Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Fuller Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 17th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Parminter (LD)]

My Lords, in the absence of the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, who had to go back to Cornwall this afternoon, I speak to his Amendment 301A, which is very simple and straightforward. It basically makes the point that the money that the developers pay should go to the schemes that they are expecting to come to fruition and should not be used by the Government, as too often happened in the past, to reduce the core funding of the department or, in particular, that of Natural England.

The noble Lord, Lord Teverson, was hoping that the Minister might be able to give from the Dispatch Box some reassurances that that would not be the case, and equally—although I know the Government cannot ring-fence—that the Treasury will not try to claw back any of the additional money that has gone to Natural England for funding of the delivery of the EDP, when developers had given it in good faith.

The noble Lord very much wanted to support Amendment 309, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Gascoigne. I do so too—and not just because I am a resident of Surrey.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, we are really getting under the bonnet here, looking at the minutiae of the EDP, and we are missing the bigger picture.

I speak in support of the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, on Amendment 307A, and Amendment 256, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Roborough. We find ourselves in this situation because the organisations with the statutory duties, powers, staff, income and systems to clean up our rivers, in so far as nutrient neutrality is concerned, have not been doing so. Defra, the Environment Agency, Natural England, the water companies in particular and the drainage boards are all in scope. They have got their job, but they have not been doing it.

I am concerned about the levy. We are talking about how we are going to charge this levy, but we are not really talking about where the money is coming from to deliver the EDPs. In effect, Part 3 lets these statutory undertakings off the hook. Instead, it falls to those people who do not have the powers or responsibilities, such as councils and local developers. If my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe was in her place, I am sure she would intervene and tell us that it will also fall to the small builders and small companies that spend money in local supply chains and so on. Here, we have the ultimate moral hazard; it is the reward for failure.

I do not deny that the costs of these EDPs could be apportioned appropriately across the canvas that is required for the purposes of the EDP and in proportion to the number of units it is going to sell. However, I am disappointed that the Bill does not require those with the responsibilities—Defra, the Environment Agency and so forth—to have the first pull. It is an omission, and one we should place on the record and return to later on Report.

I want to question the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell. He talks about the surplus. In a previous group, I explained how I have been involved in this for some time. There will be no surplus, because we are talking about 80-year tail liabilities. The money that is ponied up front to deliver an environmental improvement is going to have to be jam-spread over 80 years, in the case of nutrient neutrality, or 30 years, in the case of biodiversity net gain, and whatever other regulations come along. We are not going to know whether there is enough money in the kitty until year 79. I do not think this is fully understood.

Other noble Lords in previous groups have given numbers. Earlier, the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, spoke about £1,900 versus £2,300, and he was concerned—on the current account, if you like, or this year’s P&L—what the extra margin might be. But there has been a fundamental misunderstanding of how the accountancy works. That is why I wanted to explain it in an earlier group, and why I will talk about it in a later group when we get to private involvement. We need to have proper accounting standards for how we will approach accounting for these 80-year tail liabilities.

Nevertheless, until we do, when we are setting this levy it should be on the basis that those who are required to and paid to do this work should carry the first burden. Otherwise, small family building businesses will be cross-subsidising the large water companies which raise business water rates and should be upgrading their own sewage plants. Instead, the owners and purchasers of new homes—young families trying to get their foot on the ladder—are, in effect, going to be cross-subsidising. EDPs should be explicit in asking those who are paid and have the duty to do this work to do it first, and then, if there is any requirement left over thereafter, that has to be apportioned to the developers and, in due course, passed on to the purchasers of new homes.

In this group we have really only scratched the surface as regards the costs, accountancies and financial models. We need to do a lot more work on this, otherwise the money will run out in year 42 or 52. It does not really matter when, because we are not going to get to year 80, and, in the meantime, the costs of EDP and annual inspections, renewals and accountancy and everything else have not been factored in at all. This is not at all straightforward. As we get to Report, we will have to dig much more deeply into who pays, who should pay, and how we are going to value these tail liabilities. It is almost an actuarial problem. Until we do that, there will be no money to go back to anybody.

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

Very briefly, I found that a fascinating exposition and would happily discuss it further outside the Chamber with the noble Lord. The logical corollary of it is that it is therefore almost impossible to calculate what the levy should be, because you are dealing with unknowns into an 80-year period. But let us not discuss it now—let us move on.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

I think that the Minister has just confirmed exactly what I said, which is that if there is any money left over, it will be spent on some other good stuff. That is rather unfair on the developer who has paid for something, and now the excess that was not spent is being used on something else.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

I have listened very carefully. The developer knows what he has paid for. The developer has bought something. The developer has purchased an 80-year project, but he has not bought anything until year 79. I We have to get our heads around the money side and the financials—we are not going to know. I will dwell on this a bit more on a later group. The suggestion that someone has bought something and it is done and dusted on day one is a false premise; we have to understand that.

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

The noble Lord and I are starting to repeat ourselves, so perhaps we can talk about it outside. However, that is not the reply that the Minister has given me.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I am greatly concerned that the Bill potentially freezes out the role for private sector providers, thus stopping the flow of investment into nature. That said, I was mildly reassured by the letter that came this morning. Nevertheless, I am anxious that the proposition is that Natural England will become a monopoly consolidator and provider of mitigation solutions—with the dead hand of the state. This Bill should define how private operators can work alongside Natural England to address the market for mitigation.

In an earlier grouping, I explained the distinction between permitting and licensing. In my view, licensing is the way to go for the EDPs, not least because it will prevent the derivatives—secondary markets that enrich speculators at the expense of delivering the outcome. We cannot afford to create a new milk quota disaster with the creation of a collateralised asset class that has everything to do with speculation and nothing to do with nature recovery. That is not an argument against private involvement; it is an argument for channelling and regulating what is a fast-developing industry.

I support Amendments 258 and 268 because they seek to put in place how we deal with private industry and how Natural England is required to engage with it. This Bill should set the terms of trade. How will those 80-year-tail liabilities be secured? What step-in rights will there be in the event of the provider going bankrupt? Will the obligations be characterised as in Section 106 or as a land charge at the Land Registry? The Section 106 route has criminal and prosecution routes in the event of non-compliance, but a land charge is an unenforceable civil matter subject to litigation. How we deal with these will be very important and needs to be in the Bill.

I spoke about these tail liabilities. I have some experience with this, as I declared earlier. I am a director of Norfolk Environmental Credits Ltd, the device through which the local councils in Norfolk manage environmental credits. We are subject to international accounting standards. We need to take into account our covenant strength. I do not believe that this has been thought through at all. We made about £5 million-worth of sales of credits to local developers, but the balance sheet value was nil because we had to discount that income over an 80-year tail. I see my noble friend Lord Mackinlay nodding. He is a tax man and understands these things.

The interplay between the P&L and the balance sheet is something that the Bill has not contemplated at all—and it must. Unless we include sensible benchmarking accounting standards to value the upfront contributions against those tail liabilities, we will never give confidence and clarity so that schemes can be consistently compared. None of this essential detail is contemplated by the Bill but it should be.

This is before we get to private industry having a role in the pricing, and the heroic assumption that Natural England, as is anticipated, will be able to deliver mitigation more efficiently than a competitive, healthy private sector. Given the monopolistic nature of the state-owned mechanism for charging, and the speed at which the large bureaucratic organisations operate, this completely unqualified assumption seems tenuous. There are obvious conflicts of interest and susceptibility to legal challenges through those conflicts. How is Natural England going to kitemark private proposals? What protections would private operators have against predatory pricing or the loading of legal contractor inspection costs on to innovative solutions, with the only opportunity for these private operators to appeal being against the organisation that is trying to eat their lunch?

We need the innovation of private providers so that we avoid muddled thinking. I am delighted to see the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, in his place. He characterises as eco-zealots those who order the use of bat bridges, the eye-wateringly expensive bat tunnels—each of which was a colossal waste of money —or the sloppiness of the designation of land at Ebbsfleet as unfavourable when it was not unfavourable.

We need a streamlined process where developers can work with landowners to propose and have certified good schemes delivered in local markets at sensible prices—especially now that we contemplate that hundreds of these EDPs may be produced. While Natural England is focused on its own proposals, we need to give comfort to private operators that their applications will be dealt with promptly rather than them submitting the ideas and not having them taken seriously by Natural England. That is no way to proceed. We need to establish contract certainty, the legal basis and the enforceability of these projects, with the assurance that the mitigations will be delivered over the liability period.

Failure looks like packaging and collateralisation of these schemes into another subprime crisis. We must guard against that. The private sector has a role and can and should work in tandem with Natural England. But all this counts for nothing unless the terms of trade are set.

I have other things to say but, given the time, I will stop there. The Bill needs to state explicitly that the private sector has a role to play. But Natural England should have a statutory duty to actively assist competition in this space in a prompt and timely manner, even if it is at the expense of its own proposals.

[Lord Inglewood (CB)]

My Lords, as I listened to this debate, I thought that everybody was talking about it from the perspective of the person who does the work. The prime focus of what we are discussing should be the best outcome for nature. The most choice available to help nature is the route we should go down. Therefore, we should not exclude any possibility of all kinds of commercial arrangements that may surround this, some of which, particularly given the points drawn to our attention by the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, we may not yet even have thought of. We should keep every option open to ensure that the outcome for nature is ultimately the prime consideration.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord. He makes a point that I missed when I turned a page in my notes. Essentially, we are creating financial instruments with muddy wellingtons attached. We need to think about that balance as we contemplate how the Bill will work in practice, with those 80-year requirements to keep and maintain these projects contemplated by the EDP. It needs a change of thought.

Certainly, international accounting standards will be at the front of our mind. This is the sort of question that actuaries at life insurance companies are employed to handle. They know that they have a liability and what sum of money is needed up front to deal with it. That is not contemplated at all in Clause 59. It needs to be. That is the point I am trying to make. The state cannot do it itself—it needs a flow of private money coming into this space to benefit nature, but one that has its feet on the ground and where the numbers add up.

[Lord Roborough (Con)]

My Lords, my Amendment 318ZA seeks to ensure that farmers and farmer cluster groups are permitted by Natural England to apply to the nature restoration fund and actively participate in the delivery of conservation measures required under EDPs. This is a straightforward but essential point. Farmers are not just stewards of the countryside. In many cases, they are the very people who are best placed to implement and sustain long-term environmental outcomes.

If we are serious about delivering the ambitions of the Bill, we must make full use of the capacity, expertise and local knowledge of the farming community. Allowing them access to the nature restoration fund is not only fair but practical, efficient and better for nature and, to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, expands choice.

One of the many concerns that I and others have expressed about Part 3 of the Bill is that it disenfranchises the private sector, which has been developing BNGs to aid developers with the mitigation hierarchy. I appreciate that the Minister has suggested, and probably will again, that EDPs are intended to operate alongside the existing structures and to engage with the private landowner and farming community. But it is far from clear how that will work and it does not appear to be in the Bill. However, this amendment encourages Natural England to define the EDP that it is seeking to deliver and allows the private sector to offer solutions on commercial terms. The amendment has very considerable merit, as it guarantees the involvement of the private sector and takes pressure off the underresourced NE to design the EDP and deliver it. At a time when budgetary pressure and government decisions are seeing funding to the rural economy reduced in real terms, I hope the Minister will welcome this or any similar amendment.

Amendments 258, 268 and 353, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Curry of Kirkharle, aim to ensure that private market solutions can play a meaningful role in the implementation of Part 3 of the Bill, including through on-site mitigation by developers and investment in nature recovery through market mechanisms. We support the sentiment behind these amendments. They are thoughtful, interesting, pragmatic and right. The noble Lord rightly identifies that if we are to achieve our environmental targets, we must unlock private capital alongside public investment. That includes enabling developers to deliver effective biodiversity net gain directly where appropriate and giving confidence to investors that their participation in ecosystem markets will be valued and secure.

Amendments 318B, 320B and 325ZA, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, would strengthen the obligation on Natural England to use private markets in delivering EDPs and introduce a clearer hierarchy for Natural England’s direct involvement. These amendments point to a real concern—notably the risk of crowding out private sector delivery by overly centralised or bureaucratic processes. They would also introduce a limitation on Natural England’s ability to compulsorily acquire land, requiring Secretary of State authorisation and evidence that land cannot be bought at market value. This too is an important addition to amendments we have already put down and debated trying to restrict Natural England’s power to compulsory purchase land at will.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Fuller Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 15th September 2025 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Fuller]

188: Clause 94, page 123, line 6, at end insert—
“(c) the funding and financing of development proposals, which may extend to the issuance of bonds, debt or similar financial instruments.”

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I shall speak also to my Amendments 190 and 192. I welcome the broad thrust of empowering and reinvigorating the development corporations contemplated in the legislation. This is the best part of a complex Bill, although we know that it has already been overtaken by the devolution Bill launched in the other place.

Clause 94 seeks the achievement of sustainable development, and the mitigation of and adaption to climate change, but there would be no sustainable development without commercially sustainable financing of the proposals that the corporations bring forward. My amendment seeks to bring sustainable finance alongside those other sustainability issues. I approach this subject in the knowledge that local authorities may be reorganised and that mayors may be created in what we now learn to be a cat’s cradle of overlapping and competing responsibilities. Regardless of that, the day-to-day financial pressures felt by national and local government have never been greater.

In a former time, development corporations would simply hold out their hand to the Government or local councils for funding. Of course, that route may still be open, but we need to recognise that the old ways, with joint severability between various tiers of local government, are falling away. Building new towns is the work of generations; it goes beyond political cycles. Relying on national and local politicians will not be enough in a world where building a secondary school costs £40 million and a flyover £100 million. In the pursuit of sustainable development and delivery on the plans, the money needs to be right, because without the money, how can all the desirable options in Clause 94 be delivered?

We need to give the development corporations powers to exploit the difference between funding and financing—by explanation, funding is writing the cheque, but financing is putting the deal together. It is no surprise that it is the financiers in the City of London who are the highest paid, because their task of turning those good ideas into reality is the hardest.

Development corporations are independent, but they have the benefit of being able to lean on the covenant strength that comes from being a statutory body. I will not dwell too much on the significance of the governance of development corporations, but I will make the factual observation that strong governance leads to higher covenant strength, the ability to take a higher credit rating, and the willingness of institutional investors to pony up the cash. We need to make it easy for development corporations to raise funds in new and creative ways at the lowest possible coupon. My amendments would path find those.

Get this right and we will provide investable opportunities for pension funds that desire to invest in infrastructure bonds, for local people who want to invest in local facilities that benefit their area, or for sovereign wealth that seeks a home for its money within an advanced economy with well-defined property rights. But the well of wealth from these sources may not be enough, and there may be other ways to skin the cat. The corporations need to be empowered to engage in all manner of financial instruments, including the traditional issuance of bonds, debt or similar instruments. But we should contemplate other sources of finance. That extends to entering into joint ventures with landowners whose land is to be incorporated as an in-kind contribution to the whole, so that they may enjoy the uplift over a long period rather than cash up front. 

It should not be right that development corporations feel they need to reach for the CPO lever by default and then be forced to pony-up a premium price to the owner up front after the unpleasantness of the process—there are lots of “p”s in that sentence. In other words, development corporations need to have powers not just to assemble land but to be creative in the assembly of that land. The creative concept of the joint venture would allow more money to be spent on upfront infrastructure than on land acquisition. That is a better-value enterprise. By thinking creatively like this, the amount of upfront funding will be less and the ability to deliver essential infrastructure at the outset greater. 

 I want to place finance in its widest possible context, not just rooting it in the sort of funding where you stand on the street corner with your hand out. Let us seed these stand-alone corporations away from the other financial pressures that afflict local government and free them from the apron strings of those local authorities. While I accept that the development corporations can plan for an area and have regard to all manner of desirable outcomes, contemplated in Clause 93, ultimately those plans or outcomes will stand or fall on whether the money can be raised and the finance deals put together. That is what my amendments seek to achieve. I beg to move.

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, in the absence of other speakers, I am interested in the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, and will be even more interested in the Minister’s response, bearing in mind what I said in the previous group about management of risk and who underpins a development corporation in the event of financial loss.

Amendment 197 is very important. There are two issues: the automatic

“removal of hope value from the valuation of the relevant land”

proposed for development and, secondly, whether land purchases by development corporations should be seen as

“public sector investments to be counted against departmental expenditure limits”.

This amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, is important and I hope that the Minister will respond to it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, as part of my research for this series of amendments, I looked at the New Towns Act and I note that it is 80 years since the Minister’s home town of Stevenage was seeded, so to speak; it is now time to bring things up to date. At that time, central government had the power and the finance to get these things off the ground, but things have moved on and we need some more creative thinking. There are wider sources of capital and finance in the world and more players want to participate.

I do not accept that my amendment would arbitrarily constrain the development corporations in pursuance of financing their quite weighty objectives, many of which are enumerated in the next clause, Clause 95. It would not constrain them, but would give them a choice: an option—not a compulsion—to widen the pool of finance should they wish.

The Minister in her winding suggested that powers exist to borrow from central government. She referred specifically to the Public Works Loan Board. Anybody who knows anything about the Public Works Loan Board knows that, as a result of some rather ill-advised advances, it is now capped. I believe the sum is at £90 million; I cannot remember exactly, but that does not matter. The fact is that it is thus far and no further. The Minister asserts that the Public Works Loan Board is always cheaper than others. We know that not to be the case. As the example of the Municipal Bonds Agency demonstrated, there was a well of capital for international markets willing to invest in local infrastructure projects at lower rates than the councils were able to borrow from the PWLB—had the headroom existed. So the premise not only that central government is the only route but that any other routes would be more expensive is demonstrably false.

That is further the case if, as in the example I gave earlier, a landowner may wish to cede some of his land to the development corporations as part of the red line, in kind rather than in cash, it is possible that there would be no coupon to be paid at all. The interest—the return—would come long-term as the development proceeded.

So I do not accept that this is a constraining amendment. I take from what the Minister said that is its highly likely that the consequence of not accepting this option is that, first of all, capital may be constrained, it is possible the development corporations may pay more, and the opportunity to assemble land in a creative manner may be taken away. Clearly, we are in Committee; perhaps we ought to engage on this between now and Report. I fear that the Minister’s brief is labouring under a false premise. I think we can say that this can be resolved, and should be if the promise of development corporations is to be fulfilled. I beg leave to withdraw.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

Before the noble Lord sits down, I do not think I said that PWLB was the only source of funding for development corporations. I did mention that they will be able to enter into joint ventures and land agreements to obtain private capital and use the National Housing Bank and the National Wealth Fund.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

I thank the Minister for that. I beg leave to withdraw. Perhaps we can return to this on Report.

Amendment 188 withdrawn.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Bellingham (Con)]

My Lords, I support this amendment, which my noble friend has proposed with a very powerful argument indeed. He is not asking for a stop to housing or these other developments; he is asking for an audit so we have the information to hand.

I want to make just three quick points. Quite often, when it comes to housing, there is not a choice as to where the housing goes for obvious reasons. Most new housing developments will be adjacent to existing settlements; they will be adjacent to towns, villages and often, inevitably, they will be put on really good, grade 1 agricultural land that will get gobbled up. To some extent, that is accepted.

On food security, my noble friend made a very good point about the historic context and raised briefly the Ukraine war. One of the lessons of the Ukraine war is the fact that we cannot take our food security for granted. He touched on solar arrays, and I suggest to the Minister that, in building out solar arrays, we indeed have choice. We do not have so much choice over housing, but surely we have choice over where we put these solar arrays.

I just wanted to tell the Minister what is going on in part of my old constituency of North West Norfolk. There is a large wave of planning applications for solar arrays along the A47 corridor between Swaffham and Dereham. Much of that is going to take in grade 1 or grade 2 agricultural land. The serious worry I have is that we are not talking about willing seller, willing buyer—or willing farmer, willing buyer. We are talking about tenant farmers who are going to have their livelihoods taken away. We are talking also about some farmers who may have holdings adjacent to larger landowners who are putting their land forward for this development. The companies in question proposing the developments have come forward with a threat of compulsory purchase. We are moving away from the willing seller, willing buyer concept—at the same time putting at risk a huge amount of really good agricultural land.

The Minister should look at this amendment in the spirit in which it has been drafted. We are not trying to order the Government what to do. My noble friend is not trying to stop these developments. Of course, he wants some of them modified, but we need to have that information. We need to have a proper audit, so I support this clause wholeheartedly. I very much hope that the Minister will realise that the potential damage to our farming communities is huge—damage is being done already.

We have sites such as warehouses on industrial estates—go around any new industrial estate; you will not see a single solar panel. Look at a modern school or hospital; a new hospital is to be built in my old constituency, and there is no provision there for solar panels on what are to be flat roofs. Yet down the road, we are going to see the demise of really first-class agricultural land. The Minister needs to get a grip of this and, above all, have information to hand, so that we can be properly informed in future, so I support my noble friend.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I rise very briefly to support Amendment 214. My noble friend nearly said that we are no more than three meals away from societal breakdown, but we are—and, in the hierarchy of needs, food in the belly is the number one requirement. Land is the principal resource that provides bread, beer, biscuits, as well as broccoli, and they are not making land anymore.

I am concerned, because the land use framework that has been proposed by the Government contemplates that fully 9% of our farmland will be used for non-growing purposes. Your Lordships will have heard me say before, in respect of solar panels particularly, that it is beyond careless to allow the best land to be consumed for non-farmland purposes before the worst land is exhausted. Last year, the national wheat yield was down 20% on account of wet weather. This year, there is an impairment in many areas on account of the dry weather. The weather changes, but we cannot be careless about our food supply.

The better news is that we have recently heard encouraging noises from former Defra Ministers who belatedly realise that the risks of food security are greater than they have ever been. It is noteworthy that, while we no longer have a Minister for Agriculture, we have a Minister for Food Security, and I think we should all welcome that, provided that the title of food security flows through into recognising the importance to national security, ensuring that the greatest proportion of the food in this country can meet our needs.

