Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 9th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Parminter (LD)]

My Lords, I support all three amendments that the noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson of Abinger, has brought forward. But for brevity, I am going to address my remarks to only one of them. The Private Member’s Bill she referred to when talking about her Amendment 117 was brought to the House by a Liberal Democrat Member, Max Wilkinson.

I particularly want to address the issue of rainwater harvesting. As the noble Baroness rightly said, there is an ecological issue already with us; there is insufficient water because of the changes in our weather patterns from climate change. But if the Government are not prepared to listen to those reasons, then surely from an economic point of view this amendment makes perfect sense.

First, we are already facing housing developments not being built because of water shortages, and secondly, if the Government want to get the large number of new data centres introduced, they are going to need a heck of a lot more water. It has been estimated that the large data centres use the equivalent of 50,000 homes- worth of water a day. Unless we use every single means at our disposal to utilise water properly, we are not going to be able to build the homes or the data centres that we want, so we need to look at measures such as this right now.

Some noble Lords might say that the public would not like the idea of using rainwater harvesting in their own homes. However, a recent survey by Public First asked 4,000 UK residents that question, and there was overwhelming support for the use of rainwater harvesting, both outside in people’s gardens and inside their homes for flushing the loo or using the washing machine—as the noble Baroness has said.

It is not just the noble Baroness, me and others who are making the case for rainwater harvesting. In Jon Cunliffe’s recent independent review of the future of the water industry, he made a specific recommendation about the need for rainwater harvesting to be addressed urgently. During the repeat of the Statement on the Independent Water Commission in this House on 23 July, I asked the Minister—the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock—whether the Government would not wait for the proposed water Bill to pick up Jon Cunliffe’s recommendation but rather look at opportunities like the Planning and Infrastructure Bill to bring forward changes to building regulations so that rainwater harvesting could be mandated on new homes.

The Minister, somewhat surprisingly, immediately thought that this was a good idea—I do not often get such positive responses from the Front Bench opposite—and promised to take the matter forward and discuss it with the Minister for Water. I hope that, when the Minister responds to these amendments, she can show the House that those discussions have taken place, that the Government are taking the issue of rainwater harvesting seriously and that there will be a mandate to change building regulations.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baronesses, Lady Hodgson and Lady Parminter, and to offer support for Amendment 115, to which I attach my name, and for the general intention of Amendments 116 and 117. In the interests of time, I will restrict myself to Amendment 115.

I do not often take your Lordships’ House back to my Australian origins, but as this amendment has come up, I really have to. I am going back about 35 years to a place called Quirindi in north-west New South Wales. Somewhere out on the internet there is a photo of me sitting on a horse in a field, or paddock as we would say, that is dead flat and dead dry, without a blade of grass on it—that is Quirindi.

As an agricultural science student, I remember the farmer explaining how to live there. He took me out the back to the water tank, which was a very large tank that caught the water off the farmhouse roof. There was no town water in Australian farming, so that entire operation and household depended on the water that they caught off the roof. I still remember the farmer rapping on the side of the tin tank and saying, “That’s where the water is; we’re in trouble”.

Noble Lords might think, “Oh, that’s Australia—that’s far away; that’s a very distant place”. Quirindi has an annual average rainfall of 684 millimetres a year. There are parts of south-east England that have an annual rainfall of 700 millimetres a year, which is essentially the same amount. There is also the impact of the climate emergency and the fact that we are seeing more weather extremes and more drying out.

There is something Britain can learn from the Australian practices that have been enforced over history and that can be imported here for a win-win benefit. No one loses from the proposal in Amendment 115. As I think has already been mentioned, we in the UK use about 150 litres of water a day per capita. That compares with France, which uses 128; Germany, which uses 122; and Spain, which uses 120. This is expensively treated drinking water that we are using for all kinds of practices that we do not need to use drinking water for.

I am going to quote Mark Lloyd, the chief executive of the Rivers Trust:

“We also need to finally implement the use of rainwater rather than drinking water where we can, such as car washing, gardening, washing pets, filling paddling pools, and flushing the loo. Other water-stressed countries have used this approach for decades and we need to join that party.”


