Planning and Infrastructure Bill Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateLord Lucas
Main Page: Lord Lucas (Conservative - Excepted Hereditary)Department Debates - View all Lord Lucas's debates with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government
(1 month, 2 weeks ago)
Lords ChamberI come back to the point I made that if an applicant applies to the Secretary of State, a planning inspector would consider the case and then advise the Minister or the Secretary of State who was taking the decision. Planning inspectors are highly qualified and highly trained. Regarding the training of Ministers, we have access to bespoke training. I have undertaken some training. Because we have to operate within the Ministerial Code and planning propriety guidance, when we are making decisions we have a different call on us from that in local planning committees.
My Lords, my noble friend Lord Fuller does not need to keep the Minister on her feet. This being Committee stage, he has the right to speak as many times as he likes.
I encourage the Minister to take further the last sentiments she expressed in the context of the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, and the words spoken by the noble Earl, Lord Lytton. It is important that we do something to increase the status of planning officials in local government. I have observed the effect that having chief scientific advisers in government departments has had on science and the way it is regarded within ministries. Over time it has had a really salutary effect. Having a chief planner, someone with that name and status, would be a good way of working back, providing status to the planning profession and making sure, as the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, said, that we get a collection of people who understand the limits of their knowledge and the advice that they are given and that the public trust them in that regard.
As a small contribution to that, I have tabled an amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill to try to rescue level 7 apprenticeships. If the Minister was able to have a word in the ear of her colleague, the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, to encourage her to give a positive response to that, that might solve a range of problems, not only for planning but for other professions where level 7 is an important qualification. The point that my noble friend Lord Fuller made about the importance of taking people who have entered the profession at the technician level and upskilling them to professionals is an important part of a healthy society.
Lastly, I associate the qualities of determination and optimism with the Minister, but does she really believe that we will get to Amendment 135? If she is wavering in that belief, it would be a great help to noble Lords, when the Government realise they might fall short, if they could tell us so that those of us who have amendments late in the day might find an opportunity for more time with our families.
To take the noble Lord’s last point first, my optimism and determination is to get to Amendment 135, but we shall see. I hope I have reassured him on the point about continuing to reflect on the issues around chief planning officers. I think I already responded to the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, on that, so I hope that reassures him.
My Lords, Amendment 346DB in my name is a probing amendment to debate what can be done to get rid of the absurd rules relating to bats—I am resisting calling them “batty”. The legislation is complex, but that does not alter the need for something to be done to get rid of the present insanity.
There are no bats in the United Kingdom of the type that is threatened with extinction, so there is no harm or danger to them; you cannot damage something that does not exist. There are some types that are close to being endangered, but there are abundant quantities of these types in other countries throughout the world. If the existing legislation were got rid of, there would be no danger to the world’s bat population. In short, legislation to preserve bats is unnecessary.
I will give two examples of the absurdities caused by the present legislation. Your Lordships will have read of the first, which my noble friend Lord Fuller referred to—the £100 million bat tunnel built during the construction of HS2. At a time of appalling government finances, it is scarcely credible to spend £100 million in this way.
My Lords, does my noble friend realise that we could have had 10 front doors for that price?
I am very grateful for the intervention. It makes the world of Alice in Wonderland look normal and sensible, and that also applies to the front door.
My second example is on a smaller scale. With the support and blessing of English Heritage, I recently purchased and pulled down a particularly ugly and inappropriate 1960s chalet-style house adjacent to Castle Rising Castle, which is a listed monument, in order to replace the horror with cottages built in the traditional local stone. This was a project for the greater good that, fingers crossed, might have just broken even. That was before the bat people got involved.
An inspection took place to check whether there was any trace of bats in the house. There was no evidence of bats, but that was not good enough for the bat people. I was made to take off the roof, tile by tile, so that a bat person could inspect each tile as it was taken off. This was despite the inspection having shown there was no trace of bats. To get to the roof in safety, the building had to be scaffolded, an absurdity for something about to be pulled down. It then took six men four weeks to remove each tile and show it to the bat person before the tile could be thrown away. Using machinery already on site would have taken one man half a day. I ask your Lordships: what sanity can there be in carrying on in this manner?
I have not even started on what the archaeologist wanted. I was made to dig down three metres, a metre below the two-metre foundations that were planned. At all stages, this had to be inspected by an archaeologist, with men and machinery having to wait for the archaeologist to find time. Your Lordships can guess what that cost.
As a country, we have managed to get to a situation where the greater good is being destroyed by the antics of minority interests, which can look at things only from their own—in many cases laudable, maybe, but very narrow—perspectives. How can any Government expect houses to be built with the enormous difficulties that builders have to contend with? I have mentioned only two. Let us start on the road to sanity by repealing all legislation relating to the preservation of the bat population. They will not disappear; they will still be around centuries after the legislation has been repealed.