I had a commercial meeting this morning with one of the UK’s largest participants in the agricultural supply chain in this country. Its agricultural director gave me what I felt was a stunning statistic, and I will relay it to noble Lords. He said that, over the last 30 years, the amount of arable farmland in this country has diminished by 30%. I questioned him: “You mean 1% per year, each year, for the last 30 years?”, and he said, “Yes, we used to count on a 15 million tonne a year wheat harvest, now we’re lucky to get 12”. These are big reductions with large consequences, so I enthusiastically endorse Amendment 214. If we are going to have a Minister for Food Security, doing this arithmetic is going to be an essential part of her task—how else can she benchmark her success? I think the amendment is fully in tune with the direction this Government are going in.

Had it been my amendment, I would have probably asked for the data to be embellished by an assessment of the underlying agricultural land quality—the ALC, or agricultural land classification—so that we could work out not just the number of hectares that are lost but how they apportioned between the best and most versatile land versus the lower ranks. I wonder whether the noble Lord might consider enhancing the amendment with agricultural land classification, if he sustains it on Report. Otherwise, I give it my full support in Committee.

[Lord Deben (Con)]

I very much want to support this amendment, because it is asking for information, and one of the problems we have in this country is that when we do not like the answers, we do not ask the question. That seems to me to be the fundamental issue here.

I am rather in favour of properly placed solar farms, but I use the wording “properly placed”. I also think that, in many ways, at least you can get rid of them. The problem with building houses is that you cannot, and I am very concerned about the way in which we constantly use greenfield sites instead of insisting on the development of already used land. I have to say that this Government have really not faced up to the reality, which is that the housebuilding industry does not like anything but a greenfield site and will take those long before it will try to develop inside our already used towns and the like.

This is not only bad for food security but bad for the environment, because it means that people, instead of living relatively hugger-mugger, able to live and move within the same area, have in fact to use transport to get anywhere. In Suffolk, where I come from, I see this all the time: more and more people are commuting from villages which have never had the jobs, and will not have the jobs, to towns increasingly far away. So, the issue of housebuilding is crucial, and we have not thought it through. Merely saying “1.5 million new homes over five years” does not actually face the real issue.

I declare an interest as a small organic farmer. I am very concerned about the failure of the Government to face food security. I am not sure that I myself would have chosen Angela Eagle for that job. The fact of the matter is that it is a very important job, but it is not one that is being faced up to. When I was Minister of Agriculture, I was interviewed by Peter Jay, the cleverest man in Europe, and he said to me, “I don’t know why we have a Minister of Agriculture, because we can always buy food elsewhere in the world”. That is the ignorant position, which I am afraid has been carried on either publicly or privately, and not only by this Government, but I fear by previous Governments too.

It is a serious matter that no member of this Cabinet has real agricultural connections of any kind. No member represents a fully agricultural seat, although I am pleased to see that the new Secretary of State for Defra—who is an extremely intelligent and useful addition to the Cabinet—has the most agricultural seat of any Cabinet Minister: Wycombe. Anyone who knows where Wycombe is knows that the agricultural bit is ancillary rather than central.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I want to speak strongly for Amendments 334, 346DD and 346DE in the name of my noble friend Lord Roborough. Two years after your Lordships’ House last considered nutrient neutrality, my noble friend’s amendments seek to break the nutrient neutrality deadlock, de-layer this cat’s cradle of conflicting regulations and allow us to focus on those things for best effort.

Three and a half years ago, in 2022, nutrient neutrality rules were created, and then, at a stroke, they hunky-bunkered over 200,000 planning applications in over 75 planning authorities—planning authorities which for the most part have the greatest housing potential, because they are the ones clustered around the conurbations and thus have the greatest capacity to deliver housing growth.

I was the council leader in one of these areas. At a stroke, together with our two neighbouring authorities, over 45,000 houses in a plan were made mute. We will never get roofs over people’s heads, including through affordable and social housing, while homes are not being built.

My noble friend’s amendment gets to the heart of this; it allows us to ask the fundamental question as to whether stopping housebuilding will clean up our rivers. At the outset, let us be clear: the statutory responsibility for ensuring a clean environment falls variously upon Defra, the Environment Agency, Natural England—the statutory water undertakings for the effective running of sewage treatment works.

These bodies have the funding, the powers and the responsibility for cleaning up our rivers, but the nutrient neutrality rulings transfer those responsibilities to a completely different class of organisation with no obvious statutory or financial resources to do so: local councillors, the planning departments of local planning authorities, and the housebuilding industry more generally. It is a buck-passing from those who should be designing and implementing solutions, in favour of the LPAs and builders who do not have any control over the matter at all. Taking all the homes in the UK, the Home Builders Federation estimates that, of all the current planning applications that would be built, it would add just 0.92% to the overall housing stock of 25 million dwellings.

We have to consider materiality here. At this point, I feel I should declare that, when I was not leading a council in a previous life, my business was in the fertiliser industry. I have a degree in agriculture, I studied soil science, and I have built a career around advising on effective plant nutrition and the role of nutrients in soils. If I was on Mastermind, this would be my specialist subject.

As I reflect on my own experience, it is now widely understood that the nutrient effect of the impact of new homes, over and above the existing homes in rural places such as Norfolk or Herefordshire, might contribute just 0.2% of the total phosphate load in a catchment. Put another way, out of 500 potential mitigating strategies, 499 are more likely to reduce phosphate emissions in a catchment than prevent new homes being built. In essence, not building a handful of homes in Holverston connected to a Klargester will not clean-up Rockland Broad, to give a very local example.

It is important to restate why the restrictions have been imposed. The test in the habitats regulations and in law is to avoid “significant damage” to a special area of conservation—significant damage, not purely harm. I will never understand why we have stopped our second-largest economic sector, construction, and put tens of thousands of people out of work while serially sacrificing our housebuilding targets on the altar of nutrient neutrality—a marginal future gain of just 0.2%, when the problem exists here and now.

We are aiming at the wrong target by stopping housebuilding. Just ask the people of the Hereford catchment of the River Wye whether building a few less homes will clean up their river, or whether the wholesale processing and removing of animal waste from the catchment might be a better approach. There, it is generally accepted that 80% of the nutrient load in places like Herefordshire comes from poultry manures—not from industry, or even existing homes; still less from homes that have not yet been built.

Elsewhere in your Lordships’ House, the Environment and Climate Change Committee recently heard that over 20 million tonnes of sludges, slurries and digestates are applied to land from anaerobic digesters, and some of it on valley sides. I would venture to say that the Government would be better advised to focus on this issue, rather than stopping builders building. In essence, there is a dilemma. Do we focus on the 80%, or the 0.2%?

That is why I like the noble Lord’s amendment. It enables us to focus our minds on where the substantive problem is. It directs us at the big numbers, not the trivial numbers. It stops us worrying about the 0.2% that might come from the building of new homes and from the flushing of their loos, damaging a significant contributor to the local economies and supply chains. Instead, the amendment seeks to allow a regulatory focus on where the real problem lies, which is principally with organic manures and digestates applied to land on bare stubbles, with nutrients which become mobilised much later in the summer, after harvest, when the ground has warmed up. The summer rains produce the ideal conditions to break them down into mobile phosphates, but not when the growing crops are there to absorb them, so they run off.

If we focus on some of the bigger issues rather than the marginal ones, it might allow the Government to have a joined-up approach. We might even start to provide the grounds again for slurry schemes and storage, which were cancelled in the previous year; that is the key to handling the problem. The best chance of breaking this deadlock and getting new homes built quickly, as the noble Lord has said, is to take the rapier to Part 3 of the Bill and to work out how can we solve the problem, rather than misdirecting ourselves towards small harms. We need to address the big consequences that are harming our economy and our ability to grow, and to get roofs over the heads of the people who need those homes. These are not rich people. We need affordable housing, housing in villages, and housing on brownfield land. All this is hunky-bunker, and we must sweep it away and focus on the big target, not the little one.

[The Earl of Caithness (Con)]

My Lords, Part 3 of the Bill gives new wide-ranging powers to Natural England, which has been heavily involved in all aspects of Part 3, much of which has been made up on the hoof as the Bill progressed. Part 3 also contains a good dollop of empire building by Natural England. We should be very circumspect about agreeing this when the Office for Environmental Protection criticises it as environmental aggression and a leaked report suggests that the EU has similar concerns.

Like many of your Lordships, I have been concerned about NE for some time. There have been regular press comments about the mistakes that it makes. It is often criticised for being slow, bureaucratic and inefficient in decision-making. It seems too focused on prescriptive top-down solutions, ignoring the experience of the practitioner, and slow to embrace new technologies in environmental management. Farmers and land managers have lost trust in it, which is a disaster for nature. NE is not fit for purpose. I want to examine why.

Some key factors interlink and have a compounding effect. A major problem for NE is its structure. Where scientific expertise and sound judgment is a prerequisite, there is a lack of good in-house scientists and the consultants that it uses sometimes do not have the expertise needed. Over the last 20 years, due to budgetary constraints, the best scientific experts—and therefore the most expensive to employ—have left the organisation. It used to employ highly regarded scientists but now, with some notable exceptions, it is an organisation operated by low-grade civil servants with insufficient supervision or control by scientific specialists. Yet it is an organisation on whose judgments Ministers must rely, and legal regimes rest. Making those scientific judgments is even more challenging due to Section 63(5) of the Conservation of Habitats and Species Regulations 2017, which sets out a requirement to prove a negative. This is a reversal of the usual burden of proof under the law, raising a fundamental problem which only good scientists can tackle competently.

The job is made much harder because the precautionary principle, which is not mentioned in the habitat regulations, has been established by case law and must be applied to habitat assessment. Here we have a problem. What is the precautionary principle? It has no constant legal definition. Regardless of that, it is cited by NE as justification for giving weight to hypothetical risks for which there is no credible evidence and without being questioned.

So the requirement to prove a negative must be very tightly regulated, as without proper oversight the system is open to abuse. Because of NE’s structure, that abuse is increasingly evident. It is much easier for the civil servant to say no, even though that decision is based on myth or prejudice rather than sound science. This then sets a precedent for future decisions and the downward spiral continues.

That “safe decision” attitude, which pervades NE, is now the ingrained cultural attitude and the reason why it makes so many perverse decisions. Such decisions lead to more costly and/or delayed development, with little or no benefit to the environment. As an example, NE’s assessments of general licence applications 43 and 45 have revealed inconsistencies, a lack of understanding that game management activities are intrinsic to releasing activity, an overprecautionary approach based on bird flu risks and a presumption of negative impact. GL43 and GL45 were brought in to address environmental and legal issues, not bird flu.

NE has become an increasingly powerful organisation that can do what it wants without challenge. Frighteningly, the Bill seeks to give it yet more power. It cannot be challenged from within. However good the executives or members of the board of trustees are, they are not ecologists and they are not equipped to challenge the scientific approach, even if based on myth adopted by the case officer.

It is hard to challenge from without. Developers know how powerful NE is and do not want to campaign publicly for fear of damaging their relationships and having greater difficulty with their schemes in the future. This leads to a conspiracy of silence. Those who wish to challenge NE from outside are faced with every obstruction. I will go into the case of Biocore Agri Ltd in more detail on later amendments. In summary, Biocore was given approval by NE for its scheme in the nutrient market, only for NE to say it would refuse a detailed application due to a change of mind. Not surprisingly, this inconsistency has upset Biocore and it has challenged NE. I am told that, in retaliation, NE has now threatened not to answer future correspondence from Biocore. Given that NE has obstructed the private sector on nutrients, what confidence can we have that NE will not behave in exactly the same way when it comes to EDPs?

I have had the temerity to question NE’s science and scientists. Luckily, I have no land and NE has no hold on me. On 22 April, I wrote in some detail to the CEO setting out my concerns about the science that NE uses regarding wildfires and asked for a meeting. After long delays and a refusal to be allowed to speak to her or her office, I received a reply from a member of her staff, which included the words: “We do not feel such a meeting to discuss our approach to evidence would be productive”. However, I have now heard from the CEO, who has offered a meeting. It will be in October, six months after I asked for it, but it would not be taking place had I not asked the Minister, to whom I am grateful, to look into the matter.

I ask your Lordships to contrast the arrogant, complacent and discourteous attitude of NE with that of the director of the Veterinary Medicines Directorate, which I emailed on 28 June with concerns about the problems fiprinol and imidacloprid are causing to the environment. I received a detailed response before the end of July. That reply gave rise to further questions and, on return from holiday, I asked for a meeting on 20 August. The response was immediate and the meeting took place before the end of the month.

Inadvertently, with NE an organisation more fearsome than the environmental arm of Rostekhnadzor in Russia has been created. This part of the Bill does nothing to rectify the deep-seated problems NE has. A wise Government would drop Part 3 and sort out NE for the benefit of the environment, development and the growth that this country so badly needs before giving it more powers which, unless reformed, it will only abuse.

--- Later in debate ---

I just share those anecdotes, and I would like us to remember that official who thought this was the most exciting thing that ever happened in his career, sitting at his computer saying they did not need ecologists because a computer would tell them what to do.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

Before the noble Lord sits down, he mentioned, over and above nutrient neutrality, the biodiversity net gain levy, but has he also considered the other levies, which will apply in addition in an astonishing layering effect? There is the GIRAMS, the green infrastructure recreation avoidance and mitigation strategy, and the SANGs, which is special areas of something—there are so many of these different levies, each of which layers over and above. The cumulative effect of all these is so great that what has to give is the affordable housing, the community infrastructure levy and all those other wider improvements. Has he made some sort of consideration of that in his research?

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

The noble Lord asked me to say something before I sat down. I will now sit down, but he has thoroughly ruined my evening. Thank you.

--- Later in debate ---

[Earl Russell (LD)]

My Lords, I shall speak very briefly to this group of amendments on the role of Natural England. It is a big group, so I will not respond to everyone at this late hour. It is clear that there are remaining concerns about the Bill in terms of not weakening nature protections and the complexity of the new systems that are being put in place. There are two problems here. There is the complexity of what needs to be done and there is the issue of whether Natural England is able to deliver on what it is required to do under the terms set out in this legislation, should it be passed.

Natural England is absolutely central to delivering the environmental delivery plans and the nature restoration fund. I want to return very briefly to the comments in the paper today, because I think this is important. The Government cannot both create more complicated systems that as a result of their actions require more people to do more things, to see that the duties made by their legislation get done, and at the same time say that the actual organisations that need to deliver those need to be slashed and cut. Actually, that tension between what are almost two different sides of government worries me. It worries me a lot in terms of what is being done overall. I will just park that there.

Turning to the amendments of the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, of course I fully understand the intention that it is about looking at responsibility, bringing in the Secretary of State and trying to hold the Secretary of State accountable for what is being done. There is an argument to say that Natural England may not be as accountable, and I understand that. My problem is that the Bill actually sets out a process where we have EDPs and the nature restoration fund and I do not think that just changing the wording of the Bill changes any of the complexities of the reality on the ground. There are other ways that we can do that, in terms of holding the Secretary to State to account in any case, and holding Natural England to account, so I do not particularly feel that that is a solution to the complexities that are created by the legislation.

I want to speak to Amendment 328A in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and Amendment 333 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh. I was not certain whether Amendment 328A was a probing amendment, but the noble Lord has clarified that it is. As such, I welcome it and I look forward to the Minister’s response. My view is that the national park authority should be included, and I hope that is the case, but I look forward to hearing from the Minister on that.

Amendment 333 in the names of the noble Baronesses, Lady McIntosh and Lady Young, seeks to clarify

“that the powers given to Natural England under Part 3 can only be delegated to a public body”.

I welcome this amendment. I think it is a good amendment. I also note what the Minister said on the previous group, that the intention of the Government was that it would only be a public body. We definitely welcome that statement. I think there is still perhaps a need to have this amendment to the Bill and, with that, I will sit down.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, back in 2022, when the nutrient neutrality rules came in, it started a three and a half year hiatus that has prevented the building of new affordable homes, caused the bankruptcy of local architects, the closure of local builders’ merchants, the liquidation of many smaller builders and the folding of so many white van journeyman contractors—the plasterers, plumbers, groundworkers, roofers and tilers.

What was the basis of this catastrophe? As a council leader, I sought to find out. It did not take long to identify Natural England as the culprit. So I asked it for its reasoning. It advanced a theory that there was complete equivalence between the application of a single kilogram of phosphate anywhere in a catchment, regardless of the distance from a special area of conservation that needed protection under the regulations. It fundamentally refused to countenance the sort of risk-based approach that would be applied in any other walk of life or by any other regulator. Its approach was that the flushing of a lavatory directly into the protected Surlingham Broad was absolutely equivalent to going to the loo in Shipdham, over 30 miles away along a convoluted network of ditches, streams, tributaries and rivers before those rivers passed by the Surlingham Broad.

It is nonsense. I do not deny that there might be some infinitesimally small, theoretical riparian link between the lavatory in Surlingham and the toilet in Shipdham, but anyone who has studied for O-level or GCSE maths knows that the area around a point increases with the square of the distance, so the effect of the loo in Shipdham would be 30 times 30—900 times—less impactful; that is, if the water from that loo did not percolate into the aquifer, become assimilated into littoral plants, adsorbed on to soil particles or carried away in a farmer’s crops, in which case the impact would be significantly less, and it is.

When I asked, the designated person said that as there are no major processes for permanent phosphate losses within the aquatic environment, the nutrient neutrality approach is to assume that all the phosphorus will at some point reach the site, albeit this may take varying lengths of time and therefore there is the possibility of it contributing to the eutrophication impacts now or in the future. You do not have to be a scientist to realise that this “bathtub principle” is poppycock.

I asked Natural England to provide me with the scientific evidence. It sent me a slim paper repeating its assertions, with a long list of academic references. So I read them. The academic references that Natural England said supported its position argued the reverse. They made it clear that there were major processes for the permanent phosphate losses from the aquatic environment.

As I said in the previous group, this is my specialist subject. Before I joined your Lordships’ House, I gave written evidence to the Built Environment Committee on this point. I will not list all the ways in which I said that the scientific papers contradicted the Natural England stance but, in summary, it disregarded a whole range of natural mitigation factors, including: confusing adsorption with absorption; denying percolation to the underlying aquifer; ignoring the precipitation of phosphates in the calcareous soils that are found in the Yare catchment and along the River Wensum; the related effects of high soil pH in locking up phosphates; the effect of dilution by rainwater and the flows out to sea; and the incorporation and deposition of organic manures in the crops and along the brooks and streams.

The ban on housebuilding has been advanced on a completely unscientific, false premise, and one cooked up by Natural England. In short, Natural England’s interpretation of the scientific literature was misleading and mendacious. Its justification used selective quotation to misrepresent the balance of evidence.

Under the regulations, the test is one of significant harm. Natural England has misdirected itself and advised Ministers to substitute “significant” with “any”. How can it be trusted if it acts in this way? Its misrepresentation of the risk of the flushing of toilets in new homes has allowed it to prosecute a war on the housebuilding industry without justification. It is the enemy of growth. I can hardly believe I am going to say it, but this is probably the once and only time I believe the Chancellor of the Exchequer, because she has fingered Natural England in the article in the Times referred to by the noble Earl, Lord Russell, as the enemy of growth.

Further, I then scrutinised Natural England’s nutrient calculator, which I found to be loaded with flaws and poor assumptions.

[Lord Wilson of Sedgefield (Lab)]

Which amendment is the noble Lord referring to?

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

I am talking to all of them—particularly those in the name of my noble friend Lady Coffey but also Amendment 333.

There is more. I scrutinised Natural England’s nutrient calculator. It used the wrong digital elevation model. It used the wrong areas of influence on sewage treatment works. No allowance was made for excess capacity in the sewage treatment works. I am going to come to a very important point in a moment. The incorrect number of residents per property was assumed, which is significant where there are holiday homes. It assumed much greater water consumption for each house than we knew to be the case. The numbers for manures coming from outdoor pig units were underestimated by somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000 times, by reference to Defra booklet RB209. Suffice it to say that the calculator is orders of magnitude adrift.

There was then a completely arbitrary 20% buffer applied over and above the calculated number for no justifiable reasons. It was all very shoddy. The dodgy statistics have resulted in an extra £5,000 to £15,000 extra tariff per home for every house built in what is essentially the entirety of the district in which I live and its two neighbours.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to support Amendment 231 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Roborough. I attended the drop-in session last week with representatives of Natural England and listened carefully to what the Minister said in winding up the previous group. We are starting to get a feel for how the process by which we might even get to the start line under Clause 53 will work. There will be a process by which Natural England proposes some research, identification, some assessment of some proposals—whether it be for bats, bluebells or barnacles, it does not really matter. It will make recommendations to Ministers, and there will be some proposals and presumably some draft procurement, because with the proposal must come some sort of idea of how the EDP is to be done. There will be some consultation, selection, regulations, pricing, final procurement and legal work. I think the figure that came to mind when we had the drop-in was that it will take about three and a half years. There are less than four years of this Government remaining—three and three-quarters.

So, if the process contemplated by Clause 53 proceeds, it will not result in a single new home being delivered and occupied within this Parliament. What sort of timescale does the Minister have for the implementation and the first benefits? When will the first person be able to move into a home that has been unlocked by these EDP processes?

There is another point. Before we even get to that stage, there has to be an approach to what Natural England, if it acts as the operator, will be providing. Will it be offering to developers a permit or a licence? A permit tends to be a tradable asset, but the last thing that anybody in Defra who has a long memory will want is to go back to the days of milk quotas, whereas a licence can be surrendered at the point at which it is not needed. We need clarity on this before we even get to the consultation side on the EDP. Then there is the multiple layering: we have biodiversity net gain for 30 years and nutrient neutrality for 80 years, while the EDP is made to last for only 10 years. We need some clarity.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

My Lords, this group of amendments considers the preparation of EDPs and what they are required to contain. Many of the amendments seek to add various matters to which Natural England should have regard when preparing an EDP. These matters include the scientific evidence base for conservation measures, how the EDP relates to local policies, the local nature recovery strategy, the land use framework and the timeframe required to address environmental impacts. The Bill, as currently drafted, alongside the government amendments that we have already tabled, requires these matters to be taken into account. I can therefore assure noble Lords that these amendments are not necessary, as these matters will already be adequately considered when developing an EDP.