I really stress the “party” element. I do not think we have mentioned the issue of flooding yet. Many of us have been speaking about the need for land management to slow the flow. What could be a better way to slow the flow than to catch that water so that it is not flooding out into our drains, water treatment plants, rivers and seas and so that we can have it available for use?

Often, when we talk about water use, there is a lot of finger-waving: “People should switch the tap off when they’re brushing their teeth and people should have shorter showers”. But what we really need is a system change that makes doing the right thing the easiest, cheapest, simplest and most natural thing to do. That is exactly what this proposal is putting forward. So this is a win-win all round: for householders, cutting their bills; for preventing flooding; for protecting the environment; and for saving energy—we do not think about this much, but moving water around and treating water uses a great deal of energy. I looked up the stats, and we do not seem to have any good stats in the UK, but globally, the United Nations says that 8% of energy use goes towards treating and moving water. That is such a waste when you have water falling on your roof that you can use right there in place. Pumping it out to a reservoir, treating it and pumping it back in—all that uses energy. This is a common-sense measure; why on earth not?

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

My Lords, I assure the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, that many good things come from Australia, and she is one of them. The tapping on the tank she describes is exactly what I have been doing in Leicestershire in recent weeks. I have some experience of water harvesting, both from domestic roofs and from commercial buildings, and actually it is not very difficult, because roofs are all designed to channel water into pipes, and it is simply a matter of intercepting that water and using it.

I do have a couple of practical concerns. The first is that, as anybody who has done this will know, even a modest rain shower will give you an awful lot of water. As a result, any housing development or business premises is going to find itself with a very large need for water storage somewhere on that site, either underground or above ground. My second concern is how that water is recycled. I am not squeamish about drinking or using non-mains water. I raised a family on water drawn from an underground stream, not on the mains at all. But water left standing in a tank will grow bad and grow algae very quickly. If that is the solution, we need to find out how to treat it.

Furthermore, there is a real issue that I run into: the water companies and Ofwat will not even contemplate the danger of mingling water collected by a third party with mains water—in a header tank, in your pipes or anywhere else—because they are liable for the quality of that water. So, if you mingle it with rainwater, they will not allow you to draw mains water. The golden thread here is to find a system where rainwater is the norm and the mains is the back-up, but we are a long way from that at the moment and will be until the regulatory and practical storage issues are solved. To be clear, I thoroughly support this amendment—the spirit of it—but the practicalities of it need to be worked out effectively into the design of water systems supplying domestic and commercial premises.

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[The Earl of Lytton (CB)]

My Lords, I declare an interest, as I have nine water butts all collecting rainwater when it rains. However, further to what the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, said, there are some issues. For instance, what falls on roofs does not necessarily arrive in a clean form; particularly in some urban areas and in others, it may be contaminated by things such as bird droppings, which would be quite a serious issue.

The noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, refers rightly to the problem of having dual plumbing systems in houses. There is a serious issue to do with potential cross-contamination and, therefore, who is responsible. But on the generality of what the noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson of Abinger, has put forward, supported by the noble Baronesses, Lady Bennett and Lady Parminter, it is right that we need to conserve water, so we do not use expensively treated water from the mains supply. It is absolutely daft to be using that for washing the car or watering the roses. The roses do not care how much bacteriological contamination there is in it—they love it. From that point of view, the more the merrier. The vehicle does not mind what you wash it with either, most of the time.

I learned a great deal from my late sister, the elder of my two sisters, who died earlier this year, that I did not learn from being a chartered surveyor. She was a very senior hydrogeologist, and her point about rainwater harvesting is that you have to be careful about the infiltration that is necessary and naturally occurring. When rainwater falls on a hard surface, it runs off to a drain. What then? Does it disappear off down through some massive Thames pipeline to somewhere beyond Barking, or does it go into the soil and replenish an aquifer? If it has all been put into the loo and is going off as foul water, you lose that to the infiltration process. The more that we build, the more hard surfaces that we have and the more we pipe it away, the more we have to be concerned about infiltration.

