Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 27th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak in particular to Amendments 200 and 205 which are tabled in my name. I will also talk about one or two other amendments in this group, which were very helpfully introduced by the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Stevenage, who set out not only the purposes of her amendments but gave a very straightforward description of all the other amendments. I am most grateful for that.

As noble Lords will have heard, Amendment 200 would enable a joint spatial development strategy to

“specify or describe employment sites the provision of which the participating authorities consider to be of strategic importance to the joint strategy area”.

The reason for this is that at this point in Schedule 7 there is reference to infrastructure that is relevant to the joint strategy area as a whole, not just to one participating authority. There is then a reference to affordable housing. I am not quite sure where that came from, since it is not obviously the case that affordable housing necessarily has implications of strategic importance beyond the participating authority in which the affordable housing is to be provided, but leave that on one side.

If one is to identify and specify in this part of Schedule 7, which is about making a spatial development strategy and looking at what is of strategic importance, it seems fairly obvious that employment sites—which, by their nature, will be the large employment sites—absolutely give rise to a need for them to be identified in a joint spatial development strategy. That links directly to the question of infrastructure and, in due course, to housing need. The infrastructure point is where the SDS really comes from. The SDS is about enabling that strategic planning to be achieved.

On a later group I will reiterate a broad point, which I will return to on a number of occasions in our debates, which is that, if we do nothing else, I hope we can identify and move towards opportunities for the planning processes to be co-ordinated, not just land use planning but transport planning, utilities planning, power supply and water supply. These all need to be properly integrated to have the best overall effect.

How is this to be achieved? I should remind noble Lords again that I chair the Cambridgeshire Development Forum; that is a registered interest of mine. Back at the beginning of the year, we had a very good presentation by Graham Pointer from WSP, who worked on the integrated planning processes in New South Wales. The essence of it was very straightforward: integrated planning of land use, transport, power, water and the environment and ensuring that these plans were then able to be funded together. We are not going to get into the funding mechanisms, but we can certainly ensure that there are integrated plans, ideally on integrated timetables.

One would imagine that this is very straightforward and it should be possible to make it happen. It almost never happens in the places I go to. There are constantly different tiers of administration in local areas that are conducting different aspects of planning at different times and with different parameters. We really need to try to integrate planning. If my noble friends on the Front Bench can push that forward, using spatial development strategies, that would be really useful. At the Westminster Social Policy Forum, I chaired a discussion on the OxCam corridor the Friday before last. It was one of the strongest messages to come out. Here is a key economic area. On travel to work areas, as a consequence of, for example, the east-west rail development, those areas may well be extended, so that the travel to work area for Cambridge extends potentially to new sites and settlements in Bedfordshire, and the travel to work area for Oxford and Harwell might well extend increasingly to settlements in and around Milton Keynes.

Increasingly, we have different authorities in different counties whose planning processes need to be co-ordinated and integrated together. Spatial development strategies are a way of doing that. I am old enough to remember when we had the Standing Conference of East Anglian Local Authorities and we used to do planning processes through regional mechanisms. We do not have regional planning now but that does not mean that we need to abandon the concept of strategic planning. Strategy does not require us to have integrated and large-scale authorities; it just means that the authorities need to come together.

Amendment 200 is specifically about employment sites, because of their relative strategic importance to an area or combined areas. Amendment 205 is about bringing additional authorities with a role to play into the process. I am grateful to the County Councils Network for its assistance in shaping an amendment for this purpose. I added the reference to travel to work areas, so I am particularly pleased that the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Stevenage, commended that it should extend specifically to those authorities within a travel to work area, even if they are not one of the participating authorities. That is why we want to focus particularly on district councils, which may not join in the SDS but need to be consulted in the process. Also, counties and county combined authorities should be included in the consultation.

