Queen’s Speech

Baroness Young of Old Scone Excerpts

Monday 17th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I declare my interests in several environmental charities as listed in the register. I am very glad that the Environment Bill is finally going to be with us in this House, as was announced in the gracious Speech. It was first promised in July 2018, so we have been waiting quite a while. I hope the Minister can assure us that it will receive adequate time in your Lordships’ House, even though the Government are keen to get it onto the statute book before COP 26, because the Bill still needs improvement.

The state of nature amendment, which was well aired in the other place, needs to return to provide for statutory measurable targets and interim targets for biodiversity to match the statutory targets we have for climate change, and to enshrine in law a commitment to a 2030 target to halt and reverse biodiversity decline. The Environment Bill also needs to provide overdue statutory protection for ancient woodland. It is a disgrace that, in reality, ancient woodland has only permissive protection, as provided by planning guidance. We need similar protection at a statutory level, as is currently given to sites of special scientific interest, and I intend to put down an amendment to that effect. We also need a statutory basis for the England tree action plan, the publication of which—as I understand from the Minister, who very kindly saw me last week—is imminent. For the England tree action plan to fulfil its name, we need it to be actioned, and a statutory basis would mean that that would be more likely. I would also like an assurance that the Bill will give proper priority to native woodland and does not end up overfocusing on commercial forestry.

Perhaps the most important thing, as we see the Environment Bill proceed through this House, is to help the Government join up two very important pieces of legislation in the Queen’s Speech. The planning reform Bill is not yet published, and I share the suspicions of my noble friend Lady Jones of Whitchurch. Rumours abound that it will designate land in a topdown way as either to be developed or to be protected, and it will leave local communities powerless to do anything to stop inappropriate development, other than making sure the damaging development looks lovely in accord with the local design code. That is not very much; you can put lipstick on a pig, but it is still a pig. If the planning Bill is not to counteract completely the protection provisions of the Environment Bill, we need in statute measures to link and harmonise these two pieces of legislation.

The Environment Bill needs to give a legal status to local nature recovery strategies, for example, so that plans, planners and indeed developers have to take account of them. We need to enshrine this in statute, as I tried to do during the passage of the Agriculture Act. I hope noble Lords who supported me in that will join with me again, in trying to bring forward a land-use framework for England. The planning Bill sounds as if it will have an oversimplistic binary approach to land use: land is either worth protecting or worth developing. The reality is that the demands on land are multiple and growing: biodiversity, conservation, carbon sequest-ration, flood-risk management, other climate change mechanisms, water quality, food production, timber production, physical and mental health to name but a few. Land needs to be multifunctional and deliver a whole range of public and private benefits. We need a land-use framework to help optimise the use of land, which is a very scarce resource. We need to make sure that we recognise that a much more sophisticated and complex set of decisions needs to be made nationally and locally about land—far more complex than the Government’s oversimplistic planning White Paper envisaged.

I hope that the Minister can tell the House what co-ordination measures will be put in place between the Environment Bill and the Planning Bill, and whether the Government will introduce a land-use framework for England.

Gypsies, Travellers and Roma: Racism and Discrimination

Baroness Young of Old Scone Excerpts

Thursday 25th March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

I wrote to local authorities emphasising the need to take a negotiated, stopping-model approach, which has been taken up by a number of local authorities during the pandemic. I commit that the cross-departmental strategy will be forthcoming. Obviously the focus has been on the Covid-19 pandemic.

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab) [V]]

What note are Her Majesty’s Government taking, in respect of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, of the fact that over 75% of police respondents to the Home Office consultation did not support the proposed new criminal offence of trespass with intent to reside?

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

I note the points around that consultation, but 66% of local authorities that responded to the 2019 consultation were in favour of introducing a new criminal offence for those who reside on unauthorised encampments, and 94% supported one or more of the proposed amendments in the Bill under consideration.

Building Safety

Baroness Young of Old Scone Excerpts

Monday 22nd February 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

I thank my noble friend for making the point. It would be fair to say that the new tax on developers, details of which will be announced shortly, will include a number of the major developers historically responsible for high rises. She makes an important point that we should also consider the role of cladding manufacturers in this crisis. It is fair to say that, while developers have made good solid profits in recent years, the cladding manufactures have had healthy profit margins too. It is important that they are made to contribute to the resolution of the cladding crisis.