Amendment 274, tabled by the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, would add three requirements to the preparation of an EDP: first, requiring the conservation measures to be used to address the environmental impact of development to be defined; secondly, creating a pre-consultation period for EDPs, during which expressions of interest to deliver the conservation measures must be sought from appropriate persons or bodies; and, thirdly, publishing the expressions of interest should the EDP proceed to be made. The first of these is already addressed in the existing provisions in Clause 55. The existing provisions also allow Natural England to delegate functions to other bodies, including those in the private sector. Specifying a particular procurement method and creating an additional pre-consultation period would be unnecessarily restrictive, given that EDPs will need to be tailored to the specific local and environmental circumstances. The land use framework and other strategies that we are developing in Defra, such as the food strategy, will obviously be part of any consideration. We all work together very closely. We talk to each other, which may surprise some noble Lords, because we want these to be delivered effectively.

Amendment 231 seeks to provide the Secretary of State with a power to issue guidance relating to the making of an EDP, specifying various topics that this guidance may cover. It would then require Natural England or any other body carrying out functions under this part to comply with this guidance. As noble Lords will be aware, the Secretary of State already has the power to issue guidance on key matters that Natural England must have regard to when carrying out functions under this part. Guidance should be used to guide Natural England, not to compel it. This would be more appropriate for a regulation-making power, which is subject to greater parliamentary scrutiny. The Secretary of State will still be able to make guidance on any relevant matter and will be able to assess the extent to which it has been applied when making the EDP.

We believe that Amendment 277A, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, would be unnecessary, as Natural England will operate only within its capacity when it is producing EDPs.

Turning to the concerns raised by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, in his Amendment 253C, regarding the interrelation of the NRF model and existing biodiversity net gain arrangements, I assure noble Lords that the NRF and biodiversity net gain are distinct but complementary policies. The NRF will focus on enabling development that encounters specific environmental obligations relating to impacts on protected sites and species, whereas BNG applies to all new developments, bar the limited exceptions.

I come to the important point raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, regarding the consultation on BNG, when we would get its outcome and whether that would be before Report. It is a pertinent question, and I will take it back and look into it for noble Lords.

In answer to the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and to give him reassurance, the NRF will not affect the existing requirement to deliver BNG. That is a free-standing obligation outside the NRF. I hope that, with this clarification, noble Lords will feel able not to press their amendments.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

May I just ask whether the Minister would give some consideration to the question I posed: at what stage, following the pattern set out in Clause 53 and all the rounds of consultation, procurement and devising of schemes, does she think the first dwelling house will be completed and somebody occupies it? Will it be in this Parliament, or the next?

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

Clearly, I cannot give a precise date to the noble Lord, but we know that Natural England has indicated that the areas on which it has substantial evidence and information at the moment—for example, nutrient neutrality and on newts—are the ones that it will move ahead for. These are the areas that it already has the information on to produce an early EDP.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Fuller Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 11th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I want to speak to this group of amendments and particularly to Amendments 145, 174 and 175. In so far as Amendment 145 is concerned, which requires there to be an assessment, I am not sure that the amendment is actually needed. I have put many local plans through the local planning system, and this has been an integral part of our system. In fact, the inspector has written to us on more than one occasion to say that plans for building, housing, businesses and other environmental goods must be pari passu—alongside and equal with—the requirements to assess Gypsy and Traveller sites. The sense of what Amendment 145 seeks to achieve is already done—and I have the scars on my back to prove it.

As a leader, I have taken my responsibilities for this part of the population very seriously. One of the very last steps I took as the leader in my authority when I joined your Lordships’ House was to commit £1.8 million out of a net budget of £12 million—a significant proportion—to a complete refurbishment and upgrade of a transit site which, when it returned to us from a long lease, needed to be knocked back into shape and made decent. No one understands the importance of this more than I do.

I know that the guidance is listed in Amendment 175, but the custom and practice and effect of these assessments has changed since Covid. That has resulted through mission creep, though well meaning, to a systematic overstatement of the requirements as opposed to previous assessments. I draw noble Lords’ attention to some of the methodological changes. Amendment 174 contemplates a restatement of how we make these assessments and so it is important to lay before the Committee my knowledge of how the methodology has changed.

There has been a material reduction in travelling since Covid. Evidentially the use of transit sites has reduced, and the annual caravan count supports this assertion. The new methodologies that we seem to be sleepwalking into place significantly less regard and importance on the caravan count, a system that has supported the population over many years and has stood the test of time.

There have been other methodological changes. Instead of the face-to-face interviews that consultants engaged by councils have previously undertaken, there has been a switch to telephone interviews. Instead of the rigour and observation of family circumstance and history of travelling, custom and practice now is simply to ask youngsters whether they want a house. It is capturing wants not needs, with leading questions.

This is the point that we need to focus on. There needs to be more rigour as it is leading to a systematic overcounting. If you ask two youngsters whether they would like to have a house and they say yes, and then eventually they get together, the initial need for two is really for only one house, because they got together and are living in the same dwelling house.

I do not want to go through every single enumeration of all the changes, but we need to recognise that there has been a change in methodology since Covid, and the apparent increase in need is partly as a result of those changes and confusion between needs and wants. This is important.

As to my opening remarks, if the inspector places enormous weight on the importance of having a Gypsy and Traveller assessment alongside other parts of the local plan, if there has been a systematic overstatement and misrepresentation then otherwise good local plans could be sent back to the drawing board on a false premise. As the leader of the District Councils’ Network, although I cannot remember the precise example, I recall other districts where they suffered that indignity.

It is not good for the families concerned to have a misrepresentation, it is not good for the local economy to have plans delayed, and it is certainly not good for the national economy with the consequential of stopping building. By all means we must have the counts, but the methods must be robust and evidentially based. We need to get back to the system as it was, tried and tested, rather than the situation we have been sleepwalking into.

[Earl Russell (LD)]

My Lords, briefly, I support this group of amendments, proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, and supported by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett. I speak on behalf of the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, who has signed her name to all the amendments in this group.

I will not take up a lot of your Lordships’ time. It is a pleasure to support these amendments, and I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, and others for proposing them. It is essential that, in this Bill, all communities and sections of society are included. It is important that we make sure that the Bill represents the needs of the Traveller and Gypsy communities.

Amendment 145 makes explicit something that is currently uncertain in the Bill: that Gypsy and Traveller sites must be recognised as part of the housing need when the strategic development plans are drawn up. The need for clarity is absolute and, without it, there is a danger that these communities will fall through the cracks and their needs will not be properly met and accounted for.

Amendments 173 and 174 seek to establish a statutory duty for local authorities to assess Gypsy and Traveller accommodation needs and to conduct those assessments according to clear and consistent national guidance. These amendments are vital. We need consistency in methodologies, which often vary from area to area. These assessments are subject to criticism and there is worry about incoherence in the way they are done. We need to provide proper, clear and rigorous guidance to make sure that these obligations are carried out fairly and equitably across all areas and communities.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Addington (LD)]

I thank the Minister for that undertaking; I will take him up on it. I have to say I also support the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett. We have to get this right because the potential for cock-up is massive. It is damaging to the communities around them. There is no point in having a lovely home in a dreadful environment. I thank the Minister, and I am quite happy to withdraw this amendment. What I do with it in future will depend on the outcomes of those meetings. Under those circumstances, I withdraw my amendment.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

Before the noble Lord sits down—

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Beith) (LD)]

The noble Lord has withdrawn his amendment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I strongly support my noble friend Lord Banner in this amendment about proportionality. My experience of this come from my membership of the CIL review, to which I was appointed by the Minister about 10 years ago to imagine a new approach to developer contributions. I do not have the report in front of me—it was a long time ago—but there was one statistic as part of my evidence-gathering process that remains with me today. Ninety percent of all planning applications are for 10 dwellings or less, but the 10% that are for 11 or more are well over half of the total number of houses that are planned to be built in this country. There is an asymmetry; the larger applications are significantly larger than the smaller ones, yet we treat everything the same.

If we are to encourage local builders who spend much time with the local vernacular, local contractors and local supply chains, we must have a more flexible and proportionate system. Proportionality exists in so many walks of life. Just to reflect for a moment on some of the Bills that we have been looking at in the last few months, there is proportionality for small businesses in employment legislation. The Minister and I debated in the Moses Room the other day the definition of a smaller authority, with a different audit test that would happen to those smaller authorities with a turnover of £15 million or less. In the brewing industry, the smaller brewers have an adventitious duty regime. Proportionality should not be alien; in fact, it should be something to be encouraged.

As part of the CIL review work, we looked at how we might help smaller builders and postulated that developments of less than 10 dwellings, as a threshold, would be exempted from Section 106; they would pay the CIL—the community infrastructure levy—instead. I thought that that would be a really proportionate way of doing it. People would make a meaningful contribution to the local infrastructure, but without getting tied up in knots on some of the smaller minutiae. That is an approach we could follow.

In local authorities, when someone applies for planning permission, there is a validation exercise. Unless you have submitted your ecology assessment, CIL form and everything else, the clock does not even start ticking. I would not want whole areas of legislation to be cast aside, and I am sure my noble friend agrees. I do not believe he is suggesting for one moment that there would be no ecology report; it is just that an ecology report for a set of five bungalows in a village on the outskirts of the development boundary should not be subject to the same test as a much more significant development.

That is important because it is significantly more expensive to deliver smaller schemes. There are certain fixed costs of applying for a planning application that have to be amortised—jam-spread, if you will—over a small number of developments. There is a diseconomy of scale. I did some fag-paper arithmetic and found that it is about £40,000 more per dwelling house when you take in some of the extra burdens of a smaller-scale development over a larger one. That is why we do not have affordable housing, a subject that detained us in our debate on the Bill on Tuesday night or Wednesday morning.

We need to drag out the simple truth that smaller schemes are more expensive and that affects viability, which is a significant challenge to getting Britain building. If only we could have this proportionate effect and make a virtue of it, we would give a bit more choice to the market, and with speedy delivery. It would increase the liquidity of the local supply chains in local economies, which would make us all richer and play a significant part in getting Britain building and the economy growing.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords, as I have said on several occasions, we need to cut down on the bureaucracy of planning and the excessive application of policy on habitats. Even the Prime Minister has criticised the HS2 £100 million bat tunnel.

In my experience, we have an over-precautionary approach in planning, so I am attracted by the principle of proportionality, especially as it is promoted by a well-known planning KC, who has already contributed very positively to this Committee. My only question, either to him or to the Minister, is whether there is a risk of rising legal costs rather than the reverse, which I think is the intention behind the provision. Indeed, could this unintentionally hurt smaller builders?

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I am delighted to have the opportunity to contribute to the Committee’s deliberations. I say at the outset that Amendment 184 from the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, and my noble friend Lord Banner is eminently sensible, and there appears to be a strong consensus in its favour. I therefore that my Front Bench but also the Minister will give it a fair hearing and possibly support it, because it seems to be a great compromise.

I was fortunate when serving in the other place to support a very good charity called Hope into Action, with local churches banding together to buy residential properties for those in the most acute need, sometimes ex-offenders or people who were just generally down on their luck economically. However, I understand that that is very much a niche activity and it is not possible to buy freeholds outright, so you need this intermediate accommodation in order to give people a chance to get back on the employment or education ladder. So I strongly commend that amendment.

Principally, I want to support the amendment moved by my noble friend Lord Gascoigne. I am old enough to remember when the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 got Royal Assent. I declare from the outset—practically everyone declares this in this Committee—that I am another former vice-president of the Local Government Association, although quite some time ago. I was also a London borough councillor, and I had the good fortune to serve on the planning committee.

It should be remembered that the purpose of Section 106 was very much benign and supported by the community. It was essentially about whether expenditure was necessary, directly relevant to the planning application, and proportionate. It was absolutely the right thing to seek to ameliorate some of the impacts of residential development by providing community facilities such as schools, GP surgeries, community centres and transport infrastructure. Obviously, there was a distinction between the community infrastructure levy and Section 106. Of course, when I was a Member of Parliament and member of the borough council, those financial contributions made in support of affordable housing were very important. They obviously made a big contribution to the provision of decent housing in our borough and in my constituency.

The reason why I think this is an excellent amendment is that not all local authorities are the same. One of the frustrations is that, unless you are focused every day on trying to find the audit trail of funding from Section 106, when you have multiple stakeholders, landowners, local councillors and council officers—who often change over time—it is very difficult to follow the money in terms of what was actually delivered.

You often found in my experience that residential developments ended up with groups of homeowners or local residents who were very unhappy at, for instance, being members of a limited company and responsible for the management of their community areas. They did not want to do that; they just wanted a children’s playground, a bus shelter or a bus route, or a post office, for instance. Therefore, the openness and transparency that this very laudable amendment would give rise to would allow the distinction between good authorities which are putting much-needed money into local communities in a timely way, and those local authorities which are dragging their feet.

I accept that there is a distinction between preparing a local development plan and a county structure plan, et cetera. That is much more of a legalistic exercise, which has to be undertaken under various pieces of legislation. This is about keeping the faith and the trust of the local people you are interested in providing with very good local services, using what is effectively a tax—public money. Having the imperative of publishing that information on a regular basis would allow you in real time to account for why you have not spent that money, what priorities have changed and what the needs of the community as they evolve might be.

I cannot really see why there would be a reason not to do this. Irrespective of party in local government, whether it is independent, Liberal Democrat, Reform, Conservative or Labour—I think that is everyone; unless you are in Epsom and Ewell, and then it is ratepayers, bizarrely—everyone has an opportunity to make sure that that money is spent effectively and in a timely way.

For that reason, I support the amendment. I hope that, if the Minister rejects the amendment, she explains clearly why it is not possible to support it and incorporate it into the Bill. It is long overdue; it is what transparency campaigners in local government want, what local councillors want and probably even what planning officers want, providing clarity on expenditure. It would be a very good development, and I hope the Minister will support it.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 170 in the name of my noble friend Lord Gascoigne. As I indicated in the previous group, I sat on the CIL review 10 years ago with Liz Peace, whom some noble Lords may know from the restoration and renewal programme, as well as Andrew Whitaker from the Home Builders Federation, which is probably where my noble friend gets his figure of £8 billion from.

When I was a council leader, we had three councils that came together in the Greater Norwich area, and we were early adopters on CIL. We were only the 12th area to do it, and we pooled our CIL, blind to the administrative boundaries between us, to try to make a step change in the amount of infrastructure delivered. Sadly, following the CIL review in 2017, few other areas joined the bandwagon, and now many areas are not in scope—they have Section 106. But in principle the community infrastructure levy has much to commend it, as it is quick, simple, clear and a lot more straightforward than Section 106. However, there are some problems, one of them being sufficiency.

What we discovered on the CIL review was that the amount of money generated by the CIL was probably some 15% of the total infrastructure requirement, aggravated in many cases by a large number of exemptions—self-built homes, offices converted under permitted development to residence, and so forth. There was a further aggravating factor, in that local authorities are not permitted to borrow against future CIL receipts as they are against Section 106. That made it significantly harder to get the big, chunky infrastructure done.

As a group of local authorities, we created the Section 123 list, where we listed all the things we expected CIL to fund—and there were sections on green infrastructure, social infrastructure, education, highways and community facilities, including libraries. More than 400 lines populated that Section 123 list, which was published annually as a big report, so that everybody could see what we planned to spend the money on. Of course, I support completely the principle of Amendment 170, but it does not go far enough. It is not enough just to say, “Well, this much money is being raised on this job, and that is it”. You have to balance it—not just with the money coming in but with what you plan to spend out on, and the cash flow. It is a simple truth that after you raise the money, and it is only 15%, the next work and the hardest work is leveraging that 15% in with other sources of money, possibly joint ventures and so forth.

CIL is about financing infrastructure, not just funding it. Financing is putting that deal together, whereas funding is just writing the cheque. It is really important that we help the public to understand and see that essential difficulty. Time does not permit describing all the ways in which we have tried to do that, but this amendment does not go far enough. We need to ensure the money coming in and the Section 123 list of the infrastructure going out, as well as the financing. The most important thing that this amendment falls short on is that it does not set the cash flowing—where do you see the money going in 2026, 2027, 2028 and so forth, in a 10-year rolling period? Unless you do that, just by publishing the amount of money that you have raised, there is pressure to get the money out of the door on less important projects with lower impact, which is where we found a difficulty.

By having a more thoughtful, five or 10-year rolling programme, which contains the income, expenditure and cashflow, you would also give clarity to the development community. If you wish, and if it is sensible to do so, you could make a substitution—take an investment in kind, if you will—instead of making an upfront cash payment. That can be very useful. If a new school, for example, is on the Section 123 list, and the developer is interested in it, the new school can help him sell his houses in a large development, but if the money is not quite there yet, being open, honest and transparent, in this more complete way, makes it clear how schools can be financed in kind by the developer, and sometimes you can leverage more in that case.

I support the principle, although I do not believe it goes far enough; we need a five or 10-year programme. In my area, we publish a comprehensive annual report, which includes all the lines—the income and the outcome. However, while posting the balance is useful, it does not tell the whole story. That is what we need to do to get the infrastructure built but also the public onside.

[Baroness Andrews (Lab)]

My Lords, in another life, I had the privilege of taking through the then Planning Bill 2008, which introduced CIL. In this House, we had some very vigorous arguments, not about its purpose but about its methodology. I was very interested to hear what the noble Lord said about the subsequent review. With the support of my Front Bench, we were very proud to be able to lever that additional money for crucial infrastructure.

I have some sympathy for the amendment, because it is a confusing strategy in some respects. I would like to see CIL and local authorities getting greater credit, as well as for there to be more transparency around what developers’ funds go into. While I want to pay tribute to my earlier Government’s effort to raise these funds, I support greater transparency and clarity for developers as well as for local authorities and communities.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

I thank the noble Baroness for her comments and congratulate her on taking through the legislation. At the outset, when she was taking the legislation through your Lordships’ House, she would have contemplated that CIL was going to carry the lion’s share of the cost of infrastructure. Sadly, that never turned out to be the case. To a certain extent, the areas that have had CIL have ended up in a worst-of-all-worlds situation, where they have some CIL but they also have Section 106. That is a disappointment. It has not reached the promise that we all wanted for it, because everything has become so much more expensive. As I alluded to earlier, the developers give up with CIL and just want to build the school themselves. In fact, they are probably best placed to build the school while they are onsite, mobilised and with the construction equipment all around them. With the benefit of hindsight, perhaps forcing the council to build the school when they do not have some of that brownfield risk would have been an improvement.

I am getting off the point. In short, I support the amendment, but it needs to be embellished on Report.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Banner, described Amendment 184 as compelling, and I entirely agree with him. In the interests of time, that is all I will say on that amendment.

I will briefly speak to Amendment 218, taking us back some time to the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, who has already introduced the idea of a review of land value capture. I am going to brandish a historical figure in defence of this suggestion. It may surprise the Benches to my right, because I am going to start by saying that I agree with Winston Churchill. That is not a phrase that I bring out very often, but I do in this context. In 1909, he said that

“the landlord who happens to own a plot of land on the outskirts or at the centre of one of our great cities … sits still and does nothing. Roads are made, streets are made, railway services are improved, electric light turns night into day, electric trams glide swiftly to and fro, water is brought from reservoirs a hundred miles off in the mountains—and all while the landlord sits still … To not one of those improvements does the land monopolist, as a land monopolist, contribute, and yet by every one of them the value of his land is sensibly enhanced”.

That was identified more than a century ago, but it exactly addresses the issue that still exists and that we have not come to deal with.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Fuller Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 9th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jamieson (Con)]

My Lords, I begin by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, and my noble friend Lord Lucas for bringing their amendments to the attention of the Committee. They have raised a number of important points, and I look forward to hearing the Minister addressing both noble Lords’ concerns.

I turn to the amendments in my name. The purpose of Amendment 135HZG is to reduce costs and delays in the planning system by putting beyond doubt in legislation the principles that currently rely on case law. Where planning permission has already been granted and remains extant, decisions on subsequent planning applications relating to detailed matters, whether determined by an officer or a committee, should not reopen issues that were settled in the original planning permission. This matters because uncertainty in the system not only increases costs for applicants but creates unnecessary duplication of effort for planning authorities and applicants. Greater clarity will enable both sides to proceed with confidence, efficiency and speed.

Amendment 135HZH, in my name and that of noble friend Lady Scott of Bybrook, is a probing amendment intended to test whether the planning system provides sufficient certainty once a permission has been granted and to explore how necessary changes prompted by new national legislation might be handled without reopening matters that have already been settled. The principle of finality is essential, particularly where significant work has already been undertaken and applications are well advanced. This amendment invites the Government to consider whether clearer statutory guidance on finality could help improve efficiency and reduce delay.

Finally, Amendment 185SE, tabled in my name, aims to provide clarity to the planning system, so that project delays are minimised where legislative changes necessitate modifications to an already approved permission—for instance, as we discussed earlier today, legislation that might require solar cells on all new homes.

In such circumstances, such modifications should be deemed to have planning permission in principle. It is vital, because projects can be significantly delayed and costs increased, and developers are required to seek fresh planning permissions simply to comply with new legislation that has come about after they receive their original planning permission. By ensuring that those modifications are covered in principle, we can safeguard progress while maintaining the integrity of the planning system.

If we are to achieve the Government’s objective of 1.5 million new homes, the planning system needs to deliver. These three amendments are guided by the same underlying principle. Clarity and certainty in planning law reduce unnecessary delay, avoid wasteful duplication and allow both applicants and authorities to focus their energies on what should be their priority, which is delivering high-quality developments of high-quality homes that support our residents and our communities.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

I had not realised what the noble Lord was going to say from the Dispatch Box, but I wish to support his Amendments 135HZG and 135HZH What he could have said—but did not—was that there is almost an interaction with the previous group, in that sometimes there is a perverse incentive to add delay to a process to run down the clock. However, in this case, the noble Lord could have said that, as a result of those delays, a whole series of new studies would need to be remade. For instance, ecology studies may last for only two or three years so may be triggered once more, and they in turn can only be created at certain times of the year—in the spring, for example. The combination effect, in respect not just of the previous group but of this group, means that the delays could be even longer, so I strongly support the noble Lord. Finality and certainty are important, and I support him not only for the reasons he gives but for the avoidance of interference with the previous set of amendments.

