Architects Act 1997 (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019

Debate between Lord Beecham and Lord Deben

Monday 25th March 2019 Grand Committee

[Lord Deben]

Well, if it were consulted, why is it not listed in the Explanatory Memorandum, as far as I can see? Perhaps I have misread it—I apologise to my noble friend if I have—but I think it says that the ARB was consulted, or that officials

“have been in regular contact with ARB”.

The ARB is constantly referred to, not the RIBA. I have declared my interest, but it happens to be true that the RIBA is the body to which most architects would look for advice and to which they have given their concerns.

As this is not going to be a both-ways arrangement and because the Government do not want a no-deal exit from the European Union—although what the blazes they do want is increasingly difficult to understand, and I suspect that the negotiations would have gone much better if people had known in the first place what they wanted, because clearly not until very recently did anybody know anything about what we wanted—can the Minister give me an assurance that one of the things we will be seeking immediately in negotiations for some sort of reasonable exit—which of course would leave us in a worse position than we are in at the moment—but even if that was so, would be to make this a reciprocal arrangement and that that reciprocity would be at least as good as the present reciprocity?

That leads me to my last point, which is on the Immigration Rules. The architectural profession is remarkably badly paid. If you look at the average wage of an architect, it is remarkably low for a member of a professional body. So I am concerned, as was the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, that we should not allow the Immigration Rules to interfere with our ability to recruit from the rest of Europe. It seems to me that this is a serious double jeopardy system. Why do we have to have these rules? Surely we could have had, in these regulations, a very simple system which said that if you got a job with a British architect registered with the ARB you would be able to have that job. Why do we have to double-do it? Is there not a much more sensible way, which is merely to do exactly what we do at the moment and say publicly that we would like this to continue to be reciprocal, although we do not have the ability to make it reciprocal ourselves?

I remind my noble friend of the figures that have been quoted: it is likely that one in four of architects in the London area come from the rest of Europe, so this is no minor matter. Therefore, I hope that we can have assurances that the Government will seek, under any agreement, to have reciprocity and, secondly, that the Minister will look again at the idea that we have to insist upon going through our immigration arrangements, when we could have a perfectly simple system, like the one we have at the moment. We should look very carefully at any income limit in any case because it is likely to affect newly-qualified architects from the rest of Europe in a way that would do our profession no good. It would interfere with, and indeed endanger, the very large amount of money that Britain earns through the primacy of our architectural profession. When you are talking about what may be £2 billion, you are talking about a very serious amount of money. If we cannot recruit newly-qualified experts from the rest of Europe to a shockingly underpaid profession, that would do us a great deal of harm.

[Lord Beecham (Lab)]

My Lords, not for the first time, Newcastle is united in this Grand Committee. I think we would both welcome the noble Lord, who has characteristically analysed the Government’s proposals in a very effective way.

This instrument will freeze the list of architectural qualifications that are recognised immediately before exit day in the event of a no-deal Brexit. As a result, an individual holding one of those qualifications will be eligible to join the UK register of architects if they have access to the profession of architect in their home state. This will allow access to the workforce of EU-qualified and EEA-qualified architects. The register of qualified architects of the UK held by the Architects Registration Board currently includes 40,650 members, 17% of whom were admitted under EU directive procedures. Given that significant number, it is astonishing that no impact assessment appears to have been prepared for this SI. The UK must of course continue to attract the best talent after Brexit and have an immigration system that responds to the needs of industry, especially in the context of the architectural sector. The London’s Architectural Sector report states that the city’s architecture industry is worth £1.7 billion and is growing at 7% every year. That figure is set against the industry’s total value nationally of £4.8 billion, a significant contribution to the economy nationally.

The SI makes little attempt to make up for the damage that the industry has faced since the referendum, which has caused an alarming amount of uncertainty for businesses in the last two and half years. Since the referendum, projects up and down the country have been postponed as this period of chaos has badly damaged the investment market. An article on Consultancy.uk referred to Global by Design, published in 2018 by the RIBA, which said that 68% of architects have already seen Brexit impact their revenue stream as they have had projects put on hold and moreover, crucially, that 74% of architects regard access to the EU single market as necessary if the industry’s international workload is to grow. Already 40% of practices have had projects in the EU cancelled since the referendum.

