Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Baroness Maclean of Redditch Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 29th October 2025 Lords Chamber

I have one final stat, which is terribly important. What we are allowing is a tax on people’s desperation. The Gambling Commission survey that came out this month showed that the top reason for gambling, given by 85% of people, is because they hope to have a big win. People are desperate. The survey showed that 27% of those living in the most deprived areas gambled at least weekly; in the least deprived areas, the figure is 14%.

[Baroness Maclean of Redditch (Con)]

My Lords, I want to make a few remarks on Amendment 121G in the name of my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe. I also support Amendment 117 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, on gambling premises. I am a former MP who represented a town centre, Redditch, where we often saw these challenges in maintaining a healthy mix of shops and businesses. Thinking about planning decisions on a holistic basis would have been very beneficial. These challenges cannot be fixed by planning alone, but planning can play a part.

Turning to Amendment 121G, I declare my interest as someone who was a small business owner and an entrepreneur for more than 30 years. I thank my lucky stars that that was not in the construction sector because, honestly, that is one of the hardest sectors to operate in—particularly for a small business. When I was the Housing and Planning Minister, I spent a lot of time with small and medium businesses. It was really difficult to hear their stories, which were often frustrating, heartbreaking and tragic. Ultimately, we as a country are losing out if we fail to support and nourish these incredibly hardy and resilient people. Many of them are at risk of losing their livelihoods; in fact, some recent statistics suggest that around half of SME construction businesses are at risk of insolvency by the end of this Parliament. That is why I support this amendment.

What my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe has put forward is very sensible. She makes the point that, too often, the system defaults to one-size-fits-all requirements, which land heaviest on smaller firms. We talk about the NPPF. It has 76 pages and is relatively concise, I agree, but it sits on top of a very large and complex ecosystem of guidance. This is one of the concerns that businesses repeatedly raise: the real burden lies in all of that additional guidance, not just in the 76 pages of the NPPF. Volume housebuilders can navigate such things easily, but it is not so for SMEs. For instance, negotiating Section 106 agreements hits them disproportionately harder, on top of all of the cost burdens that they face.

Anyone who has been a local representative—whether a councillor or a Member of Parliament—knows well that opposition exists to virtually all housing of any kind, no matter where it is. However, in my experience, SME local builders with roots in the community are in a much better position to overcome these hurdles and contribute to desperately needed housing.

In conclusion, these are practical amendments that support local authorities to plan for places in which families want to live, shop and invest.

[Lord Deben (Con)]

My Lords, I support the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Foster. I am appalled by the statement read to the House by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett. Noble Lords have to understand that it is very embarrassing for me to be on the side of the noble Lord, Lord Foster, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, but I have to say that what she just read out shows what a disgraceful industry this is and how much money is being made out of the poorest and most deprived places.

I have lived with this problem for many years. My father was a clergyman in one of the worst slum areas of Britain. He always said that gambling was much more damaging than drink or any of the other things to which referred. It was particularly damaging in his parish, which contained a large number of military personnel, both retired and present.

I hope that the Minister will not make the speech that I suspect I might have had written for me as a Minister. It goes like this: “This is a planning Bill, and this amendment refers to the licensing duties of a local authority. I know that we already said that it was more appropriate for licensing authorities than the Planning Bill but, because this is a planning Bill, we really believe that it should be left for a different piece of legislation”. Yet the Government have said that they will make these changes immediately when there is some opportunity in Parliament to do it.

This amendment is an opportunity. What is more, it has been shown to be within the long title of the Bill, so, if the Minister says that it cannot be done because it is not appropriate, I will have to say to her that I do not believe the House should accept that. The House should simply say that it is clearly appropriate and that this is a clear opportunity. If the Government do not support that, I say something very tough to them: this is about the very people whom this Government are always banging on about and are supposed to be supporting. These are the people who are most at risk from the bloodsuckers who run the gambling industry and know what they are doing. They are applying to the very people who are most vulnerable and from whom they get most of their money.

I say this to the Minister: there is a growing anger around the country at what is happening and at the vast sums of money that some of the people who own these companies make. The biggest payer of income tax in Britain runs a betting company. That says something deeply offensive about our society; I do not believe that any of us should stop the battle to change this.

I wish also to say one thing about my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe’s amendment. I hope that the Government will not say that it is not necessary to make the point about small businesses. My noble friend has concentrated on the construction industry but, very recently—in the past three years—I applied to the local authority to change a residential building back to what it had originally been since 1463: a public house.

That piece of planning change for a very small business —I do not know what I was doing starting a small business at my age, but there we were—for the benefit of the community, took a year. It was the year in which construction prices rose faster than they had for generations. At the end of that year, the cost of what one was trying to do for the community was significantly greater than at the beginning. The reasons for holding it up included the conservation officer complaining that we were going to use second-hand pamments and bricks; we were obviously going to do so because that is my attitude to these things. My architect said, “My client is strongly concerned about climate change and wishes, therefore, to use second-hand materials”. He got back from the conservation officer a note that said, “I don’t care about climate change; I’m interested only in conservation”.

Even if you know something about these things, it is very difficult to put up with a year of that kind of conversation. I merely say to the Minister that it is essential that we have in this Bill a clear statement that small businesses must be treated with the consideration that they do not have the means to do things that big businesses have. I really hope that we can resurrect small construction businesses, but we will not do that unless they have special understanding as far as planning is concerned.