Previously in Committee, noble Baronesses raised the point about flooding. Of course, infiltration is part and parcel of that. If you have all the run-off arriving at the same point down a modern piping system that conveys water away very quickly, you will end up with trouble. If you can detain water in some way by storage and infiltration, you stand a better chance, little by little, of dealing with some of those problems. But it is a fine balance as to what is happening, and it certainly requires a lot of further investigation.

The other amendment that attracted my attention was the one on ground source heat pump installation. I absolutely take the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson. All I would say is that, if a heat pump requires three-fifths of what you might call the energy demand to provide heating, that means that three-fifths of whatever the alternative will be—oil or gas—is put on to the grid.

The chief problem with the grid is that it does not have the distribution capacity—I am not sure that it has the generation capacity in total, but other noble Lords are much more knowledgeable about that than I am. This raises a particular problem with housing development. I recall not so long ago going to visit a small housing development in north Dorset. The developer there had to provide energy for cooking and heating via an LPG bulk storage tank, which noble Lords will know is a very expensive way of funding your energy. That was done because the tank was provided free of charge, provided that the LPG was purchased from the particular supplier, and the reason for that was because there was not sufficient capacity in the local grid to power these things from an electrical standpoint.

That ties in, to some extent, with the other point that the noble Baroness raised, about solar power. Yes, I agree that that ought to be part and parcel of it, but maybe there is a link to be made between solar power and the efficiency thereof and the ground source heat pump. Now, I know nothing about the wattage that is needed for a ground heat source pump, but again I say that there is a trade-off, a balance between that 60% of what would otherwise be the carbon load being transferred on to either the grid or a solar panel system.

I know that in places such as Austria, there are now things that they refer to as balcony panels or balcony sheets. These are flexible sheets of material composed entirely of solar PV material. People put them up and they can power small appliances. Other people tell me that solar panels in certain configurations have become so cheap that they can now be used as a fencing panel, because it is a cheaper way of doing it. Now, I do not know what the rate of deterioration and attrition is of these panels, and that is obviously a fairly important consideration, because they contain things which are not readily recyclable and therefore there is that problem of end-of-life disposal, but I think that perhaps the noble Baroness could encourage the Minister to think about and work on getting this balance right, so that at least we cut some of the consumption—maybe not all of it, but some of it—of these expensively produced and increasingly scarce resources. To that extent, I very much support these amendments.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I ask the noble Earl, and indeed the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, perhaps rhetorically, whether they are aware of the One Million Cisterns project in Brazil, which aimed to deliver what it said on the tin and indeed has done so and was expanded subsequently. This is in the semi-arid area of Brazil, home to 18 million people. Brazil, of course, has a lot less infrastructure and is much economically poorer than the UK, yet it has been able to deliver a programme that has won United Nations awards and had all sorts of impacts. I hope the noble Lords will acknowledge that since other countries have achieved this, maybe it is not an unreasonable expectation for us to achieve it too.

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

I should just quickly say that we can learn a lot from Brazil as well as Australia. I am in favour of the amendment; I would just add that I did not realise that water butts were a declarable interest, and if they are, I had better declare that I too have some.

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[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

My Lords, I too will miss the noble Lord, Lord Khan, on the Government Front Bench. He always managed to respond to any questions I had with a smile. I even forgave him for living in Lancashire. We wish him well from these Benches and I hope the Minister will pass those messages on for us. We look forward to the noble Lord, Lord Wilson, also responding with a smile.

Amendment 120 in my name seeks to ensure transparency in decision-making in the planning process. The integrity of the process is vital. From my own experience, I know that objectors to a planning application can readily feel that, if they do not get their way, it is because shady deals have been done. Transparency helps to cure any such allegations.

Unfortunately, there is a recent example of a senior national politician who became far too closely involved with a developer and made hasty decisions based on pressure from the developer regarding funding and costs. The example that I have in mind is that, in 2020, the Housing Secretary, at that time Robert Jenrick MP, accepted that he approved a £1 billion housing development in the east of London unlawfully. The 1,500-home development on the Isle of Dogs was approved on 14 January, the day before the community infrastructure levy charges placed on the developments were increased. The timing of the decision

“meant Conservative Party donor Richard Desmond avoided paying around £40m”.

