Queen’s Speech

Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts

Monday 17th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful for this opportunity to raise a couple of points regarding the gracious Speech in today’s debate. One is minor and the other is a little bigger. I hope that the Minister will be back for the bigger one because, every time I raise it, we never engage with each other.

The first point relates to the introduction by the noble Lord, Lord Greenhalgh, who spoke about—and I support him all the way—the need for decent, safe and well-designed homes, in the context of the planning Bill. Many people have followed the Government’s exhortation to stay at home, work from home and travel less. These are some of the important messages that we have been getting, and I declare an interest here: I live on a private estate where a lot of the younger people have stayed at home and converted their attics into working rooms. But they have a problem. They have local authority permission to do that, but they cannot get past the management board, which has restrictive covenants saying that they cannot touch the tiles on the roof. They cannot install a simple VELUX window, which would give light and air to a working space. In many instances we have people working in unfair conditions because of these restrictive covenants.

My question is whether this issue has been examined in the context of the planning Bill. If not, will the Government look at it again? Can we not adopt a more reasonable approach, rather than some of the nimbyism we encounter on issues such as this, whereby people’s health and well-being is being damaged by the enforcement of aesthetic views of what a roof should look like? A simple little VELUX window should not offend anybody.

My second point concerns the wider context of the future of God’s planet. I have had a number of exchanges with the Minister recently about the growth of the world’s population. This is the most fundamental issue relating to climate change and the unsustainable position in which we find ourselves. The Chinese are complaining that their numbers are growing in the order of just over 5% only, and they want to see bigger growth. The Pope has been complaining that young girls are not having enough babies, yet we are living in a world that has grown from 1.7 billion, when the Duke of Edinburgh was born in the early part of the last century, to 7.4 billion. All the projections are that, unless there are fundamental changes, we will be heading towards 10 billion, which many say is unsustainable. The planet cannot support it.

I have been trying to get answers from the Government on the extent to which they will engage in a discussion with people of influence. Why is this issue not on the agenda for COP 26? They engaged Dasgupta to report on biodiversity issues, but he spent several pages looking at world population and the absence of policies on it. I again ask the Minister: when will we have a debate on this fundamental issue?

I know that this is difficult and extraordinarily sensitive, but there are two people in the world who could greatly influence the course of events. One is the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church and the second—and he has made a very good start as a new President—is President Biden, who is a Roman Catholic too. They should engage in discussion about the fundamental issues of contraception, abortion, dying with dignity and so on. I know that these are difficult topics, but we cannot run away from the fundamental problems we face in this world of ours. There are other major ethical issues which require a deep-seated examination of where we have been going and why we have ended up in the mess we are in. I hope that the Minister can give me hope that some thought is being given to how we might have worldwide engagement on this issue. If we do not, the state of the planet will get even worse.