Homes: Existing Communities
Lord Lucas Excerpts(1 week, 2 days ago)
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Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, when I listened to the Government’s announcement this morning, I was hoping to hear much more courage than I did. As my noble friend Lord Wolfson of Aspley Guise points out, courage and change are what is needed here. We know that the current situation will not do. The longer it persists, the more damage it does. Reversing out of it is a big thing: it will have big consequences, and it will need some big thinking to do it right. I really hope that this Government discover their mojo on that.
As my noble friend said, artificial scarcity over a long period has created house prices that are out of people’s reach. It is not resulting in good patterns of community building. It is not resulting in beautiful buildings. All sorts of things are going wrong. We need a different way of facing. I am attracted by what the noble Lord, Lord Best, suggested as one of the ways out of this: development corporations could help take existing communities onwards and also build new towns.
We have different requirements of towns these days. We want them to support a really good public transport network; we do not want them to be car dependent. A lot of that comes into how we want communities to evolve. Where we have villages, we want them to have sufficient houses so that they can support the local services they need. However, when it comes to towns, they need to be big enough too: they need to support good medical facilities, good sixth forms and other services. There are lots of things that should go into deciding what we want our communities to look like; we then need to find a way of expressing that, through the planning system, in what gets done.
I think that the concept of the green belt has had its day. What we want is communities with embedded green space so that people find green space and nature on their doorstep, something that is easy to access and part of their everyday life. What we want outside towns is spaces that we dedicate to nature, places that are preserved but are accessible by a bus route so that people can get out there to see something and enjoy it, but which are frozen so that we can look after nature in them and are part of the funding system to do with where people live so that they are not cast out on their own, dependent for ever on handouts from Defra or whoever, and are part of the integral economy of the urban centres. We need to rethink the concept of green space completely.
We also need to look at the regulations that we have imposed on existing communities. We can afford to let these places get denser. By using permitted development rights allow people to extend the houses they have, use the spaces between houses and add another floor or two. A bit of variety never spoiled a streetscape unless it was designed like the Royal Crescent in Bath which you might want to preserve. Most places can take variety. I have a Private Member’s Bill on this subject coming in the new year, and I very much hope the Government will support it. Beyond anything else, I am with my noble friend Lord Godson: we want beauty because living among beauty is one of the most healthful, well-being inducing things that you can offer to people and communities.
Spending Commitments to Local Councils
Lord Lucas Excerpts(4 months, 4 weeks ago)
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Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
We know that the council tax banding system has been around for a very long time. In recent years, it has been important to keep the stability of funding for local councils because of the pressure they have been under. We will continue to make sure we get the balance right between local autonomy on funding and the financial pressure on residents. However, long-term funding stability in the wider local government funding system should help that. As for looking at the banding system, that could cause the kind of disruption that would make life even more difficult for local authorities.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, will the Government look carefully at whether the burden of funding homelessness could be more equitably distributed between councils?
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
My Lords, homelessness is one of the most serious issues that local authorities have had to deal with; it has caused immense pressure on their finances and immense distress to the people affected by it. This morning, we heard from Oxford Economics and Skipton Group that only one in eight renters can afford to buy property. We must address this and deliver the long-term solutions that are needed. We will develop a new cross-government strategy, working with mayors and councils across the country to get us back on track to ending homelessness once and for all. I hope we can also scrap the Vagrancy Act 1824 and get that off the statute book.