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Teverson has raised an important aspect of the planning process in his amendment on planning enforcement. Planning enforcement can be a neglected part of the planning system, partly because it is not a statutory function but a discretionary one, and as such is not necessarily funded to the extent that it ought to be. Effective enforcement is vital in the planning process so that everyone—the developer, the council and local people—can have trust that what has been agreed will be fulfilled.

I will give noble Lords one example from my role as a councillor, when I was contacted about a housing development which is adjacent to a motorway. A resident raised the concern that the developers were not adhering to the agreed siting of units. Planning enforcement went on site to investigate and discovered that the construction was undermining the motorway banking, which would have had catastrophic consequences if it had continued. A stop notice was issued and the matter resolved; I should say that this was a major housing developer.

Enforcement is key for the integrity of the planning system, for the conditions that are applied to a planning application when it is given consent and for residents who have asked questions about its impact. It is therefore key to retaining the trust of residents, as my noble friend has said, and so that democratic decision-making can be relied on to check that planning conditions are properly fulfilled. That requires adequate funding. I would like to hear from the Minister whether the Government are of a mind to make a move from a discretionary function to a statutory one, which would then be adequately funded for the very important role that planning enforcement plays.

--- Later in debate ---

Amendments 135HZG and—

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

I may have misunderstood what he said, but I thought the Minister was saying they were reducing the power of certain statutory consultees. I know we are probably advancing the consideration of the Bill, because we are going to deal with this next week, but the entirety of Part 3 creates entirely new burdens for an entirely new set of quangos. It is actually going to slow things down. I just wondered whether, in the light of this consideration of Part 3, he might like to review what he has said. If we truly are going to reduce the veto that these statutory undertakings have, then that is absolutely to be welcomed. It is just that the thrust of this Bill is going in the completely the other direction.

[Lord Wilson of Sedgefield (Lab)]

I would not accept that. It has to be a balance between what we can do to make things more flexible and ensuring that we have the right kind of infrastructure to lead to the growth we want in the local economy. We need a flexible system and what we are trying to devise here is that.

Amendments 135HZG and 135HZH cover the important but technical issue of decision-makers revisiting matters which have been established through the grant of planning permission when determining applications for supplementary consents, such as reserved matter approvals. I recognise that these are probing amendments, and I understand the concern about matters being revisited when they should not be. We want to see supplementary consents determined as swiftly as possible. Case law has long established that supplementary consents must focus on the specific matters directly related to the consent and not revisit wider matters which have been addressed by the original grant of planning permission.

However, we are sceptical about the merits of putting this case law on a statutory footing as suggested by Amendment 135HZG. The principle is well established among planning officers and putting it on a statutory footing will not speed up their decision-making. Indeed, it could create new grounds for legal challenges to planning decisions, which we want to avoid.

Similarly, I am not convinced that we need a review on this matter.

--- Later in debate ---

Modular is very sensible, and it is cheaper to do this by having an approved scheme as in the amendment that my noble friend Lord Lucas has tabled. Regrettably, the whole NHS building regime got dragged into the mire, again, of customised building as opposed to modular. If we want to make sure that we have good-quality homes for communities right around the country, I suggest that we back my noble friend’s amendment as well. I beg to move.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to speak in support of Amendment 135 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, and declare an interest in that the sponsor of her amendment, Richard Bacon, was the Member of Parliament for South Norfolk, where I represented the council for many years; it is worth putting it on record that he devoted the greater part of his parliamentary career to pursuing the importance of self-building in our nation. Self-building is not just the right thing to do because it is going to deliver more homes; it enables striving families to build a house of their dreams. Of course, they do not actually build it themselves. Self-building is not about getting all the tools; it is about procuring and possibly designing a home for you to live in for the long term—the basis of community and empowerment in that sense.

I welcome the amendment, not least because we have sleepwalked into a situation where a small number of national housebuilders have created for themselves a substantial monopoly, not just in the building of homes but in their design. Local distinctiveness and vernacular have been lost. A bungalow that has gone a bomb in Barnsley is built in Bunwell, 200 miles away, yet it is the same design language. We need distinctiveness. The logical conclusion, the spirit of what this amendment seeks to achieve, is that not only do we give those wanting to build their own home or procure their own residence the chance but local authorities can be very distinctive about making sure that we are capturing the correct need for those people who have the wherewithal to do it—not just the casual want, as was the original case and has now been tightened up.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I have Amendment 135H in this group. This is another of my attempts to help the Government make the way that housing is delivered slightly more efficient. I live in Eastbourne, and Eastbourne Borough Council has a long-standing partnership with a modular house builder called Boutique Modern, which has produced some very effective houses in the town, looking quite different from one another because it is easier to customise the outside of those modular homes; but the structure, what is happening inside, is the same. It is produced in a factory. It is daft, when you are producing identical goods, to have to go through type approval for them as if they were being built on the ground.

You have a design, which has passed all the tests and been approved by the Buildoffsite Property Assurance Scheme, I suggest—though it could equally be some other body—then you avoid all the processes and costs associated with whether it is an acceptable design for a place for someone to live in and can concentrate on how the site is laid out and what the building looks like. That makes a really effective way for people to build and procure their own houses, to go with my noble friend’s excellent amendment.

I urge this on the Government as a way in which they can make another small improvement that will, over time, decrease the cost and increase the rate of housebuilding.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I am gravely concerned. Normally, of course, I agree wholeheartedly with my noble friend Lady Coffey, and perhaps I have misread her amendment, in which case I apologise, and she will correct me in the winding. In the evidence that the chief executive of Natural England gave to your Lordships’ Built Environment Committee 18 months ago, she said that it had no regard whatever for economic growth in determining its position on development proposals; it was purely, solely and entirely for environmental purposes. Of course, if growth is the principal and number one objective of this Government, these things need to be balanced. So the amendment puts a touching faith in the professionalism of Natural England, which, as I think we will discover next week, may be misplaced.

Natural England, in its provision of EDPs, as I read in the Bill, will be given monopoly powers to be a monopoly regulator, a monopoly provider and a monopoly price-maker of environmental schemes in this country. These EDPs, as I see it, could conceptually be 100 different EDPs on a national basis for 100 different species, each of which may be in a less favourable condition, or so forth.

If the experience of nutrient neutrality is anything to go by, it will take Natural England years to come up with mitigating programmes. That is what it has done, and in some parts of the country we are still waiting. So I have no faith that Natural England, vested as it will be in Part 3 of the Bill, will be prompt and complete in its provision of EDPs.

As I read this amendment, I see that it will be an excuse for local authorities not to grant an otherwise appropriate permission, which would in normal cases sail through because every other obligation and stipulation has been met. So I think we can contemplate that this could not only gum up and slow down the development, but there is a second problem. The risk is that the developer may have made his own inquiries and found his own local solution to a particular local requirement for an especially local problem, whether for species, environmental ecology, or whatever. I can see that the consequence of this amendment would be that he might have to pay three times: once for the delay, once for his own mitigation, which in so far as he or any reasonable person is concerned meets all the regulations, and another time to wait for the EDP, which may or may not be coming from Natural England in a prompt situation.

I am really concerned about this amendment. I do not believe that Natural England is the appropriate body to do this. If the Government take a different view, that is their prerogative. But we should not vest in Natural England monopoly powers that cut out private provision, private delivery, and especially local delivery, and sacrifice them on the altar of some national scheme at hugely inflated values.

[Baroness Grender (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, for ensuring that one person is watching tonight—it is much appreciated—and the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, for raising interesting debates regarding Amendments 135A, 135F and 253A in the context of biodiversity protections through environmental delivery plans, or EDPs, and the capture and use of that data.

EDPs must do more than simply mitigate harm. They must require the active protection and enhancement of biodiversity, with clear enforceable timetables and measurable outcomes. Our concern is that EDPs risk becoming instruments of offsetting impact rather than delivering real local environmental recovery. We need a strong legal framework that prevents development-related damage to irreplaceable habitats, such as ancient woodlands and chalk streams, and makes sure these habitats receive the highest protection in planning decisions.

We welcome these amendments and look forward to some level of timetabling and monitoring in EDPs and the introduction of an overall improvement test seeking to ensure that conservation gains significantly outweigh harm. However, for us, questions remain about whether the provisions are sufficient in practice to guarantee meaningful biodiversity outcomes. The reliance on compensation rather than upfront prevention remains a concern, as does the limited timeframe for public scrutiny of EDPs. We all in this Committee note that Part 3 includes new measures on EDPs, including, as discussed, powers for Natural England to oversee and design conservation strategies, but it is still unclear how these changes will translate into on the ground improvements or prevent the loss of vulnerable habitats.

The hour is late, but it would be useful if the Minister could tell us to what extent these recent changes to Part 3 address the deep concerns about EDPs being used as a compromise rather than a solution. Will we see stronger enforcement, longer public consultations and better integration of biodiversity data into our planning decisions?

EDPs that guarantee biodiversity need to ensure that our natural heritage is a foundation, not a casualty, of sustainable development. I welcome this debate, therefore, and look forward to clarification—if not tonight then certainly when we debate Part 3 next week—to ensure that the Bill delivers the nature protections that we all believe this country urgently needs.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I want to make a brief comment. I very much sympathise with the thrust of this amendment, but I am anxious about the term “members of the public”. Those noble Lords who sit on a planning committee will know that there are decision-makers—the councillors who sit around the table—who will ultimately pass judgment one way or the other on the application. As I understand it, the amendment would contemplate that those decision-makers would be in the room and then members of the public outside, watching remotely, might contribute.

Is it the intention of the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, that special participants, who are not members of the public but also are not decision-makers, will be able to contribute from outside the room? The people I have in mind are local members, for example, local parish council members, or the local neighbourhood group, who have special status in the sense that they are consultees. While I can see that the decision-makers need to be in the room and members of the public might be outside, perhaps the noble Baroness could help us by saying what would be the status of these special people—the local member and so forth—who may be members of the council but not decision-makers.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

I do not think that it is for us to decide about these special stakeholders. I would have thought it would be up to the council to decide whether they are allowed in the room. In my council, they are certainly encouraged to attend. The key issue is the involvement of people who would not dream of turning up to a council meeting. Of course, the local member and all the other people the noble Lord mentioned would not fear going into a council meeting and could get there easily enough. It is those who are normally excluded who are the issue. I genuinely believe that, by expanding the voice of people who contribute, we may take some of the heat out of these really controversial planning decisions.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

At the moment, some of these special stakeholders are not permitted to participate unless they are in the room. I take the noble Baroness’s amendment to say that they might be able to participate if they are outside the room. That is what I was trying to probe.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

It would certainly put more pressure on the council to allow that, which I think they should.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Fuller Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 9th September 2025 Lords Chamber

We have huge problems with our political system. This would be a small step towards tackling some of them.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I have not been in your Lordships’ House for that long, but this is the most outrageous amendment possible. It is a baseless smear against somebody. The noble Baroness says that it is a safeguard, but this is a stunt that will do nothing to improve transparency in politics. The last two speakers talk about trust in politics while suggesting back-hands and under the counter deals are the lingua franca of planning and that there is some sort of corruption at play.

I have been a council leader for 20 years. I can tell you that, when I ran my council, while it was easy to have cheap remarks in the local newspaper about brown paper bags and so forth, on not one occasion was I ever aware, either colloquially or in practice, of even the suggestion of bribery or corruption. That is what is at the heart of this.

The noble Baroness mentioned a former Secretary of State in the other place and suggested that money passed hands. The suggestion was that he happened to meet a person at a dinner who subsequently donated through his company, quite properly and with a full declaration to the Electoral Commission. That is not improper. In politics we need to meet people outside the Westminster bubble to find out where we are.

That aside, the substance of the amendment is nonsense. We already have an organisation—a trusted public body that is outside the organisations that the noble Baroness seeks to smear—called the Electoral Commission. Every few weeks, and certainly every quarter, a summary is provided of any donation by any individual or company that exceeds £500, not just to an individual but to political parties in general. That is where people should look if they want to find malpractice or malfeasance. The hard-pressed local planning officer and his support team are not the people to act in judgment on this.

This is just a stunt. I hope that, even before the Minister stands up, the noble Baroness will think about withdrawing the amendment without further debate. This is an assault on the political integrity of our country. It is a smear that should be beneath the noble Baroness and those who speak in favour of it.

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

My Lords, I am not sure that this amendment hits the target of potential corruption in relation to planning. In my view, the central problem is not with central government but with local government. We are all becoming accustomed to the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, who is very eloquent, describing the council that he has been involved in as a paragon of perfection over the last 20 or 30 years, and I accept what he says about his council down there in Norfolk. However, those of us who have been in legal practice over the years, and/or have been Members of the other place, and/or have had to deal in other ways with allegations of corruption, are well aware that there is a centuries-long history of local government corruption in relation to planning issues above everything else. I accept that there are protections and that most councillors, such as the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, would never consider being involved in corruption. But my experience of doing criminal corruption cases in relation to local government is that the people who commit the corruption, whether they are councillors or officers, are not the ones who subscribe to the regulations and the registers that have been set out.

We must continue to be extremely vigilant about corruption in relation to planning. There is an enormous amount of money involved. I hope that the Minister is of the view that to call this kind of amendment an appalling stunt is to lose oneself in the backwoods of local government and to be not a frequent reader of newspapers.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Fuller Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 4th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I will make two brief points. This debate has shown us that we need to charge fees for planning permission, and one has to understand the purpose. It is common ground that there is a lack of planners in this country, which is one of the reasons why the fee arrangement has to change.

One reason why we have insufficient planners in this country is not that we cannot charge enough. My authority, South Norfolk, has an advanced programme of upskilling planning technicians to become fully qualified planning officers, on a work release scheme, by using the apprenticeship levy that all councils and large employers put into the system. However, this Government have stopped that, because those sorts of people, who have made their way for a few years and have shown expertise and enterprise, are no longer able to be upgraded by using the apprenticeship levy. That has been cast away and it is an omission. I ask the Minister whether she might consider revisiting that rather short-sighted decision to stop upgrading these planners, which would start to address this.

I have huge sympathy with the point raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, about proportionality in planning fees, but I need to explain that, although the planning fee is important, it is just a single sliver of the total cost that developers, particularly small developers, have to pay. For example, there is the complexity of Section 106. As a council leader, I had to review a Section 106 agreement of which 15 banks were cosignatories. Can your Lordships imagine the cost not just of the applicants’ but of everybody else’s fees? The bespoke nature of many Section 106 agreements is really onerous. Some planning authorities require the use of only their particular lawyers, at a full rack rate. I will not go into nutrient neutrality, although that has an additional level of fees, or building control and so forth.

I know that we are in Committee, and I sympathise with what the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, said, but, if she is minded to bring this matter back on Report, we might have a full idea of all the layering so that proportionality can be taken into account in the round.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

I will see what I can do.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, it is a delight to follow the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, on his amendment. I entirely agree with everything he says. Not that long ago, a lido not far from where my daughter lives in east London was ripped down and turned into, of all things, a car park, which seems an ultimately depressing sanction on today. I can tell him right now that, if he chooses to divide the House on that subject in the future, I will walk behind him through the Lobby. I thank him.

On my Amendments 100, 101 and 102, I am very grateful to be supported by the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, on all three and by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, on Amendment 100. They are in addition to Clause 50, and they are about training to do with climate change, biodiversity and ecological surveying. This does not just hold up planning distinctions—it is a question not just of newts, bats and different kinds of badgers but of people not knowing what they are talking about. Therefore, a lot of decisions are not only delayed but end up going to appeal.

My Amendment 100 would mean that the training would be mandatory in the overall planning that is to be provided in general under Clause 50. Amendment 102 provides that the training must be provided not only to elected members of the planning committees but also to local authority planning officers responsible for making any planning decisions. Amendment 101 includes the highways, with the list of authorities to which the training provisions apply. That is obviously crucial and often gets left out, because roads, after all, cut through animal corridors, divide woods, divide fields and separate areas where nature is trying to talk to itself and be together.

These skills and resourcing gaps with planning authorities have been identified very generally across the board as a key blocker. Indeed, the Government’s own impact assessment for the Bill states:

“There is very limited data on how environmental obligations affect development”,


yet there is clear and mounting evidence, including from the OEP, that ecological capacity and skills within the planning system is a key reason for the environmental assessment not functioning effectively.

The OEP goes on to say that

“without Government commitment to providing those public bodies responsible for assessments with the skills”

and

“expertise … needed … now or in future”,

they

“will not deliver as they should to support positive environmental outcomes”.

It advised that the Government should now develop a strategy for this resourcing and for securing the expertise by the public bodies.

A survey undertaken by the Association of Local Government Ecologists of its planning authorities found that only 53% of survey respondents said that their LPA has limited access to an ecologist for planning work, and only 5% of respondents said that their system is adequate. Any noble Lord who was in the House on Monday listening to the Science Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Vallance of Balham, answer a question about AI and training would have found it interesting to hear him say that a report from MIT last week on the use of AI across companies

“noted that 95% of companies got very little benefit and 5% got massively disproportionate benefit”.—[Official Report, 1/9/25; col. 511.]

The reason was that they had been properly trained. Whether we are talking about training to build sports grounds or training to protect wildlife, the training is needed.

The excellent charity Plantlife has highlighted that these gaps are even more acute for, say, botany and mycology. Botany was once compulsory, I guess, when most of us took GCSE biology. I certainly did it, and I did at A-level too. Research shows, however, that it is now practically non-existent. That is why, again, it is crucial that the amendment includes botanical and mycological survey.

Much has been made here of the cost. The noble Lord, Lord Thurlow, mentioned this as well, but I always feel that I am trying to plead amendments that put more and more emphasis on local authorities doing more and more. I expect that many Members remember the extraordinary Dasgupta report that came out from the Treasury under the Tory Government and looked at the costs of nature. I had the privilege of spending much of last night interviewing Professor Dasgupta. We were talking about many specific things, one of which was that the real way to rebuild our shattered biodiversity and our ecological strength is, generally, through a community, but there is a very strong financial aspect here. Our GDP, at the moment, is an incentive to depreciate all natural assets. The system for measuring the state of public finances discourages all investment in maintaining the UK’s stock of natural capital. Shockingly, the Bank of England mandates do not recognise that value.

It would make a lot of sense for the Government to revisit some of these local-looking economics and say, “Yes, we can afford to train people properly; in fact, we can’t afford not to train them properly”. Well-trained councillors and well-trained planning leaders will also add to people’s enjoyment and, as with building sports facilities, the joy they take in nature, being out in the countryside and thinking it is something in which they have a vested interest to protect. Unless we all start doing that, we will all be poorer, regardless of what we do.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 103, which was tabled in July but has risen to the top only today. The aim of this amendment is really simple, although I must congratulate the Public Bill Office for also making it comprehensive. “Comprehensive” is the appropriate word here, in the week when so many people have gone back to school after the summer holidays. If this amendment is accepted, quite a few people in government might find themselves returning to their alma maters. This amendment would go beyond the provisions that the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, has just outlined, because it would include Ministers and officials.

The Minister and I both go back some way in local government. While we might have trodden different paths in the sense that we approached things through two different political lenses, we have progressed by making evidence-based decisions grounded in policy with an intellectual honesty that would increase the well-being of those we served. I want to make the distinction between the different sorts of decisions that we take in local government. Some are political, some are part of an executive function and sometimes we make decisions within the scrutiny function. When it comes to planning or licensing, however, we make quasi-judicial decisions. These are the decisions that carry the weight of law and, when you make them, you need to be clear that you are acting within the law.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

Before the Minister sits down, I have a question. She mentioned that when Ministers—who are lay people, not specialists in this field or professionally qualified in planning—take decisions, they are so advised. I cannot quite get in my mind the distinction between a Minister making a quasi-judicial decision on planning and a councillor or a mayor. None of us has mentioned mayors, but mayors are contained within the provisions of the Bill. Of course, I understand why the Secretary of State might want to resist having to get a qualification, but that is not really answering the point because this is not just about the Secretary of State and the Minister for Local Government. This is about Secretaries of State and Ministers throughout all the departments of state, including the Treasury, which is setting planning policy and so forth. Can the Minister help me by explaining clearly what the distinction is and why the Government appear to be resisting this so strongly?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I come back to the point I made that if an applicant applies to the Secretary of State, a planning inspector would consider the case and then advise the Minister or the Secretary of State who was taking the decision. Planning inspectors are highly qualified and highly trained. Regarding the training of Ministers, we have access to bespoke training. I have undertaken some training. Because we have to operate within the Ministerial Code and planning propriety guidance, when we are making decisions we have a different call on us from that in local planning committees.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Inglewood (CB)]

My Lords, I will briefly support my noble friend Lord Cameron of Dillington’s amendment. In the 1980s, I was chairman of the development and control committee of the then Lake District Special Planning Board, and I can see no reason why those kinds of organisations should not be treated exactly the same as the others on the inherent merits of what is being proposed and what the authority members wish to occur. I was the Secretary of State-appointed member of the Lake District Special Planning Board. It occurred to me then that that was rather analogous to being a Member of your Lordships’ House as a life Peer—but, of course, I would not understand that.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I strongly support this set of amendments, particularly Amendment 135HZE, which I think my noble friend is just about to wrap up on.

Noble Lords will recall that I have been a councillor and sat on a local planning committee for 23 years; I was the leader for 17 years. It was one of my privileges to appoint the committee and choose the chairman. I always explained to my members that the purpose of planning was not an administrative function that existed as an end in itself—although this Bill sometimes treats it as if it were so—but to arbitrate between the private interests of the applicant and the public interest. I use the word “arbitrate” purposefully, because people who sit on a planning committee have a difficult job. They must weigh up so much conflicting information within an adversarial system and, ultimately, either the proposer or objector wins.

