Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 6th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interests set out in the register. It was a delight to listen to my noble friends Lord Goldsmith and Lord Randall describe the importance of swift bricks to the preservation of this species and to stopping their decline. I am delighted to be able to support it.

Installing these bricks is an absolute no-brainer. They cost between £25 and £35. Last year, the big four housebuilders—just four of them, Barratt, Berkeley, Persimmon and Bellway—made profits of £2.749 billion. I am sure they can afford a £25 brick for the 300,000 homes they might or might not manage to build next year. Installing the bricks is a no-brainer.

I learned today—I hope, wrongly—that the Government may be opposed to this measure. That, too, would be a no-brainer if they are. I wonder where the opposition has come from. I hope they have not been lobbied by the Home Builders Federation—the organisation which lied, lied and lied again about the Government blocking the building of 145,000 homes because of nutrient neutrality. That was totally untrue. Of course, housebuilders are sitting on more than 1 million planning applications and are land-banking until they can release them gradually and make maximum profits. If that is legitimate, so be it, but let us not let them attack the Government for holding up housebuilding when it is not the Government doing it.

I understand that in the Commons the Government said they could not mandate this nationally and it must be left to local voluntary discretion. Housebuilding left to local voluntary discretion? You cannot build a house anywhere in the country without the Government almost dictating the colour of the curtains. Look at the national regulations on every aspect of housebuilding: electrics; plumbing; the type of cement; the way the damp-proof course is laid; the tiles and insulation. Nearly every mortal thing of importance in the house—the width of the doorways, the bannisters, the boilers you may install after 2030—is dictated by central government, and rightly so. I am not complaining about that, but I am complaining about the apparent hypocrisy if the Government I support are now saying “Oh, we can’t order every house to have a little brick installed because that is taking national government interference too far”. If that is the case, I think that is nonsense.

I know that some Government Ministers have already installed these bricks. They have done it voluntarily, without guidance. If it is good enough for some Ministers, quite rightly, to save swifts out of their own volition, then it should be quite right that the Government support a measure to impose this nationally.

If it is the case that the Government are opposed to this, I would really like to know where that opposition came from in government. If it is true then some idiot—an adviser, spad or civil servant, but hopefully not a Minister—has decided to oppose this. I exempt my noble friend the Minister, as this is an environmental matter and nothing to do with her brief, but why in the name of God should a Conservative Government oppose this?

In the first three years of this Government, under Michael Gove and George Eustice in environment, we made the biggest strides forward in environmental and nature protection that this country has ever seen, with the 25-year plan and the Environment Act. Now we could lose that good reputation because of a trivial thing if we oppose installing a 25-quid brick in a house wall to save swifts.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I speak in support of Amendment 221A on swift bricks, as your Lordships might expect. My noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb has, in the terms of the noble Lord, Lord Randall, flown back from a nearby cavity just to be here for this debate, but she could not be here at the start, so your Lordships get me instead.

This is something that I have been talking about. I was on TalkTV, talking to Julia Hartley-Brewer about restoring biodiversity. I happened to mention swift bricks in that discussion and the presenter said in response, “Isn’t that just a small thing? Don’t we have to do much more?”. Of course that is true, but, if you are a swift then a swift brick is not a small thing. The fact that you need somewhere to make your home and raise your young is a matter of life and death. As the noble Lord, Lord Goldsmith, said, there has been a 60% decline in the population in the last 25 years. These beautiful and utterly amazing creations of nature depend on having a place to rest and raise their young, and we are closing those spaces off.

The noble Lord, Lord Goldsmith, also made an important point about human well-being—how much we all benefit from having swifts around and what a wonderful addition they are to our environment. Think about young people, such as the toddler who says, “What’s that?”, and has it explained so that they learn more. That is crucial.

The state of our biodiversity is absolutely parlous. We are one of the worst corners of this planet for nature. As we heard passionately from the Benches opposite, surely the Government cannot oppose this—they cannot oppose what was said by MPs in the other place and is being said by so many petitioners. Please let us have some common sense here.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I too wish to support Amendment 221A. Swifts, by their nature, nest in holes in trees but took advantage of the advent of human buildings to transfer their allegiance in our direction. Now in our towns, any tree with a hole in it is immediately felled as a danger to people and we are blocking up the places where swifts used to nest in buildings. We need to do something about that—it is absolutely our obligation.

We also have to deal with the quantity of insects, so bringing 30 by 30 into towns is really important too, but swift bricks seem to me an absolutely symbolic act. We would be saying that we will start to make room for nature around us and in our habitations. It would involve people, as Dasgupta wished, in direct contact with nature, rather than nature being somewhere else where they do not have to go if they do not want to. That makes this a really important symbolic advance.

I like the amendment: it is just that you put in a swift brick. There are no downsides, no penalties and no rules. You could fill it with cement a year later and no one is going to prosecute you. I have got scaffolding on my house at the moment, so we are putting up some swift boxes because it is not suitable for swift bricks. The best supplier I found said, “If you’re buying a swift box, why don’t you put a bat box on the back?”. I looked up the regulations as to what would happen if a bat actually occupied that box, and it is ridiculous. It would be tens of thousands of pounds off the value of the house, and all the regulations mean that you cannot do anything without bringing in a bat person if you have bats in a bat box. I could not paint it or shift it; I could not paint around it; I could not make noise next to it. The contrast between bat regulation and this proposal on swifts is stark. I am not putting in a bat box—I am not bats—but I am putting in swift boxes.