King’s Speech (4th Day)

Lord Horam Excerpts

Monday 22nd July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Horam (Con)]

My Lords, I genuinely congratulate the Labour Party on its success at the polls, and I also congratulate our two maiden speakers on their first excellent efforts. My noble friend Lord Petitgas gave the lie to the famous remark by former President Bush that the problem with the French is that they do not have a word for “entrepreneur”.

The stated economic aim of the Government is to be the best-performing economy among the G7 nations and to do that by massively improving the rate of housebuilding. Good luck outperforming America. Leaving that aside, does anyone seriously think that they can hit their target of building 300,000 houses a year and 1.5 million over a five-year Parliament? Last year, we produced 165,000 houses. At the present capacity of the construction industry, it would be difficult to get up to 300,000 a year by the end of five years, never mind to reach that every year.

There is also a big downside to boosting housebuilding to the levels that Labour proposes: it gobbles up ever more of England’s green and pleasant land. Estimates suggest that even building 1 million houses would mean concreting over an area the size of Birmingham. The UK is already the second most heavily populated country in Europe. People do not want this. According to a YouGov poll, 73% of us think that Britain is already overcrowded.

On top of this assault to the countryside and damage to the cordon sanitaire of the green belt, Ed Miliband has already lifted the de facto ban on onshore wind farms and approved three massive solar farms. Many years ago, the poet Philip Larkin penned these lines:

“And that will be England gone,

The shadows, the meadows, the lanes…

There’ll be books; it will linger on

In galleries; but all that remains

For us will be concrete and tyres”.

That is the serious danger of the present Government’s approach.

None of this is necessary. Of course we want young people to have a decent house that they can afford and we want to do our bit for climate change, but it is perfectly possible to do this while at the same time having solid economic growth, and without destroying our precious and limited countryside. For example, the number of households in the UK increased by 3.3 million between 2000 and 2019, but an examination of the census figures shows that in three-quarters of these the head of the household was an immigrant. If we reduced legal immigration to reasonable numbers, the demand for new housing would be significantly reduced. We could also make better use of our existing housing stock and allow local authorities—here I suggest being really radical—to compulsorily purchase land for housing at much lower prices, as Shelter has suggested. The price of land is 50% of the cost of a new house.

As regards solar and onshore wind farms, we certainly need offshore wind and have done very well there, but we could do far more with nuclear power. France, for example, has the cleanest and cheapest power in Europe, because it has spent 50 years investing in nuclear energy. I was very glad to hear Ed Miliband making some helpful remarks in that area.

I appreciate that, after 14 years in opposition, the Government want to move ahead fast and improve our economic growth. I am with them on that, but there are plenty of areas and opportunities for growth that do not impact on the environment: life sciences; fintech; AI, as my noble friend Lord Fairfax of Cameron just remarked; quantum computing; high-end engineering; and the creative industries. These are all areas where we can grow. Above all, we need to make more of the things that other countries want to buy from us. That is the central weakness of our economy, which we need to put right. In my view, that is the right way to go, not bulldozing the countryside for more developer housing and covering our farming land with solar panels.