National Infrastructure

Baroness Garden of Frognal Excerpts

Thursday 22nd January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rogers of Riverside (Lab)]

My Lords, we live in an urban age. Ten per cent of the world’s population lived in cities 100 years ago; today it is 50%, and in the next 30 years we shall see it at 80%. People are drawn by jobs and the possibility of meeting other people. They are the hearts of our culture and the engines of our wealth.

As part of this we need to invest in the infrastructure of cities, particularly in housing—the infrastructure of the everyday. Some 15 years ago, I chaired the Urban Task Force set up by my noble friend Lord Prescott. We said then that we needed 300,000 homes a year. That is more or less what we are saying again, but today we are for the first time building only one-third of this. We were building up to 400,000 after the war. In addition, we have some of the smallest—and in my view, the shoddiest—housing in the world. We need to rediscover our skills in creating cities that everyone wants to live in.

The only form of sustainable city is compact, mixed-use and well designed, using brownfield land, retrofitting and densification, supported by public transport, and has well designed public space—and a lot of it—for walking, cycling and leisure. For example, in the centre of Manhattan 60% of people walk to work—in a city that is known for cars. Such cities must have a mix of uses of living, working and leisure, for poor and rich, and we need to build affordable houses to make cities have a real social mix. We will meet our housing targets only if we make the most of our brownfield land, and England has among the most brownfield land of any country, first, because of a vast Industrial Revolution, which changed it completely; and secondly, because there are still remnants of the war.

That industrial change and its impact give us a tremendous opportunity to strengthen our existing cities. We have enough brownfield land for 1.5 million houses, at a medium density. That is according to government figures, and after the selection of certain areas of brownfield that are easily developable and which would link in with the cities we already have, so it is a low figure that misses out on a lot of things. That supply is constantly being replenished as industrial change continues, so 15 years ago we used lots of it but we still have the same amount. Left derelict, brownfield land is a tear in the urban fabric and a focus for crime and disorder. Intensification and retrofit add much more potential. Somewhere like Croydon, for example, has potential for new development within the urban fabric on the scale of a new town, and already has wonderful infrastructure systems. The centre of Croydon is nearly empty.

Therefore I believe—and I have studied this for many years—that building new towns is not sustainable, either regarding climate change or using already half-empty buildings which are left near those areas. The situation is made worse when the planning and building of new houses is led by volume house builders, whose primary concern is the bottom line—and I am sure they would agree. That would seem crazy anywhere else in western Europe.

I have good examples of urban regeneration, where the people and the local authority take responsibility.

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

My Lords, I remind noble Lords that this is a time-limited debate.

[Lord Rogers of Riverside]

We need to give elected local authorities the powers and resources to plan for new brownfield development, intensification and retrofit so that they can repair the tears in the urban fabric and build the houses that we need, building on brownfield land before green. With the right infrastructure investment, and the power taken back by local authorities, we will be able to build new towns in our cities, not outside them.