Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Lord Lansley Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 17th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness. It was also a pleasure to listen to two excellent maiden speeches, not least that of my noble friend Lord Jackson of Peterborough; we were together for a decade in the other place as Members of Parliament for South Cambridgeshire and for Peterborough. I particularly enjoyed his one-nation sentiments. I draw attention to my registered interest as chair of the Cambridgeshire Development Forum. I have four quick points.

First, I do not think there are enough missions about wealth creation. I do not see how we will reduce economic disparities without additional wealth creation in the less advantaged regions. One of the salient differences in London and the east and south-east of England is that they have greater than their relative proportion of people working in the private sector, and a greater proportion of the stock of businesses. One of the missions should be for enhanced new business formation in the less advantaged regions, increasing the level of business and economic activity.

Secondly, on digitisation, I like what is in Chapter 1 of Part 3, but it should also enable us to be more ambitious, with local authorities reducing planning delays and getting on with putting local plans in place—most of them do not have them. However, as was mentioned earlier, they need more resources. They should not just get more money; we should have planning performance agreements between major developers and local authorities which tie additional resources directly to the performance of those tasks by those local authorities.

Thirdly, on the infrastructure levy, I do not understand how you can have one levy that tries to address probably three distinct things: first, the obligations associated directly with a development, which is where Section 106 reform should come in; secondly, the provision of social housing and additional tenures of housing; thirdly, infrastructure delivery, which may be completely unrelated to the development in question and somewhere else entirely. Those seem to be different things to me. I do not yet see how one levy could do that, and we may have to revisit it very carefully.

Finally, the Government are not going to mandate housing targets, I accept that, and there were sometimes anomalies in the way the standard method worked. But local authorities must have an up-to-date local plan, and it must be sound. A sound local plan is one that makes sufficient provision for anticipated housing need, and through which planning authorities work together within a given “travel to work area”, which may extend some distance. They should work together and co-operate to ensure that they provide for the anticipated additional housing requirements resulting from additional economic activity and employment in their respective areas. If they do not, the plan is not sound, and if they do not have a sound plan in place, they should not be able to refuse development. They should be required to put a sound plan in place, and they should accept the development necessary for the housing need relevant to their area.

I look forward to elaborating on these and other issues during our debates.