King’s Speech

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Thursday 18th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, and indeed all my Labour friends and colleagues. We are very lucky to live in a country where power changes in the way it does, where civil government is civil and politics are polite. Nobody is exiled or shot—in fact, raising the bar a little higher, there is not even really the prospect here, as there is in many of our allied countries, of a party refusing to accept the outcome and going to law. I think we can take that for granted. I hope we all want Britain to succeed, and that means wanting this Government to succeed.

I will focus this afternoon on areas not just where I think the party opposite can succeed but where it can succeed by the metric of comprehensively outperforming the outgoing Government. There were two spectacular candidates in the King’s Speech. One is healthcare, which your Lordships will debate tomorrow. Even within the red lines set by the Health Secretary, the fruit is not so much low hanging as piled up in great snowdrifts, because the previous Government were so terrified of being accused of privatisation if they allowed any mechanisms of internal markets.

But I will talk about housing. I share my noble friend Lord Attlee’s enthusiasm for the speeches given at the beginning of the debate from the Front Bench. The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, set out the problem extremely well. We do not build enough houses in this country, and we have not been doing so since the 1960s. Housing has been falling as a proportion of our population for longer than I have been alive.

The problem has accelerated as our population has grown. In the last 15 years, population has increased through immigration by 5 million, 1.5 million of that within the last two years, and housing stock has fallen in percentage terms commensurately. What are the results of this? Well, we can see them whenever we compare this country with our nearest neighbours. The average size of a dwelling here is two-thirds the average in France, Germany or the Low Countries. Rents here are 1.5 times higher on average. Rents in London are twice what they are in Paris and three times what they are in Berlin. The number of young people who own their own house has fallen by 51% since 1989.

So much for the diagnosis—what about the prescription? Here again I have some grounds for optimism in what we have heard from the Front Bench opposite. Particularly, it is a good idea to begin by calling in some decisions that have been held up, often with trivial and vexatious objections. I agree 100% with the onshore wind decision, and it is an example of how quickly things can be done. I struggle to see why that logic does not extend to fracking or, indeed, to the issue of North Sea drilling. I very much share my noble friend Lord Ashcombe’s concerns that, by simply stopping getting our own energy here, we are driving up the environmental costs of bringing it in from elsewhere, since all sides agree that, at least during the transition, we will need some of it. But I promised to be positive, so I will not dwell on that and I will go back to the question of calling in these decisions.

I hope that this Government will have a general presumption in favour of infrastructure. A great many projects have been hanging around for an inordinate length of time. If there is a tunnel or an interconnector, build the wretched thing—there is no point in having yet more rounds of consultation. The proposed inter- connector to Portsmouth would bring in as much clean energy as a brand-new, state-of-the-art nuclear power station, yet it has been held up again and again, without, as far as I can see, even that much local objection to it—there is some very vocal local objection, but it is not universal. The lower Thames crossing would free up immensely the capacity of our ports, as well as relieving pressure on the Dartford Crossing. If you have these projects, use the power to call them in and get them done.

But that is only a short-term fix, not a long-term solution. We cannot govern the country by a series of these decisions made by one Minister in Whitehall; we need to reform the system more widely. Again, this comes down to how we build more houses. I was delighted to hear the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, talk about new towns, but it is important that we build new towns where people want to live. That generally does not mean putting them in the middle of the countryside somewhere; it almost always means putting them on the edge of an existing town.

The railway station I commute here from every day is in Basingstoke, my nearest town. I hope that none of my neighbours in Basingstoke will take it the wrong way when I say that not even the most patriotic local would say that it is the loveliest town in the country. It was a new town, but I think that if you had to choose between Basingstoke and, let us say, the new town of Edinburgh, it is kind of a no-brainer as to which is the more architecturally pleasing.

A number of proposals for significant urban expansion were in the in-tray of the outgoing Government. My right honourable friend Michael Gove spoke about them at the beginning of last year: the expansion of Leeds, the expansion of east London and, above all, the idea of a new town in Cambridge. If I may say so, these are very early tests of whether the party opposite means what it says about capacity. They will need to be actioned sooner rather than later.

This will also mean lifting the noose from around some of our cities that goes under the name of the green belt, which I think is an extraordinary bit of mismarketing. A couple of years ago a think tank ran a competition for people to photograph the ugliest bits of green-belt land they could find, and it was deluged with images of car washes, petrol stations and rubbish heaps. A lot of what is called green-belt land is scrub-land, but because we are not able to build in it, the building has to take place in genuinely green fields, which is what most people understand when they hear the phrase “green belt”. Again, that did not happen under the last Government—let us be frank about this—because a lot of the local MPs had association chairmen who were district or borough councillors. I think that is less of a problem, looking at the electoral geography of the country, and that too is an early test. By the way, the green belt in Bristol begins one mile from the city centre. How can the cities where people want to live grow if they are asphyxiated in this artificial way?

I will end with one suggestion: we can go for what my late friend Roger Scruton used to call gentle density. In our cities we have some of the lowest density in the advanced world. If we moved to a slightly more normal model by European standards of having comfortable, spacious, four or five-storey buildings with family apartments, we would solve a lot of the problems that noble Lords opposite have identified. There are some changes that could be made very quickly, not all of them requiring primary legislation. We could have a presumption in favour of building mansards or upward extensions in cities. We could allow for street votes or estate votes on greater densification. The noble Lord, Lord Mawson, was talking just now about Tower Hamlets. I saw that there was a project in Tower Hamlets where an estate that had contained 24 houses has increased to 202. All the previous residents got a bigger house; they had to vote to do it, but it helped tackle the problem. A similar one in Lambeth has gone from 135 to 441 houses, plus a gym and other amenities. Make it easier by giving communities a stake in expansion, to get that kind of gentle density through.

I would ideally like to scrap, or at least massively overhaul, the Town and Country Planning Act 1947. If you look at any village, the ugly houses tend to begin around 1947. If anything has failed on its own terms, it is that legislation—but I think that would be asking too much.

I end with a proposal put forward by my friend the writer Sam Bowman that he calls the 1894 project. It is named after the London Building Act 1894. Give buildings in the Greater London area or within a mile of surrounding tube stations or the Elizabeth line a presumption that they can grow up to seven or eight stories, equivalent to what every other city in Europe did.

These are decisions that have a high upfront political cost and the economic gain comes later, so I urge noble Lords opposite not to hang around, because as the next election comes closer, the political costs become more visible and the economic gains get pushed to the other side of the election, so

“If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well

It were done quickly”.