The regulations fail to protect the recognition of UK-qualified architects’ qualifications in the EEA in the event of a no-deal Brexit. Those architects will have to rely on the individual registration policies of the 27 member states. The Government must look to establish a new mutual recognition agreement with the EU as soon as possible in order to provide reciprocity, and a date for that would be very welcome. I will be interested to hear the Minister’s response on that issue.

The Explanatory Memorandum states:

“The applicant’s ability to establish in the UK will be dependent on Government immigration policies”.


However, the Government’s immigration Bill has stalled and a £30,000 salary requirement for skilled migrants has been suggested. How many architects from EU or EEA countries living in the UK earn more than £30,000 now? How many architects have already registered with the Government’s settled-status scheme? Being a tier 2 sponsor for those earning more than £30,000 is difficult for many architecture firms because the process is lengthy and expensive. Have the Government done any work with the sector and the RIBA to assess exactly how much it will cost and whether the sector can bear the cost? According to the RIBA, the number of EU architects registering to practise in the UK has dropped by 42% since 2016, and 60% of them here at the moment say that they would consider leaving. That would damage architecture as a service both in this country and abroad; it would clearly suffer.

Architectural qualification requirements are frozen during the review period. How long does the Minister expect that period to last? How will architects come and work in the UK with new qualifications during this period? Paragraph 2.14 of the Explanatory Memorandum states:

“After EU exit, the ARB may lose access to the Internal Market Information (IMI) system. This facilitates communication between competent authorities. As a result, this instrument places the requirement to provide written verification from their home competent authority on the applicant should ARB be unable to secure it directly from the relevant competent authority”.


What assessment have the Government carried out to determine the ease of getting this written verification? Does it differ between authorities? Paragraph 2.12 states:

“This instrument removes the registration route of General Systems, which enables EU and EEA applicants who do not meet the automatic recognition criteria to work with the ARB to map what experience they do have against the UK criteria, and gain the experience necessary”.


Will the ARB offer any additional help to get candidates to work in the UK?

Finally, what estimate have the Government made of Brexit’s impact on UK practices and individuals currently, or potentially, working in Europe? What steps, if any, are they taking to create a new system including a reciprocal system of accepted professional qualifications?

Greater Manchester Combined Authority (Functions and Amendment) Order 2017

Debate between Lord Beecham and Lord Deben

Monday 24th April 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Beecham (Lab)]

My Lords, I thought the Minister might have made a glancing reference to the present editor of the Evening Standard for his contribution in a previous life—well, not quite previous life, but shortly to be so—as the author of what is described as the northern powerhouse. Some of us, however, might regard it as something of a northern poorhouse in large parts of the area where there are very significant social problems.

The noble Lord referred to the consultation process, and it is certainly true that there was a process. I am not sure whether he is delighted with the response because, out of the 2.16 million people resident in the area, a grand total of 511 responded to the consultation—that is to say that there were 511 responses, although that does not necessarily mean 511 different people, since some of them may have replied to more than one of the propositions. It is not a matter that has apparently elicited any great enthusiasm in the area, although that does not necessarily disqualify the substance of the regulations from approval.

I would welcome comment on a specific issue. Paragraph 2.6 of the report that accompanies the order states that the Act will be amended to,

“provide that the Secretary of State may by order make provision for any function of a mayoral combined authority to be a function exercisable only by the Mayor and such an order may confer ancillary powers on the Mayor for the purposes of the exercise of general functions”.

On the face of it, that appears to give the Government the right to prescribe extra powers to the mayor without the agreement of the combined authority. Will the Minister say whether that is the case or, if not, assure the House and indeed the local authorities that that power is not to be exercised by the mayor without the consent of the combined authority?

