Building More Homes (Economic Affairs Committee Report)
Baroness Young of Old Scone Excerpts(7 years, 8 months ago)
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Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)
My Lords, I declare an interest as chairman of the Woodland Trust and president or vice-president of a range of wildlife and conservation organisations. I very much welcome this report from the Economic Affairs Committee—particularly the focus on enabling local authorities to retake their place as providers of social housing for a range of tenures, including rent. Then there is the proposal that local authorities are given the power to levy council tax on developments that are not completed in a set time period. The report is very much complementary to the report of a year ago by one of the ad hoc Select Committees—the Select Committee on National Policy for the Built Environment, on which I had the privilege to sit. I do not know whether we had slightly longer than the Economic Affairs Committee to wait for a response from government, but it was 10 months during which I reminded the Government pretty well monthly that time was ticking away—but it came.
I want to raise two economic points germane to both these reports. First, I echo the contribution of the right reverend Prelate on the need for houses but not at the expense of quality. The report on the built environment stressed that the quality of our housing and other development is vital in creating places that foster health and well-being that are environmentally sustainable. If we do not achieve that, we could fail to get value for money and we could build ourselves economic and other problems for later years.
There is a lot of evidence to be worried about on quality. First, new homes in the UK are now smaller than anywhere in western Europe. I used to visit friends in the Netherlands and think secretly, when they were showing me great hospitality, “I could not live in these little boxes”. In many cases, those are now our little boxes. I suspect when I look around that noble Lords are old enough to remember the Pete Seeger song in the 1960s about,
“Little boxes made of ticky tacky”.
According to the RIBA, half of homes built in the UK fall below the Government’s space guidelines. That is particularly so the further north you go in England. I welcome the commitment in the housing White Paper to review space standards, but we cannot continue in a situation where they are to all intents and purposes voluntary. Can the Minister comment on the prospect of statutory space standards?
Another example of worries about quality is with design and the process of design review, which is faltering and patchy as local authority resources diminish. Inadequate care has been taken to ensure access to green open space, which the evidence increasingly shows is good for physical and mental health and cheaper than the NHS. The Government’s Natural Capital Committee estimates savings of £2.1 billion in reduced health treatment costs if adequate green open space access is provided. That committee has also calculated that if 250,000 additional hectares of woodland were planted in and around towns and cities, it could generate net societal benefits of £500 million per annum. So the evidence is there that the quality of settlement and design is fundamental to value for money. We have heard in the news recently about the quality of build of some developers, which really does reinforce the worry that they are all “made of ticky tacky”. I am sure that many of them are not, but we need to make sure that we maintain the quality of build. It was distressing to hear about poor experiences of the NHBC in helping house purchasers who had bought substandard houses.
A common theme in the evidence that we received during the built environment inquiry—I am sure that it was the same with the Economic Affairs Committee—was how under the cosh local authorities feel, faced with the need to deliver plans for ever rising housing allocation targets. This can result in poor location decisions, as local authorities grasp thankfully at large greenfield sites which offer big numbers of houses but raise major questions about transport infrastructure, access to jobs and sustainability, and eat away at formal or informal green belt. I very much welcome the Government’s commitment to the green belt in the housing White Paper but open countryside is also at risk. My overall point on quality is that we must not, in the dash for much-needed houses, make the mistake of building small, mean houses of patchy quality which are poorly located and create places which have no quality of place, do not promote well-being, are not sustainable and rapidly become the slums of the future. Will the Minister indicate how the Government can avoid the “stack ‘em high and sell ‘em cheap” philosophy?
