeed at all. However, there is a pressing need for it to be replaced with a new mechanism to deliver joined-up thinking and action for climate change, transport, infrastructure, housing provision and nature recovery. Does the Minister yet have any idea whether that duty will be changed, strengthened or weakened in the new reforms? Finally, why not have a national spatial framework?

Building Safety Defects: Costs

Baroness Thornhill Excerpts

Monday 18th October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My noble friend is right that we need more detail. Details of the residential property developer tax will be announced at the Autumn Budget on 27 October, so we will have to wait till then. However, I want to make it clear that the figure of £2 billion over 10 years is an absolute minimum and I hope that we will go far further than that when the rates are finalised.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

As has already been stated, social housing providers are having to pick up the bill for all of their properties. These sums are having a significant impact on their budgets and are detrimental to their ability to provide more, and better-quality, social housing going forward. Are the Government monitoring the impact of this on providers’ budgets, in particular the opportunity cost that is lost to the sector, and looking at how this will affect their ability to do the jobs that they want to do to improve their social, affordable and supported housing properties in the future?

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, we are working very closely with the sector. I point out that there was a £400,000 fund specifically for providers in the social sector to remove aluminium composite material, the most serious form of unsafe cladding. In addition, where social landlords are thinking of passing costs on to leaseholders, there is an opportunity for them to apply to the building safety fund, which many of them have indeed done.

Supported Housing: Funding

Baroness Thornhill Excerpts

Tuesday 14th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, as I set out in my original Answer, the focus has been away from ring-fencing of funding, but of the £12 billion that has been provided during this pandemic for local councils to deal with the pressures, £6 billion was non-ring-fenced, and a lot of that money can be prioritised for the issues around housing-related support services to ensure that the quality of the services can be continued.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

My Lords, there is genuine concern among councils that there is abuse of the exempt accommodation status, which grants housing run by a supported housing provider additional housing benefit. Does the Minister agree that, to do right by the majority of good providers, more must be done to increase the transparency of such accommodation costs and to give councils greater flexibilities and powers to act against those who are failing their most vulnerable tenants? Does he have any feedback from the supported housing pilots that were working on this important issue?

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

The noble Baroness is right: we are concerned about quality issues, and that is why we carried out some pilots in Birmingham, Blackburn, Darwen, Hull, Bristol and Blackpool. We do not have the results from those pilots, but that is why we invested £5.4 million—to ensure that there is no drop in quality.

Mortgages: EWS1 Form

Baroness Thornhill Excerpts

Tuesday 29th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, that is quite right: we have committed to a £700,000 funding scheme to train up to 2,000 surveyors. That has already begun, and I will write to the noble Lord with the precise number that have been trained up to this point. We have also announced a bespoke insurance model to ensure that professionals have access to professional indemnity insurance cover. Details will be published in due course.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD) [V]]

At the heart of this is a very simple question, which I do not believe the Minster has actually answered: what action do the Government intend to take in the event that mortgage lenders continue to insist on this form being obtained for buildings that do not actually need one, according to the RICS criteria, with sellers finding themselves in a classic Catch-22 situation?

Housing: New Developments

Baroness Thornhill Excerpts

Thursday 17th June 2021 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Thornhill]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government how their proposed changes to the planning process will ensure that the public is supportive of new housing developments.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper and declare my interest as a vice-president of the Local Government Association.

[The Minister of State, Home Office and Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (Lord Greenhalgh) (Con)]

We know that the planning system has a poor record of community engagement and can often be adversarial. That is why our reforms have effective engagement at their heart. By ensuring that communities are meaningfully involved in preparing plans and local design codes, they can have real influence over the location and design of development. This will be supported by digital transformation, with new tools to make planning more transparent, accessible and engaging.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD) [V]]

I thank the Minister for what he said, but could he explain how involving the public only every five years when a plan is drawn up, alongside so many sites under the new reforms having automatic permission in principle, will restore trust and confidence in the system? As a former council leader, how does he think this will work in reality years later, when work actually begins?

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, it is not just involvement in the local plan that happens every five years but producing the design codes. But, importantly, communities will have a say in detailed aspects of planning applications.

Town and Country Planning (General Permitted Development etc.) (England) (Amendment) Order 2021

Baroness Thornhill Excerpts

Tuesday 8th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

My Lords, I too declare my interest as a vice-president of the LGA. I have a very strong sense of déjà vu, or Groundhog Day, because here we go again. This is of course a key issue for us on this side of the Chamber, because, despite overwhelming evidence from an amazingly wide range of sectors and professional bodies, apart from cutting red tape and speed, there are no compelling reasons to bring forward another raft of permitted development rights removing the need for full planning permission. Perhaps the Minister could enlighten us. This considerable disquiet has changed to a rather loud chorus of bewilderment and disbelief that these PDRs continue to be brought forward without even an attempt at an impact assessment or evaluation.

