Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 17th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, I am very pleased to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan, and my few remarks will build on what she said. I will look at where the money is going, in terms of UK public procurement, which, at the moment, accounts for £300 billion a year, or 13% of GDP. Recent research by the World Economic Forum estimates that government procurement accounts for 15% of our greenhouse gas emissions. By harnessing the enormous lever of procurement, government can show strong leadership in driving climate-positive and nature-positive public procurement. As well contributing towards the achievement of our net-zero and environment targets, it can contribute hugely to levelling up across communities by driving investment in new, low-carbon technologies, services and skilled jobs, as well as better health and well-being outcomes. You can get a lot of bang for your buck out of this.

I will also reference Chris Skidmore’s Net Zero Review, which came out this week. It recommended that the Government

“develop a public procurement plan for low-carbon construction and the use of low-carbon materials, by the end of 2023”—

which is this year. It also recommended that the Government

“set standards and build new markets for low-carbon construction through its own public procurement standards”,

which would

“send strong signals to the sector and enable firms to test innovations and start to scale them up”—

which is precisely what we need. We need to link into this agenda, which will help drive opportunities across all local authorities and will hugely help private companies. The Part Z campaign is already calling for these kinds of changes. Building regulations to introduce the reporting of carbon emissions and to limit embodied carbon emissions in new developments would of course help to drive down emissions. The Bill is the perfect place to introduce these changes.

The Net Zero Review also highlighted the example of how Preston in Lancashire has used its net-zero delivery strategy to retain procurement spend locally and to prioritise procurement from local and socially responsible businesses, helping to build community wealth. In my work on food over the last 15 years or so, I have seen a lot of local authorities make decisions about the local procurement of food, which is a win-win, not only for local growers, who have a market, but for the end users: we, the eaters, get better food at better prices.

In a report on the impact of locally spent money, the New Economics Foundation found that, if you spend £1 in a local shop, you will generate £10, but, if you spend it on a multinational or a company that is not local, such as Tesco—I am not singling it out—that money goes whizzing back to head office and does not circulate in the community. In this case, it is not just the growers who do not get the work; it is also the plumber, the locksmith and the printer, because that money is taken away. We have seen other towns do this, and I have put down amendments to other Bills to look at 50% of government procurement being used locally to generate local jobs and industry.

I will make two final points. During Report on the Procurement Bill in the Lords, an amendment was passed to ensure that the strategic priorities included in the national procurement policy would include achieving our climate change and environmental targets, adding social value, promoting innovation among all potential suppliers and minimising fraud. That Bill is now approaching Committee in the other place, and I hope that the Government will not seek to remove this important amendment.

Finally, another huge lever for linking up the delivery of our climate change targets and levelling up is planning, as many noble Lords have pointed out. In its progress report to Parliament, the Climate Change Committee recommended:

“Net Zero and climate resilience should be embedded within the planning reforms that are expected”


to be part of levelling up and regeneration. The Net Zero Review recommended that a reformed planning system

“should have a clearer vision”.

The Government have recently consulted on reforms to the national planning policy, seeking views on

“opportunities to support the natural environment, respond to climate change”

and make sure that it always contributes to “mitigation and adaptation”. However, the reforms are proposed to come in after the Bill has received Royal Assent, so please could provisions be included in the Bill to fully align our planning system with net zero at every decision-making level and to demonstrate that government leadership and commitment are really about delivering net zero, as well as social benefit?

Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 22nd March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, I was thrilled to add my name to my noble friend Lord Ravensdale’s Amendments 179 and 271. It is seriously important to make sure that the planning system is aligned with our climate and nature targets; this also goes to the heart of whether we will meet our net-zero targets. Currently, our planning system is not doing enough, yet it is one of the most important single levers we have.

All too often we see the degradation of natural habitats caused by housing and other infrastructure, from high-carbon development being approved to homes being built that will later require expensive retrofits. The Environment and Climate Change Committee has just done a report showing how expensive and difficult that process is. It could all be solved in one go. Natural England commented to our inquiry that nature and climate are at risk of further and irreparable damage from a range of pressures, including the need for new housing, which is currently not up to scratch.

It is welcome that the Government are currently consulting on changes to the National Planning Policy Framework to make sure that it contributes to climate change mitigation and adaptation as fully as possible, but it is only guidance. Government must send a strong message about the importance it places on achieving our climate and nature targets.

Fully embedding climate and nature within planning also brings, as the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, pointed out, great outcomes through green jobs, sustainable economic growth, improved health and well-being, helping to reduce the cost of living in lots of instances and making us more resilient to extreme weather. It is extraordinary that we still build houses in known flood zones; those will only get worse, not better.

At the local authority level, most local plans do not contain any comprehensive or robust policies on climate change mitigation or adaptation, yet lots of local authorities want just that. At the individual decision-making level, ambitious local councils often have their plans refused by the Planning Inspectorate because we have a completely unaligned system. It does not work as a thought-through process from beginning to end, but the Bill provides the perfect opportunity to address this gap.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

The Minister said that everyone is moving in the same direction. Since the big building companies such as Barratt and Taylor Wimpey have not come up, can she enlighten the House on what kinds of conversations she has had with such companies about their willingness to adopt a statutory policy about net zero into their building targets?

