Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 4th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Caithness (Con)]

My Lords, I fully support what the noble Lord said about the need for climate change to be in the Bill. I will speak to my Amendment 246A in this group. It is on the topical issue of wildfires, which have been exacerbated by climate change. As all your Lordships will know, wildfires have caused an enormous amount of death and disruption, with huge social, economic and environmental impact, across the world this year. You only have to see the regular news about what is happening in Greece and Canada to know what a problem it is. This year, we in the UK have been fortunate that we have not had fires on quite that scale—although we have had fires.

This debate slightly follows on from Committee, since when I have been in correspondence with the Home Office. We have a Minister for Fire there, but, in his reply—I think it was to me; it was addressed wrongly but it landed at my address, so I guess it was—he immediately referred me to Defra. So we have at least two departments in government involved, and although there is a Minister he is not in the department of most interest: Defra. That is why I have tabled Amendment 246A. Subsection (1) of its proposed new clause would require the Secretary of State, together with the Home Office and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, to produce

“a national wildfire strategy and action plan”

within six months of the passing of the Bill. It is ludicrous that, in a country that has suffered, and continues to suffer, the wildfires that we have, we do not have an overall action plan.

Action plans are all very well and good, but they have to be implemented at local level. Therefore, in proposed new subsection (3) I suggest that each local planning authority produces a wildfire risk assessment plan in conjunction with the fire and rescue services. This is a local matter in the end, and it is vital that the local authority and local people are involved, as we have heard in two recent amendments. The noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, waxed lyrical about it. My noble friends Lord Deben and Lord Lansley also mentioned how important it was to have up-to-date plans that were approved by local people.

In proposed new subsection (4), I list some of the things that need to be included in the proposed strategy and action plan. One of the issues is

“a map identifying the areas of current risk produced in accordance with the Met Office Fire Severity Index”.

At this stage, I ask my noble friend on the Front Bench—I think my noble friend Lord Howe is going to answer this—whether he considers this to be a valid index.

The current index, known as the MOFSI, helps us to plan for and react to fires but, unlike a fire danger rating system, MOFSI gives an indication of fire severity based only on the meteorological data and does not fully account for the varied fuel types that we see across the UK. Although MOFSI can indicate whether conditions are worsening or improving, its primary role is to determine whether open-access land should be closed to prevent the spread of fire. However, MOFSI does not always work effectively. For example, during the dry summer of 2018, in some regions the indices did not rise sufficiently to trigger land closures in areas that went on to experience severe wildfires. That proves to me that we need a different system of assessment and a fire danger rating system. Does my noble friend agree with me on that?

I do not want to pursue the arguments I used in Committee. I want to look at this issue briefly from another point of view—the insurance point of view. I do not know whether the Government have given any thought to insurance. We have had huge insurance problems with floods. There is a lesson to be learned from that, which is that we must act in advance when it comes to fires.

As I said, we have not had a repeat of the fires of last year, but on 18 and 19 July last year there were 84 wildfires affecting 28 of the 46 response areas, and it overwhelmed the fire and rescue services to such an extent that there was very little spare capacity for other emergencies. If that was not a warning to us that we need to improve the situation, I do not know what other action the Government need to be presented with.

That brings us to the question of insurance. The insurance industry is beginning to look at this in a serious way. As we continue to build, the urban/rural fringe is going to be hugely important. This will be the critical area of damage to the most property. There will be, and has been, damage to properties in rural areas, but the urban area is now most at risk. The expert report on wildfire in the UK for the third climate change risk assessment advised that wildfire and sources of ignition from outside of buildings should be considered in future planning actions and in building regulations and mitigation measures put into action. That is a relevant issue. Marsh McLennan, one of the experts on this, has quantified the benefit of fire buffer zones for the rural/urban interface. In the report it produced, it stated that wildfire

“risks can be greatly mitigated and reduced to a level that is both livable and insurable”.

It would be sad if the Government put us in a predicament in which people could not get insurance.

I have stressed the urban/rural fringe for one particular reason. Part of Defra’s agricultural policy is rewilding land, which leads to more abandonment, trees closer to rural areas and a much higher fuel load. It is the fuel load that is absolutely critical. We are blessed in this country with a wide diversity of geological stratas of soil, reflecting the countryside. Because of our maritime climate, we have very high fuel loads at certain times of the year and in certain places. The concern is that these are not assessed at the moment.

If we want to consider whether the fuel load matters, we can take a brief look back at the Saddleworth Moor fire, which was on peat and on very long, unmanaged and unkempt heather. When it burned, it produced something like 36,720 tonnes of carbon. In real figures, that equates to the annual emissions of 86,000 passenger cars—and that was one fire alone. The key in all this is the fuel load and how it is best managed. To do that, it is important that the local planning authorities have the appropriate plans underneath an overriding national fire strategy for England and Wales. I hope that the Government will support this amendment.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I offer Green support for all the amendments in this group, but in the interests of time I will restrict myself to commenting on just two of them. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Earl, Lord Caithness. Due to my Australian origins, I feel I am constitutionally obliged to make a contribution on wildfires, which for most of my youth I would have called bush-fires. In the British context, from 2009 to 2021 there were 362,000 wildfires, with nearly 80,000 hectares burned. The estimate is that, if we were to go to 2 degrees of global warming—something that we cannot afford—the number of very high fire risk days would double. That is because there is less rain in summer and it gets hotter and drier. As the noble Earl just said, if you have a wet winter and a spring that has a great flush of growth, that presents one set of risks—and, of course, peatlands, in which it is extremely difficult to extinguish fires, are another area of serious risk.