My Lords, I contribute briefly to this debate to strongly support my noble friend on the Front Bench in her excellent amendments, both in respect of houses in multiple occupation and of hotels being converted to hostels.
I mention the specific case, in my own former constituency of Peterborough, of the Dragonfly Hotel in the west of Peterborough, which is a very pleasant residential area. Last November, without any consultation, the Home Office moved in 146—disproportionately male—asylum seekers. I raised the issue with the Home Office Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Hanson, earlier this year and he gave an undertaking that, henceforth, there would be better communication. Even the Labour Members of Parliament for the Peterborough area had cause to criticise the process of moving—decanting—those asylum seekers into the Dragonfly Hotel. The two Labour MPs, Sam Carling of North West Cambridgeshire and Andrew Pakes of Peterborough, said that
“the Dragonfly is the wrong hotel, in the wrong location and bad for Peterborough and nearby residents”.
There has been no indication of when it will cease to be used. They went on:
“We are a welcoming city but are playing more than our part already”.
The context of that is that there had been no attempt to speak to the Labour-led city council, adult social services, children’s services, the police or NHS primary care.
The context that we need to think about is that, hitherto, the planning process has been well recognised as a form of governance that works in this country. We have local development plans, we have county structure plans and—for those who really have nothing better to do with their time—we have mineral plans. I know that this is all meat and drink to my noble friend Lord Banner. The point is that it is a well-established idea that, where there is significant change in planning and development, particularly in urban development, there is a process of proper consultation between stakeholders and those affected. It might be informal discussions between planning officers and local residents or it might be a formal committee, but there is a process where people are invited to comment.
With any decision to significantly change and impact the residential amenity of a local area and people’s quality of life in that area, particularly where—as in the case of the Bell Hotel—there are a significant number of schools and young people in the area, there will be some legitimate concerns. No one is saying that all asylum seekers are criminals or are likely to be criminals but, when you bring forward very significant local change, you will cause concern.
I think a form of governance, a piece of primary legislation that obliges that information to be put in the public domain, is sensible and would prevent people listening to extreme points of view in pursuit of their particular political agenda. That is why I think that this amendment is sensible.
The noble Lord, Lord Teverson, can criticise as much as he likes. Let us hear the Liberal Democrats’ view on this and what they would do. It is very easy to criticise and put it on a focus leaflet in the opportunistic way that the Liberal Democrats do; it is much tougher, as this Government are finding and the previous Government found, to be in government, because politics is to choose and to make tough decisions—something that the Liberal Democrats are unfortunately not very used to.
My noble friend Lady Scott makes a very sensible point about accountability, transparency and clarity in the local community. If in future we are to avoid the social dislocation, violence and anger that we have seen in Epping Forest in the last few months, transparency will do that. It will allow people to have their say. It will allow their elected representatives to have an opportunity to properly represent them and ventilate their concerns, and I think that will be all to the good. The Government would be wise to do it, because they are now looking at some policies that we would have pursued. I think they are trying to tackle this issue in a sincere way. We on this side are offering these amendments as a way to ameliorate the issues because we know it is necessary so to do.
My Lords, if I may return briefly to the main subject of bats, I do not at all agree with my noble friend Lord Howard of Rising that bats are unimportant. They are absolutely part of nature. Nature in this country is hugely depleted and we need a lot more bats, but the lesson I draw from his story is that for all his huge expenditure, no bats benefited whatever. Nothing that he was made to do benefited bats in any way whatever. It is an entirely wrong-headed way of going about things. What we want is a lot more bats. If we had made my noble friend pay a few thousand pounds to make spaces for bats elsewhere in his estate, I am sure he would have done so with pleasure.
There is no need. The castle provides a home to endless bats.
I think the Government recognise this both in the later parts of this Bill and indeed in what they have done with offshore wind. They recognise that offshore wind will kill a number of sea-birds and that compensation must be made for that.
What we need in this country is a lot more nature. That will take a good chunk of money. It is ridiculous to have a system that just spaffs that money away. We ought to be taking the opportunity of bats, which are pretty mobile creatures. In nature, bats live in cracks in trees. Trees fall down all the time and the bats just move home. We are worrying about bats in a completely ridiculous way. We are wasting huge sums of money and we must stop.
My Lords, Clause 51 may look innocuous, but I am concerned that it is removing the effect of democracy. National democracy is imposing its will against the will of the local people. I was reflecting on when in 2013 I was on the Bill Committee for the Growth and Infrastructure Bill, now Act. The House of Commons Committee sat for seven days on a Bill of 28 clauses. This Bill went through the Commons in seven days, with 97 clauses being considered. That is why it is important that this House takes the appropriate time. Interestingly, back then the Lords sat for only five days on the Growth and Infrastructure Bill, with the Commons having done a much more thorough job, and that is something for us to think about.