Mr Jenrick eventually accepted that his decision was indeed unlawful after the Government’s own planning inspector

“advised against the scheme saying it needed to deliver more affordable housing in what is London’s poorest borough”.

The inspector described the 44-storey high buildings as harming the character of the area, but, despite the clear direction from the planning inspector,

“Mr Jenrick rejected that advice and approved planning permission for the project”.


Obviously, planning permission was later rescinded following the legal challenge made by the local council. I have quoted largely from the BBC report of that event.

It is clear from this example alone that safeguards are needed. Amendment 120 in my name and that of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, would require local planning authorities to maintain and publish a register of planning applications where the applicant has donated to the relevant Secretary of State within the preceding 10 years. This proposal aims to increase transparency regarding potential conflicts of interest in the planning process.

The amendment will mandate local planning authorities to create and publish a public register. The register will list planning applications that have been determined by the Secretary of State for Housing and Planning—or whatever the name is at any point—and the applications included would be those from applicants who have made donations to that Secretary of State within the past 10 years. That is not much of an ask, but it is yet another safeguard in the planning process. Whenever applications reach the Secretary of State, it means that they are very controversial and have been called in following referral to the planning inspector.

The planning system absolutely depends on public trust if people are to believe that the process is a fair one. Given that, I look forward to the Minister welcoming greater transparency and a very simple process to throw light on some of these more controversial decisions. I beg to move.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, and to commend the noble Baroness for introducing a practical, sensible and necessary amendment to the Bill. Before I get to that, I want to join the chorus and give my very sincere thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Khan, who, like others, we in the Green group have found was very approachable and extremely hard-working, and he will certainly be very much missed—I want to put that on the record.

This amendment aims to ensure that a planning authority maintains a register of applications in its area where the Secretary of State has made a determination over it and where a political donation has been associated with it. As the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, said, this might be called the Jenrick amendment. I will just leave that there—I will not go back over that ground.

I will make a very serious point. The noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, spoke about this as safeguarding the planning process. I think this is about something more important and central than that. This is about safe- guarding, or at least making a step towards restoring, trust in the political process. That is far more important and crucial. I do not think there is anyone in this Chamber who would disagree that we have a huge problem with trust in politics.

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[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)]

My Lords, I am really privileged to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Fookes, who I admire greatly from afar—and she is absolutely spot on on this occasion as well. Several noble Lords have laid out the benefits and value of nature-rich green spaces close to where people live, so I will not go through those.

I want to focus particularly on Amendments 138B and 206 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Willis. I commend her erudite book on green spaces and health, which is an excellent evidence-based exposition of the whole case for green spaces and health—including mental health—improvement. In the interests of transparency, I particularly commend it since she sent me a free copy.

Apart from all the evidence the noble Baroness’s work provides on health and mental health benefits, I will also give an example from the work of the Woodland Trust, which I was privileged to chair until very recently, on what it is calling “tree equity”. The trust has mapped the prevalence of woods and trees and discovered, in line with other relationships between green open space and deprivation, that the poorest communities have the least wood and tree cover. That means that deprived populations are deprived in not only a socioeconomic but an environmental sense. The Woodland Trust is now engaging with local authorities, developers and others in those most tree-deprived areas to focus on the creation of green wooded spaces to enhance health, mental health and well-being and improve the environment for these deprived communities.

The model comes from an American example that covers the whole of the United States and was developed by the Woodland Trust’s equivalent in the States—good things do come out of the United States. Chicago, an early example of where this was promoted with some vengeance, showed unexpected benefits beyond mental health and well-being. There were reduced crime rates and enhanced community engagement, and the whole project of creating more green open spaces also created community leaders of the future, who learned their skills as community leaders in tree-planting schemes and community green space and then, strangely enough, went on to champion other community action on a whole range of issues. This is about community cohesion and the development of leadership, as well creating these very important green open spaces. I commend to noble Lords the Woodland Trust’s website on “tree equity”—although I hate the term as it is very clinical for something that is very important.