That takes me to my second, linked point, which, again, chimes with the Economic Affairs Committee’s conclusions on planning reform. Time and again during the built environment inquiry we heard from planners, local authorities, developers and practically everybody about local authority cuts resulting in the loss of planning resources and expertise. We heard of planning departments struggling with few or no specialist resources such as heritage experts or ecologists. Two-thirds of local authorities now have no ecologist in their planning department. I very much commend the committee’s proposal that local authorities should be allowed to set and vary their own planning fees. I welcome the housing White Paper’s announcement of a 20% increase in July and the consultation on a further 20% incentivisation to local authorities which are actually delivering homes. However, we need something beyond this one-off hike and I would be grateful if the Minister would indicate whether there are long-term plans to give further flexibility to local authorities. The strength and expertise of planning departments is vital if we are to see well-thought-through local plans, good support to neighbourhood planning and swift, effective development decisions.
If there was one overriding message throughout the evidence we heard from all sides during the built environment inquiry it was this: although many development proposals start off excellently, proposing quality places with good contributions to mixed housing, infrastructure and open space, there would then be a falling back. Developers would subsequently use the viability test to row back considerably from delivering these collateral benefits to simple housing numbers. Developers would come back wringing their hands and saying that they simply could not make the value proposition stack up to deliver all the promised goodies that secured the planning permission in the first place. Struggling planning departments, we were told time and again, would simply cave in, unable to challenge the viability test arguments of the better resourced developers with sharp suits and shiny consultants. The result was that the initially proposed quality of development simply disappeared. So we need strong, expert planning departments. Encouraging housing development must not be at the expense of quality of place or we will achieve poor value for money and many people in this country will live to regret it.
Lord Layard (Lab)
My Lords, as a member of the committee, I too thank our great leader, sitting in front of me. As has been said, the starting point for our inquiry was a very remarkable estimate that is widely accepted—that, simply to stop real house prices and rents from rising further, we need not 200,000 homes a year but 300,000, just to stop things getting worse. However, surely we want things to get better, so we need more than 300,000 homes a year to make the target of an affordable housing sector a reality. That means a massive housing boom over 15 years, as the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, has said—that is what we have to generate. We have to ask ourselves what conditions could generate a continuing housing boom—not little tinkerings but the fundamentals for generating such a boom. However, I do not think that we will get the answer to that unless we understand the fundamentals of our present situation, which is really quite remarkable.
Real house prices and rents have trebled over the last 30 years—it has been said that that is completely out of line with the experience in the rest of the world—yet the number of houses built by the private sector is the same as it was 30 years ago, so there is no response. You would have expected those extraordinary prices to generate an extraordinary supply response but that has not happened. If you look for explanations, you can find little ones that might apply in one year or another, but surely the fundamental explanation must be the planning system. The planning system determines the supply of land on which the houses are built and, if the supply is restricted, the real price of land goes up. So what has happened to the price of land? It has more than quadrupled. In fact, in terms of the constituents of the price of housing, the whole increase is due to the increase in the price of land. Therefore, I would like to talk about land and planning.
There is only one way that we can describe the present situation, which is that it involves a major disregard of human need. For example, if a hectare of land is worth £2 million when it is used to provide homes for people and with its existing use it is worth only £20,000, that simply disregards the simple evidence of human need. What is the value of the land to society with one use as compared with another? The only exception to that being an outrage would be if one could show that the amenity value of the land with its existing use was as high as the price of the land if it provided homes. That might be the position sometimes but certainly not in an awful lot of cases at present.
How can we improve the situation and unleash the energy of the housebuilding industry? The key is to make it easier to get planning permission. It is that simple and, unless we face up to that, we will not start from the central analysis of how we have reached where we are. In particular, we have to make things easier for small and medium-sized builders, who have been pushed out of the market mainly by the complexity of the planning system. We have to get them back in to create this boom. Therefore, I want to make two suggestions for liberalising the planning system and generating the boom.
First, there has to be in the system more presumption in favour of development. I think that the Government have used that phrase sometimes but it has to be made real. One possibility is to focus on areas where the price of land is very high and therefore the evidence of human need for houses is very strong. You could say that in areas where the value of land was above £2 million, there would be a presumption in favour of development, and the local authority could refuse it only if it could persuade the inspector that the amenity value of the existing use exceeded the value of the land if it were used to provide houses. I would not suggest that as a universal arrangement, and certainly not in areas of the green belt that were open to public access, for example, but I shall make a few suggestions as to where you could start.