Much of the detail has already been given by my noble friend Lady Pinnock and the noble Lords, Lord Kennedy and Lord Berkeley, on the level of parliamentary scrutiny and the undue haste to bring these changes into law under the negative procedure, which leaves a debate such as this the only route for any scrutiny. We on these Benches are by no means unsympathetic to the aims that the Ministers claim for them, but these proposals will not in any way contribute to those aims—quite the reverse. Paradoxically, we are likely to see property owners taking the quick and easy option of a change of use via PDRs, when a greater involvement by the local planning authority might have helped achieve a wider and more comprehensive scheme that would further the Government’s stated objectives. Among local planning officers, there is already anecdotal evidence: “Oh my God, if only they’d come to us first, we could have made this better”.

We also believe that this continuous erosion of the ability of communities and their local elected representatives to contribute to the shaping of the places they live in is damaging to democracy and ultimately counterproductive. People already feel disempowered by the planning system—you need only attend a local planning committee to know that. Even if they are denied a role in the planning process, they will, thank goodness, find a way to make their voices heard.

Of the several aspects of this SI, I give full support and agreement to the position on statues, ably outlined by my noble friend Lord Paddick and the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Brixton. In line with our localist principles, we believe that this is a matter for local communities to decide. We have heard from my noble friend Lady Bakewell about the potential loss of health centres and nurseries, and the danger that this will be exacerbated if such facilities can be converted to residential use without permission. We have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, extremely practical examples of how Whitehall does not always know best.

I would like to focus on further conversions to housing on the high street. The debate today shows that opening up high streets to property speculation—which is what this is—is a misguided attempt to answer current challenges that have existed for years and have been exacerbated significantly by Covid and by changes in our shopping patterns. We believe that it will only worsen the ingrained inequalities that have been so starkly exposed by the pandemic.

Back in 2019, the Housing, Communities and Local Government Select Committee produced a report on the future of the high street, which argued that the Government should suspend any further extension of PDRs, pending an evaluation of their impact on the high street. And here we are again. It is clear that this united opposition to the extension of PDRs, backed by evidence, has simply been ignored by the Government, apart from some small changes, such as that the homes created now should contain a window. It is too late for those that I brought to the attention of the House two years ago—the notorious case in Watford—but it is progress.

Changing the face and fortune of a town takes years. I know, because it was one of my primary objectives for 16 years while Mayor of Watford. Put bluntly, it is hard-going and requires building enduring partnerships with different stakeholders—easier said than done with the competing aims and demands from all those with a legitimate interest in the high street—and genuine community buy-in, as many of the changes are very significant, which is never easy to obtain and even more difficult to hold over time. Most of all, it needs a plan, resources and time. It flies in the face of all my experience that a planning free-for-all is the answer to that problem.

I am also concerned by the implication in these proposals that local authorities do not know what their high streets need and are not already working to produce good solutions. Good councils have long recognised that housing in a town centre is a good thing. They were at the forefront of recognising how repopulating town and city centres could turn urban decline into renaissance. They promoted flats above the shops, mixed-use development to create residential, leisure and community uses alongside retail, and a move to have activity in our town centres that was not just about daytime shopping and late-night drinking. It has taken years to get to that point in many a high street, including ours, and yet these proposals have the ability to undo that work.

Someone has to hold the ring for a whole place, not just think about making a fast buck from a single site. What will our high streets look like in five, 10 or 15 years’ time? How do we get there from here? We believe that these proposals undermine such strategic thinking, with a misguided attempt at a quick fix. They certainly undermine the democratic mandate of elected representatives.

These are big issues but, from my experience, PDRs have always had the potential to be controversial, and have been a source of anger and upset from affected residents. I have stood looking out of a window in a family’s beautiful home while having to explain that the significant extension their neighbour was building was legal, permitted by government rules and did not need planning permission, and that thus the council had no power to suggest amendments, let alone refuse it. I remember the look of incredulity on their faces. It was one small family home, but the impact on their enjoyment of it was huge. This is often the case, which is why council officers try to balance the needs of all parties and why obtaining planning permission has a useful and positive purpose, which appears not to be recognised by the Government.