When people assess the risk in the UK, we think about those rural areas—those uplands and peatlands—but there is very serious risk, particularly in the south of England. I point noble Lords to the desperate and horrendous events in Hawaii. Noble Lords may have seen the photo of the now famous red-roofed house, which was one house that was not burned in the midst of blocks and blocks of houses. The two key things with that house were that it had a tin roof, rather than the asphalt roofs that most of the houses had, and they had cut back the vegetation. That is a demonstration of how preparation is so crucial in planning and guiding the thinking of people in the UK, who are really not very used to thinking about fires, to prepare for the risks ahead.

I point to a not terribly recent example but one that demonstrates the dangers, as Hawaii did, to urban areas—the peri-urban fringe but extending quite a way into urban areas. The Swinley Forest fire in Berkshire in 2011 burnt 300 hectares and 300 firefighters had to work to stop it getting into Bracknell, population 110,000. So, this is a modest but really important amendment that really is for the age of shocks, the age of the climate emergency we now live in.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I have an illustration—as ever, from Eastbourne—of what is going on with solar panels. We have in the middle of town about 400 hectares of grazing marshes. There is a proposal to build a solar farm on a chunk of that, right next to 100 hectares of industrial estate. None of the firms have solar panels and nor do their car parks. There is clearly a local demand for solar electricity and the grid connection needed for it, but nothing is happening to provide solar panels on the existing space, which could so easily be used for them.

The Government’s policy is pointing in the right direction, but it is inadequate. It needs reinforcing. They need to give a much harder shove to putting solar panels on existing commercial buildings and commercial space. I very much hope that, if the exact wording of the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, cannot be accepted, the Government will commit to bringing something back at a later stage or finding another way of doing something about it, because where they are at the moment will not do.

Exactly the same applies to the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, which I have great sympathy for. Therefore, I do not see the virtue in Amendment 191B, the wording of which seems very strange. I do not think that “should” bears the meaning that my noble friend tried to put on it; it is an imperative in legislation. Statements such as

“all new homes should be secure and built in such a way as to minimise the risk of crime”

mean that we would need to have eight-inch thick concrete blocks with tiny portholes for windows, because these are absolute words and not the much more open and discursive words employed in Amendment 198, which I therefore favour.

I also like the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale. We need to look seriously at embodied carbon. If that involves new construction methods, we need to learn from the lesson of reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete. It was the miracle of its time, but that wonderful new method of doing things has not worked out. If we are going to introduce new methods and new structures extensively in housing and other buildings, we really must go back to not only testing them to destruction but monitoring how they are working in the environment. We used to do that with new building methods; we need to get back to it now.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I rise very briefly to offer the strongest possible Green support for all these amendments, which really fit into the intersection of Green policies on public health, climate and poverty eradication. I will make just three brief points.

First, on solar panels on a suitable new homes and buildings, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, for pursuing this for so long. If I look on Twitter, the question I am asked most often is, “Why do new homes not have solar panels?” It seems such a no-brainer to the public, and they cannot understand why. Of course, the answer to that goes back to 2013 when David Cameron had gone from “hug a husky” to referring to “green crap”. The plan to bring in this effective regulation was abandoned a decade ago. This means that more than 2 million British households are now paying vastly more for their energy than they need to be paying, while also emitting more carbon than they need to be emitting.

Secondly, the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, and others have been extremely powerful on the parlous state of public health and the relationship that has to housing. It is interesting that if we go back to the start of the NHS in 1948, Aneurin Bevan was Minister for both the NHS and housing. Those two things were seen as intimately interrelated. Somehow or other, we seem to have lost the plot with this. To quote some figures from the Building Research Establishment, it is estimated that poor housing costs the NHS £1.4 billion a year—money that could be saved.

Thirdly and finally, I acknowledge the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Best, about his awakening to the issue of embodied carbon. This is something that has been largely ignored. There has been the shallow approach of “That’s a terrible building. We’ll knock it down and build something better”. I have just come from a conference in Zagreb—an international conference with a lot of European speakers. I was hearing of so many amazing projects that are happening across Europe and looking at how we can build in innovative new ways while using existing materials.

I shall quote just one example of this. If a building needs to be knocked down, how can we reuse those materials, rather than just throwing them away? In Copenhagen, there is something called Resource Rows: housing has been built largely with slabs of bricks cut from existing buildings that had to be demolished. Those slabs are cut out and put into the walls of the new buildings. They have recycled materials. The timber is coming from where they have put a new Metro extension in. The timber frames that went around the concrete pieces for the Metro then go into building housing right beside it. They have greenhouses for growing vegetables on site, made from old windows. This is the kind of innovation that is happening elsewhere because they have the regulations that demand it. We are lacking those regulations; we are lacking this guidance from the Government. Just look at what we are building now.

[Baroness Sheehan (LD)]

I refer noble Lords to my interests as laid out in the register and as a director of Peers for the Planet. In the interests of time, I will address just two amendments in this group, but that is not to detract from my strong support for the remaining amendments.

First, Amendment 282H, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, which has support from across your Lordships’ House and to which I have added my name, simply calls for the Government to require all new domestic, public and commercial buildings to be fitted with solar PV and will include existing public and commercial buildings, subject to appropriate exemptions and criteria. Frankly, I do not understand the Government’s opposition to this very sensible measure. I spent four consecutive years on the planning committee while I was a councillor for Kew ward in the London Borough of Richmond. My experience there taught me absolutely to recognise that progress on this issue will be vastly expedited if the decision is not left to construction companies whose sole concern, at least for the majority, is profit.

The Government’s argument is that it is happening anyway. That fails to demonstrate that they take the need for urgent action on climate change seriously. Anyway, where is the evidence that it is happening already at effective rate? Is the figure for new-build solar PV 10%, 5% or 50%? What is the Government’s policy on this? Can the Minister tell me? Who keeps account of these figures? Surely the Government’s policy must be 100% solar PV on all new buildings and, if not, why not?