One obvious starting point that has been suggested in some reports is on land near railway stations. I think it has been suggested that if we could build up the areas within two miles of railways stations in commuter reach of big cities, we could have an awful lot more homes. Another suggestion would be parts of the green belt lying inside the M25 but without public access. There is an awful lot of land without public access inside the M25. I do not know whether your Lordships know this extraordinary fact but if only 10% of the green belt inside the M25 were developed, this would provide 1 million homes. It is important to get these things in perspective.
Baroness Young of Old Scone
I have recently chaired a conference on the green belt for Greater London. It was startling to see just how the proposition that my noble friend is putting forward works in practice. The reality is that, if we are to make London liveable in the face of climate change, we need to maximise the benefits of the existing green belt to deliver heat reduction, water protection, flood risk management and access to open spaces, otherwise we will see the heat impacts on London of increasing temperatures from climate change. As far as I am concerned, the secret is not to build lots of houses on the green belt but to get the green belt to work for its living in all these aspects. Two-thirds of the green belt being inaccessible to the public is something to change, but it does not need to be built over.
Lord Layard
I am grateful for that. I am a bit more hopeful about dealing with climate change by electrifying the economy with clean electricity rather than by failing to give people homes. I think that we can make progress without expecting people to go into ever more expensive properties. I was very encouraged by what the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, said about the green belt. It is true that attitudes are changing, and that is very helpful.
Of course, we understand that local authorities have political reasons for not wanting to give planning permission. We always remember how Aneurin Bevan got the National Health Service set up by stuffing doctors’ mouths with gold. It still seems to me that we ought to allow local authorities to have a higher fraction of the financial uplift that occurs when they give planning permission, and we should then insist that they use that for housing purposes. My colleague Professor Cheshire at the London School of Economics has suggested a levy on the final value of a completed development, combining that with the change in presumption that I referred to earlier. There are many areas in which these ideas can be explored. The committee took no view on these issues but it made a clear recommendation that the Government should examine these proposals. I hope that the Minister can confirm that his admirable colleague Mr Barwell will be doing that.
We should recognise that we are suffering from a self-inflicted wound. We have inflicted it on ourselves mainly through the way in which we have operated the planning laws. Other countries have much less of a problem because they have not done what we have done. It is a case of the triumph of the few over the many. The distributional impact of the planning system is one of the most powerful sources of inequality in our society, and I think that we will satisfy the needs of the many only if we are honest about the origins of our present situation.
Health: Diabetes
Baroness Young of Old Scone Excerpts(8 years, 1 month ago)
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Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen
The noble Lord is absolutely right: a key issue in dealing with diabetes is education. We have put together several packages. For instance, Public Health England, NHS England and Diabetes UK are working together on Healthier You, which seeks to educate people who might have type 2 diabetes. We are also looking at how we can get to these people in different ways, such as web-based approaches, apps and joined-up thinking. It is sometimes difficult for people to get to clinics, and it might be easier for them to look at digital or the web.
Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)
My Lords, in the face of investment in diabetes care and the strong priority being given by the Government to multidisciplinary teams for foot care, why can there not be a directive from the Government to ensure that all CCGs commission to that standard? Currently, two out of five patients are not seen within the recommended NICE guidelines on treatment for foot care. Unless local health economies are required to deliver to that standard, I believe that we will continue to see loss of feet as well as a huge increase in costs to the NHS. What are the Government going to do to make this a universal provision?
Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen
As I said, we are encouraging all NHS trusts to take up the multidisciplinary approach. We are disappointed in the take-up, and we think there are several reasons for it. The Department of Health and Diabetes UK are working together on ways to improve the take-up of structured education and considering more diverse provision in this area. It is also important to remember that a lot of people, when they go to see the doctor, do not say that they have a problem with their feet. We need to educate healthcare professionals to be able to ask the right questions, one of which should be not, “Have you got any problems?”, but, “Do you have a problem with your feet?”. A lot of people are embarrassed to say that they have a problem, so education could be done on both sides.
Housing and Planning Bill
Baroness Young of Old Scone Excerpts(8 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord Porter of Spalding (Con)
My Lords, I refer the Committee to my pre-declared bunch of interests. I do not know whether I have to declare them again—someone will have to explain the rules to me.
I am sure that noble Lords will be surprised to hear that I am not that bothered whether local government has to face competition in dealing with planning decisions. On the basis that they already cost local government a fortune, I would be very surprised if, under the current fee structure, anybody from the private sector came anywhere near them. So I see this part of the Bill as a chance to get value for money for councils and, if the private sector does get anywhere near it, we will be able to get an increase in planning fees. Therefore, from a councillor’s point of view, I welcome the competition because it can only drive prices up, not down, and in this case I am happy with that.
I should point out that the comments of my noble friend Lord Carrington about those producing the planning report being involved only in the mechanics of the process does not give the whole picture. There is a presumption in favour of development, so somebody will have to recommend to the committee either that the application complies with a presumption in favour and therefore it must be granted, leaving the matter to be democratically argued, or that it should be rejected because it is not sustainable development. Whoever prepares the report, whether they are independent or council-based, must come forward with a recommendation to either grant or refuse, but the final decision must be made by politicians who are accountable to the affected community, and something needs to be put in the Bill to make sure that that is explicit. I am not sure whether these amendments do that but the Government will need to ensure that it is done somewhere.
I am making a brave step out, as I am going to try to take on one of the big beasts for a bit of sport. My noble friend Lord Deben talked about attaching farm fields to gardens not being a problem and being fairly straightforward. It would be fairly straightforward if gardens did not then become previously developed land and thus brownfield, leaving them more susceptible to development in areas where that might not necessarily be sustainable. Before anyone on the other side laughs, they need to remember that under the brownfield policy vaunted by the previous Labour Government, 60% of the brownfield land that they managed to develop during their time in office was reclaimed garden land. So there is a good reason why councils are very cautious about changing use from farm fields to garden land.
Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)
My Lords, I recognise that it is late in the day to be contributing to this amendment but I have put my name to an amendment in the very last group, so I am simply delaying myself getting home. I want to remind the Committee about the findings of the Select Committee on the Built Environment, on which I have the privilege to sit, and the very worrying evidence that we heard from planning departments across the country about their ability to recruit experienced professional planning staff and about their viability for the future.
I absolutely support the concerns about this proposal, and I think that Amendment 102D is well worth supporting as a safeguard in terms of the moral hazard issue, but I think that we also need to take account of the fact that at the moment there is a real shortage of suitably skilled and experienced planning staff. If we set up alternative economies in a commercial planning capability, we will find that local authorities are rapidly hollowed out in terms of their planning capacity. It is very close to that at the moment. They have next to no specialist planning skills in heritage, environment and other areas. They are finding it difficult to afford planning staff of their own. So in this proposition we need to take account of the viability of planning departments for the future if skilled and experienced staff are likely to be attracted towards a commercial planning capacity in a competitive sense.
We also need to think about whether we are trying to solve the right problem. There is a real issue about the quality and capacity of planning departments across the country. We saw in our work with the Select Committee impressive alternative models. Local authorities gathered together to create more critical mass and to allow themselves to maintain a range of specialist planning officers. These authorities had voluntarily contracted out their planning support to commercial organisations.
Importantly—and here I disagree violently with the noble Lord, Lord Deben, a rare event in my experience—the planning authority was very much in the driving seat. The worry I have about these proposals is that if you are paying a fee to a commercial provider of planning-support services you will expect them to be on your side. They will be professional and I hope that a quality-assurance process will be put in place to ensure that professional standards are maintained.
