Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Debate between Lord Banner and Lord Carlile of Berriew

Committee stage
Tuesday 9th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 185SA. I have put my name to a number of other amendments; I support those and welcome the speech made by my noble friend Lord Crisp. He referred to this as the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Levitt, and I should say of my noble kinswoman that 48 hours and about 31 minutes ago, she was asked to go on the Government Front Bench and by the time we got here yesterday morning, it was too late to remove her name from the amendment in the conventional way. But what I have learned in those 48 hours and now 32 minutes is that if at home you say, “Yes, Minister” often enough, you can get your own way much more than you used to.

My intellectual inspiration for this amendment comes in fact from a man, a wonderful friend, David Levitt OBE, who is also my father-in-law. He is a very distinguished architect who, recently, in his 90th year, was given a lifetime award by the Architects’ Journal for his service to social housing, and I pay tribute to his work. I know from my time as a barrister and part-time judge and as an MP how inadequate housing—the lack of a decent home in which to live—blights the lives of all too many of our fellow citizens, and all too frequently plays a large part in their coming before the courts, so to me, decent housing is essential to the reduction of crime, especially among adults. In four words: “Good housing brings justice”, and this amendment is designed to achieve that on a large scale.

What is striking about this otherwise inspiring Bill is that it says little about the design—the architectural design—of the 1.5 million homes that the Government are going to build. I think we all agree that nobody wants to build badly. National planning policy already makes it clear that poor-quality design should not be allowed. Yet the general quality and design standard of much volume housebuilding in this country continues to be poor. I spoke earlier about financial irregularities, but it is not just that; it is the way in which the thinking about building takes place that leads to poor design. Not only does that affect the people inhabiting the houses, it contributes to local dissatisfaction with local government and opposition to further development. So, while there is widespread support for streamlining our slow and expensive planning processes—words I use cautiously with the noble Lord, Lord Banner, in the Chamber—there are legitimate concerns about the quality of new development if existing checks and standards are weakened.

There is widespread disquiet about whether the housebuilding industry has the ability or the incentives to make the change needed to deliver both the quantity and the quality of homes that are required. If it does have the ability, is it willing to make that change? The problem lies not with national planning policy, which is pretty clear. The fact that the guidance is currently under revision demonstrates ongoing commitment by the Government to achieving good design. In my view, the difficulty lies at local level. As a result of the erosion of skills over time, inadequate training, which has been discussed earlier, and pressure on budgets, few planning authorities have sufficiently strong policies and processes to allow them to require effective change confident in the knowledge that they will be able successfully to resist planning appeals.

Without enforceable design standards, local authorities have no firm policy footing to reject inadequate schemes, so such developments are frequently approved on the basis that they meet housing needs. Thus, an all too familiar scenario is that outline planning permission is sought and granted on the basis of some attractive early visual impressions, but where all the important design matters are reserved and thus the images produced in fact have no contractual force. Because of national housing targets, councils feel under pressure to approve outline permission. The site is typically then sold to a housebuilder and later the reserved matters submission proposes a generic design based on standard house types on a typology that has nothing to do with local circumstances and places too much emphasis on roads and cars and too little on people and their needs.

What we are trying to achieve is that if somebody lives in new-built social housing, they will say in the years to come, “I come from such and such a place”, and they will try to live there for as much of their life as is economically possible. When the final scheme looks nothing like what was promised, many residents and councillors feel misled, and this leads to a built-in resistance to future applications. To allow this situation to continue would, I suggest, be a betrayal of the excellent vision which has led to the promotion of the Bill.

The good news, as this amendment reveals, is that no radical change is needed. The tools already exist within the existing planning system. All we are proposing is basically a tweak, an adaptation which will set the threshold for good-quality design and will give the already excellent national standards more traction at local level. Doing this will embed consistency and predictability, which will help local authorities, the community, developers and landowners. Consistency and predictability will simplify and thus speed up the planning process and reduce the need for appeals. Thus, the quid pro quo for housebuilders is that those which comply will get their planning permission much more quickly and will therefore be able to maximise their profits by building well within the permitted period.