On Clause 51, I was struck by what the Minister said to me on the previous group when I had specifically singled out issues that went against the local plan. The Government’s guide to the Planning and Infrastructure Bill on GOV.UK specifically says that controversial decisions should be done by planning committee and that the best way for councillors and local communities to be involved is in the creation of the local plan—I am paraphrasing slightly. Local plans are not created every four years—sometimes it feels as if they take more than four years to create, although they should not—so I was somewhat surprised when the Minister said that planning applications not in line with the local plan are not necessarily always controversial, so we should not worry about them and allow officers to make that decision. I would love to hear some examples of planning applications that are not consistent with the local plan and have not then been controversial.
My Lords, it is nice to see amity break out across the Committee after the previous group. I imagine a digital twin of the House of Lords would get to Amendment 135 by 7 pm.
Digital twins offer such an ability for local councils and their officers and members, and members of the public, to really get to grips with a plan. Otherwise, you are presented with something static that is really hard to change. It is just, “Shall we push it through or shall we retreat?” With a digital twin you can adjust, look at different ways of doing it and absorb comments as they come through, at a really low cost, and arrive at a much more evolved, much better, solution at the end of it.
I urge the Government, given that digital twins are part of the industrial strategy, to use this as an example to develop the Government’s role as a partner/customer, as a way of helping new small businesses and technologies cut their teeth and get a worthwhile first contract or two out of the way, and not to stand back but be part of the development of a strong new British industry. There is an opportunity here to do that, particularly with the Government’s new town programme. I really hope they take it.
My Lords, I endorse completely the speeches by the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, and her supporters. She introduced it engagingly and comprehensively. I have therefore scribbled out most of what I was going to say. She has done the Committee a double service in that respect.
A common difficulty for those citizens who wish to examine or question a development proposal is the scarcity of information, expertise and resources they have, often when up against a large professional development company. Planning authorities have the same problem, and the risk of very expensive and protracted discussions and inquiries to get to grips with the proposed project. Some applications that I have seen seem almost designed to overcome planning authorities and public resistance through the sheer volume and number of boxes of paper that arrive, within which people have to try to find where the bodies are buried.
If such projects were obliged to produce a digital twin model, as the amendment proposes, not only would we have a more equitable process but it would also save a great deal of time, resources and money. I could say a great deal more, but I will not because we all dread the phrase, “My Lords, a lot of good points have been made” and I shall not repeat it. I genuinely shall not. I support these amendments, and I will now sit down.
My Lords, I do not know if the Minister has spent much time looking at the maps of the advance of termites across France. It is a gentle horror film, if she likes such things. They have reached Paris. There are now extensive provisions in French law for dealing with termites, for checking your house for termites before you sell it. It has become a very serious economic problem for them. As with eight-toothed bark beetle and other pests, it will doubtless make its way across the channel at some moment. It is very much headed in our direction.
Termites are not susceptible to the same pesticides as we use to control woodworm, because they function in a different way and occupy a different part of the wood. It therefore seems sensible, given that we are likely to get this thing, for us to make preparation for its arrival and not leave our entire housing stock vulnerable.
Indeed, if we were to make preparations before the termites arrive, we would have a set of people who are used to combating them and dealing with the pesticides involved, and an industry that is not building houses that are vulnerable to them. I therefore very much recommend this provision to the Government, although I appreciate that it may not actually require an amendment to the Bill. I beg to move.
My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, for tabling Amendment 113. He is right that I was not intimately acquainted with the procedure of termites in France. However, I do now know far more about the house longhorn beetle than I have ever known, and I will continue to look at this issue.
The noble Lord may have been in the Chamber on Monday when we were discussing wood being used in construction. I mentioned an office development I visited, which is just across the river from Parliament, and which makes extensive use of wood in its construction. We will see more of that; wood is a good building material and developments such as that are good uses of wood. It is therefore very important that we take these matters extremely seriously.
The noble Lord’s amendment seeks to prevent planning authorities from granting planning permission for new-build homes if timber construction products specified at planning stages are not termite resistant. Fortunately for us, termites are not endemic to the UK. Even though an infestation was recorded in the 1990s, that was subject to a successful eradication programme.
While I appreciate the noble Lord’s intention, the Building Regulations, rather than the planning system, are the appropriate way of establishing minimum legal requirements in the design of new building work. The sanitary arrangements we have in place to regulate timber imports allow us to remain vigilant. The Government take the view that mandating termite resistance in any wood used for construction materials in new-build homes would be a disproportionate measure, leading to an increased cost for developers and consumers, and adding to local planning authority burdens. However, if a threat were to emerge, guidance on timber products for new development and suitable wood treatments could be included in Approved Document A, which accompanies the Building Regulations for structure.
I hope I have given some reassurance to the noble Lord; nevertheless, I ask him to withdraw his amendment.
My Lords, I am very grateful for that reply, even though I had hoped for something more positive. I did take out of that, given the caution that the Minister expressed about raising costs for housebuilders, that the rumours of a change to the landfill tax are probably erroneous. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.