As the noble Lord, Lord True, said, the reality is that when you are in front of the jury you will have your man arguing your case, not the local authority’s man helping the local authority’s elected officers take a dispassionate look at what the decision in the public interest should be. As I say, I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Deben. I am a great fan of the planning system, which is one of the last genuinely democratic processes in this country. It is the responsibility of the local authority and the officers who support it to take a decision in the interests of the local community, balancing all the economic, social, environmental and other issues. I fear that if we do not handle this set of changes carefully we will find that we have tipped the balance too far in the direction of the developer.
Lord Shipley
My Lords, I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone. I have two amendments in about half an hour from now and I am conscious that we have reached a point where virtually all the issues around Clause 145 are being discussed. The noble Baroness has rightly identified that the balance is about to be tipped. I hope that the Minister, in replying to this debate, will answer the question posed by the noble Lord, Lord Beecham: what exactly is the problem that the Government are seeking to solve? Unless the problem is properly defined, the solution can ultimately give rise to a whole set of new problems that have not been forecast.
There is a real issue about being able to dissociate the democratic decision from the designated person who is writing the recommendation. This was put so well by the noble Lord, Lord True, who rightly defined that the process of making a decision is dependent on what the person who writes the recommendation actually says. It is a whole and a continuum. It is not a function separate from making the decision.
A further issue of major concern to me relates to what the noble Lord, Lord Deben, was talking about earlier. It is wrong in principle to privatise public regulatory services. That is now happening. There are issues around cost, as to whether it would be more expensive to go down that route, but the principle of a planning decision in practice being privatised is a major issue about which we must be very careful. A designated person who is writing a recommendation has to be independent and to be seen to be independent.
I have concluded that Clause 145 is now not fit for purpose and should be withdrawn in its entirety. If the Government can explain how they can bring it back at Report better than it now is, meeting the public interest test of independence, we might be willing to look at it—but at the moment I see no evidence base that convinces me that Clause 145 should remain part of the Bill.
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
I am sorry, but I do not think that the noble Lord understands exactly what I am saying. I would be grateful if we would allow business to continue. We do not normally close until 7 pm, and it is not 7 pm.
Baroness Young of Old Scone
My Lords, I have my name on one of the last two amendments and seek clarification from the Government Chief Whip. If it is being proposed that our amendment will take place on a Committee basis on the first day the Bill is dealt with when we return, and that we will then move to Report stage and have a chance at the end of it to re-debate that amendment if we choose to bring it forward at that point, having had the benefit of the Minister’s response, fair enough. But if we are simply saying that when we get to the relevant point in the Bill on Report, Committee rules will apply, I am afraid I cannot personally undertake not to put forward the amendment.
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
I will be very happy if we resolve all these amendments this evening, but it has been suggested that we will not do so because of the pressure on time. It is up to the House to decide how it deals with this matter, but I hope that noble Lords will take my advice. There is very little left to do on this Bill in Committee—please let us continue.
Baroness Young of Old Scone
My Lords, I am conscious of the fact that noble Lords are dying for me to shut up, because I am probably all that is between them and going home. But I think that this is an important issue—and it is important for two reasons. I rise to promote Amendment 119 in my name and support Amendment 120, proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Krebs. There are 4 million people at risk of surface water flooding and climate change, and increasing urbanisation will make that worse, so it is a really important issue. More important is the fact that this Parliament agreed the Flood and Water Management Act 2010, which included provisions for sustainable drainage—but the relevant sections have not been commenced. I am very ambiguous about the Government’s habit of not bringing into being the will of Parliament. Instead, they have decided to rely on planning measures through the NPPF and have provided two pages of non-technical standards to guide developers.