Some of the issues the Government believe they are trying to solve are absolutely legitimate, and their views are shared by those on our Benches, but we are asking: why not allow people putting forward such schemes to apply for planning permission, as now? This would mean that genuine consultation can occur, and that planners and councillors would be able to do their jobs. It would help the Government’s professed objective of driving up quality and building beautiful. Prior approval gives officers a rotten job to deal with, knowing that they cannot really say no—after all, that is the purpose of these changes—and councillors still have to carry the can for a decision that they cannot influence or change. It is lose-lose for all but the developer/investor.

That is the crux of this issue, illustrated so well by my noble friend Lady Pinnock, the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, and others. The Government have continually eroded the role of local democracy to decide on or even influence matters that suit the circumstances of its communities. We believe that there is more to come in the future planning Bill. All this is before we even get to the quality of the conversions, which were heavily criticised by the Government’s Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission, which concluded that they have diminished quality, delivered low levels of affordable housing and reduced developer contributions. It said that increased PDRs had “inadvertently permissioned future slums”. That was colourfully articulated by the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Brixton. There is very little time to talk about the impact on conservation areas.

We feel that these reforms lack the critical safeguards to prevent further damage to already suffering high streets by turning community amenities into often substandard homes. Those are some of the reasons why we wish to express more than mere regret at what is happening to our planning system and, more importantly, to our communities and our democracy.

Queen’s Speech

Baroness Thornhill Excerpts

Monday 17th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Thornhill (LD) [V]]

My Lords, this has been a wide-ranging and fascinating debate, and my contribution will focus solely on one aspect of the much-heralded planning reforms: public engagement, or the lack thereof.

I am certain, judging by the controversy stirred up by the release last August of the Planning for the Future White Paper and a wide range of ongoing consultations, that this will be one of the most contentious Bills of this Queen’s Speech. There will be ample time to dissect the Bill when it eventually comes before us, but I have huge concerns that the Government are taking neither the public nor their own MPs with them on this important journey to solve our housing crisis, and thus they are probably doomed to failure.

I have noted in the press over the last week that MPs from the shire counties are already organising to oppose these reforms. The Government have already caved in to these MPs by scrapping the algorithm that produced the new targets, so they got some reduction in their targets, while urban areas saw theirs increased. In Watford, ours have been tripled in recent years, resulting in our oven-ready local plan having to be scrapped and started again.

In my former position as an elected mayor, development was a very real and constant worry. Sadly, development management meetings were usually acrimonious, with the anger and bewilderment of the public evident. Their main cry was: “Why don’t you just say no?” As we all know, councils cannot “just say no” to government policy, yet, as was shown in the recent local elections, councillors of different parties and in different parts of the country are being punished at the ballot box for what is seen by their electors as overdevelopment.

Planning by appeal is not a sign of good governance, but it gets you on the side of the voters, with cheers at the planning committee, only for hopes to be dashed as inspectors overturn the decisions on appeal. Currently, about a third of appeals go in the developers’ favour, which in the Government’s eyes means that too many schemes are being refused that should be approved. Presumably it is to avoid that there are also plans to penalise local planning authorities when they lose appeals.

The planning reforms will further dilute democratic involvement. We believe that they are being introduced precisely because public engagement is difficult and challenging, and so the Government are finding ways of bypassing it altogether without actually saying so. Where are the plans to change this confrontational narrative and to press the need for more homes and for more appropriate housing, such as social housing, supported housing and homes for the elderly?

The reforms will mean that the future focus of local engagement in planning will be at the local plan-making stage, so communities will not be able to influence applications as they do now. Good councils already do this up-front consultation, so there is plenty of evidence that, while working closely with communities in the early stages can be positive, it does not preclude massive protest when a detailed application eventually goes in. It is doubtless this that has led to the Government’s presumption in favour of development in the zoning proposals. There is ample evidence that zoning has not worked in planning previously, so where is the evidence that it will work now?

Development within growth zones will receive automatic outline consent, while renewal areas will have presumption in favour of development. As a result, there will be no opportunity for either public consultation or assessment by local authority councillors or officers. According to the White Paper, public involvement will be limited to

“detailed matters to be resolved”,

rather than on a particular building or development and whether it is appropriate in its local context. This, alongside proposals for faster decisions on planning applications, and further expansion of the controversial permitted development right, leaves far less room for local input into individual decisions and is an erosion of democracy within the system.

Finally, development is always bound to be controversial. People are never likely to be thrilled that the attractive fields that their garden backs on to are to become a housing estate; nor that low-rise town centre offices are to be demolished to make way for something much taller. But, as things stand, we have a broken national conversation about development in which local authorities, planners and councillors feel as though they are everybody’s scapegoats, whether for building too little or too much. If the Government are serious about solving our housing crisis, they must first convince the public that there is one. That key issue is ignored in this Queen’s Speech.