Although it is a bit better than it was, at the moment the creation of green spaces associated with developments depends wholly on the commitment of local authorities and developers. Some developers and local authorities are good at doing this and some are not. Guidance and the NPPF only encourage this, and as the noble Baroness, Lady Miller of Chilthorne Domer, pointed out, the NPPF is very vague in defining what standards are to be achieved, both on proximity to where people live and the quality of the green open spaces. I have seen development proposals where planting a few trees along avenues is the best they can muster.

As has already been pointed out, we need a much more fundamental approach. Master planning needs to be the space in which it happens, but encouragement and requirement needs to be built into spatial strategies, local plans and the responsibility of development corporations through statute, not simply by exhortation, as happens in the NPPF. The Minister will probably tell me—she told me this morning she was going to say this—that the NPPF is a requirement laid on local authorities and developers, but if you look at the terms of the NPPF, the reality is that it is an exhortation rather than anything that can be measured in performance.

I hope the Minister can tell us whether the Government are satisfied with developer and local authority performance on green space delivery, and, if they are not, whether she will seriously consider accepting these amendments so that a statutory requirement is included in the Bill.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to join this rich debate, in which the House is blooming with eloquence as we focus on the value of green and blue to all our futures, to our health and well-being and of course to the planet. I particularly commend the noble Baroness, Lady Willis, for adding blue spaces, which are what we need to focus on. I want to cross-reference Amendment 115, which we started with. We are used to the 20th-century approach: “There’s some water: we’ve got to flush it away, get rid of it, manage it”, as though water is a problem. Of course, water is crucial to our life and well-being, and we need to treasure it, value it and hold it around us, rather than treat it as a waste product, as far too often happens.

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I hope that these are compelling arguments for why these amendments should be considered by the Committee. I hope that they gain a fair wind and advance to be included in the Bill.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lords, Lord Best and Lord Moynihan, who have very much set out the case for other amendments in this group. It is worth focusing on how we need to debate, consider and act on the parlous state of health in the UK and the significant contribution and terrible impact on people’s health that the built environment, the state of our housing and streets, and the way in which people are forced to live, is having. It is not the way that I would do it but, if nothing else, we should consider the economic impacts of that ill health.

I will focus on the three amendments in this group that I have tabled. They are fairly diverse; two of them are specific and one is a much more general purpose on adverts, as the noble Lord, Lord Best, previewed. Amendment 124 is about the display of advertisements. It would amend Section 220(1) of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990. Currently, it allows the regulation of public advertisements for amenity or public safety reasons. The amendment would add environmental impact and public health as reasons for which advertising can be regulated. Noble Lords should think about how, when they were coming into the House today or when they are going home tonight, they are bombarded with advertisements for gambling companies, junk food and polluting substances. The odds are that there are a lot of them, and this is having a negative impact on public health. Many Members of your Lordships’ House are focusing on how out-of-control gambling is a public health issue in our country.

I pay tribute to the campaign group Adfree Cities, the inspiration for the amendment, which wants a complete ban on all outdoor corporate advertising. As one of its campaigners said, these ads are in a public space without any consultation about what is being shown on them. They cause light pollution—often these days they are digital—and they are for things that people cannot afford or do not need. The fact is that advertising is designed to make you miserable and suggests that you should spend some money to fix that misery.

This is not just the dreaming up of some new idea. To go back to 2006, São Paulo, the largest city in the southern hemisphere, banned all outdoor advertising. Under its clean city law, more than 15,000 billboards were removed, along with 300,000 store signs considered too large. Grenoble in 2014 said that it was not going to have digital advertising and that it would take advertising off its streets altogether. Amsterdam banned adverts for petrol and diesel cars and air travel, something that we have seen happen increasingly with local governments—with Bristol City Council, and Norwich is exploring it, as well as Sheffield and Edinburgh. That is protecting people and the public spaces that they have to be in.

