Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Lord Stunell Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 18th April 2023 Lords Chamber

I very much hope that between now and Report the Government will recognise that there is a strong feeling in this House and out there in the country that we need to do more. We need to revert to what the Government originally planned before the climbdown before Christmas and give the other place time to think again and reflect on what happened in December, then revert to the Government’s original policy, which was a manifesto commitment, enabling the country to build the 300,000 homes each year that we need.

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

My Lords, this is an extremely important debate with a large number of amendments of great importance. Having recently been recruited to the rapidly increasing cohort of the over-80s, I am entirely with the noble Lord, Lord Best, and his amendment. Certainly the Liberal Democrats support the case that has been made.

I was interested to hear what the noble Lord, Lord Bradley, had to say in relation to his amendment about making an assessment for student accommodation. As a resident of Greater Manchester, I understand the issue very clearly. I am sure that the Minister will want to tell us about how it is possible to have such a requirement applied in a proportionate way, bearing in mind that for a neighbouring planning authority such as High Peak it may be a very small consideration, whereas for an authority such as Manchester or Salford it is very significant.

I wonder if I might impersonate the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, in respect of the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, and ask where the leasehold reform Bill is, of which the Government have spoken so much and delivered so little. I shall leave my remarks there. I think we need to hear from the Minister not simply that she does not particularly like the amendment that the noble Baroness has tabled but that there is actually a positive plan by the Government to tackle the issues the noble Baroness has identified.

I want to focus my remarks on Amendment 219 and Amendment 218, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lansley. Amendment 219 would require local planning authorities to have a local plan that reaches or exceeds the requirement for housing prescribed by the Secretary of State. Amendment 218 would nail this down further by requiring strict conformity with the Secretary of State’s targets, using a method of calculation specified by the Secretary of State. We should be clear that, taken together, these amendments would mean that local land allocations for housing would essentially be taken away from local planning authorities and placed back in the hands of the Secretary of State. This would be a reversion to the statutory situation that obtained at some very distant time in the past—some 12 months and three Prime Ministers ago. It is a policy position that was denounced by the previous Prime Minister as Stalinist, and was this week repudiated by the current Prime Minister when speaking on the BBC. He said he saw an urgent need for change to the existing policy, assisted materially by conversations he had had last summer with Conservative councillors all over the country, who spelled out to him its consequences and the damaging impacts it was having locally.

A close reading of the two amendments suggests that, actually, they may seek to go slightly further back, to something that is even more Stalinist than the preceding Prime Minister was suggesting. The drafting of Amendment 218 appears to say not only that falling below the target would not be permitted but neither would exceeding it, because it has to be in strict conformity with the targets that have been set by the Secretary of State—not a house more, not a house less.

Noble Lords who are proposing this pair of amendments are certainly quite right to point out that the current situation suits nobody, least of all the tens of thousands of families on council waiting lists or the many others for whom a house purchase is hopelessly beyond their means and for whom renting can only ever be an inadequate, insecure and expensive option, given the current size and nature of the housing stock. They are also right to point out that the current policy uncertainty has paralysed local plan decision-making, slowed site allocations, and infuriated the development and housing industries.

We need more homes urgently. Specifically, we need many more social homes for rent. If money was switched from the Help to Buy programme to investing in those homes, as we on this side have often advocated, that would make a start, but the supporters of these two amendments need to explain in more detail how going back to the status quo ante will deliver the outcome that they desire. Not once did the system to which they are now encouraging us to go back deliver 300,000 net new homes a year, or even near it. The noble Lord, Lord Lansley, drew that to our attention. The old system was not delivering, so reinstating it seems unlikely to work miracles. Indeed, I shall quote the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, in respect of another matter he spoke about: repeating something that you know does not work is verging on madness.

There are even more Stalinist options available, and maybe these two amendments point the Government in that way. There is no doubt that a centrally imposed national five-year plan for housing construction could deliver such numbers, but only provided there was state funding for anything over the 150,000 or so homes that would be funded by the private sector—and with the proviso that the party in government that put this policy in place was ready to forego its local democratic representation on the shrivelled local planning authorities that would be left.

There is an alternative—one that has proven to work in practice over the last 10 years, one that produces more land allocated for housing than the local plans have previously done for that area, and one that has popular consent, validated by a public vote locally. It is an alternative that meets local housing needs, has local popular consent and routinely exceeds government housing targets. You might think that that was a far better policy option than resurrecting a system of failed top-down targets that will not meet local housing needs anytime soon, raises huge opposition, and is constantly gamed and warped by developers, politicians and local interests, while Ministers in Whitehall can only stand around, flummoxed and frustrated at the failure of the plan to deliver. I am referring to neighbourhood plans, and here I need to redeclare my interest as a member of a neighbourhood planning forum. Now that neighbourhood plans are seen as a success—this was debated to some extent earlier in our proceedings—everybody claims to have invented them. I say only that it was quite lonely at the Dispatch Box in 2010, steering them through in the Localism Act.

There is a later group of amendments in which I shall have more to say about neighbourhood plans—I am sure noble Lords will be delighted by that news—and the impacts of some of the clumsy proposals in the Bill, which I think will damage and hinder their prospects. However, for this debate, I look forward to hearing the Minister set out what the Government’s plan for reaching 300,000 new homes will actually be. If it is not going to be Amendments 215 and 218 from the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, or spending absolute shedloads of money on a massive state investment programme, or facilitating a much-expanded neighbourhood planning programme, what on earth is it going to be?

Leaving the Bill as it is, as the Government would obviously prefer, may well be seen as their best expedient short-term fix for the forthcoming local elections. They may even hope that it might be a middle-term fix for the general election next year. I do not think it will achieve either of those things, but one thing is certain: it will definitely not be a long-term fix for the homes that are vitally needed in this country. Leaving the Bill as it is will provide no help at all for those stuck on endless housing waiting lists, for those desperately saving for a deposit at a time of rising interest rates, or for those stuck in overpriced short-term lets with no hope of rescue. It really is time for the Government to set out their plans. I look forward very much to hearing a constructive reply from the Minister.

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

My Lords, this group of amendments exposes the conundrum at the heart of planning for housing. At this point, I repeat my interests, as in the register, as being a councillor in Kirklees, with its up-to-date local plan, and as a vice-president of the Local Government Association. My noble friend Lord Stunell is of course right to say that the simple statement of a number of new house builds per year has failed and will continue to fail: top-down diktats are the last resort of a failed policy. As the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, helpfully reminded us, there are more than 1 million unbuilt homes with current planning consents. That seems to me to indicate that a top-down planning policy is failing to produce the number of new home builds that the country needs and wants.

Amendment 207 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Best, points to a challenge in housing development that is considered far too rarely: housing and planning policy should have a focus on fulfilling need. There is ample evidence of which housing units are needed, such as those for older people. As my noble friend Lord Stunell has said, we know that there is a desperate need for housing at a social rent. There are current applications from over 1 million people for social housing. Their chances of success are very limited indeed, as successive Governments have continued with the right-to-buy policy while ignoring the need to build replacements. The challenge of supplying housing that meets expressed need is not being addressed by the changes to planning policy in this Bill.