Much of this Bill is established under the false premise that local planning committees are blockers of development and that the ranks of officials will not rest until every square inch of our nation is concreted over. But this is nonsense. The premise is that officials bring none of their prejudices to bear, but that is simply not true. We have Natural England, which leaves no stone unturned in blocking development. We have the railways, which ballast every proposal with ridiculous costs, such as £5 million for a footbridge to cross between two platforms. We have the highways authorities, which tie themselves in knots under the misdirection that personal transport outside development boundaries is unsustainable. That is before all the other bad actors in many other quangos that increasingly advance their own narrow self-interests rather than the public interest.

I do not deny the importance of some of their representations, but the problem with these quangos is that they all claim a veto—it is their way or no way. It is from these vetoes that we have got the £100 million bat bridge, to which I expect my noble friend Lord Howard may refer. It is from these vetoes that we get this mitigating trade in natterjack newts or whatever they are, organisms that are rare in Europe but commonplace in every English village pond. And then of course there is the insanity of nutrient neutrality, as if building a bungalow in Bristol is going to somehow clean up the River Wensum.

Given the way planning works, in many cases it takes only one of these vetoes from just one of the statutory consultees to block the entire proposal. That is especially the case when officers advise members to refuse an otherwise acceptable proposal on the overly precautionary grounds that an adverse decision could be grounds for appeal or expensive judicial review. We need the planning committee to cut through the undergrowth, and to stop looking over their shoulder and being fearful of challenge.

I congratulate my noble friend Lord Banner, who is not in his place, on his report in which he made several recommendations. But those will count for nothing if there is nobody without the mandate, duty and courage to get those applications to committee. In my experience, it is the committees populated by the accountable councillors that do more to get Britain building than the faceless dead hand of the state quangos.

We need elected people who know a self-serving veto or spurious objection when they see one. We need people on the ground who know the importance of building homes, economies and places that enhance communities to arbitrate those competing interests. That is why this amendment is so welcome and necessary. It is absolutely right that the chair of the planning committee, working with the senior planner, should be able to revisit otherwise fatal objections to get that balance, to enable the local champions who populate those committees to take all the evidence into account, to listen carefully to objections, to balance the private and public interest and to get Britain building, and not pander to the self-serving quangos sometimes interested only in pursuing their own ideologies to the exclusion of all else.

[Lord Jamieson (Con)]

My Lords, I will briefly speak to Amendment 135HZF and to my noble friend Lady Scott of Bybrook’s Amendments 103A and 103B before addressing the other amendments in this group.

Local democratic accountability must be protected. Local people should have a say in the decisions that affect their daily lives. These amendments seek to ensure planning decisions remain the remit of elected councils which are accountable to their communities. It is important that large or controversial applications should be considered through local debate so that all views are sufficiently represented.

Delegation of decision-making to unelected planning officers not only deprives local people of their democratic voice but compromises the entire planning framework. Public planning committees allow for transparent and easily accessible forums for residents, ensuring that their voice is heard in the planning process. Enforced delegation of important planning decisions or controversial ones would make the whole process more opaque, weaken community engagement and disfranchise those most affected by the decisions. With a loss of local trust in the whole planning system, how do the Government plan to maintain community engagement and trust in the planning system if they are not involved?

By ensuring the Secretary of State does not have sweeping powers of delegation, local autonomy would be preserved, empowering those best equipped to make decisions about their local community. Amendments 103A and 103B question the Government’s decision to make guidance on the scope, size and composition of the national scheme, subject to delegation rather than primary legislation.

Amendment 135HZE enshrines the right for an application to be determined by a planning committee where there are objections to the application and both the head of planning—or, potentially, the chief planner—and the chair of the planning committee have agreed that these are on valid planning grounds, which is best practice, currently. While some have raised the risk of spurious arguments causing delays, the above protections and subsequent amendments in my name on finality should address these concerns, enabling us to get on with housing delivery while retaining the democratic voice. This is the right balance.

--- Later in debate ---

There is another way of getting rid of the ambiguity. If the Government were of the view that the public interest in this kind of accommodation is as compelling as has been said, it would be open to the Government to propose amendments to the general permitted development order and/or use classes order deeming that, in all circumstances, this accommodation is not a material change of use or does not need permission, so the bright line in the sand can be drawn the other way. If the Government have the courage of their convictions in relation to that, they can bring forward the relevant secondary legislation, which would be subject to the scrutiny of Parliament in the usual way. The current ambiguous uncertain situation is not satisfactory. It has to be either one or the other but not somewhere in between.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

I strongly support my noble friend Lady Scott’s amendments, particularly the one in which she requires the asylum provisions to be implemented immediately on the passing of the Bill. I congratulate my noble friend who, by gripping this, demonstrates the urgency of the situation we find ourselves in, in direct contrast to the ponderous approach from a Government, who appear to give greater weight to the process of international law than the well-being of our settled populations.

This is an infrastructure Bill. I alight on a simple truth that hotels are an essential part of an area’s economic infrastructure. Their importance exceeds the turnover of the business and the payroll for the cooks and cleaners behind the scenes and the front of house staff. Hotels accommodate more than weekend tourists. They enable commercial travellers to visit distant customers, provide shelter for tradesmen working on local building sites away from the main base, and drive a huge multiplier effect in holiday hotpots and conference cities. Local restaurants, tourist attractions, coach operators, florists and artisan food chains all benefit. Hotels are a huge economic driver.

 If you take away the liquidity in accommodation that hotels provide, local economies are damaged, especially in rural market towns that might only be able to sustain a single coaching inn. This is a matter of public interest. In the pursuit of growth, it is a matter of national interest. So, we cannot and must not carelessly allow the conversion of hotels into hostels after behind-closed-doors under-the-counter deals between the Home Office and local landlords. I do not blame the owners for entertaining these blandishments, but we cannot allow ourselves to sleepwalk into a situation where these decisions are taken—a connivance between the Home Office and the investors behind the hotels—over the heads of local people, whose justifiable concerns are swept aside and airbrushed away. That just will not do.

A friend of mine who operates a small seasonal seaside hotel with 29 rooms has been offered £40,000 per month for 12 months of the year for three years—£1.5 million in aggregate—for a property that might otherwise have achieved at best £500,000 at auction. She was then offered a fully expensed refurbishment at the end, while having to fire all her staff, who were already costing more because of the national insurance increases. She has not taken the bait, but others have. The contracts and values here are madness. They are economically illiterate. It is distorting whole economies with perverse incentives. These deals are being done right under our noses.

As my noble friend Lord Banner said, the conversion from a hotel to a hostel is not just planning semantics. People staying in hostels have no freedom to choose their accommodation. They stay for months, not days. They are required to check-in with a commissar each night. They share rooms with people they do not know. They do not pay the bill. They have nothing to do but wait. There are many other differences between them—

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for giving way. Does he feel a sense of humility given that, by 2023, a peak of 400 asylum hotels had been reached under the previous Government?

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

By June 2024, that had gone down to 213. At the moment, there are 2,500 more asylum seekers in those hotels than there were when the Government changed.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

I will answer the noble Lord’s question directly, because this is an unsatisfactory state of affairs. The points I have just made—

[Baroness Laing of Elderslie (Con)]

Will the noble Lord clarify the point? In particular, the argument before us is that some hotels in some places are not suitable for asylum seekers. The previous Conservative Government recognised this point and closed the Bell Hotel in Epping in April 2024. I know because I asked them to do so, and they did so taking into account the opinions and sensitivities of local people, which have been ignored by the current Government.

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

Since the noble Baroness provokes me to return to the question, I ask the noble Lord whether he agrees that 400 hotels were in use for asylum seekers in 2023 and that the reduction that took place was met with no change in asylum law that enabled the new Government to address the situation in a constructive way?

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

I am grateful to my noble friends for answering some of the technical questions for me. I was not aware of the numbers, but I am better apprised now. The point I was trying to make is twofold. First, I am trying to draw out the distinction between a hotel, a hostel and an HMO. In so doing, I am only repeating arguments that were made in the judgment referred to by my noble friend—the interim injunction in the case of the Bell Hotel in Epping. The noble Lord may wish to throw mud in my eyes, but I am only repeating the authorised judgment of the Court of Appeal and the points that were raised there, and I take no criticism for doing so. It is a matter of public record. There are many of my learned friends in this Committee, including my noble friend sitting to the side of me, and if I have erred in what I have just said, I am sure it will come up.

The point is, and the noble Lord gives me the opportunity to say so, that the movement of a hotel into a hostel is a material change of use for the reasons I just gave. The people who are staying there are not the sort of guests who pay their way and are there for a few days. They are mandated to be there by the state. That is the point we need to make. That is a material change of use. It is plain and simple. There is no denying it. As we have just heard from my noble friend, the planning system exists not just to regulate those changes in use but to arbitrate between the private interests of the hotel owner and the public interest. Let us be clear: there is no denying the public interest in this matter.

I want to make the distinction between the interim provision of accommodation for helping whole family units get back on their feet and the circumstance where that situation morphs in the building into the provision of bedrooms for single, mostly male, economic migrants. The conversion of a hotel to an HMO for the use of family groups is a bit of a lottery that shapeshifts with time. There are areas where a hotel might be converted into an HMO under permitted development rules—that is common—and thence separately from an HMO into a hostel. I want to paint a picture where a hotel has been converted into an HMO for family groups under permitted development but then without notice has flipped into a hostel when the Home Office decides to disperse families out and move in single, unrelated migrants. That is not just a theoretical possibility. It nearly happened in Diss in South Norfolk where I used to be the leader. In that town, a whole generation ago, arms were outstretched to welcome the Vietnamese boat people. Demonstrating that humility, under my leadership, the local council worked to welcome the largest group of Ukrainians in our county. More recently, migrant families—again, under my leadership—settled into a hotel which has, in effect, become an HMO. Please do not suggest that I have any ulterior motive; I have done my bit. Not only that but I have done my bit to smooth over some of the difficulties that certain people on social media and elsewhere have tried to make. You invite me to make these points.

In July—I am no longer the leader now I have taken my place in your Lordships’ House—the Home Office announced without notice that the families that had become settled would be dispersed, meaning that 42 children were going to be removed from the school roll just a few weeks before the start of the new school year. Their families would be taken away from the local GP practice and from the networks that they had created among themselves and with the local community, together with the infrastructure that had been wrapped around them. Again, something put in under the budget that I set was to be removed. No wonder local people were cross. They could see the injustice in that approach. If there was a crime, it was from the Home Office, which thought that sort of behaviour was acceptable. But we were lucky, because it had not been four years since the families were initially welcomed, so the council was able to issue a stop notice to prevent the forced removal of those family groups.

Elsewhere, with the slippery slope from moving from hotel to hostel, a stop notice cannot be issued. That is why I completely support the amendment which would stop the limit on stop notices so that there is no sleepwalking into a system where a hotel goes to an HMO then to a hostel without due process. We should put local people at the heart of decision-making and prevent those with an axe to grind claiming that they do not have a say, which is the source of the community tensions we seek to stop. If they do not have their say, they should just not be smeared as far right activists for expressing proper concerns. This problem has been created by national politicians, but local people need to be heard.

[Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer (LD)]

Given how much business we still have to get through today, I wonder whether the noble Lord would very kindly observe the advisory time that is given to speeches?

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

The noble Baroness will know that I was interrupted on more than one occasion. I am on my last 50 words, so we are going to get there. Normally, interventions from other parties do not count against the time. I will take advice from the clerks if necessary.

This problem is created by national politicians, but local people need to be heard and to be part of the solution. We need to recognise that, in this infrastructure Bill above all, we should be building economic infrastructure and community spirit. We do not do that by removing hotels from circulation.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I rise briefly to offer the strongest possible Green group opposition to all these amendments. I do that to make sure that the breadth of opposition across your Lordships’ Committee is demonstrated. I hope that we are going to hear very strong opposition from the Government Front Bench too, but I cannot be sure of that, so I want to put this on the record.

I will start with the rather oddly grouped amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Howard of Rising, about bats. The noble Lord characterised bats as a minority interest, but I hope that I am going demonstrate why they are not. I begin with a study published in Science journal on 6 September last year about what has happened in the United States of America in certain areas where all the bats have been wiped out by white nose disease. In those areas—it is a natural experiment—the rate of infant mortality has increased significantly. This looks very strange. How can it be? How is the health of newborn babies and bats related? Well, with the bats gone, insect populations have risen enormously. Then, farmers have sprayed 30% more pesticide, and that pesticide is linked to infant deaths. When I talk about this study, I am usually focusing on pesticide use, but in this case, there is an important illustration of a point we were discussing in an earlier group of amendments about one health—human, environmental and animal health are intimately interrelated.

I say with the greatest of respect that, from the noble Lord’s own Benches, there was a suggestion that there should be education about ecosystems for members of the Government and civil servants—maybe we need that right across the House, because ecosystems, including bats, are crucial to the health of all of us. We are one of the most nature-depleted countries on this planet and that is bad for human health.

I come now to the other set of amendments in this group, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Scott. I was talking, on that last amendment, about the health of our society. My reaction to these amendments is about the nature of our society. What kind of country are we? Changing our planning law by creating a special use category for asylum seekers is entirely inappropriate and dangerous. The noble Baroness, Lady Scott, said that these amendments are “targeted”—absolutely too right they are. That is very evident and disturbing.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

The intervention by the noble Baroness, Lady Laing, seemed to distance where somebody lives from their behaviours. The intervention she made was irrelevant. The fact is that the previous Conservative Government started using hotels for temporary accommodation for asylum seekers and made no effort to increase the speed of assessment for those asylum seekers, so that they could have certainty in their lives and local accommodation would not be put under undue stress. It was not only a failure of public policy by the previous Government; it was inhumane. It surprised me that the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, for whom I have high regard, has seen fit to bring these amendments. It is out of character for her to do so. Perhaps on later reflection, she will regret bringing them.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

This is the Planning and Infrastructure Bill—the opportunity to have this sort of wider debate on asylum, borders and infrastructure was yesterday with the borders and asylum Bill. What we are trying to do here is focus on the very narrow point about when there is a change in the planning status. As my noble friend said, when there is development, should the rules that cover planning and development be engaged and, if so, to what extent? I think my noble friend’s amendments—I am sure she will say something aligned with this when she winds up—would establish the principle that, when development happens, we cannot just pick and choose which bits are subject to planning law and which are not. When development happens, local people should be able to have their say.

It pains me to do so, but I ask the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, directly: is it her position that local people should not have a say when development happens and there is a material change of use, either from a hotel to an HMO or from an HMO to a hostel? If it is, we need to know.

[Lord in Waiting/Government Whip (Lord Wilson of Sedgefield) (Lab)]

I ask the noble Lord to get to the point of his question.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Earl of Clancarty (CB)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to my Amendment 185H in this group, which is a probing amendment. I ask the Government to give some serious thought to it as it addresses a gap in our thinking about the arts and arts practice. I am grateful for the support of the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering. I am also grateful to UK Music for its input into this amendment.

This amendment would establish a system for locally identifying and protecting physical assets of cultural value—that is to say, the spaces or buildings in which the arts take place, be it a music venue, a rehearsal space, a recording studio, an arts centre, a theatre or a visual artist studio, to list just a few potential examples, and one can think of others. This amendment is intended to work alongside and complement the community value scheme. I should also say that I support Amendment 112 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey.

At the national level, my amendment would be helpful to and complementary to funding bodies such as the Arts Council, whose concern is primarily for artists and arts organisations, although I acknowledge that its new creative foundation fund will be concerned specifically with the repair of selected buildings.

Of course, most arts are being produced in local, non-residential physical business spaces, public and private. Sometimes they are purpose-built. They are most often furnished for a particular cultural use. If individual artists and organisations do not have access, or lose access, to the spaces in which to work or rehearse then they cannot work—or at least, they cannot do so in the optimum environment, irrespective of the value of their work commercially or the value placed on it through support by a funding body. That is the crucial importance of buildings to the arts, which we always seem to be in danger of overlooking. Buildings are always somewhere, and always in local communities.

I want to address one potential criticism of such a scheme, which is that the arts should not be preserved in aspic; fashions change and new ideas come in. However, the great danger in the present day is the unnecessary loss of assets which are still relevant and still have currency, but without there being any form of replacement.

The Music Venue Trust cites examples of music clubs which have had to close days after they have sold out events, such are the often overwhelming contemporary pressures on our cultural assets. Of our grass-roots music venues, 125—16% of all GMVs—closed in the UK in 2023. Last year, 25 closed, but we are still talking about an overall downward trend. GMVs are, of course, important at the local level but a circuit of clubs for performers is of national importance. The loss of so many grass-roots music venues threatens that circuit.

I will cite one other example: theatres. The theatres at risk register 2025, compiled by the Theatres Trust, finds that 40% of theatre buildings face closure without urgent investment. Sometimes, of course, such buildings also have strong architectural merit.

There is a real concern for our cultural assets in the current climate of economic uncertainty, alongside other pressures such as those discussed in the last group. Such pressures include energy and other running costs, rent, business rates and the depletion of council resources, alongside the selling off of council buildings and the contemporary pressures of housebuilding and redevelopment. All these things are piling enormous pressures on our cultural buildings, which ought to be understood as having a significant value, both in themselves and as part of the local infrastructure. The loss of such buildings is a loss—often an irreplaceable loss—not just to the arts, but to local communities, which often take huge pride in their own cultural facilities. The crucial thing, which this amendment specifically addresses, is that we do not think enough about the particular relationship between culture and locality. Local cultural value is not the same, necessarily, as local community value. I hope the Minister will agree with that.

At present, it is all too easy for our cultural facilities to quietly disappear without any local protective system in place to question that disappearance. As I have intimated, this is currently happening across the whole country. Such a system would give power to local people for the protection of their own cultural buildings and spaces. As well as the social effect, there is the effect on the local economy and the ripple effect that can be created in additional jobs and trade. Of course, this is something local people understand more than anyone.

In summary, the value of the scheme—it is not just for the arts in the abstract, but for the local people themselves, whom these cultural facilities serve—is the crucial point. The scheme has a significant geographical local dimension. I look forward to the Minister’s reply.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lady Coffey in her Amendment 112. When I first read this, my mind immediately went to pubs—historic pubs. Of course, we are losing pubs as an accelerated rate. But then I realised, having done some research, that since 2017 it has not been possible to demolish a pub without seeking planning permission. So, my noble friend’s concept comes straight into the ambit of other non-pub things. But then my mind went to the Crooked House, that wonky pub in the West Midlands. I will not say that the owners were crooked, although there have been arrests and there is a police investigation. That building was on the local environmental record.

I wonder whether the noble Baroness might consider strengthening her proposal, because this is not something that is done locally on an ad hoc basis by the local council. Historic England publishes some criteria—pubs aside—for other assets that are not quite yet assets of community value. Of course, “assets of community value” is not as restrictive as you might think: there is no restriction on gifting the pub or on it being sold. The designation does not even last forever; it is for only five years, provided that the use is maintained. I just wonder whether there is any merit in saying that, where a property meets that Historic England designation on the proper national criteria, her anti-demolition provisions ought to be extended to those pro tem, so that at least we do not accidentally and carelessly lose these buildings—non-pubs, or other community buildings —accidentally. We could give additional breathing space to local communities to put a bid forward for protection.

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

My Lords, I will briefly lend my support to both amendments in this group, particularly Amendment 185H from the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, which I have signed. It dovetails neatly with the discussions we had in the debate on the last group. The noble Earl has said that this is a probing amendment, but I hope the Government will look sympathetically on it. We lose buildings of cultural value—cultural assets—at our peril, and the noble Earl made a strong case about all the challenges they have with the oncosts, lighting and heating, that they have to meet, given the sheer size of some of these buildings. I hope we can look favourably on establishing a scheme that would look at assets of cultural value in the ways he set out, and I believe it would greatly enhance the possibility of these buildings remaining for generations to come to enjoy.

Local Audit (Amendment of Definition of Smaller Authority) Regulations 2025

Lord Fuller Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd September 2025 Grand Committee

Lastly, ICAEW is a statutory regulator, but it is completely outside the scope of the freedom of information legislation, which means that no member of the public can question or scrutinise its operations. Does the Minister agree that that is an error which needs to be corrected? I look forward to the Minister’s reply.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as I have, in the past few days, stepped down as the vice-chairman of the local government resources panel, which has oversight of audit and accountancy within the Local Government Association. In that guise, I have been very well acquainted with the difficulties in local government audit.

If there is a villain of the piece—I use that word advisedly—the noble Lord, Lord Porter, when he was chairman of the Local Government Association struck a wonderful deal that established the PSAA, referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Sikka. He drove down those costs and council tax payers benefited from low-cost audit for many years. With the benefit of hindsight, however, perhaps he did too good a job, because it came to pass that it was very difficult for audit practitioners to recruit the right staff at the right level, and they got behind.

We ended up in regrettable circumstances—through no fault of the noble Lord, Lord Porter, I stress—aggravated by Covid, in which a number of local authorities had failed to sign off their accounts. I cannot remember the precise details but some were four or five years old—so old, in fact, that the authorities concerned no longer existed because they had been reorganised away. I am very pleased that the previous Government, belatedly perhaps, took a grip. A line was drawn in the sand and some transitional arrangements made, and now things are much better.

However, I am very concerned that we now see the increase in the threshold. I appreciate that we need to increase the threshold value, but going from £6.5 million to £15 million is a huge increase—of 230% in one bite. That will mean that some of the smaller authorities, which hitherto have been contained within the audit regulations—I will give some examples presently—no longer will be.

I am seeking reassurance because we are establishing the definition of a smaller authority. I cannot be blind to the notion—the Minister referred to it in the earlier debate—that we have a local government devolution and reorganisation Bill in the other place; it passed Second Reading yesterday. In that circumstance, we will see a large number of smaller principal authorities, which are subject to the full audit regime, fall into the third tier of local government—that is, they will not be subject to the 5% or £5 council tax increase cap, if I may use that word.

