Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Debate between Lord Jamieson and Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle

Committee stage
Thursday 11th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

Okay—I am not going to get that far into the history.

I declare an interest in that land value tax is a long-term Green Party policy and one that I am very happy to talk about at length, but I am not going to do that because it is not what this amendment would do. However, it is worth thinking about the fact that the problem with how we tax land goes back a very long way. There was a royal commission on the housing of the working classes set up in 1885; it was the first time that an inquiry had referred to land value taxation—it was called site value rating then—and it said that this would be a better way to solve a housing crisis. These are issues that we have been wrestling with and failing to solve for a very long time.

My final point is that this amendment by itself would not deal with the crunching, terrible elephant-in-the-room issue of council tax, but it would start to provide the Government with a way to open up these issues. This is all regarded as too politically difficult, too challenging and too complicated to explain—I know what it is like to try to explain land value tax in 15 seconds, because it is a challenge. We are now 35 years on from when council tax was created. It was an emergency crunch measure created by the Treasury after the political disaster of the poll tax. It is a deeply regressive tax. Someone living in a home worth £100,000 pays an effective tax rate five times as high as someone in a £1 million property. The average net council tax is only 2.7 times higher for the top 10% of properties than for the bottom 10%. This is something that we have to address. This amendment would not address all, or even the bulk, of it, but it would start to inch us into a space where we could tackle some issues that desperately need to be tackled.

[Lord Jamieson (Con)]

My Lords, we have already debated some complex topics in Committee and the issue of land value capture certainly continues in that vein.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Debate between Lord Jamieson and Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle

Committee stage
Tuesday 9th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I am going to point to what the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, said—how close we got, and a really bad decision was made. How do we make good decisions really quickly?

Okay, I will come to what the Minister said. It relied on building regulations and compliance with those, but we know what is being built now is not complying even with the inadequate regulations we have now, and that issue needs to be discussed. The final point I want to make is this: the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, said that we cannot do anything to interfere with much-needed housing delivery. We have to build houses that people can safely live in. That has to be an absolute prerequisite. But, in the meantime, I—

[Lord Jamieson (Con)]

I do not think I said that we cannot do anything. It is all about having a balance.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I accept the point made by the noble Lord, and I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Debate between Lord Jamieson and Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle

Committee stage
Thursday 24th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I briefly and with pleasure offer support for the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, who is the House’s acknowledged expert and champion in the area of whistleblowing. Reacting to some of the comments made, the noble Baroness said she would prefer to see an overarching system rather than operating within the frame of this Bill. With the huge changes the Bill is potentially making, it is clearly very important that, if things are going wrong, we are able to see them and whistleblowers can safely speak out.

The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, raised the health service. It is useful to reference our earlier debate on the infected blood scandal. The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, went through a very long list and ran on a theme she has long been running on; we have this cascade of continuing scandals and crises with all sorts of harrowing outcomes. I do not think she mentioned this, but issues such as sodium valproate and vaginal mesh are quite recent and possibly ongoing. There is a systemic problem with the structure of government and the way it is working. We are potentially giving the Government much more power here.

I want to fulfil my traditional Green role and add to the thoughts about the impact on the environment and when environmental issues go horribly wrong, as they potentially will. I note that since we were last in Committee the Government have brought in some changes to the highly controversial Part 3, which the noble Lord, Lord Grayling, referred to. In response to those changes, the Office for Environmental Protection has said:

“We are clear that even after the material amendments the Government proposes, the Bill would, in some respects, lower environmental protection on the face of the law”.


The OEP is saying that if we are lowering environmental protections, there is a real risk—“environment” usually means human health impacts as well—and environmental whistleblowers need to be able to speak up and point out what is happening. These are people from within organisations who may be the only ones who really know what is happening.

Finally, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, for mentioning HS2 so that I do not have to.

[Lord Jamieson (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, for tabling this amendment. It is a clear and well-intentioned proposal that raises important questions about how individuals can share concerns relating to NSIPs. We on this side of the House recognise the value in exploring such concerns and that they are heard and addressed. Clarity in that process is undoubtedly important. However, at the same time the question of establishing independent bodies through amendments is not straightforward. There are practical and structural considerations that merit careful thought, particularly around proportionality, as my noble friend Lord Grayling mentioned.

I want to focus on what the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, said: this is an issue of culture. No bureaucracy can overcome the wrong culture, and we need to fix the culture if we are genuinely going to have people listening to whistleblowers. So, while we welcome the opportunity for Ministers to set out how the concerns will be raised and responded to—and clarification will be helpful in understanding whether further mechanisms are needed—it will be most interesting to hear from the Minister how he will change the culture.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Debate between Lord Jamieson and Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle

Committee stage
Thursday 17th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I offer my strong support for the entire presentation from the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, and her amendments. I cannot top her example of unknown mines underground, but the example that I was thinking of is on a much smaller scale, and it addresses the point raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe. She said that those mines, et cetera—the physical infrastructure—should be on the record; I think we all know that very often they are not.

However, there is also the question of the local community and how it works, which is never going to be written down. The example that I was thinking of comes from central London, from Camden borough. I was at a meeting where the council came along very excitedly with the idea that it was going to knock down a community centre, build housing, and build a new community centre on what most people from the outside thought were some pretty unpleasant, small, raggedy corner shops—a little row of shops which you get typically in suburban areas. The council officers and the local councillors were visibly astonished when local people, mostly elderly, were up in arms and horrified about the idea of those shops being demolished. They said, “We’re not mobile enough to get to Camden High Street and we’re scared of the traffic on Camden High Street and the speed at which it goes. Even though these shops are probably both very expensive and don’t have a great range of goods, et cetera, we hugely value them”. That is just a small-scale example of how only communities themselves know the way in which they work. If they had had input earlier on, there would not have been lots of very angry pensioners at that meeting, as we saw.

Amendment 107 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, is really important and picks up the use of technology, and potentially its positive use, and sets out rules for it. Again, I am afraid that my next example is also from Camden, because that is where lots of my planning stories come from. The Crick centre was imposed on the local community—I declare a retrospective interest in that I was the chair of the St Pancras and Somers Town Planning Action committee that opposed it, a long time ago. When it was finally built, people said, “But that doesn’t look anything like what the pictures looked like”. I think that is something that we are all extremely familiar with. The idea of creating some standards and rules—they already exist, but we should put them into statute—seems an extremely good one.

[Lord Jamieson (Con)]

My Lords, first, my apologies: I should have mentioned my interest as a councillor in central Bedfordshire earlier in the debate.

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, for her leadership on this important group of amendments. Clause 4 systematically removes several pre-application requirements. I will focus first on Amendment 25, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock. This amendment seeks to retain Section 47 of the Planning Act: the duty to consult the local community. Can the Minister clarify the Government’s position? Ministers have previously stated that the Bill does not in any way reduce local democratic input. If that is the case, can the Minister explain why the duty to consult communities is being removed? How did the Government arrive at the decision to remove Section 47 of the Planning Act, as my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe raised, and what are the specific problems they are trying to resolve in doing so?

We know from experience that when local communities are given genuine influence over planning through mechanisms such as neighbourhood plans, they are often more supportive of new housing and infrastructure—we have heard cases from the noble Baronesses, Lady Pinnock and Lady Bennett, where the local input added significant value—especially when it reflects local needs such as affordable housing, safeguards green space or comes with vital local infrastructure improvements. Indeed, neighbourhood plans introduced under the Localism Act 2011 have in many cases led to more housing being approved rather than less. This suggests that working with communities delivers better outcomes.