The presumption in planning that sustainable urban drainage should be included in new developments is not working. It has created uncertainty for developers and created a diversity of interpretation of what is acceptable. Planning authorities—poor souls—are leaned on to ignore it if developers suggest that the costs of providing sustainable urban drainage affect the viability of the development. Local planners at the moment have neither the expertise nor the time, and cave in under these viability challenges.
As the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, said, the planning rules include no structure for formal adoption or long-term maintenance of sustainable urban drainage schemes, which has been a problem for years, with schemes being created and then left orphaned with nobody to look after them and make sure that they continue to be safe and effective. Of course, it is not just about sustainable drainage and flood protection. There are also potential additional benefits of amenity, water quality and biodiversity that have not been garnered.
I had the privilege of talking briefly to the Minister about this and she indicated that the Government’s intention was at least to run the scheme on the planning presumption basis for two years while it was monitored. My further inquiries since meeting her have revealed that no body has been charged with keeping these records—so I am not clear that the Government will be able to say at the end of the two-year period that the scheme is or is not working.
So far, the evidence we have been able to glean from people such as members of the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management—of which I should declare that I am an honorary fellow—is that the situation is now worse since local flood authorities took over responsibility for surface water drainage. Noble Lords have heard the figures from the adaptation sub-committee and the quotation from Barratt Developments that about one-third of its developments do not include sustainable drainage.
We appear to be fiddling while Rome burns in anticipation that at the end of two years, we will be better informed, when in fact the figures will not be available to demonstrate whether it is working. We should press for the implementation of Schedule 3 to the Flood and Water Management Act. That would fulfil Parliament’s will, cost no more than conventionally engineered drainage systems, help reduce flood risks and the costs of flooding, provide improvements in water quality, biodiversity and amenity and give developers a degree of certainty.
In the interest of brevity the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, said she would not list the diverse range of expert bodies. I will list but a few of them: the Institution of Civil Engineers, the Royal Institute of British Architects, the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management, the Construction Industry Council and a few others—I have forgotten what the acronyms stand for, so I shall not bore noble Lords with them. We should re-enact your Lordships’ previous support for this provision, which is enshrined in legislation.
I support the interesting Amendment 120, which was tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Krebs. When I first read it and was asked to support it, I was slightly wary because it seemed to be a bit bonkers. But, having thought about it and having read it in detail, I think it is one of the more cunning pieces of win-win, incentive-based legislation I have seen for many a long year, in that it would mean that developers would have to think harder about developing more flood-resistant properties and about developing on less flood-prone sites in a way that would not require any cost from them provided they did it well. That is what a good amendment looks like, and I commend it to the Government.
Lord Deben
My Lords, I declare an interest as chairman of the Committee on Climate Change, and I rise to support these two amendments. They are both based upon advice given to the Government by the Committee on Climate Change. We are talking about a very serious issue. Tens of thousands of houses have been built on flood plains and in circumstances which are more vulnerable than Cockermouth. This is serious. If we go on like this, we will be creating problems which we will have to meet. We cannot avoid it. This is going to happen. Not to do in this Bill what we can do is to avoid an opportunity, to the detriment of very large numbers of people.
The Adaptation Sub-Committee of the Committee on Climate Change told the Government that there are a number of simple things that should be done that could help protect us in future. For example, water companies are not at the moment compulsory consultees to planning decisions, which means that they are in the very peculiar position of neither being able to comment under the statute on a planning decision, nor being able to refuse to connect the houses then built to an inadequate sewer. We have to put this right. When the committee suggested this to the Government, their official reply was that it would be inappropriate to do this. The word “inappropriate” may have been the right word before the floods in Cumbria, but to suggest that it is inappropriate to do this is stretching the English language beyond any possible appropriate use.
My noble friend may be unable to accept these two amendments at the moment, but it seems to me that it would be pretty impossible to explain to the public that we are prepared to continue with a position in which houses are being built without proper and adequate means of getting rid of the surplus water that they create, and without proper protection of the surplus water that is created outside. These amendments make sure that we have modern, sustainable drainage in a form which this House and the other House have already agreed, and which the Government support. Secondly, they ensure that developers have a duty to develop in a way that makes houses resilient to the normal circumstances of life.