I want to highlight the example of Salisbury City Council. It used to be a district council and a principal authority but, since the reorganisations in Wiltshire, that is no longer the case. In the past four years, it has jacked up its council tax by 44%. I note that its total precept for this year is only £6.065 million, marginally below the threshold limit to which it is subject. Its gross income is £8.64 million. Currently, it is part of the arrangement to have a full audit. Having jacked up council tax by 44% over the past four years, I think it should be. If it is increased to £15 million, however, what assurance can the local people—the long-suffering residents of Salisbury—have that the council has their best interests at heart? By contrast, the Wiltshire unitary authority, which has assumed responsibility for most of the expensive services, put its council tax up by only 4.5% last year.

I am concerned that this definition will, in due course—not today, because I am conscious that we are concerned solely with audit—be used, as we go through local government reorganisation, to give a free pass to some of the smaller city councils and larger town councils, which will inevitably will fall out of the LGR process and let them let rip. Of course, it is not just the district councils, it is the internal drainage boards. I am concerned about the case of Great Yarmouth Borough Council, which had an increase in the internal drainage board levy of 91% last year, which the council was mandated to pass on to local taxpayers. Over the past few years, it has gone up by 117%. That means that because the district council in Great Yarmouth is a principal authority, it could put its council tax up by only £5, but 91% of that was as a result of the unavoidable increase from the internal drainage board that lies within it. That meant that only 9%, just £26,000 of the increase in council tax in that historic borough—I declare an interest because my business is in that borough, but I do not pay council tax there—could be devoted to the provision and improvement of local services. We shall see a whole class of authority that would currently be within the £6.5 million but will no longer be caught if the threshold rises to £15 million.

I want to highlight the example of the Broads Authority, which is well known for its governance failings. It is well known to be a dysfunctional organisation and, in the interests of transparency, I have in the past made complaints to that body through the mishandling of certain planning matters. Its gross budget is £9.7 million. If ever an organisation needed the close scrutiny of a full audit, it is the Broads Authority and now it will be given a free pass. It will be let off from public scrutiny. This is the unintended consequence of this legislation.

Finally, I want to get the definition of “smaller authority” on the record in the context of local government reorganisation, and ask the Minister what the Government’s intentions are. If it is contemplated that this definition of “smaller authority”—the £15 million threshold—will be used post local government reorganisation, when some of these smaller cities, such as Salisbury, or larger towns such as Scarborough or Shrewsbury, which are certainly covered by the audit now but would not be in future, is it proposed that this definition will cap them at £5 or 5%? There will have to be some reckoning. We cannot have a situation whereby only the large unitary authorities that will be formed after LGR have their council tax capped at £5 or 5%. What is the Government’s view about capping, limiting and putting the local taxpayer first from some of these much larger authorities, which will take on other responsibilities—possibly for local culture, parks and dog bins—when their current responsibilities for social care, planning, housing and homelessness are removed? We cannot have a situation where a 230% increase in threshold allows a new class of large, small authority to let rip at the expense of local taxpayers.

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for explaining the statutory instrument. I share many of the perspectives of the noble Lords, Lord Sikka and Lord Fuller. I hope the Minister, in replying, will be able to meet some of the concerns expressed. The context, as we have heard, is the abolition of the Audit Commission 10 years ago. It was supposed to save £100 million a year but it did not do that. It was supposed to make local audit more efficient and it did not do that. It has not saved money. Costs have risen substantially since 2015. The private sector was supposed to take over from the Audit Commission but it has not worked like that, because there have been nowhere near enough trained auditors. There have been, as we have heard, huge delays in the audits of English local authorities. That is the background to this draft statutory instrument.

--- Later in debate ---

There are a lot of implications of that change. It may be justified on inflationary grounds—a figure close to £15 million may be about right—but it needs a little more than that. I was surprised not to find an impact assessment or any indication of what the formal guidance to local authorities will be. I hope the Minister is able to allay some of the concerns that have been expressed here.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

As the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, was speaking, I was looking at the RPI tables from the Office for National Statistics. Had the £6.5 million been increased by inflation, it would have been £10.3 million. So we are seeing a proposed threshold that is fully 50% greater than the increase in inflation over the same period. I just wonder whether that might help the noble Lord’s argument.

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

I thank the noble Lord for that intervention. It may be that RPI is the right way of doing it. I do not know why he took RPI there and not CPI. However, the issue is: why, in fact, are the Government not going to peg the £15 million to inflation? At what point will that figure then be adjusted because inflation continues to rise? We have to have a debate about that fact, but I thank the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, for explaining the RPI figures since 2014. Clearly, it may be that £15 million is the correct figure, but I would like to know what assessment the department has made of the implications of that figure on the number of local authorities that will be taken out of the full audit requirement?

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

I am grateful to the Minister for that important clarification, which will give local taxpayers a great degree of reassurance that this is wholly separate from the LGR process.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for raising the issue and giving me the opportunity to clarify that.

The noble Lord, Lord Shipley, referred to the history of the abolition of the Audit Commission. He asked me about the 2014 threshold and there being no impact assessment. I cannot answer his specific question about how many authorities are taken out of this regime, but I will reply in writing to that question.

The way that this has been developed is that we have been very responsive to stakeholder feedback following the consultation that was initiated. The view of stakeholders is that £15 million will be the appropriate threshold ahead of the Secretary of State undertaking a wider review of audit regimes to make sure that they are all fit for purpose as we enter the new local audit office regime. I hope that answers the substantive question that he asked me.

Aligning audit thresholds with inflation in the future is an important issue. We need to make sure that we do not get ourselves into the same bind that we have before of audit regimes that get out of sync with what is happening in local authorities. Subject to parliamentary approval, the local audit office will work with the department to advance a more proportionate approach and remove the sorts of cliff edges that come from purely financial threshold-based approaches. Our intent is to work with the sector and the local audit office to change that approach.

The noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, asked about progress on implementation. This is a first step. Also picking up the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, about Salisbury City Council and Lindsey Marsh Drainage Board, our engagement with the sector demonstrates that uplifting the upper threshold should be prioritised ahead of the local audit office’s establishment, particularly given the issues with the authorities that noble Lords have mentioned, because they already exceed the upper threshold and they found it impossible to get auditors to do their audit. That is the reason why this has been done ahead of that, but progress on the local audit office is going through. We know that there was a Second Reading in the other place yesterday. I hope my response to the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, on local transparency helps to answer some of the questions from the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Fuller Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 1st September 2025 Lords Chamber

I am lucky enough to have spent the Recess in a rural area of Shropshire, where we have a house. I watched the harvesting over August, with farmers working all hours of the day and night. I know from talking to many people in the area that it feels as though the countryside is not understood and is being attacked by this Government. Proposals for solar farms on agricultural land are yet another attack. I beg to move.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I speak to Amendment 92 in my name. The amendment is simple and straightforward: it recognises that solar farms have a role to play in our energy security, but that that must be balanced with an effective use of our best farmland for food security. I observe that the lack of Labour Party Back-Benchers here says more than we need to about their views on farm and food security.

This amendment would not prevent or fetter the development of solar farms on the poorest quality land or restrain smaller proposals on the best land which command the support of the local planning authority. However, where large-scale solar proposals come forward that include the best and most versatile land, my amendment would mean that the nationally significant infrastructure project—NSIP—process would not and could be engaged. To be clear, this would not be an absolute ban on large-scale solar farms on the best land; it is just that, if those proposals were to come forward, they would need to be determined locally by the planning authority.

It is said that modern society is no more than three meals away from breakdown. In the hierarchy of needs, food in the belly is the number one priority. When the chips are down, you cannot eat a solar panel. Last year, the national wheat yield was down by 20% on account of wet weather. This year, the yield impairment is similar but because of dry weather. Just as there are no guarantees about the weather, we cannot be careless with our food supply.

I have recently heard encouraging noises from Defra Ministers who belatedly realise that the risks of food security are greater than they have ever been and that the best land should be reserved for food production, where inputs can be used most productively. The poorest and least productive land can be harnessed for other uses—environmental, amenity or economic. I welcome this sinner that hath repenteth and I venture that there is now common ground between people like me, who appreciate and value food security, and the Government. That should make acceptance of my amendment easy to achieve, so that the right balance is struck between heating and eating.

I will not go into quite so much detail as my noble friend, but let us talk about what I mean by the best and most versatile land. The Library tells me that, under the 1966 agricultural land classification process, grade 1, 2 and 3a land comprises 42% of the cultivated area of Great Britain; by difference, therefore, the substantial majority, 58% of the agricultural land, is in the poorer grades 3b, 4 and 5. Now, this would still be available for large-scale solar energy under my amendment, and there are millions of poor hectares to go at. That is land the size of 12 Norfolks or two and half times the size of Wales—noble Lords will note that I do not use the football pitch analogy.

Last year at the Dispatch Box, the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, explained that, in the case of a recently approved Sunnica proposal in Suffolk, the proposal did not include some of the best and most versatile land. I will not criticise her for an honest mistake, but I regret to tell the Committee that there was plenty of the best land, including grade 2 land, in that proposal—land that is now lost to food production for a generation. On so many levels, the Government’s rhetoric is at odds with the reality. They have lost control of the numbers, and in so doing are imperilling our food security, which is national security.

In Lincolnshire, the county that more than any other puts bread on our tables, already 2% of that county is under threat from solar. Worse, thanks to my noble friend Lord Frost we learn that the majority of the Heckingham proposal is predominantly the best grade 1 land under the 1966 rules.

In an Answer to a Written Question last November, the Government reported that 1,400 hectares of land in Norfolk were currently under NSIP applications. But the reality was that it was 7,500 hectares, and now the number is greater still. We know from Great British Energy—I am pleased to see the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, in his place—that there just is not the grid capacity to accept all the solar that is being promoted.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, surely the point about the Bill is that it is enabling us to put the structures in place to actually get the grid capacity up and running.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

True. The noble Lord makes a good point, and so I sense even further a degree of consensus on both sides of the Committee on this matter. If we take the fact that the grid capacity is not there to accept all the solar that has been promoted, because it is diurnal and seasonal and comes in very big flashes which can overwhelm the grid, and that capacity to absorb is limited, only a fool would disagree with limiting the proposals to the poorest land first.

I have heard it said that we need not worry about this and that only the amount of land currently used for golf courses is being used for solar—something like 0.5% of all land—but that is simply not true. It is the 19th hole tale that has grown with the telling. The Government’s land use framework contemplates that 9% of all land will be used for environmental and energy schemes. Let me say straight away that agri-solar is starry-eyed, greenwashed fantasy. The solar panels are taller, so they are even more visually intrusive, with even more chemicals used to bash the weeds so that they do not shade the panels or wrap their tendrils around the steel stanchions.

The principle of controlling solar development aside, this amendment is important because it seeks to remove the loopholes and abuses that we have seen flow from the misuse of the NSIP regime for solar applications, including artificially stringing together many disparate smaller schemes, some miles apart, to get over a hurdle threshold. Where I live, a local proposal comprises a dozen different blocks of land spread out over a canvas more than 15 miles wide and eight miles tall as a device to get over that NSIP threshold. That is an abuse.

I can see that it is in the farmer’s private interests to sign up for solar. On normal arable economics, a farmer would do well to earn £200 an acre from the fruits of his labours, having investing millions in plant and equipment and subjecting himself to the risks of weather and the market. By contrast, solar developers are offering him the chance to sit on the beach with an index-linked £900 or more. Landowners of really quite small holdings which have been aggregated together have given tenant farmers notice to quit so that they can enjoy those inflation-linked payments of over 40 years at many times the rent. But our tenant farmers are among the most entrepreneurial growers, not having had the benefit of inheriting land, and we cannot afford to lose their dynamism.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Coffey (Con)]

My Lords, in speaking to my Amendment 94B regarding permission for energy substations on higher quality agricultural land, I will also speak to Amendment 94A, tabled by my noble friend Lord Forsyth of Drumlean, which according to the Herald is pronounced “drum-lang”. The amendments reflect the concerns that I and my noble friends have about what is happening on higher quality agricultural land, which, as we have heard eloquently described, is critical to food security.

My noble friend’s amendment reflects quite a lot of the concerns expressed in the House of Commons. I am thinking of my right honourable friend Wendy Morton, my honourable friends Sarah Bool and Mike Wood, and a number of other people who have spoken in debates in the House of Commons who are concerned for a couple of reasons about why battery energy storage systems seem to be not exploding —well, some of them are—but certainly expanding.

There is an important point to understand. We have seen, progressively, the previous Administration and this Government trying to get a grip on managing energy production and to get a proper strategy going. Meanwhile, in the Clean Power 2030 Action Plan, the proposal is that we need about 27 gigawatts by 2030, 29 gigawatts by 2035, and a broader estimate—although the Government have not set a formal target—of 50 gigawatts by 2050. But where are we right now?

Figures from a paper from RenewableUK published in December 2024 suggested that there were 5 gigawatts of total operational capacity and 127 gigawatts in the pipeline. You do not need an A-level in maths to add up and find that that comes to 132 gigawatts. Of those, I think it is fair to say that 40 gigawatts have already been consented, 30 gigawatts are in the planning process and a further 48 gigawatts are being developed to go into the planning system.

My concern and that of my honourable friends and right honourable friends in the other place is that, in our process, we have already approved pretty much all that has been wanted by our energy operator. So why is it that, in effect, we seem to be encouraging even more to come through?

I am conscious that not every application will necessarily produce the outcome that is desired—we have seen that with other things—but, frankly, for those who have got the planning consent, we should make sure that they deliver what they say they are going to do. We should do that instead of, yet again, building up, and potentially blocking, land being used for food production to perhaps become an area for battery energy storage in the future, when we will have already achieved our outcome.

We discussed a lot about safety earlier; the noble Lord, Lord Khan of Burnley, spoke to that. He spoke comprehensively, but I point out to him there have been some instances where, for example, chemical interactions meant that hydrofluoric acid was produced. I did my PhD in chemistry a long time ago, but HF is one of the chemicals that I used. I can honestly say that, if you get it on your skin, although you will not realise it for a couple of days, your bones are basically crumbling right inside your skeleton. If you get it in your eyes, it is game over, frankly. On a very serious note, it is fair to say that there are significant risks. While the HSE has been cited as having a framework in place and similar, the noble Lord, Lord Khan of Burnley, referred to the Defra consultation about bringing these regimes into the EPR. It was published only last week. This is no criticism of the Minister, but what is noteworthy is that it said—I am quoting word for word—that

“it is not the role of the planning system to regulate fire risk and there is limited provision through the planning scheme to ensure that measures are maintained”.

I am sorry, but one of the key features of the planning system is to consider fire and fire risk and the like, so it will be worth the Minister looking at that element again; I am sure his officials will be keen to do so as well. We need to make sure that these things are safe. I shall give way.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

I am reminded to reprise what the noble Lord, Lord Khan, said earlier about the need to have pre-scrutiny and the fact that a national organisation, the HSE, was the competent body. As my noble friend has been speaking, I have been reminded that it is for local organisations, the local fire authority and the local planning authority to make those determinations. National bodies such as the HSE do not have the capacity or the local knowledge to comment appropriately.

[Baroness Coffey (Con)]

I think that is right. The HSE, on its own website, refers to the fact that it cannot comment on every application and, in effect, needs to be proactively contacted only if there is considered to be a major risk.

I am also conscious that the River Test is considered by my honourable friend Caroline Nokes to be under threat. For people who are interested in these things, I commend the speech of my right honourable friend Sir Alec Shelbrooke, who talked about dendrites. It was a very knowledgeable, well-researched speech about fire risk, including thermal runaway and the like.

Coming back to the fundamental proposal of my noble friend Lord Forsyth, he specifically asked me to talk about safety. There is a concern about overdevelopment and the loss of food for agricultural production. We will keep coming back to this on this side of the House, recognising the importance of food security alongside the other elements of national security.

On the amendment that I have tabled, perhaps I should declare an interest as this is about a subject that I have referred to a few times before: energy substations. Again, I am worried. There is an element here of thinking about where we do energy generation or other aspects of interconnection. Frankly, if the Government think the only way they can get these things done is by ripping apart environmental protection law and reducing food production land, they should not connect at those areas that already have these environmental designations or are key producers of food in this country.

My amendment refers specifically to 1, 2 or 3. I am conscious that the best and most versatile land is traditionally grades 1, 2 and 3a. However, Defra, through Natural England, does not publish where grades 3a and 3b are, because apparently that is too difficult to do, as it requires individual local site surveys on determining whether a particular field is grade 3a or 3b, so for comprehensiveness I have put in grades 1, 2 and 3.

However, as my noble friend Lord Fuller has pointed out, there is an element here about the fact that, frankly, a lot of this stuff was—in effect, with a light touch—reconsidered only in 2010. Fundamental parts of our land have not been assessed in terms of their contribution towards food production or food security for probably the best part of 40 to 50 years. As a consequence, recognising the targets set by the Government and the challenges that we face, I am conscious of the land use framework. Admittedly, I did a draft of that nearly three years ago, and I am sure everyone is frustrated that we still have not seen it yet. One of the challenges is this competing element of what we do with the land that we have.

Let us be straightforward about this: once agricultural land is gone, it is gone for good. I am not blaming farmers or landowners, who, candidly, the policies of the last 12 months have given even more reason to get a secured income on the basis of the value or use of their land. One of the foibles, in a way, of doing things such as leasing out land for solar is that it does not adjust in terms of the agricultural elements of inheritance tax. However, when farmers can get a guaranteed income for a proportion of their land, while other things are so uncertain, I do not blame them for wanting to make that choice.

My honourable friends—apologies, I am still earning about this place; I should have said my noble friends—have eloquently put some of the issues around solar. There definitely has to be a place for solar across our country, but one final point that I want to make on battery energy systems is that we really need to target where they are going to be. There is no point in having batteries in parts of the country that are nowhere near the grid or near where most of the energy is going to be used. That is why I have proposed the amendments I have today.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Housing Communities and Local Government (Baroness Taylor of Stevenage) (Lab)]

My Lords, Amendments 89, 92, 94A and 94B relate to Clause 28 and the protection of agricultural land. I thank the noble Baronesses, Lady Hodgson and Lady Coffey, and the noble Lords, Lord Fuller and Lord Forsyth of Drumlean, for tabling these amendments. Is that the right pronunciation of Drumlean? I am glad he is not here, because I know he would shout at me if I got it wrong.

Amendment 89, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson, seeks to prohibit the construction of ground-mounted solar farms on land of grades 1, 2 and 3A. The Government view food security as national security and champion British farming and environmental protection. All solar projects undergo a rigorous planning process, considering environmental impacts, local community views and any impact on food production. The Government believe that solar generation does not threaten food security. As of the end of September 2024, ground-mounted solar PV panels covered an estimated 21,200 hectares, which is only around 0.1%—not 1%—of the total land area of the UK. Even in the most ambitious scenarios, only up to 0.4% of UK land will be devoted to solar in 2030.

The Government are in total agreement with the noble Baroness in that we want to get the balance right between protecting fertile agricultural land and facilitating renewable energy. The Government agree that protecting food security should always be a priority. That is why land use and food production are already material considerations in planning. Planning guidance makes it clear that, wherever possible, developers should utilise brownfield, industrial, contaminated or previously developed land. Where the development of agricultural land is shown to be necessary, lower-quality land should be preferred to higher-quality land. However, we do not believe the accelerated rollout of solar power under present planning arrangements poses a threat to food security.

The government consultation on the land use framework sought feedback on what improvements are needed to the agricultural land classification system to support effective land use decisions. The land use framework, to be published later this year, will set out the evidence, data and tools needed to help safeguard our most productive agricultural land. It will also lay out how government intends to align the different incentives on land; ensure that joined-up decisions are made at national and local levels; and make accessible and high-quality data available.

As such, we believe that this amendment is not necessary to protect agricultural land. Moreover, a total ban on the use of higher-quality land may have several deleterious consequences. Quite often, a site suitable for solar development will contain soil of varying quality. At the moment, the amount of high-quality land proposed to be developed is examined by planning officers. This is a consideration in planning decisions. Were this amendment to be incorporated into the Bill, large projects could be rejected for the sake of a small area of higher-quality soil that constitutes a small fraction of the overall site.

This amendment would reduce the number of economically viable sites for solar generation, which would increase costs for developers. They may seek to recoup these by placing higher bids in the contracts for difference scheme. That cost is ultimately borne by bill payers. In short, banning all solar development on higher-quality land may endanger the Government’s mission to achieve clean power by 2030, increasing the exposure of British consumers to volatile imported fossil fuels.

I shall touch on the noble Baroness’s point about solar on domestic and non-domestic buildings. Deploying rooftop solar remains a key priority for the Government and we will publish the future homes standard this autumn. The new standard will ensure that solar panels are installed on the vast majority of new-build homes once it comes into force, saving households hundreds of pounds a year on their energy bills. That will support our ambition that the 1.5 million homes we will build over the course of this Parliament will be high-quality, well designed and sustainable.

Additionally, the recently published Solar Roadmap contained several actions for both government and industry to support the deployment of solar PV in the commercial sector. These included unpicking the complex landlord/tenant considerations in the sector by developing and distributing a toolkit for owners and occupiers. The Government set out that rooftop solar on new non-domestic buildings will, where appropriate, play an important role in the future buildings standard, due to be introduced later this year.

The Government have also announced £180 million of funding for Great British Energy to help around 200 schools and 200 NHS sites to install rooftop solar. We expect the first of these installations to be complete by the end of the summer—summer being a flexible concept, so whenever that comes. The Government are assessing the potential to drive the construction of solar canopies on outdoor car parks over a certain size through a call for evidence, which closed on 18 June. We will publish the government response to that consultation. I trust that the noble Baroness will be satisfied with that response and I kindly ask her not to press her amendment.

Amendment 92, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, seeks to remove solar projects on high-quality land from the nationally significant infrastructure project regime. I thank the noble Lord for his engagement on this subject. I know that he has spent many years serving in local government and has considerable expertise. However, I hope that he recognises the contradiction in his argument. At the same time as he argues about the very difficult conditions that farmers face in growing food, these are brought about by climate change, but he is using them as arguments not to tackle it by moving to clean energy—so there is a bit of a contradiction in the argument there.

