King’s Speech

Lord Lansley Excerpts

Thursday 18th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington. I remember his amendments to legislation that were supported by this House and made important contributions to our thinking about how to have cleaner rivers. From my point of view, in Cambridgeshire, it is also very important that we use water well. The measures that we are piloting in Cambridgeshire for reducing the usage of water to below 110 litres per person—potentially even further down—and using the water credit system to support that will, I hope, enable the water industry to work more effectively in future.

For the purposes of this speech, I should declare an interest as chair of the Cambridgeshire Development Forum. I join with noble Lords, and indeed the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington, in welcoming Ministers to their new responsibilities. I have been here and listened to many of the speeches that they have made on the subjects for which they will now be responsible, and I know that we look forward very much to their being able to deliver on some of those objectives.

One that I want to focus on particularly is the question of planning and housing. My noble friend Lord Young of Cookham and I tabled an amendment to the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill on the reintroduction of mandatory national housing targets. I was rather pleased yesterday that the Leader of the House said that Ministers would, she hoped, remember the importance of this place in bringing forward considered and constructive amendments. That was one such amendment; as it happened, it had the support of the Labour Party and, indeed, a number of Cross-Benchers. I must remind the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, that the Liberal Democrats abstained, so it did not secure the overall support of the House. When we now move forward with mandatory housing targets, I hope that we can try to work in some of the beneficial effects that we anticipated at that time.

I want to talk particularly about the planning and housing structure. In this speech I will dive deeply, rather than range widely, because I think that what we need to do on planning and housing is urgent. Of course, there is in the gracious Speech a planning and infra- structure Bill. There are some important measures in that, particularly in relation to land assembly, compulsory purchase powers and the value attached on compulsory purchase for land assembly. But much needs to be done that does not need to wait for legislation. As Ministers will recall, the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act, as it is now, has powers for Ministers. The most important question is about how they will now be used.

We want to see, as rapidly as possible, the revised National Planning Policy Framework. We want to see the mandatory housing targets. We want to see, I might say, a revision of the standard method, because the current standard method is not fit for purpose. I add, in parentheses, that clearly it must reflect demographic changes and potential demographic changes. It should reflect affordability and the relative price of housing, since that is a straightforward measure of the pressure on the housing market in that area. It should also look very carefully at employment change and future employment needs—and do so not in individual local planning authorities but collectively across functional economic areas and travel-to-work areas. The local planning authorities in a travel-to-work area should, collectively, be required to meet the housing requirements associated with the employment changes in that area and, for that matter, should work together on employment space as well.

We will be looking forward—I hope that Ministers have this very quickly in hand—to the publication of national development management policies. The legislation permits this, and I think that Ministers would be well advised to pick it up. I know that there was some scepticism among Ministers during the passage of the Bill, but it affords the possibility for local plans to be produced more quickly and with significant reduction in the consultation requirements for much of the decision-making processes. A clear example of where Ministers can use it is in relation to the green belt. Ministers will recall that, in Cambridgeshire in 2006, we reviewed the green belt and took land out of it. If we had not done so then, we would not now have the growing Cambridge Biomedical Campus and Cambridge would not be the scientific superpower that it presently is. We know that we will have to do it again.

In addition to enabling decisions on the structure of the green belt, and indeed on individual sites within the green belt, to be more flexibly considered, it is important that Ministers restate some of the objectives. For example, in Cambridge we were always clear that we would not prejudice an historic city in a countryside setting, that there would be green fingers and green space within Cambridge itself and that we would not allow the coalescence of surrounding villages into Cambridge to create a much larger urban area. All those things are continuing, valid proscriptions and will rightly be applied, I guess, in other places. We have shown that much can be done in the green belt by way of positive development if one looks at it in a locally led and constructive way.

On things that should be done straightaway using the available powers, I mention the revision and reintroduction of an infrastructure levy. Again, there was some scepticism during the passage of the Bill, but the powers are there for every local authority collectively to produce infrastructure delivery frameworks. The combined authorities, or whatever subregional structures are put in place, should all have infrastructure delivery strategies and affordable housing strategies, and should all be required to have infrastructure levies that are predictable—based on pounds per square foot rather than net development gain—so that developers and promoters are absolutely clear that the land that they option or buy will have substantial infrastructure and affordable housing requirements that must be met and that, therefore, the value of the land that they acquire is properly discounted to take account of that.

I come back to Cambridgeshire for my last minute. I am looking forward to the maiden speech of my noble friend Lord Fuller, a fellow East Anglian. He might acknowledge that the Cambridge effect is an East Anglian phenomenon. We want to support it. In my last minute, I just want to say to Ministers on the Front Bench that, just before the election was announced, we had a very useful and important seminar at St John’s College, Cambridge, where we brought together local leaders, the Cambridge Delivery Group and Peter Freeman as chair of Homes England and of the Cambridge Delivery Group. It demonstrated that the Cambridge 2050 initiative is not the “Gove plan” but a shared ambition that can be delivered by the Cambridgeshire region. We may be only 1% of this country, but we are much more than 1% in terms of our future economic ambition and potential for growth. I hope that Ministers will, as I suspect that the speech by the new Chancellor of the Exchequer highlighted, support the Cambridge 2050 initiative and work with the conclusions from that seminar, which have been communicated by us to Ministers. I look forward to those constructive discussions.