This engagement and consultation is in relation to their functions but it does not make them participants in the spatial development strategy itself. It does not give them a veto over the spatial development strategy but is confined to their bringing to the party the things that they can do. Given that for counties it includes something as integral as transport planning, this is fundamental to a spatial development strategy being able to work effectively. I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, for signing that amendment. I confess that I cannot see that we can put counties into the spatial development strategies as such, because of the difficulties of their not having planning powers—this is a combination of those that do have the planning powers—but it is absolutely right that they should be involved.

Apart from my own amendments, I want to say a word about Amendment 199. When I read it, I asked myself why the combined authorities are not part of this. The only reason I can think of is that they already have a non-statutory spatial strategy power. Frankly, I think that should come to the party. If noble Lords have a moment, I suggest they look at pages 288 and 299 of the Bill, and the new subsections at 15AI to be inserted. This is about what happens when a combined authority is created, and where these areas are already engaged in a joint spatial development strategy. It is awful. Basically, it collapses and it is cancelled; it is all withdrawn. That is the last thing you want. Where participating authorities are working together on a spatial development strategy, the creation of a combined authority should supplement that and enable them to accomplish it more effectively, not cause it all to be withdrawn or cancelled. The language is terrible, but the intention seems to me to be wrong too. I would much rather combined authorities joined in.

In the Cambridge area, we have the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority. The need for planning in that key economic hub extends out from Cambridge to Royston in Hertfordshire, to Haverhill in Suffolk, to Thetford in Norfolk, and to Bedford and Cranfield. It is obviously a candidate that is not only economically important but requires the joint working of local authorities and integrated planning across a wider region. It seems to me that spatial development strategies are a good thing, designed to enable that to happen, but we need the legislation to be more permissive. I would particularly focus on Amendment 205. I hope my noble friend will indicate that Ministers are sympathetic to the ability of counties, and other county combined authorities, to get involved in this way.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow 11 minutes of the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, explaining the amendments. I have tabled amendments in this group and supported others because of the potential importance of strategic planning in tackling the climate emergency. We need to embed it in everything that councils do, alongside solving the acute housing crisis in this country.

Mine are probing amendments to find out how the Government see the role of county councils within the production of a joint spatial development strategy. County councils sit one tier above planning authorities, but many have strategic functions—for example, transport, health, social care or education. It seems slightly odd that they do not have a planning role as well.

Schedule 7 as currently drafted would need participating planning authorities to consult the county council once a draft strategy has been produced. It seems to me that this perhaps misses the opportunity to involve county councils actively in the development of the strategy, which I think they could very much contribute to. Taken to its highest level, the county council could even initiate the process and convene the planning authorities to work together. It seems to me that that is likely to happen anyway.

I would like to know the Minister’s thinking on how the Government see the role of county councils in strategic planning and whether they might explore the opportunity of more fully involving counties in spatial development plans.

For most Bills, the more I get involved the more fascinating they become. This Bill is an example of that not working at all. I am finding it incredibly difficult, and I sympathise with the Minister dealing with it. It is very difficult to find a coherent thread through this whole Bill. I applaud her and the Labour Front Bench for toughing it out.

[Lord Deben (Con)]

I wonder if my noble friend would accept that it sounds a bit odd to those of us who live in the countryside that counties should be left out. I know why it was; I can see the civil servant saying to her, “Well, you know, counties don’t have planning powers, except for minerals, so it really doesn’t count here. It’s the district councils that have it”. I know what they have said; they would have said it to me all those years ago—that is what they would do. I say to my noble friend that I will not easily be dissuaded from the fact that the county council is crucially important if you go in for spatial planning. I do not see how you do it otherwise.

Take the planning authority for Ipswich. Several of the housing developments and industrial sites that anybody else would have thought were in Ipswich are not; they are outside it, in another district council. The county council has to provide many of the services that service the whole group. If the county council is excluded from this, it is not just a bit odd but it will not work—the county council is crucial.