Simply, what this amendment proposes is a code of practice which requires a set of templates incorporating core design standards. If these are given greater weight through the National Planning Policy Framework, that will make it easy for local authorities to apply the principles at local level. This amendment has been developed with a team of leading architects and planners whose publication, Placemaking Not Plotting, will probably be published tomorrow—I have actually seen a draft of it during the debate.

Once these core quality standards are embedded at local level, local authorities should require compliance with them at the earliest practical stage in the planning process and ensure that they are not left to the reserved matters stage. Clear, predictable and measurable design requirements would enable officers to sign off significant components of planning applications, leaving much-streamlined areas which would then be the subject of proper democratic debate and decision-making in the council chamber—proper local accountability but much more quickly and efficiently. That is exactly what the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, would love in his council chamber in south Norfolk, and he would have good cause to speak of it proudly in this Committee if so he wished.

So enacting a code of practice would allow applications which demonstrate compliance with the standards to be processed speedily within the current system. The promise of speedy approvals will provide an incentive for housebuilders to incorporate these measurable standards in their application.

The aim of this amendment is to find a practical way to use the best of architecture to provide the best in housing design quickly and efficiently. I hope that this approach will appeal to the Minister, who has such long experience of local government and the planning process and has demonstrated extraordinary understanding of it to us in the Chamber in recent days. I observe that this amendment is one of several related to design and quality, and I urge Ministers at least to include the basis of our amendment as part of the planning procedures at local government level to follow this Bill.

[Lord Banner (Con)]

My Lords, I will say a few words in support of Amendment 132 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, concerning the purpose of planning. To my mind, there would be some advantage in following the precedent in Scotland, where a similar purpose clause exists in its planning legislation. It would provide a guiding light to remind everybody involved in the planning system what planning is for and why we are doing all this.

There are two advantages in practice to this. First, it would remind those responsible for planning decision-making that that is not only about those who shout loudest, who very often tend to be the vocal minority as opposed to the silent majority who may wish to live in an area, and work in the area, but cannot find or afford a home there. It would provide a daily reminder that planning is about long-term public interest and not short-term expediency. For reasons I outlined in a previous debate, it would—in combination with the proposal for a statutory chief planning officer that was discussed in the debate on my noble friend Lord Lansley’s amendment—buttress the independence of professional planning officers from undue influence. That would be all the more important in the world where the national scheme of delegation exists, to give full effect to that scheme and for it not to be undermined by undue pressure from members or officers. I have a few quibbles with the drafting—that is not for today, but maybe something we can take up later. I urge the Government to consider this amendment very carefully.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Debate between Lord Banner and Lord Carlile of Berriew

Committee stage
Thursday 4th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Banner (Con)]

My Lords, as this debate has progressed, there has been increased heat and perhaps a commensurate decrease in focus on some of the issues that were raised. I hope noble Lords will appreciate that I chose my own words extremely carefully when I outlined my legal views on the consequence of these amendments.

I reiterate that one of the key issues of the status quo is the uncertainty due to the fact that currently, there are no bright lines as to whether a change from hotel use to asylum accommodation or an asylum HMO is or is not always a material change of use. There is an advantage in having certainty one way or the other, and I am very deliberately not expressing a view on which way or the other it should be. It is simply that the ambiguity is deeply unsatisfactory. I stress that the extent of that ambiguity has increased in recent years, months and days. The case law—not just in the Epping case, but in earlier judgments by Mr Justice Holgate, which were earlier in the High Court concerning Great Yarmouth and other locations—has developed in such a way that the uncertainty has got greater, which has exacerbated the problem. Very respectfully, I invite any remaining speakers to deal with that point objectively and in a focused and unheated manner.

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

My Lords, I agree with the noble Lord, who brings to this House a greater knowledge of planning law than the rest of us added together. It is absolutely right that there is uncertainty, and the uncertainty should be resolved by the Government having a look at whether the changes that he has suggested need to be made, not by the amendments that have been moved. What we have heard this afternoon sounded much more like the other place in action, where constituency issues have been brought to bear to try and deal with what really ought to be rational arguments.