It is vitally important that every project is submitted to the planning process that best suits its impact, scale, and complexity.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

The point is that the difficulty that farmers are under may be aggravated by poor weather, either too wet or too cold, but the real problem is that this Government are engaged in a war on the countryside by undermining the finances of every family farm and damaging food production, even with the stuff on bioethanol, taking 1 million tonnes of wheat out of the market. That is the reason why farms are doing so badly—it is not to do with climate change.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

The noble Lord was referring specifically to climate impacts on food growing, which I felt was a bit ironic as we are trying to tackle the climate change that is bringing them about with exactly these measures to use clean energy.

The Government recognise the benefit of returning control over decisions to local planning authorities. As of 31 December 2025, we will double the NSIP threshold for solar projects from 50 megawatts to 100 megawatts. However, the Government believe that large solar farms, even when they propose to use higher-quality agricultural land, are best dealt with under the NSIP process.

The NSIP regime is rigorous. Although the decision is not taken locally, local engagement is still at the heart of the process. Under the current legislative framework, developers taking projects through the NSIP regime are required to undertake community consultation as part of the preparation for the application. This gives communities ample opportunity to feed in their views and shape the project. Currently, the level and quality of community consultation, among other factors, is taken into account by decision-makers. I am glad the noble Lord made a protest about the one that he was subject to; I hope communities will do that if they feel that those consultation processes are not being carried out in good faith.

Moreover, considerations under the NSIP regime include any impact on land use and food production. Planning guidance is clear that poorer-quality land should be preferred to higher-quality land, avoiding the use of best and most versatile agricultural land where possible. This is in line with the policy governing decision-making by local planning authorities. Even if there were a marginal gain in public confidence from returning the decision to local authorities, we would not expect the outcomes to change.

This marginal gain must be weighed against the likely costs of this proposal. First, a proper examination of the potential impacts of a large-scale solar farm is a major and lengthy undertaking. Giving this responsibility to local planning departments may place an untenable burden on resources which are already under pressure.

Secondly, it is right that projects of such scale, size or complexity as to be nationally significant should be considered through the NSIP process. These proposals are of strategic importance to the country as a whole, and as such central government is the most appropriate decision-maker. Changing policy to allow decisions about these projects to be taken by local authorities may increase investor uncertainty at a pivotal moment for the Government’s 2030 clean power mission. This may jeopardise our work to reduce reliance on imported fossil fuels, increase energy security and protect consumers from global price shocks, just at the very time when Members have raised the issue of security.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

I am prompted to intervene only because the head of the noble Lord, Lord Khan, nearly seems to be falling off with nodding. The point is that the NSIP regime is combining schemes which, frankly, should normally go through the local planning authority. These are disparate, small, stand-alone schemes which fall under NSIP only because the system is being abused to string them all together quite artificially. There are no capacity constraints in local government planning to do with these smaller schemes; we know where they are and we know the issues. To suggest that stringing together a dozen different small schemes is nationally significant demonstrates the falsehood and the paucity behind the argument that NSIP should be engaged in this manner.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

These are geographical schemes. As I said, we are increasing the size of schemes that will go to NSIP.

Lastly, I am concerned that accepting this amendment would imply that there are some issues on which the NSIP regime is either not competent or not qualified to adjudicate. This is simply not the case. Setting this precedent may reduce public confidence in the NSIP planning system as it applies to other types of infrastructure. It may undermine trust in decisions which have already been taken. For all the reasons I have outlined—although it sounds as though I have not convinced the noble Lord—I hope he will not press his amendment and will continue to work with us on this issue.

Amendment 94A, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, and spoken to by the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, seeks to prohibit battery developments on best and most versatile agricultural land. The Clean Power 2030 Action Plan set out an expansion of renewable technologies required to achieve the 2030 ambition, including the acceleration of grid-scale battery development from around 5 gigawatts at present to at least 23 to 27 gigawatts by 2030. Grid-scale batteries, which are rapidly falling in cost and increasing in scale, allow the power system to store cheap excess renewable energy and use this, rather than expensive polluting gas, at times of need.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Fuller Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 1st September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mackinlay of Richborough (Con)]

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lord Swire’s application that these things should be buried. I am the director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation; that is not relevant to this debate, but it is somewhat relevant to the discussion about renewables.

My noble friend raised a few points about how previous Governments over the last 30 years have been somewhat deficient in managing the grid. The grid was perfectly adequate when we had large, central power stations, whether coal, gas or nuclear. Of course, our nuclear fleet is diminishing and nearly all those stations will be turned off by the end of this decade—probably before any of the new ones are turned on. We have obviously closed down all our coal power stations now, and gas is rather intermittent; it has to be put on stream when renewables fail us, which unfortunately happens more and more regularly. The old system worked when we had centralised, big power stations. The problem now occurs because we have decentralised that.

We could put that right by going down a domestic gas route, which I would recommend to this nation as a means to bridge the gap before nuclear is properly on stream. We could put small modular reactors in the places where old gas and coal stations used to be, because we have the huge grids, supplies and existing pylons that served that old infrastructure, which is now a redundant and dead infrastructure.

We are being asked to despoil our countryside because of the dash to renewables, in trying to link up offshore and onshore wind farms. Each of those produces fairly small amounts of energy, but we need new pylons to get it into the grid. I agree entirely with my noble friend that the required cables should be underground. I have never believed that some behemoth of an aluminium and steel platform to carry cables can be that much cheaper than an underground cable, which does not require such support. I recommend that the Government ask for some independent advice on what these things really cost.

I am very surprised to have had a discussion—started, again, by my noble friend Lady Coffey—about Christmas trees. I will discuss Christmas trees at the appropriate time, because my family was very involved with Christmas trees and, as a young lad, every winter I bore scars all the way up my arms from selling them. I hope to discuss that in the future.

The whole concept of electrification and the problem of serious storms was raised very well by my noble friend Lady McIntosh. I do worry. As I said at the time, if you live in that part of the world—and I think another storm hit Scotland at almost the same time—you rely entirely on electricity cables to run your internet, which runs your telephone, as the old 50-volt copper system is being wound down. You obviously need electricity for the internet generally, and one will need electricity to power one’s car, if the Government have their way and traditional cars are put on the scrap heap. One will also need electricity to heat one’s home. Storms go through parts of this country with some regularity, and I have always made the point that you can lend a neighbour a bucket of logs but you cannot lend them a bucket of electricity.

I agree with the amendment that was put by my noble friend Lord Swire. I request that the Government look at this rather more carefully, rather than say flippantly that “Thou shalt have dirty great pylons”. Norfolk and Suffolk in particular will be hit by this massively. I think my noble friend who is following me will make some similar observations about what will be hitting parts of Kent, including those that I used to represent.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 79A in the name of my noble friend Lord Swire about the presumption in favour of burying cables as the default method. He spoke of insanity, but I did not think I was going mad—I believed and agreed with every word he said. Not only is burying cables less visually intrusive but, storms notwithstanding, as we have seen in the Ukrainian conflict, surface infrastructure is more vulnerable to malign and military disruption. I have not seen any calculation anywhere that takes that national security angle into account. That is an omission that should be corrected, and would be if my noble friend’s amendment is accepted.

I do not stand entirely shoulder to shoulder with those who accept the construction of pylons in any circumstance but I am not the Luddite who is in denial about the difficulties of strengthening and hardening the grid. We all need to be realistic about what it takes for the lights to come on when you flick that switch, with fluctuating renewables on the one hand and new demands from electrical vehicles on the other. But that should not give National Grid a right to be judge and jury in its own court and carte blanche to ride roughshod.

My interest in the amendment has been piqued because I have experienced at first hand the process undertaken by National Grid when it seeks to promote a new pylon power line, in this case from Norwich to Tilbury to transport electricity from the wind farms off the Norfolk coast down to the smoke. At that time, I was leader of the South Norfolk Council, an area to be bisected across its entire height by new HV power lines. What I experienced was institutional arrogance from National Grid and its agents. It thought that a single consultation event, offered at short notice on an afternoon in a remote village hall for an area of 400 square miles, was sufficient. It had a boneheaded refusal to accept that burying was even an option—even just in part across the picturesque Waveney Valley or the Roydon Fen county wildlife reserve.

National Grid exhibited a steadfast refusal to demonstrate or explain why the option of providing a future-proof offshore ring main, connecting the existing infrastructure that used to serve the redundant Bradwell nuclear power station, was even a possibility. The suggestion that offshore was impractical was wholly disproven by the offshore link that is currently proposed from Sizewell to the Richborough marshes—I am stood next to the noble Lord, Lord Mackinlay of Richborough, and I expect him to intervene in a moment to say how wonderful that part of the world is and how it should not be despoiled.

National Grid had unevidenced assertions relating to the unaffordability of burying lines, as opposed to having them overhead, without either explaining or quantifying the quantum of those extra costs for the whole line or just per kilometre. There was a failure to consider parallel running to the existing pylon line to minimize visual impact, with the result that the wonderful and historic market town of Diss is now proposed to be fenced in on all four sides by huge steel pylons to an unacceptable degree. This lack of understanding, further, that the mooted community compensation schemes for overhead lines, but not for buried cables, might undermine the business case for pylons now turns out to be the case because it stands as part of Clause 26 of the Bill. There were other questions to answer, which I will not detain the Committee with.

Now, of course, there may have been good reasons why National Grid might be right on all the points I mentioned, though I struggle to see how, but with friends like these, who needs enemies? National Grid has gone out of its way to pick fights rather than bringing people together. As a council leader, I met officials from National Grid and put the points privately, to try to have a neutral forum where it could make an improved case for the proposals and build consensus. That olive branch was spurned, so it is little wonder that there is now widespread resistance to new pylon routes. Opposition has been carelessly and recklessly whipped up by a ham-fisted approach from the people who need all the friends they can get.

I like this amendment in the name of my noble friend Lord Swire because it would set the default expectation that new lines will be buried. Of course, that does not mean that they must be buried, but for the operator to go above ground as the preferred option, he will need to make the evidential case and have it scrutinised, and to build friendships and not enemies. That is a much better approach and balance of power, literally, between the parties than the regrettable and aggravating behaviours that we have seen thus far, where the lazy overhead option is chosen and everybody else be damned.

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

I just underline that the missing ingredient in this debate is actual numbers on the costs. There is a lot of theoretical toing and froing this afternoon but what we really need in this discussion is a hard number cost for, say, 100 metres of buried cable as opposed to, say, the cost of a pylon. I asked a Written Question about a pylon some months ago and got a wonderfully “Yes Minister” Answer: “Of course, all pylons are different and some pylons are more equal than others, but it is all very difficult so I can’t give you an answer”.

I hope that we can do a bit better than that. It would be great to know the cost of, say, 100 metres or 500 metres—whatever is the right metric—of buried cable and pylon with the equivalent cable. Until that answer is before us—I suspect that it will be a lot more expensive—we are not going to lay this debate to rest. I think that everybody, on all sides of this Committee, would like to see the cables buried. The question is at what cost and whether that cost is worth it. Until we have that number, we are just talking theory.

--- Later in debate ---

Moved by

[Lord Fuller]

82A: Clause 25, page 34, line 38, at end insert—
“10Q Long duration electricity storage: safety(1) The Authority must ensure that the scheme established by section 10P includes measures to be taken by LDES operators (as defined by that section) to reduce fire risk and protect public safety.(2) The scheme must ensure that before installing long duration electricity storage, LDES operators consult the local fire authority who must assess the fire risk posed by the installation.(3) The LDES operator must pay the local fire authority a reasonable fee for their assessment of the fire risk under subsection (2).(4) The Secretary of State may, by regulations made by statutory instrument, define a “reasonable fee” for the purpose of this section.(5) A statutory instrument containing regulations under this section is subject to annulment in pursuance of a resolution of either House of Parliament.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment seeks to ensure that proposals for long duration energy storage systems, which may contain flammable batteries and equipment, are designed in consultation with the local fire authority to minimise fire risk and protect public safety.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I will not detain the Committee greatly with this amendment. It seeks to ensure that, when electricity storage systems are planned, it is with the full knowledge and consent of the local fire authority, so that fire and public safety risks are understood and mitigations are put in. Surprisingly, there is no duty for promoters of these schemes to consult the local fire authority, so my amendment would correct that omission.

As the grid is reinforced, the ability to stabilise and isolate the electricity supply from surges and shocks is essential, and a number of short-term and long-term technologies exist to smooth the path of electricity from the generator to the consumer. The people of the Iberian peninsula will attest to the consequences of failing to have network stabilisation in place, especially when dashing for renewables. Some of these smoothing technologies contain highly flammable materials such as lithium. Hydrogen is another but, given the time constraints today, I will focus on the lithium side for the purposes of proving the point.

Not a day goes by without a fire being caused by a lithium battery. The noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, is promoting a Lithium-ion Battery Safety Bill; this does not seek to trespass on that, but it demonstrates that fires caused by batteries are a thing. The issue is clear: when a lithium battery, for example, catches fire, huge quantities of water are required to extinguish it. Your Lordships will recall the car-based conflagration at Luton Airport, where the multi-storey car park was totally consumed. Whether or not that fire was started by an electric vehicle, once it took hold the batteries in those cars quickly made the fire unfightable for longer—more so than had petrol or diesel alone been involved.

The dangers are further illustrated by the number of fires in bin lorries. Even a small computer battery can consume an entire refuse freighter. Airline passengers are now routinely warned about the dangers of phone batteries catching fire and imperilling the whole aircraft in an inextinguishable blaze. Imagine the scale of the flames if an entire grid-scale battery storage facility caught alight.

This issue needs to be taken seriously, and the Bill as drafted fails to do so. It just glosses over the consequences of failures in long-term and short-term energy storage, including large-scale battery systems—especially those storing huge electrical capacity and containing flammables. You do not need to be a bright spark to realise that an electrical spark can spell danger.

Many of the proposed LDES and BESS schemes are in the countryside, where the existence of fire hydrants is limited. Rivers and ponds may be far away across the fields or along narrow lanes. Water carriers may be miles away and, during a dry period, deep-seated and hard-to-fight fires can spawn secondary blazes that can run wild across a whole area. In towns, the proximity of businesses, schools, homes and buildings adds a further dimension of public safety to the mix. In both cases, consideration of the leakage of lithium, in particular to the underlying aquifer, from the firefighters’ runoff water is essential.

Of course, there are other risks: the availability of water carriers, of appliances and of specialist equipment in areas which may be staffed by part-time retained firefighters are just a few. This amendment would therefore enforce a duty for an applicant for an energy storage facility and the local fire authority to fully assess the risks, including fire and public safety, and to pay a reasonable fee to do so. If the Government resist this stipulation, we risk damage from uncontrollable fires to people, property, businesses and the environment at significant cost to the wider taxpayer and local government—costs which should be borne by the developer.

I have had representations from councils that the costs of providing water storage lagoons, additional appliances and staffing should be fully borne by the applicant, not the taxpayer. I have not gone that far with this amendment, but I wonder whether the Minister would meet me to explore this if other noble Lords feel that it is a good idea, in which case I would consider bolstering this proposal on Report. For the moment, if we just take the issue of fire safety for these high-value, high-consequence electricity storage systems, we would be doing not just this House but society a favour. I beg to move.

[Lord Roborough (Con)]

My Lords, Amendment 82B in my name would require the Government to evaluate and report on how this legislation affects the UK’s capacity for long-duration electricity storage. Clause 25 outlines the introduction of a scheme intended to stimulate investment in long-duration electricity storage. Yet, as with any initiative of this scale, we must pair aspiration with scrutiny. It is one thing to launch a scheme, but quite another to ensure that it is fit for purpose.

We hear regularly that storage will solve the challenge of intermittent renewables. It is a reassuring narrative that excess wind and solar can simply be stored away, ready for when needed, but that message risks masking the scale of the task ahead. To get the facts straight, the UK’s average electricity consumption is around 780 gigawatt hours per day. Current grid-scale battery storage stands at roughly 12 gigawatt hours, enough to meet national demand for just 30 minutes. On a global scale, the picture is not much better. All the batteries in the world combined could keep the UK powered for less than a day.

Storage is not futile. However, we must acknowledge that we are starting from a very low base. We must also ensure that any storage added to our energy infrastructure does not undermine grid stability and that it is available to release power in the timeframe needed. This could be seconds for battery through to hours for pump storage. My amendment seeks to ensure transparency. We need regular reporting to Parliament on whether the measures we are introducing are expanding our storage capacity at the pace required.

Moreover, as we look to scale up these technologies, safety must be a central concern. My noble friend Lord Fuller rightly highlights the risks associated with high-capacity storage, particularly lithium-based battery systems. These systems often contain highly flammable materials and, when they fail, the consequences can be catastrophic. Fires involving lithium-ion batteries are notoriously difficult to control and demand vast quantities of water to extinguish. In rural areas, where many of these installations are proposed, access to that water is limited. Climate change and restrictions on the preventive burning of fuel load in wild environments are leading to greater wildfire incidence and severity. In urban settings, proximity to homes, schools and critical infrastructure raises additional risks. We must ensure that local fire services are not only consulted but properly resourced to assess and manage these risks. Any developer seeking to install large-scale storage must be required to engage with emergency services and contribute fairly to risk assessments and preparedness.

We must also consider the environmental impacts. In the event of a fire, runoff containing hazardous materials could seep into groundwater or flow into rivers. This is not just a fire safety issue; it is a matter of public health and environmental protection. We cannot afford to be complacent. As our electricity system becomes more complex and decentralised, so too do the risks. It is the responsibility of this House to ensure that those risks are identified, assessed and addressed. Long-duration energy storage may be a useful addition to our energy mix. However, we cannot rely on this technology alone to support our renewable future.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Khan of Burnley (Lab)]

Let me reassure my noble friend that transparency is absolutely important in this situation. Both my noble friend and the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, provided examples; of course, it would be remiss of me to comment on them, but I am sure there will be some investigation and learning from them. If the point is to go away and find out what lessons have been learned, and look at them as part of our transparency, it is a good one and I accept it.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, we have had an interesting, brief debate which actually had a few twists and turns. The Minister asked me whether I was satisfied with his response and I regret to say that I am not satisfied at all, for reasons I will give in a moment. Before that, I will deal with the interventions from the noble Earl, Lord Russell. I was not sure whether he was for or against this amendment, but I regret that he fatally undermined the Lithium-ion Battery Safety Bill, brought forward by his noble friend Lord Redesdale, which now must be pointless from the Liberal Democrats’ point of view. I would have thought he would have been standing full square behind my amendment, which highlights the dangers of lithium.

The noble Baroness, Lady Bloomfield, quantified the value of battery storage in terms of amp hourage and capacity. However, the value of battery storage is not necessarily purely in the storage capacity; it is in the smoothing of voltages at an aggregate level, across a whole grid, and maintaining the hertz. It is a difference of only 0.2 hertz in the Iberian catastrophe that caused the contagious knock-on effect that brought down the entire grid in Iberia, in Spain and Portugal. So we must not look at battery storage in terms not only of current but of stability.

Renters’ Rights Bill

Lord Fuller Excerpts

Monday 7th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I shall speak on Amendment 47 in the name of the noble Baroness, Baroness Miller. I speak as a landlord of rental properties in Norwich, as declared in the register. Naturally, we should consider the rights of people who own companion animals, but that must go hand in hand with the rights of a landlord who may be concerned about damage to his property and the rights of neighbouring residents who may have to deal with the consequence of noise, mess, smell, and so forth. Once again, there is a balance to be struck, but this amendment strikes the wrong balance.

It is obvious that keeping a pet elevates the risk of damage, especially in the case of furnished accommodation. This Bill contemplates that all tenancies are the same, but there are different sorts of properties and in furnished accommodation the consequences of damage are greater. It fails to recognise the reality of different types of accommodation, whether they be period or listed or of some historic or archaeological merit making the building incompatible with pets. There are often circumstances, particularly in blocks of flats, where there are communal amenities—for example, common courtyards or gardens, often where children play. All these are different to the detached rented home in the countryside where there is much more space. This Bill contemplates a one-size-fits-all approach, regardless of all the different types of properties one may wish to tenant, whether they be furnished, unfurnished, in the countryside, or flats.

It is reasonable for a landlord to refuse to allow a large dog in a small flat where there is no outside space. Confined animals do not just chew, although they do. They bark and upset the neighbours, and the needs of neighbours must be considered. This Bill is all about the tenant, and I can understand that that is important, but it is to the exclusion of any other stakeholder, and that cannot be right. The landlord must make the judgment and take into account whether the applicant, perhaps a night-shift worker with a large dog, is suitable for his property. I will concede that there is a world of difference between the different types of pets: goldfish, spiders, dogs, cats and ferrets—may I be the first to introduce a Second Reading having just heard the First Reading of that particular Bill? Let us make those distinctions with the chewing variety. By just calling them pets, we are denying the obvious distinction between two legs, four legs, 100 legs, no legs, fishy ones with scales and so forth. There are different types of animal contained within this catch-all. That cannot make sense.

The one point where I agree with Amendment 47 is in proposed new paragraph (a), where it says that the landlord should not form predisposed opinions of the tenant. I agree with that, but not in the way you might think. I once had the chief executive of a county council as a tenant. Her cat ate my sofa. The white polyester fluff was everywhere. I did not know where the cat ended and the sofa began. These things happen, but my point is: however well-heeled or fragrant that tenant might have been, she had no control over the pet whatever. It is important that we consider that it is the pet which potentially does the damage, and not the tenant, because that lady worked long hours and travelled widely. She was not there. The chewing cat was incompatible with her lifestyle, and my furnished apartment took the consequences.

Let us move on. The Bill contemplates that the tenant with a pet has that pet at the outset, but neither the Bill nor the amendment adequately takes into account the possibility of a tenant who may acquire a pet during the tenancy or somehow mendaciously mislead as to the nature of an existing pet or even hide it away altogether. When we are considering pets—this is probably a bit too late because that is in Clause 4, which was done last week—we have to contemplate that wilful misdescription amounts to a breach of contract.

