Planning (Subterranean Development) Bill [HL]

Lord Selsdon Excerpts

Friday 20th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Selsdon (Con)]

My Lords, I am most grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, for his Bill because he has taken an enormous weight off my own shoulders. Four years ago I introduced a Bill in your Lordships’ House, having worked in the construction industry for some time, to look at development. We had one of the best teams that I have ever come across, from the Pyramus & Thisbe Club, which I am sure your Lordships will know well and was founded when a big building block collapsed and brought down Lloyds Bank. This was effectively the origin of the club, which looked at rules and regulations relating to development.

Your Lordships will be aware that this great building here, on Thorney Island, is built on not very much—logs of wood. Downing Street is, I believe, built on faggots, and the average depth of a building in the Greater London area is approximately 12 inches. So there is a problem with foundations. The purpose of my Bill was to introduce some regulations that could be followed voluntarily. We had great confidence in the Civil Service. We said, “Let’s not move on to having a Committee stage; let’s do this all by regulation”, because there was no need for any new legislation. However, what happened within the Civil Service when we sat down to meet was that people could not attend a particular meeting or another—we had a whole range of meetings—and no one got anywhere. All it needed was regulation.

That is where we are now. I should explain that I spent many years in the construction industry. My latest experience of a subterranean development is of minding my own business in our house in London—near to which eight subterranean developments are now taking place and I am not one of them—when the wall where all my confidential parliamentary papers were stored half-collapsed and a bald head appeared through the midst of Hansard documents. It was a Romanian builder, who with a hammer drill had by mistake hammered too hard and knocked down the party wall.

The point made by the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, about the lack of comfort that comes with development is pretty serious. You have a scene with television lines being ripped up, telephones going wrong and the vibration, and no bother and no regulations. So what is needed is regulations, and what I am going to ask the Government for is very simple: I will give them again a copy of this particular Bill and of the documents from the party wall team, which is one of the best you will find in the world, and ask whether we could have another meeting. Within a week or four weeks, we could produce the regulations which would solve all those problems.

I wanted today also to speak on the asbestos Bill, because I started my time in the construction world working for a company called Universal Asbestos—because asbestos was one of the best insulation materials of all—but having listened to what was said today, I think that I have survived so far so well and feel much better.

This could be done by regulation. We are talking of the underground situation in London—I will make available, if your Lordships wish, the routes of all the rivers and where they go from. Water became a problem because the foundations were linked to beer. When the breweries were in London, they consumed an enormous amount of water, and they pumped and sucked out and kept the subterranean surfaces from being damp. One of the reasons why foundations were not deep was because of the presence of water in all those areas.

I do not need to waste your Lordships’ time. I am totally supportive of the Bill and expect the Government, within a matter of weeks, to arrange to hold the meeting we originally planned two years ago. The details are all on file—if they do not wish to look for them I can provide them—and we could meet and do something before Christmas.