In thinking about the public health impacts of this, Dr Nathan Critchlow from the Institute for Social Marketing and Health at the University of Stirling said:

“There is consistent evidence that exposure to marketing for unhealthy commodities—for example advertising for alcohol or food and drinks high in fat, salt, or sugar—is associated with consumption, including among … young people”.


This is being pushed to people and their health is suffering as a result. Many people will be familiar with the ban from Transport for London on unhealthy food advertising, which a study found prevented almost 100,000 obesity cases.

We can think of the positives instead of just the negatives. What if, in those spaces, we had community arts. One thing that our cities, towns and villages lack is more community arts, such as murals and local projects —or indeed, let us have some more trees. Would not that be nice?

It is worth saying that this is very much a public health issue. Adfree Cities found that four in five outdoor billboard advertisements are in the poorest half of England and Wales. They are actually increasing inequality, so we need something different there.

Amendment 132 deals with something very different. Noble Lords are used to debating purpose clauses. Very often, when we start to debate a Bill, someone puts an amendment down for a purpose clause. This amendment is about all planning functions. What is the purpose of planning? What are we trying to achieve? We have a lot of piecemeal provision in different legislation and different places, but why not say, as an overarching principle, what planning is for?

This is an amendment that I picked up from my honourable friend Ellie Chowns in the other place, and it was backed by the other Green MPs there. This is our attempt at suggesting a way of saying what planning is for. I am very happy to debate the detail, but it is to

“manage the development and use of land in the long-term public interest”.

To spell that out a bit more, it

“addresses the long-term common good and wellbeing of current and future generations”.

The phrase “future generations” is one that many noble Lords will possibly recall from a Private Member’s Bill that the noble Lord, Lord Bird, brought forward some Sessions back—I have forgotten how many—copying the model of the future generations Act in Wales, which says that we cannot just govern for the moment. We know that our democratic system has a real problem with short-term thinking, and this would be a way of introducing the idea that we have to think about our impacts on future generations. It ultimately draws on the very well-known law of seven generations. That comes from the great law of the Iroquois, also known as the Haudenosaunee, which says that you should make every decision on the basis of what impact it will have in seven generations’ time. It is about thinking about the future and leaving this place better than we found it.

The amendment refers to the Climate Change Act and the Environment Act 2021. I can predict that the Minister will say that the Government are bound by these Acts, but the amendment explicitly lays down that planning considerations have to take account of those Acts. It also says that the processes have to be “open, accessible and efficient”.

Finally, I come to Amendment 227, which brings me to ground on which noble Lords will have heard me speak many times. I will cross-reference amendments that I, the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, and others brought to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill addressing concerns about the poisons and threats to health contained in school uniforms. This is an amendment to look explicitly at the threats to health from new buildings.

Noble Lords are probably aware that PFAS, the forever chemicals, are in many substances that are part of the fabric of buildings. There is an increasing understanding that there is a build-up of these chemicals—there is a reason why they are called “forever chemicals”—because we are all being exposed to them from our clothing and in our buildings and food. They are building up and up, and our bodies cannot get rid of them and our environment cannot get rid of them.

Again, this is a very simple review amendment. I cannot write an amendment that deals with all these issues for the Government now, but we are on a poisoned planet and we are living in poisoned buildings and this identifies some of the issues—the PFAS, the plastics—and it also very explicitly draws attention to something that many campaigners reach out to me regularly about: artificial turf. We were talking in an earlier group about how we need more green spaces, more natural environments, healthy soils. The absolute opposite of that is taking a piece of ground and covering it in plastic, because that is what artificial turf is.

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The Government are committed to protecting human health and the environment. We are not complacent. Nevertheless, the regulations, risk assessment and control frameworks that we have in place offer safeguards from toxic chemicals in buildings. For all these reasons, I hope that noble Lords are reassured and will not press their amendments.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I specifically address the issue of artificial turf, about which there is rising public concern. Perhaps the Minister could write to me later about whether the Government are taking a look at that, given the level of public concern.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I will.