[Lord Deben (Con)]

My Lords, I have raised this question before, but I do so again in the hope that this time the Government will listen. If one investigates these orders, in every case local authorities are being given powers that devolve to them choices and decisions that are more suitable for people living in the area. However, the other characteristic is that they enable local authorities to think in a much more holistic way to bring together housing, transport and planning. Yet as far as I can see the Government themselves are not learning their own lesson about how they do things in the centre. We still do things in the centre in precisely the siloed way that we are trying to avoid when it comes to devolution. We are about to have a general election, and this is an ideal moment for the Conservative Party, as represented by the Minister, to say that in future it will reorganise government so that government thinks in a non-siloed way.

I was rather unhappy with the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, which were a little curmudgeonly. After all, many of us have been looking for devolution for a long time. We thought that that was the essential way to reconnect politics with people; what they see in their locality matters a great deal. However, when we started to think about it we recognised that there was not much point in doing that if we merely replicated the siloed system at the centre. If in this most recent essay in better democracy we come to the conclusion that holistic thinking is the answer, should we not learn that lesson ourselves at the centre?

I hope that my noble friend will be able to say that he will take from this House the message to those concerned with the production of election manifestos—I hope the party opposite will do the same—that we all ought to be concerned with holistic government. If we have started to think in that way in relation to local authorities, we should do it at the centre was well.

[Lord Beecham]

Does the noble Lord agree that restoring the regional offices of local government, which the previous Conservative Government instituted, would be a helpful way of achieving the objectives to which he referred and with which I concur?

[Lord Deben]

I do not really want to politicise what is, I think, a generally accepted view about one successful and agreed part of the devolution proposals that we have at the moment. Let us keep to where we can be united and seek to get this Government and this Opposition in their various forms at least to agree on this simple concept. Let us have holistic government and not divided government.

Housing and Planning Bill

Debate between Lord Beecham and Lord Deben

Wednesday 13th April 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Beecham]

My Lords—

[Lord Deben]

I will give way to the noble Lord but I want to tell him a personal fact. When I was the Secretary of State responsible and worked out the lowest number of houses we needed, what did the Labour Party do? It denied that that was the number needed. Indeed, when the noble Lord, Lord Prescott, came in, he reorganised the figures to cover up the fact that I was right; we did need those houses. I do not think that the Labour Party, the Conservative Party or indeed the Liberal Democrats had anything to trumpet about in the past. We now have a Government who are actually trying to do something about it.

[Lord Beecham]

I do not for a moment disagree that insufficient numbers of houses were built, in particular council houses, under the Labour Government, but the massive investment in the condition of the housing stock under that Government should not be forgotten.

Housing and Planning Bill

Debate between Lord Beecham and Lord Deben

Tuesday 9th February 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Deben (Con)]

My Lords, I am so pleased to be on the same side as the noble Lord who has just spoken. It seems a frightfully good word, it says exactly what we mean and it would be very nice if more of our legislation used language which we understood. “Rogue landlord” is a very good phrase to use because it is very important to underline how disgraceful some people are in their treatment of other people in this crucial part of their lives. My only objection is that the word is not used more frequently within the Bill, because there are several references within it where a reminder that this is a rogue-like activity is very necessary.

My only other objection is that “rogue” has a certain rather light touch—it is not as nasty as a number of other words that were used. Perhaps if we had to change it, we could go through the list that the noble Lord has put forward and choose something that is thoroughly more unpleasant than the word “rogue”. However, I cannot imagine why anybody should start this very serious debate off with a discussion about the word “rogue”. This is one of the best things in the Bill. I may have to draw my noble friend’s attention to a number of other things later on as requiring significant amendment, and many things are left out of the Bill that I would like to see put in, but the one thing I certainly would not like to see left out is the word “rogue”.

[Lord Beecham (Lab)]

My Lords, I understand why the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, would not wish to be considered to be a member of the “Liberal Demotic Party” but we have more important things to discuss in the 14 groups that are before us. I trust that the noble Baroness will deal with the matter briefly, and then we can get into the substance of the Bill.