I have no intent to be overbearing or heavy-handed, but these are examples where the rights of the tenant must coexist with their neighbours. At the moment I have a case of a tenant who repeatedly allows his small dog to urinate against the wall in the communal courtyard. That is damaging the brickwork, which is for my account, and is really unpleasant for the kids because it is the only place for them to securely play away from the traffic that passes outside, and that is really not fair on everybody.

I have mentioned the distinction between the goldfish and the Staffordshire terrier and between the spider and the snake. While I am not scared of spiders or snakes, some are. One of the clauses in the Bill is about predispositions towards certain sorts of animals. Scaredness is a different sort of cat completely, the scaredy-cat. It is right and proper that people with a predisposition against those sorts of animals are protected.

I regret to say that the noble Baroness’s amendment is well meaning but does not live in the real world between the differences of location, different properties, different furnishings, different types of animal—fur or feather—and the neighbours. These examples are not grounded in prejudice; they are grounded in the balanced welfare of all residents, and the landlord has a role to arbitrate to everyone’s benefit. I am afraid I cannot support Amendment 47. I make no comment on Amendment 48.

[Lord Sentamu (CB)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 48 from the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, not because he is the Convenor of the Cross Benches, although that could be a bonus point, but for three reasons. First, my family have never kept a pet, but why should I be part of a legislature that would deny somebody seeking consent to keep a pet simply because they live in social housing? To me, that is clear discrimination. It cannot be right that you would say, “Because you’re in social housing, you cannot request the consent of the landlord”. It is their right to ask for consent. That is not to say that it would give an automatic right to the social housing person to keep a pet.

Secondly, we are constantly told that this wonderful nation and the other three are nations of pet lovers. Do we want to say that somebody in social housing cannot be a pet lover? Who would want to say that?

The third reason is our beloved Majesty, the late Queen Elizabeth II. Do your Lordships remember when there was somebody who was going through a lot of trauma and she invited that gentleman to come and spend time with one of her corgis? Noble Lords will remember that the person said, “This has put my trauma in perspective”.

Those who want to keep pets because they live in social housing, and because they are animal lovers, should be given the same right as others to request consent.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer (LD)]

My Lords, I thank everybody who has contributed to this debate and thank the Minister for her reply. I found very helpful her response to the amendment from the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull—which we do support—saying that she will write to ensure clarity and consistency.

I had a slight dread when the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, got to his feet, because I thought it would be something really tricky, which of course it was. On the circumstances in which superior landlords can have an opinion on specific pets, I am trying to include superior landlords in the same way as the Bill already includes landlords. I understand the issues the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, raised, but they are for direct landlords, not superior landlords, and we debated those very fully in Committee. It is people with portfolios of hundreds of flats having a blanket refusal—or not—I am concerned about. The noble Lord talked about a simple detached home in the countryside.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

We can bandy around the distinction regarding the superior landlord with the offshore pension fund and hundreds of thousands of dwellings, but what about the small charity that owns a listed building held in trust for possibly hundreds of years? It surely must be entitled to its head leaseholder laying down certain provisions. It is not just about a common or garden large house in the countryside versus a flat; there have to be guardrails. Does the noble Baroness not understand that, as well-meaning as her amendment is, she has failed, I regret to say, to consider some of those narrow points and therefore it is incomplete? I find myself having huge sympathy for the Minister on this one; the amendment is incomplete.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Pannick (CB)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 53A. However, I ask the noble Lord, Lord de Clifford, to deal with one point when he replies. There appears to be no requirement in the amendment that the landlord must be acting reasonably in demanding a deposit. It is easy to understand and entirely reasonable that the landlord may require a deposit if the tenant wishes to keep dogs, but it would not be reasonable to demand a deposit if the tenant wishes to keep a goldfish. It is easy to understand the idea that there is no harm done because the deposit will be returned at the end of the tenancy, but the requirement of the deposit may well inhibit the tenant from being able to have the goldfish and the companionship that it gives.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, once again I declare my interest, in that I am a landlord.

I support Amendment 53A most strongly, but I wonder if I might dwell on the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Miller. Looking around this Chamber, I see that most of us travel a lot as part of our duties in this House if we live outside of London. I am sure my wife would be the first to complain if I brought bedbugs back to our family home.

Drawing on my experience as both a landlord and a managing agent, I know the cost of the Bill will be that the additional costs of damage, wear and tear, fluff, cleanliness, pest control and all those other little things—as enumerated most ably by the noble Lord, Lord de Clifford—will, particularly in blocks of flats, be borne by those tenants who do not keep pets. I do not think that is right. Quite simply, keeping a pet is an add-on to a tenancy and the additional cost should be borne by those who bring the pets with them.

There are lots of examples of where things can go wrong and I will give an example, from my own lived experience, of a tenant who declared that he did not own any pets at all. In due course, he brought his two large dogs to the property, where he left them while he went to work. By and by, it became clear that my house was being used as a kennel. Not only were the neighbours disturbed by the barking all day and all night but, by the time the tenant had stopped paying rent and I had taken proceedings, £15,000-worth of damage had been caused. When he finally left, I discovered the most foul-smelling and revolting scene: one bedroom had been used as a doggy lavatory for weeks. It would have been even worse had the proposals to stop repossession action been extended from eight to 13 weeks.

This was a gross case, in every respect, although I was lucky to get an insurance claim because the sum of money was so large. But that is not what we are talking about generally in this Bill. We are not concerned about granny who may be infirm, as the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, implied, chewing the table leg or eating the carpet. We are thinking of the middling bit, where it is above and beyond the three weeks. I agree with my noble friend Lord Howard that the additional three weeks is not enough, but I accept that we have to fight the battles we can win. If that is as good as we can get, it is a proportionate compromise that I am prepared to accept.

Several noble Lords mentioned—and I agree—that if the pet does not cause any damage, the tenant gets the deposit back in full, with interest. I place on the record that in the statutory deposit protection schemes, interest is not normally paid. The deposit goes in and the costs of interest are retained by the deposit scheme, presumably to defray their costs of operating the system and its administration. I would not want those watching this outside the Chamber to think that we are now going to introduce the requirement to pay interest if the landlord does not accept that.

I listened carefully to what the Minister said about the Government’s ability to increase the deposit through the Tenant Fees Act 2019, but I think we should accept here and now—and Amendment 53 implies this—that there are additional costs and risks to keeping pets, and it is obvious that we should not necessarily wait. Let us have those provisions within the Tenant Fees Act 2019 introduced immediately, but proportionately, so the goldfish is not charged at the same rate as the Newfie—that would not be sensible—particularly in cases where there is furnished accommodation. Then we can have a good compromise that everybody can live with.

Finally, I do not want to repeat this at length, but I believe that if we can come to that arrangement, having that deposit benefits the tenant because at least they get it back, whereas in the case of buying an insurance policy—not that these policies exist, as the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, said—that would be an absolute cost because they would pay whether there was damage or not. I strongly support Amendment 53 and if the noble Earl is minded to test the opinion of the House, I will follow him through the Lobby.

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My Lords, the issue of pet-related damage is understandably a source of concern for landlords. This group of amendments raises important questions about how we balance—that word balance again—the increased rights granted to tenants to keep pets with the responsibilities and protections that landlords need.

It is simply not reasonable to argue that the existing tenancy deposit, which is designed to cover damage under current arrangements, is also sufficient to cover the additional risks introduced by granting tenants a new right to keep pets.

The Government have already accepted that pets pose a greater risk by including pet insurance measures in the Bill. That was a clear recognition that pets are likely to cause additional damage. However, as we consider these provisions, it is crucial to reflect on the experience already gained in Scotland, where tenants’ rights legislation has evolved to allow pets in rented properties, while seeking to balance landlord protections. In Scotland, the introduction of pet-friendly tenancy provisions and related insurance requirements has offered valuable lessons. While these measures have expanded tenant freedoms and encouraged pet ownership, they have also revealed challenges, particularly in ensuring that landlords are adequately protected against damage and in making sure that any additional costs or deposits are fair and transparent.

Either pets cause additional damage or they do not. If the Government now claim that they do not, they must provide clear and compelling evidence to justify overturning their original assessment. Without such evidence, it logically and fairly follows that the landlord should be permitted to take a separate pet damage deposit.

We believe it is inevitable that some damage will result from pets. That is why we support Amendment 53A, which would introduce the option of a dedicated pet damage deposit. This would provide landlords with an essential route to recoup costs, while also protecting tenants from unfair charges by clearly defining that this is a separate and transparent element of a tenancy agreement and that, as we have already heard, if no damage is done, they get this charge back.

We recognise that some landlords may choose to welcome pets without requiring additional deposits—or, in the future, insurance—and they should be free to do so. But where landlords require further protections, there must be a fair and transparent mechanism for tenants to provide it at the outset of the tenancy.

Finally, the experience in Scotland reminds us that implementing pet-friendly rental policies is a delicate balance that must be tailored to the practical realities that landlords and tenants face. As the Bill moves forward, it is essential that it draws on such lessons to achieve frameworks that work fairly across the whole United Kingdom.

If the noble Lord, Lord de Clifford, is minded to test the opinion of the House on Amendment 53A, we will support him.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Kennedy of Cradley (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a trustee of the Nationwide Foundation. Amendment 61 seeks to address a growing and deeply concerning issue in the private rented sector: the overuse, and often misuse, of guarantor requests. This amendment was expertly moved by my noble friend Lady Lister of Burtersett in Committee, and I thank her for her support today along with that of the noble Baroness, Lady Grender, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester—all of whom have given continued support to addressing the issue of the overuse of guarantors.

I am sure that noble Lords across the House will accept that landlords should retain ways to manage financial risk. However, the increasing use of guarantor requests is creating a new form of exclusion, particularly for vulnerable renters. This is what Amendment 61 is about: it is not about banning guarantors altogether but restoring proportionality and fairness in their use.

Guarantors have become a significant barrier to housing for many. Recent data from Generation Rent shows that almost 30% of renters who moved in 2023-24 were asked to provide a guarantor. A further survey by Shelter and YouGov showed that over 100,000 private renters per year are blocked from renting a home in the private rented sector due to a guarantor request they cannot fulfil.

Meanwhile, only 2.9% of landlords attempted to claim unpaid rent from a guarantor in the last two years, despite an estimated 1.85 million tenants being asked to provide one. Guarantors are therefore becoming commonplace, yet they are rarely needed in practice and often never pursued when payment issues arise. Noble Lords may be asking why. A YouGov survey by Shelter asked the same question. When questioned, 25% of private rental landlords said that they asked for a guarantor because “My letting agent advised me to”. Another 16% said, “I thought it was standard practice”, while 12% said, “I’d heard from other landlords it was a good idea”. Simply put, guarantors are over-requested, largely unused and, worst of all, increasingly serve as a proxy for discrimination.

When a tenant can show that they can afford the rent through a standard affordability assessment, the additional requirement of a guarantor becomes both unnecessary and unfair. It many cases, it adds to an already substantial financial burden, alongside the five-week deposit and the first month’s rent in advance. The evidence shows that this practice disproportionately affects people on lower incomes, those without access to financial support networks and groups already at greater risk of housing discrimination: women, single parents, renters with disabilities and black and Bangladeshi households are all significantly more likely to be asked for a guarantor. A renter with a disability is 20 % more likely to face such a request, and a black renter is 66% more likely. These figures cannot be anomalies; they are a pattern. In Committee, we heard from my noble friend Lady Lister of Burtersett about older renters securing their pensions, being asked intrusive questions and then being required to provide a guarantor. From the noble Baroness, Lady Grender, we heard of a self-employed single mother being asked for a guarantor even though she was earning £45,000 a year—well above the UK median income. Too many renters simply do not have someone in their network who can act as a guarantor. Unless this issue is addressed, we risk entrenching a two-tier system in the rental market: one for those with access to wealth and another for those without.

The justification for these requirements often rests on an overstated fear of rent arrears, yet government figures show that only 2% of private renters were in arrears in 2023-24, and the English Housing Survey puts it at 5%. Of course, that is not negligible, but it does not warrant such widespread and disproportionate use of guarantors. There is an eviction ground for rent arrears, which is the primary backstop for when tenants fail to pay their rent.

Moreover, Amendment 61 aligns with the National Residential Landlords Association’s own guidance that guarantors should be requested only when a tenant cannot fully demonstrate that they can afford the rent. This amendment strikes a balance, allowing landlords to use guarantors when genuinely necessary, while protecting tenants from unjust exclusion. It is supported by a wide range of voices: Shelter, Independent Age, UNISON, Renters’ Reform Coalition, the Mayor of London and others. It is also worth noting that this amendment not only calls for legislative clarity but invites the Government to go a little further by introducing national guidance on fair and proportionate tenant referencing. Such a move would help standardise best practice and prevent local variation from undermining equality in the rental market.

In summary, this amendment is proportionate and reasonable and would not remove a landlord’s right to safeguard their interest, but it would ensure the right is exercised in a way that is just, consistent and in keeping with the spirit of the Bill. I hope that my noble friend Lady Taylor of Stevenage is minded to accept this amendment, but if that is not the case, I ask my noble friend four final critical questions. With guarantor requests increasingly becoming standard process, rather than when they are needed, will the Government issue guidance to landlords on when to request a guarantor? Will the Government look at what support they can provide for people who are at risk of homelessness because they cannot find a guarantor? Will the issue of guarantors be examined in detail as part of the post-Bill implementation work? Will my noble friend commit to working on these issues with Shelter, the Renters’ Reform Coalition, noble Lords in this House and many others on these issues, to find other ways to support the growing number of renters being locked out of the PRS because of the overuse of guarantors?

Without this amendment or government action to address the issue of guarantors, the Bill’s measures to tackle discrimination risk being undermined by the very practices it seeks to reform. I beg to move.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly against Amendment 61. It is well-meaning, but I am afraid it is a blunt instrument full of unintended consequences. I do not deny that to require a guarantor for most tenancies is disproportionate and unnecessary, and the Bill makes welcome provisions to regularise what has become standard practice for the most part. However, I want to alert your Lordships’ House to some perverse consequences for three particular types of potential tenant who are among the quietest voices: the foreign student; the groups of students; and those with impaired reputation or difficult personal circumstances. Guarantees make the unrentable into rentable, in some cases. It makes opportunities exist when refusal would otherwise be the only other choice.

Let us dwell for a moment on the case of the foreign student. The foreign students come from far away; they have no reputation, there is no covenant strength and they may not even have arrived in the United Kingdom. They certainly do not have a UK bank account at this point and they probably do not have a UK mobile phone either. In many cases, the only way in which they can secure a property to live in before they arrive is to have the support of a guarantor; a guarantor allows them to have a roof over their head.

Then we have the groups of students. I refer to the case of my daughter, when she went off to Newcastle. There were seven students who were friends, although none of them really knew each other that well; they certainly were not related to each other, and there were no family bonds to tie them, whereas the Bill contemplates that the tenant is a single tenant. It is quite reasonable for a landlord renting to students, if they cannot have payment in advance—I will not talk about that because we discussed that on day one of Committee—to require some sort of guarantor so that the downside risks can be compensated. Not all students want to live in expensive halls of residence; they are disadvantaged at an early part of their lives.

Let us think also about those with an impaired reputation—people who may have left prison or are suffering from domestic abuse or family breakdown. I have been a guarantor for hundreds of families in these sorts of situations, but the Government seek to make my well-meaning interventions unlawful. Let me explain. Sitting in your Lordships’ House, I see the Minister and my noble friend Lord Jamieson who, like me, have been leaders of councils. We know that councils, in certain circumstances, have to step in to avoid homelessness. We know there are not enough registered social landlords and that the private sector landlords are our friends—they are part of the solution, not the problem. However, we cannot expect the private sector landlord to be the only one who takes a chance to get that person, who may have become homeless, a roof over their head.

In common with many other councils, my council—and I am proud that we pushed this hard—went for guarantees. We stood as guarantor for somebody in difficult circumstances so that the private sector landlord, who was prepared to take a chance with us, could provide a home. This is an essential part of managing a housing market. It is all about supporting the most vulnerable. It works; it is a success. If you have been a council leader—I am sorry that I failed to identify the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, who has also been a council leader in these circumstances—this is about helping families get back on their feet.

In considering Amendment 61, I ask noble Lords: in what universe can this misdirected, misguided and counterproductive amendment help those with the quietest voices get a roof over their heads? Providing a guarantor is the way in which the unrentable can rent, and there is nothing fair about keeping people in bed and breakfasts if they could, via a guarantor, be housed. I cannot support this amendment.

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

My Lords, I am pleased to support my noble friend Lady Kennedy of Cradley, and I am grateful to her for taking over the amendment. She is much better placed than I am to speak to it, and has done so very persuasively. The noble Lord, Lord Fuller, called it a blunt instrument and was hyperbolic in his description of the amendment. According to Shelter, the Bill and this amendment would restrict the scenarios in which a landlord can legitimately request a guarantor to those in which a prospective tenant cannot prove that the rent is affordable to them.

So it does not seem to me that the amendment excludes the groups that the noble Lord described. If it does so, then perhaps we can have a refined version of it, but the fact is that there are problems without an amendment of this kind. My central argument in Committee—

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

The noble Baroness talks about the burden of proof. In the three examples I gave, proof is not available. I can understand the intent and the well-meaning behind Amendment 61, but if it is to form part of the Bill, noble Lords need to ask themselves how those people in difficult circumstances are going to demonstrate the proof. They cannot, so a guarantor is the only way forward.

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

This amendment does not preclude the use of guarantors; it just limits their use. I will leave it at that. As I said in Committee, if there is a better way of doing it, then fine—perhaps the Government could bring forward an amendment that ruled out any unintended consequences. I am not convinced that there are any—but anyway.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Grender (LD)]

My Lords, I have added my name to this amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of Cradley, and am absolutely delighted to support it. We spoke about this in Committee, but I still feel that there is an opportunity here. This is not about banning all guarantors—if that needs clarifying—and that is made very clear in the wording of the amendment. This is about trying to stop the blanket use of guarantors, which, I am afraid, is occurring and is highly discriminatory.

The noble Lord, Lord Fuller, referenced student groups. But I am a little bit confused, because my understanding is that the student groups that have been in touch with me over the last few days about this amendment are in support of it—unless the noble Lord has any examples of student groups that have been in touch with him that are against this amendment, then I am happy to sit down to allow him to tell me.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

I have not canvassed student groups, but I know the example of my own family—my daughters went to Oxford and Newcastle—and the strictures that were placed on them. So I am talking from my personal experience rather than that of the representatives of other organisations.

[Baroness Grender (LD)]

It is my understanding that student groups are happy with this amendment and against the blanket use of guarantors. The current use of guarantors is, I am afraid, a proxy for discrimination against vulnerable groups. There is evidence that black renters are 66% more likely to be asked for a guarantor—I know that has already been said, but it is so profoundly shocking that it bears repetition. If you are on benefits, you are 60% more likely to be asked; if you have a disability, it is 20%. The great Equality Act 2010 is being driven over with the use of guarantors and I am delighted to support this amendment.

I read with a lot of care the Front-Bench speeches in Committee. The noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, suggested that guarantors can be a lifeline for those with poor credit or no rental history, but on these Benches we genuinely believe that nothing could be further from the truth. The harsh and stark reality is that 550,000 private renters were unable to secure a desired home in the last five years because they lacked a guarantor.

There is not a single organisation that I am aware of that campaigns and advocates on behalf of people who could be described as those who need that kind of lifeline, who are on no or a low income, which opposes this amendment. That includes working-class, international, estranged and care-experienced students who struggle to find suitable guarantors because they do not know anyone in those highest quartiles, which are the only guarantors that many landlords will accept. They just do not have those contacts or connections.

The noble Lord further suggested that tenants have market discretion or choice if a landlord is imposing a blanket guarantor policy. That defies the logic of the current marketplace, where the low-income tenant is never in the luxury position of shopping around. Again, that choice rests only with those whose income is in the higher quartiles.

On the Minister’s point in the same discussion about guarantors providing confidence, we must ask: at what cost to fairness? Landlords already have really robust tools: a five-week deposit, the first month’s rent up front, and affordability checks. As the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, said, guarantors are rarely invoked in practice. Like the noble Lord, I am currently a guarantor for my son, who is a student, so I completely understand that this is what we currently do. But in the past two years less than 3% of landlords have ever attempted to claim lost rent from a guarantor. When they did, it was 16 times more likely to be difficult than easy. Landlords have other, much more appropriate business risk management tools, such as rent guarantee insurance, rather than relying on a tenant’s family member, and so many of these tenants do not have a family member who is earning way above the median income, which is what is demanded.

Even before this legislation has come into effect, there is a worrying rise. A 2024 Generation Rent survey of its supporters found that 30% of private renters who had moved in 2023-24 had been asked for a guarantor—up from 22% of people who had moved in 2019. Always in this context, I fear that the debate is held on a presumption that renters lack responsibility somehow, unlike other tenures. However, as the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, said, only 2% of tenants were reported as in arrears in 2023-24. The vast majority of tenants are responsible individuals, who, by the way, often forgo other things, such as heating and eating, in order to pay rent, because they understand the severe consequences of not doing so and because the market is so limited for them.

This amendment is not a radical proposal. As Generation Rent and Shelter argue, it simply ensures that guarantors are used sparingly, appropriately and only when absolutely necessary, when a prospective tenant genuinely cannot demonstrate that they can afford the rent. This entirely aligns with the National Residential Landlords Association’s own current guidance.

When the Minister responds, if the Government are unable to stop this loophole for discriminatory practice, will she at least make it clear, either today or perhaps in a letter to follow, that guarantors should be used only as a last resort, that the Equality Act should be used if there is further evidence of discrimination, and that landlords already have the means to ensure that tenants pay through other mechanisms? I hope that her words today will ensure that the widespread use of guarantors is not the next version of no-fault evictions.