I can think of no more moderate or reasonable amendments to put down, and I remind the Minister that they are based upon the advice of the body that spent a great deal of time researching independently what should be done. Therefore, if she is not able to accept them now, I hope she can give us some hope that between now and Report, the Government will take this opportunity to do two very simple things which will save maybe the lives—and certainly the property and the future—of a large number of people.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
My Lords, I shall deal first with some of the latter remarks. Following December’s floods, it was clear that the rules that we thought applied did not apply, and that what we thought were blip events were becoming trend events. Therefore, there were lessons to be learned from both last year’s floods and the previous one-off-event floods. Following the December events, we established the National Flood Resilience Review, led by Oliver Letwin, to assess how the country could be better protected from future flooding and increasingly extreme weather events. This review will identify any gaps in our approach and pinpoint where our defences and modelling need strengthening, allowing us to take prompt action.
I understand the intention behind Amendments 119 and 120, but Amendment 119 seeks to place unnecessary provisions into the Bill, as national planning policy has already been strengthened to deliver sustainable drainage systems, and there would be problems with implementing the second proposal.
On Amendment 119, following enactment of the Flood and Water Management Act 2010, proposals to implement the provisions under Section 32 and Schedule 3 were put out to public consultation. The response to that consultation gave rise to a number of issues. These included the potential impact on the delivery of new development under a system that required the approval of sustainable drainage systems under a consenting regime separate from that for approving planning applications. There were concerns that this could add undue delay to the consenting process and impact on the speed of planning decisions.
The coalition Government listened to that response and in the autumn of 2014 put forward for consultation a new proposal to make better use of the existing planning system to deliver sustainable drainage systems, otherwise known as SuDS. In the light of the response to that consultation and a subsequent government announcement in December 2014, national planning policy was strengthened with effect from April 2015. The strengthened policy makes clear the expectation that SuDS will be provided in all major new developments, such as developments of 10 dwellings or more, unless demonstrated to be inappropriate, and it ensures that clear arrangements are in place for ongoing maintenance over the lifetime of the development.
This strengthened policy applies alongside the existing policy expectation that SuDS will be given priority in new developments in flood-risk areas, as well as the drainage requirements of building regulations. Despite the strengthened planning policy, the amendment would require provisions for a new consenting regime for sustainable drainage systems to be brought into effect before important provisions in the Bill could come into force.
We need to give these new arrangements time to show that they can work effectively. We are meeting key stakeholders to gauge their views on how the changes are bedding in, and we will undertake similar reviews at intervals in the future. The noble Baroness, Lady Young, asked where the reviewing process had got to. As I said, we have taken the views of key stakeholders and we intend to have a more in-depth review in a year’s time, which will be two years post change.
Baroness Young of Old Scone
Can I prevail upon the noble Baroness to write to us indicating which stakeholders she has taken views from? The evidence that we appear to be getting from stakeholders is that it is not working.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
I will certainly do that. We would also welcome suggestions from the Adaptation Sub-Committee based on its ongoing evidence gathering, as that would obviously help to build up a fuller picture.
Baroness Young of Old Scone
I am sorry to prolong the sitting but I should declare an interest as a former chief executive of the Environment Agency. The point of sustainable drainage systems is not necessarily about the location of development, which the sequential test that the Minister has just described attempts to deal with, but about the fact that increasingly with climate change we are seeing much heavier downpours of rain in rather random places that fill the drains up and flood no matter where you are. I have a house on top of a hill. Two Wednesdays ago a lake that had not been there for 50 years appeared as a result of torrential downpours of rain in Northamptonshire. It is that sort of situation we are looking for protection against in sustainable drainage systems. That can happen virtually anywhere. Were the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, in his place, he would testify to the fact that in the big flood of 2007, Sheffield did not flood as a result of the river but as a result of the drainage system. Protection against that is what we are looking for in the sustainable urban drainage package.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
I completely take the noble Baroness’s point, but I reiterate our point that local planning authorities are expected to steer new development to areas at least risk of flooding. That is not to say that we will not have one-off events. Nowhere is safe from that sort of one-off event.