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

I have certainly had no conversations with those people, and I do not know whether the Housing Minister has. I will make sure to ask and find out. That is the whole idea of planning: if the policy requires it, the developers need to act within planning policy in order to develop.

I reiterate that the Government will be reviewing the strategic objectives set out in planning policy to ensure that they support the Government’s environmental targets under the Environment Act, net zero, and the national adaptation programme. This comes back to what the noble Baroness opposite was saying: are we joining it up? Yes, we are checking it with the Environment Act to make sure that we will deliver through the planning system everything that we agreed to in it.

While I appreciate the essence of this amendment, it is not one that the Government feel able to support, given the clear purposes for planning already set out in national policy.

Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 24th May 2023 Grand Committee

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, in moving Amendment 481, I shall also speak briefly to Amendment 483, the other amendment in this group. It has not been introduced yet, so we can regard this as perhaps an amuse-bouche—a taster of what is to come—given that we are talking about growing food, as well as other things. Last week, I was at the Sheffield Festival of Debate, talking about just access to land. People were saying that what we should be doing in the House of Lords was speaking up for the right to grow food. I am looking forward to the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, and others speaking to that amendment, which really sets out an important principle.

Amendment 481 is my second attempt to bring in what is generally known as Zane’s law, named after Zane Gbangbola. The Truth About Zane campaign is still working, with a wide range of support, to get on the record the truth about the seven year-old’s death in Chertsey in 2014, when floods swept hideously toxic hydrogen cyanide into the family home. That is not what the inquest verdict concluded in 2016, but the inequality of arms in legal representation in that inquest and the illogic of the verdict—given that Zane’s father, Kye, was at the same time left paralysed by hydrogen cyanide—means that it will surely have to go back. That very much highlights a broader issue, which is why I, the family and many others are campaigning for Zane’s law.

To go back in history to set out the legal background to this issue, in 1974 the Control of Pollution Act first took control over waste disposal. When that came into effect, many historical dumps were quietly closed and, essentially, forgotten about, except perhaps by people in the local community. EU regulations on waste and pollution came in through the Environmental Protection Act 1990, tightening up controls. In particular, Section 143 provided an obligation for local authorities to investigate their area and draw up public registers of land that may be contaminated. Section 31 of that Act also gave local authorities powers to inspect and close landfills and clean them up if necessary.

The fact is that lots of housing developments are and continue to be on old landfill sites. There were three consultations between 1991 and 1993, which eventually decided that Section 143 of the 1990 Act would not be implemented and all plans for public registers of contaminated sites were to be dropped. The explanation was that it was about the cost and desire not to place “new regulatory burdens” on the private sector. Limited powers were brought back in 1995, although they did not come into force until five years later, which meant that when developers found contamination problems, public authorities had to pay. But the situation further worsened in 2011. As part of the Cameron Government’s bonfire of red tape to reduce statutory burdens, the right of the enforcement authorities to use the law was further reduced. The emphasis was on voluntary clean-up by developers, with no real power to check that it had been done.

Amendment 481 attempts to return to the situation that we would have been in if Section 143 had been implemented. In discussion about this, a noble Lord asked me who was going to pay for this measure—the big question. Being in your Lordships’ House, where we are not allowed to allocate spending, I have not addressed that issue directly in this amendment. However, proposed new subsection (2)(c) would make it the law to

“identify the resources required to bring all land contamination in England to safe levels”.

I would therefore say in answer to that question that I am going as far as I can.

The last time I brought Zane’s law before your Lordships’ House was during a debate on the Building Safety Bill in this very Room. The Labour Front Bench, albeit different from today, expressed some interest and support for the amendment—as did the Lib Dem Front Bench—but asked, “Is this really a problem?” Of course, we have the tragic death of Zane to point to and we are in a climate emergency situation, seeing increasing levels of flooding, increasing temperatures and erosion around the sea where there have often been landfill sites at sea level. These are increasing problems.

I will give the Committee some practical examples—just three cases that have been highlighted in the media in recent weeks. First, near Cedar Avenue in Coseley, Dudley, there are plans to build 72 homes on a former landfill site that was once home to hundreds of tonnes of toxic waste. It was an old open-cut coal mine that became a fishing site and then, in the 1970s, became a landfill site. Some of the things that locals recall being dumped there were fruit machines, vegetable and medical waste and up to 220 tonnes of toxic metal compounds, including industrial waste products such as mercury, arsenic, cyanide and asbestos, all of which, as I do not need to tell the Committee, are seriously concerning. There are plans to put 72 affordable homes on that site, which are currently on hold because of local controversy, as far as I am able to establish.