Local Government Finance Bill

Debate between Lord Beecham and Lord Deben

Monday 16th July 2012 Grand Committee

[Lord Deben]

My Lords, I rise to say a word or two about the disablement issues; that is why I have come for this part of the Committee. It seems to me that we have not covered the point properly. We have talked about the lack of thinking in the round, but we have not talked about the fact that it becomes more important given the circumstances that we are in at the moment. My 35 years as a Member of Parliament led me to have some pretty grave doubts about some of the claims that people made. You had only to sit in your surgery to see with what tiredness they came in and with what alacrity they left, complaining about some illness or other in the mean time. It was one of those sad things and it was a real problem. The Government—perfectly rightly, in my view—have approached that, and in doing so they have reminded lots of people that some people have claimed invalidity or impairment of one sort or another improperly. The difficulty with that is that it is necessary to put things right, but that creates an atmosphere that can be extremely deleterious to people who genuinely are disabled or in real need of help.

The points that have been raised on both sides of this Committee are very important at this time in particular. It is extremely important to get the balance right and to remind people, particularly local authorities—and some still do need reminding—of the very considerable difficulties in which many disabled people live and the need for them to treat these issues with a degree of sensitivity that I am not sure is found universally. I want to look at that background just for one moment.

Secondly—and I address my noble friend the Minister very carefully—it really is time that the Government got out of their problem; and it is genuinely a problem of all Governments. After all, the Government are telling everybody, rightly, that we should have joined-up thinking. We have pathfinder operations to try to get people to have joined-up thinking about property locally, local councils and government property and to try to get various organisations to work out their problems together. So we have a Government very keen on reminding people about this, and yet they still have not dealt with the central issue that we still have silos when it comes to this kind of issue.

I am interested in the comment that we all have to look to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the Institute for Fiscal Studies and others—it is hoped before but certainly afterwards—to see the real impact. The question that I really want to ask my noble friend is: will he take back to the Government, in his own inimitable way, the request that it is about time that they learnt from these outside bodies? Why have we had this kind of discussion for as long as I can remember in politics, both here and in the other place? There is nothing new about this. It has always been true.

Why is it so hard for Governments ever to learn a lesson such as this? I remember the difficulty when I was Secretary of State for the Environment of trying to get government offices to have all their area offices and headquarters of other offices in the same town so that you could actually get a job done. You often used to have to go to five different towns to make any kind of decision, and then you would discover that the area covered by each department was different, as far as that region was concerned. We got over one or two of the more extreme cases, but the thing that really worries me is that the conversation that we have just had—which, after all, has been most amicable and agreed on both sides—is one that we have had too often.

I wonder whether this Committee might be the one in which we could say enough is enough and that this is a matter for governments seriously to deal with. Otherwise, it does not matter who is on which side. We will go on having this discussion. If it is not about disability, it will be about something else where as similar problem arises—where the Department of Health, the Department for Work and Pensions, the department responsible for local government and everyone else have not really got together to see how their various concerns impact on particular individuals.

This is the effort of a long-time Member of Parliament and a very long-serving Minister to say that having failed myself, and being honest about that, do you think that we could on this occasion bring it home to someone who is very much above the pay grade of anyone in this Committee? This is something that the Government have to take seriously. It is very boring, constantly, to have this conversation, with good-hearted people on both sides of the House saying the same things and, in the end, knowing very well that it will not have the effect that we really want.

[Lord Beecham]

My Lords, this has been an interesting debate with some extremely perceptive contributions. I very much welcome the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Deben. He and I occasionally crossed swords during his tenure at the Department of the Environment, as it then was, but he was right to say that we need a balance in the view of claimants that is so often the focus of public debate in the media and, sometimes, by politicians. There are always some who abuse the system, but they are not by any means in the majority. There are many people who do not claim who should claim, whether it is for disability or other things. That reference to balance is highly desirable.

However, I am slightly nervous about his reference to government offices because there certainly was a problem and the Government have certainly solved it—they have closed them. There are now no government offices for people in the regions to go to. It has all been centralised. However, his fundamental point is right. The Government need and have failed, so far as one can judge in connection with the Bill, to look across departmental interests and the client groups that may be represented by various government departments.

It is interesting that there is no specific mention of disability or any other particular category in the impact analysis, although it is a significant element in the Bill, the Government illustrate only the impact on pensioners and other age groups. The analysis does not refer at all to disability as a specific issue and yet, as we heard from the brilliant forensic analysis by my noble friend Lady Lister, there is a huge problem that affects a variety of people with different disabilities and conditions, and of course their carers, which clearly must be taken into account.