The second reason why I ask my noble friend to look again is a simple matter. We had the welcome announcement of a new relationship between national and local government. I am distressed by the way that national government often treats local government as if it is a sort of incubus, and I am afraid that civil servants often have a view of local government officers which is other than entirely polite. They say, “Better not, Minister—you never know what they might they do. Therefore, don’t give them any powers without us being able to pull them back.” I am afraid that is the view of many of the civil servants who serviced Ministers and continue to do so, so I want to break into that.

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I very much hope that, on Report, noble Lords will ask those in the other place to think again about these changes and restore the Government’s policy to what it was when the Bill was introduced, rather than what it has become since those changes were proposed over Christmas.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I have been trying not to get into a lot of the groups on the Bill but I regret not getting into this one. Amendment 198 makes such good sense because politics is a fairly dire arrangement these days. A lot of voters have lost interest and do not trust us. Getting people involved at the local level is an excellent way of stimulating their appetite for more politics at different levels, so I very much support Amendment 198.

I quite like Amendment 209, but somehow “environmental issues” is just thrown in—you have to say it, do you not? I do not know what it means. I would like it to mean a lot but I am not sure that it means very much at all.

The noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, quotes to us the Conservative Party manifesto when the Government have broken so many promises and back-tracked on so many things. I hardly think it is a very good example for any of us to hold up as something we need to follow. Plus, his comments about the green belt were absolutely outrageous. It is not for people with gardens or people with country estates; it is for people who live in inner cities, who have no gardens or green space to walk about in. The green belt has a huge value for them, so please let us not forget that.

Amendment 211 is from the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, and the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, for whom I have huge respect, by the way. My telling him that the Conservative Party manifesto might as well be thrown in the bin—as it has been by the Conservative Party—does not mean that I do not have huge respect for him. Again, this amendment is about economic growth. We went through this in the Budget. Growth is not about well-being or prosperity; it is about grabbing more and more of the earth’s resources. It is not necessarily something that we want to keep promoting. If we are going to talk about growth, can we please talk about well-being, green spaces and environmental support, and not just constantly about businesses, inward investment and that sort of thing?

Let us please try to remember that we have a climate crisis. It does not matter whether you believe it or not; the fact is that the IPCC has published a report that was gone through by dozens of Governments and hundreds of scientists. They all quibbled over it, but they finally came to a report that is absolutely devastating. We really should be looking at that. Every time we put down an amendment, we should have that at the back of our minds, so that we say things that will help us in the future and help our children and grandchildren. At the moment, we are not doing that.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I was not going to speak, but the noble Lord, Lord Young, summed up one of the problems with this Bill in general: we have an important Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill that does not tackle the crisis of housing supply—something I talked about at Second Reading.

I want to clarify at this stage in the evening that, while the points made by the noble Lord about the green belt are not by any stretch of the imagination that every part of the green belt should be built on or concreted over, it is a misnomer to suggest that the green belt is a beautiful green area for people who do not have country homes, gardens or parks to go to. Lots of it is actually unusable by the public. What the noble Lord suggested was a review. If the review indicated that it was valuable for the well-being of the nation, that would be fine, but it would be able to show that huge swathes of the green belt are misnamed and could be productively used for housing for young people and people who are desperately in need of homes.

My final quick point is that economic growth has to be the solution for austerity and the cost of living crisis. You cannot tackle the fact that people are too poor unless you produce more. That is called economic growth. Austerity is unpleasant, nasty and brutish, even when dressed in eco clothes. We need more growth, not less, especially at this time. People’s well-being will not be tackled or helped if they do not have the proceeds of economic development and growth.

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[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

This is utter nonsense—absolute nonsense.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

I appreciate that we disagree. I thought the point was that we would disagree well in Committee. I have sat and listened to this debate for many hours. I just wanted to clarify why I think economic development is important: we will not be able to build any houses and nobody’s well-being will be helped if we stand still economically or go backwards. I do not relish austerity for the masses. Therefore, I think we need economic growth, mass housebuilding and the supply side to be tackled.