Secondly, in the village of Somercotes in Derbyshire there are plans to develop hundreds of homes on a patch of land dubbed the most contaminated site in England. It is supposed to include particularly highly toxic dioxins, which have been illegally dumped there in the past. My third case study is the 263-home Coppenhall Place development in Crewe, Cheshire, where it is feared that the homes have been built on a contaminated site.

We have a very clear issue here, and an approaching issue with the Government talking about building hundreds of thousands of new homes and the rightful desire to put them on brownfield sites. The first thing we have to know is what is on those brownfield sites and whether they are suitable for housing, in view of the potential contamination problems. That is what this amendment would do. It is not particularly new or creative; it simply seeks to bring in something that decades ago was thought necessary and is clearly even more necessary now.

I will keep pushing this. I would love to think that the Minister will leap up and say, “Yes, you’re absolutely right”, but I ask the Government at least to look at this issue, because there is a problem here that clearly affects many people and presents an enormous risk to their lives. Surely, a basic duty of the Government is to ensure the security of people in their own homes, which, quite frankly, they are unable to do now because they are not empowering, directing and resourcing local authorities to ensure that they know what is in their land. I beg to move.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 483, which is in my name and those of the noble Baronesses, Lady Scott of Needham Market and Lady Young of Old Scone, and the noble Earl, Lord Caithness. I am very glad that this group of amendments has been reached today, because otherwise we would not have had the noble Earl with us. That is great.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

It is a bonus.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

It is a real bonus. This is an incredibly simple amendment. It does not demand money, it demands very little to be done and it would bring an enormous number of benefits. As the amendment says, we are asking councils across the country to publish lists of where there is vacant land within their area that could be suitable for food growing or other kinds of growing. Take a group such as Incredible Edible Todmorden; it has grown both vegetables as well as flowers. It cheers up a neighbourhood but does a great deal more.

This first important thing to say is that we are not asking for allotments. Allotments are completely impossible, as anyone who has ever been involved in any campaign to get rid of an allotment will know. Allotments are there in perpetuity, as it should be, and they cover large areas, and the queues for them are huge. I have a couple of examples: the queue in Camden is 12 years, and in Southampton it is 20 years. More allotments are not going to be created—they need to be on land in the middle of town, which will therefore be seen as prime for building houses—but we can get community growing spaces.

In the belief that any good idea is best told in stories, I will tell your Lordships a few stories. In 2008 I went to work for the then Mayor of London, Boris Johnson—he later became Prime Minister, but that is another matter—as chair of the London Food Board. Not long after I got there, I was approached by a very eager group, which said: “We’ve seen something that was done in Vancouver before the Olympics, where they created edible community gardens. We want to do 2,012 gardens in London by 2012”. “Uh oh”, I thought, “How is that going to happen?” But I thought it was a good project—and, I have to say, so did the mayor.

We undertook the project and in the autumn of 2008 we opened the first garden at the Thrive garden in Battersea. It is a vegetable garden that is primarily used for people who have mental health issues—their doctors prescribe a session at Thrive for them. It is still going. There are many Thrive gardens, and it is extraordinarily important in what it does for people having a traumatic and difficult time.

However, things were very slow. We got hardly any gardens, and we could not figure it out. Councils and hospitals were reluctant; there was space, but what could we do? Then a man from the water board said, “What you need is a meanwhile lease”. That is a very simple thing: it says that you can be there for a few years but can be thrown out. That changed everything. Overnight, it flipped this project from being, quite frankly, hopeless to suddenly being a runner. We would assemble leaders of councils for breakfast, and I would collar them and say, “I want you to do 60 sites”. We would go to the housing associations and ask them to do 10 or 15 sites. Bit by bit, over years 2 and 3, we suddenly started to have this explosion of gardens.

Today, we have 2,500 gardens. We opened the 2,012th at St Charles Hospital in the north of Ladbroke Grove in the winter of 2012—it is a fantastic garden and is still going. I remember some of the objections. Most of these gardens did not have fences and it was said that people would steal from them. Weirdly, no one ever stole. In fact, we opened a garden outside City Hall, by Tower Bridge. We got the patch of land, and someone called the Phantom Guerrilla Gardener would come by and plant extra plants—it was all very mysterious but wonderful.

We had a garden in King’s Cross, which, following on from what the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, said, was on contaminated land. Some genius came up with the idea that we could have a garden in a skip, and furthermore that the skip could move. We had three skips on one of those sites just behind the station—sites which are now unrecognisably beautiful and modern. We had three gardens, which you climbed up to; they were used by schools on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. Then the building developers wanted the site back, so they picked up the skips and moved them to another site, with the gardens. We did that three times before it was finally filled in.

We had gardens that were in the middle of tower blocks. When the designers in the 1950s put up those pretty terrifying concrete blocks, they left areas in the middle. We saw photographs of people walking, pushing children in their prams and walking dogs, but nowadays they are completely terrifying, because they are full of old needles and dog poo, rather than nice dogs on leads. People did not want to come down from the tower blocks and go there. But put a garden in, and something magical happens. People became protective of it and felt they could come downstairs and join in.