Healthy Homes Bill [HL]

Baroness Andrews Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 15th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Andrews (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the House for allowing me to speak in the gap. The noble Lord, Lord Crisp, will know how important and timely I think the Bill is because we have worked for many years on related issues. Looking back at the report that we in the Select Committee produced in 2016, Building Better Places, it is that emphasis on places that comes through in his very important Bill today. As the noble Lord, Lord Best, said, unless we emphasise the building of places in their context, unless we get buildings and homes right, we will not be able to get the whole environment right.

We have wasted more than a decade. I hope the House will forgive me if I refer to the policy that the last Labour Government introduced in 2009 of lifetime homes and lifetime neighbourhoods, from which there is a direct trajectory to all the things we have discussed today, including lifetime homes standards, which we wanted to be mandatory within a matter of years. We were looking at regulation by 2013, but of course, that was wiped out by the coalition Government. We are now nowhere nearer mandatory standards for lifetime homes, yet in order to make the noble Lord’s Bill a reality we absolutely have to have mandatory standards to drive permanent, sustainable changes in the quality and design of buildings, which would make it possible for older people to live and age in place. That is what we have all been aiming at for the past decade.

We are slightly nearer it because the social care White Paper, for example, brings for the first time a proper, explicit emphasis on integrating housing and commits money to it in relation to social care. Of course, it is also in relation to discharge and the crisis we are having, which we see every day now. We absolutely need to do that as quickly as we can.

The second point I want to make—I hope I will take only three minutes—is that not only have we gone backwards because we have failed to address the reality of what is required to enforce standards and get developers to deliver them, but we have also gone backwards on the adaptability of buildings. The loss of Care & Repair England, for example, with the wonderful work that Sue Adams did there over so many decades, is a terrible one. We no longer have the momentum and discipline to ensure that we have those sorts of provisions at a local level, which can make all the difference to providing adaptable homes—not just new homes but homes that people can live in and cope with.

This is particularly important for older people and if we are to get any movement into encouraging older people to downsize, so that we can free up homes as a whole-systems approach to providing affordable and accessible homes for younger people. This is all part of the system and the Bill fits in so clearly and so importantly with that. I hope that the Government see the opportunity—as well as the set-up—here to support the Bill and, when we begin Committee I hope we will have a raft of amendments to strengthen the Bill and make it more enforceable, deliverable and workable.