Charities (Protection and Social Investment) Bill [HL]
Baroness Young of Old Scone Excerpts(9 years, 2 months ago)
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Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)
My Lords, I am very grateful that the noble Lord, Lord Low, said what he did. I declare my interest as a former charity chief executive and having had a connection with the charity sector for many years; and as a regulator on four separate occasions, though not in the charity sector, I can speak on regulation with some insight.
There has been a bit of a witch-hunt this summer. I am not saying that charities are getting it absolutely right, but there has been a huge focus on those charities that, from time to time, were getting it wrong, and on the admitted gross inadequacies of the Fundraising Standards Board. I do not quibble that we need an independent and effective regulator, but I hope that we are not going to be dragooned by the witch-hunt that the Daily Mail has led in quite an extreme fashion, to the point where charity fundraisers are now being followed around in the streets, in public places and in meetings of charitable donors and beneficiaries, just in case something can be picked up that can be used by the newspaper.
We have also had a bit of a knee-jerk reaction from some of the other players. The Information Commissioner is steadily redefining his position on data protection issues in charities, to the point where a charity now cannot phone a volunteer, who may have volunteered for that charity for many years, unless there is express permission in place that the charity may phone them. If they have signed up to the telephone preference scheme that would also prevent the charity from phoning.
We are in the position where some of the interpretation of the existing regulation is becoming incredibly counterproductive, to the point where my concern is that charities that are trying hard, that had good codes of practice, that have trustees who are interested and that enforce their rules with the agencies that work with them, are now being penalised. That makes their business not just of raising money, but of talking to their donors, who in many cases are also beneficiaries, more difficult.
I cannot support the amendments in the name of my noble friend Lady Hayter. The Fundraising Standards Board is so unfit for purpose that when the Government or the charitable sector make a decision following the Etherington review, I very seriously advise that they do not call it the Fundraising Standards Board, but that whatever new regulatory function comes forward is called some entirely new name. I would also be extremely nervous about enhancing the role of the Charity Commission in this area. I do not think, in the 45 years that I have been connected with charities, that I have ever seen a Charity Commission that feels more hostile to the sector that it undoubtedly is regulating, but which it is also there to promote and enhance. I believe that the Charity Commission needs to examine its soul on how it is currently behaving and how it has done for the last year.
I am sure that the Etherington review will talk a huge amount of sense. The noble Lord, Lord Wallace, and the noble Baroness, Lady Pitkeathley, both have in-depth knowledge of what they are talking about and are people of huge stature. I hope that whatever emerges from the Etherington review can go forward on a voluntary rather than a statutory basis. I believe that charities are very willing to look at how the public can be reassured. However, we need to make sure that all these changes, and all the anxiety that has been evinced over the summer, do not result in our lurching to a position where charities incur considerable costs in ensuring compliance with a statutory regulatory regime. Right regulation may not be light regulation, and therefore may involve considerable compliance costs. The one thing we do want to make sure is that charities are able to carry out the huge amount of work that they do for the public good in the best, most effective and publicly acceptable way, and in a way that has least dead-weight regulatory cost, because that is in the interests of the beneficiaries we all serve.
Lord Lexden (Con)
My Lords, as a former general secretary of the Independent Schools Council, I wish to add to the comments of my noble friend Lord Moynihan to underline the seriousness with which the council takes the obligations and undertakings that it has given during our debates, and to make clear that it looks forward to remaining in touch with those Members who take an interest in its affairs as it seeks to build up the not inconsiderable partnerships that it already has with state schools and local communities to the benefit of all three participating parties.