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[Lord Beecham]

My Lords, we have had a longer and more entertaining debate than many of us thought we would have. We had the Browning versions, two of them, and we have had an interesting conflict between Norfolk and Suffolk. I hesitate to arbitrate between those two counties. In relation to the remarks by the noble Lord, Lord Deben, from time to time, I have been tempted to form a society for the preservation of the postcode lottery. In some areas of policy, it is absolutely the right line to take. We have had too much regimentation and prescription nationally about what should and should not be done.

However, we are not talking about policies here but about the people’s basic right to a minimum income. To take the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Deben, to its logical conclusion, we would have differential benefits across the piece. We would have different benefits for disabled people, pensions, child benefit and whatever up and down the country, determined locally. The noble Lord shakes his head, but where is the difference? The difference that he advances is that council tax is raised locally, but that is an irrelevance to the person looking at his disposable income that he has to deploy in support of his family. Where the localism part should come in—not the faux localism of the Poor Law—is that you would have a national basic minimum entitlement which, if the local authority thought it right, you could increase and enhance benefits. That would seem to be a reasonable application of localism because everybody is guaranteed a national minimum and locally the community may decide to augment it but, in our view, it should not be in a position to reduce it.

One of my noble friends, or perhaps the noble Baroness, Lady Browning, referred to Localising Support for Council Tax Vulnerable People. Paragraph 3.4, about equality information and engagement, states in connection with child poverty that:

“authorities will be required to take into account their local child poverty needs assessment”.

That is fine.

“Local authorities should be able to design localised council tax reduction schemes in a way that best suits local circumstances, tailored to what child poverty looks like”—

looks like—

“in the local area”.

I will tell you what child poverty looks like in any area. It is the undernourished child going to school, perhaps dependent on free school meals. These days, he may have to go to a breakfast club to get a breakfast. According to a recent survey, 50% of teachers are going into schools with food that they can distribute to the children. Child poverty is children going badly clothed, living in fuel poverty so the house is cold, and perhaps with dysfunctional families, although that is, of course, not simply a financial matter. This can occur anywhere. These children can be found in the city that the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, and I have represented and led and in the city that the noble Lord, Lord Smith, still leads. They can be found in villages in Suffolk, I guess, and in Norfolk, and in Kensington and Chelsea for that matter. They can be found anywhere. As my noble friend said, it is not locality that determines the character of poverty. It may possibly exacerbate a basic condition of poverty, but locality is not the determining condition, and it should not be locality that determines the basic support given to children in poverty or, indeed, to any other vulnerable group. To say that this is somehow an issue of localism is to pervert the proper definition of localism. The noble Lord has advanced a weak argument—from the best of motives because, in policy generally, he has a strong point. But in this area it is entirely misconceived.

[Lord Deben]

Let us take child poverty of the kind that the noble Lord described which is certainly true in some of our villages in Suffolk. It is up to the local authority to decide whether it is going to spend its resources making sure that those children all have a hot meal and all have breakfast rather than by having a special element in the council tax arrangements to deal with that. If the noble Lord feels that there is not enough elbow room for local authorities, I wish he would listen to his noble friend’s comments, because it seems to me that we should be pushing for many more opportunities for local people to have the resources to do the things that matter. How you deal with poverty in very distant rural areas is very different from the way in which you deal with it in Limehouse.

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[Lord Deben]

They do have control over it—they have an election. If they do not like what the county council has done they can vote against it. If the noble Baroness is really saying that the only system that people can understand is a single-tier system, she is making a mistake that is very much wider than this. Many people know which do what, and, if they do not like what one of them does, they vote against them in the local election, as we all know.

[Lord Beecham]

Does my noble friend agree that although there is a significant reduction in the amount of central government support for the benefit, it is still approximately 90% government funded? So it is going towards a council tax, but the funding is still essentially central. Unfortunately, some more of it will fall on the locality as a result of what the Government are doing, but the greater part is still centrally funded.