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab) [V]]

The Minister did not answer the question raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock. Post-Grenfell surveys have revealed other fire-related defects such as flawed fire separation. The leaseholders in these properties suffer the same problems of the inability to sell, high remediation costs and rocketing or no insurance. Yet the Government seem to be leaving it to leaseholders, building owners or somebody unspecified to pursue action against those who made the errors and omissions in the past. This is not good enough. What will the Government do to help these non-cladding victims?

Planning: Accessible Homes

Baroness Young of Old Scone Excerpts

Wednesday 4th November 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

I refer to my previous answer. The results of the consultation will be published by March 2021.

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab) [V]]

The Minister indicated that more homes were needed, as well as more accessible homes. We know that the viability test often puts the lid on accessibility being built into the equation by developers when they say that they cannot afford to provide these standards. Can the Minister assure the House that, in this consultation, the Government will not allow developers to hold them to ransom, as well as those in need of these higher levels of accessibility in their homes?

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, the Government recognise the importance of accessible housing for the elderly and the disabled. I point to the strengthening of the policy approach in the NPPF in July 2018 and in the planning guidance issued in June 2019 on housing for the disabled. These point to the direction in which we are travelling to ensure that there is enough accessible housing. As your Lordships know, we have been looking at Part M of the Building Regulations as well.

Town and Country Planning (General Permitted Development) (England) (Amendment) (No. 2) Order 2020

Baroness Young of Old Scone Excerpts

Tuesday 27th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I am honoured to follow the excellent maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Sikka. He has had an acknowledged academic career, during which he has relentlessly shone a clear spotlight on the self-interested behaviour of various corporations that are acting against the public interest. He has shown how they have often been unchecked by the accountants and the banks—truly, as he said, the dark side of capitalism. His lifetime of working for justice in the taxation and accountancy fields will be of great value to your Lordships’ House, and I look forward to working with him.

I also welcome the opportunity that the noble Lord, Lord German, has grasped in bringing forward his concerns. These statutory instruments reveal how the Government have become excessively fixated on housing delivery in their approach to the planning system, almost to the exclusion of all other issues. According to a government response to a parliamentary Question, these instruments are aimed at reducing planning bureaucracy and speeding up housing development. Now everyone in this House recognises the need to build more houses of good quality in the right place, and which are, above all, affordable; but we also know that laying the blame for lack of housing delivery at the feet of the planning system is a wrong premise. There are already over 1 million houses that have been granted planning approval which have not yet been built and will not be built for many years, as developers build out sites sparingly to avoid reducing housing prices locally—the exact opposite of what the Government are trying to achieve.

These statutory instruments are also harbingers of the sort of stripping down of the planning system that the Government’s overall planning reforms, which are currently out for consultation, will bring. Those proposals will considerably reduce the say of local people over what gets built and where in their local area. The planning system used to be one of the few forms of genuine democracy in this country, balancing competing local development needs and making decisions locally. But local authority planning departments have been hollowed out, denuded of specialists and hounded by an unholy alliance of government and housebuilders to give in to any housing development that will help them meet the government-imposed housebuilding targets.

These targets are now highly questionable. Covid has radically changed the view of many people as to where they will want to live and work remotely. The targets are based on estimates of population growth, which included 5 million net additional migrants to this country—and that is now highly unlikely to happen on this scale. Surely the Government need to reassess the housing targets urgently, if only to address the two issues of Covid and immigration.

We already build the smallest houses in Europe. The Government’s own review has revealed that housing built under permitted-development rights is of a worse than average quality. Can the Minister tell us what he plans to do about this, and what safeguards will be put in place to prevent this widened permitted-development regime building even more substandard housing? Can he also tell us how these statutory instruments accord with the Government’s stated desire in the planning system consultation for beauty, high quality and sustainability, when permitted developments are exempt from the local services infrastructure payments that are so often vital for enabling place-making and the development of sustainable, fair local communities?