Housing and Planning Bill
Debate between Baroness Parminter and Lord Krebs
Baroness Parminter
My Lords, we return again the to the issue of building the homes that we need, ensuring at the same time that we contribute fully to meeting our greenhouse gas emission targets and lowering fuel bills.
I am very disappointed to see that the Government and the other place did not feel able to accept the amendment that we proposed. In lieu, the Government are proposing a review. I remind noble Lords that the zero-carbon homes standards were agreed during the time of the coalition, with industry-wide support. Again, we ask why there is a need for a review. As the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, so powerfully asked last week: how many more homes will have to be built before this review and the implementation date and any action coming out of that review takes place? Given that we are looking to build a million new homes, how many more of those homes will have to be retrofitted—at great cost to individual home owners—because we have added a requirement for a review, when we know what we need to do now? There is no guarantee of action at the end of the review proposed by the Government. Indeed, the Government are obliged anyway to review the building regulations by June next year as a condition of the 2010 energy performance of buildings directive.
Finally, on that point, given that it was the Government and the Chancellor who scrapped the zero-carbon homes last year—the Government throughout the process of this debate have refused to engage on anything other than the viability issues around the housebuilding industry; again, the Minister chose to quote only from the housebuilding industry this evening—it gives this House little confidence that the review will look, alongside viability for housebuilders, equally at the need to ensure that we meet our greenhouse gas emission targets and lower the energy bills of people so that we can contribute to meeting our fuel-poverty targets. Given that a third of our greenhouse gas emissions in this country come from buildings and two-thirds come from homes, my contention is that this is too important to leave to a review.
I accept, however, that at this late stage there is a need to move to a compromise. Therefore that is again what I have done today. The amendment before your Lordships is a compromise. At the last stage we were proposing carbon standards of 60% for detached properties, 56% for attached properties and 44% for flats. This compromise would set the reductions at 44% in greenhouse gases on the basis of comparison with the building regulations in 2016. That is the level that the Government recommended during their time in coalition as the on-site zero-carbon standards, which would take effect from this year. It is those standards that a growing number of local authorities were setting as a condition of giving planning permission, until they were scrapped by the then Secretary of State, Eric Pickles, last year. I point out that, between 2007 and 2014, 79,000 homes in England and Wales were built to this standard. Further, Scotland has introduced this standard already, last October, and the volume of houses to this standard is growing. Therefore, the standard is proven to be both effective and achievable.
As I told the Minister, I trawled through the Conservative manifesto this morning to study exactly what their commitments were in this area. The Conservative manifesto made a clear commitment to the legally binding climate change targets and to tackling fuel poverty. It made a very clear commitment—some of us in this House may not have liked it—to offer no further public subsidy to wind farms. That was the Government’s priority; it was in the manifesto and this House can therefore understand it. However, while they made no commitments on rowing back on building standards, they made a commitment to deliver on the greenhouse gas targets and to tackle fuel poverty.
Throughout this debate, all sides of this House have challenged the Government endlessly to make quite clear, if they intend to meet their greenhouse gas targets and are not prepared to accept this amendment, how they will meet those targets. The Bill is an opportunity to provide us with the sustainable homes that we need. This compromise amendment would put us back on the right trajectory towards getting more zero-carbon homes. It would help deliver on our greenhouse gas targets, ensure that people’s fuel bills were lower and at the same time deliver the homes that we need. I beg to move.
Lord Krebs (CB)
My Lords, I support the amendment. I, too, am sorry that the Government have not accepted the compromise that has been brought forward from our previous discussion.
The Government’s reason for rejecting the amendment is that it would increase burdens on housebuilders and threaten delivery of the large number of new homes that is proposed, but, as the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, pointed out, how can this be true if 79,000 homes have already been built to this standard? The Scottish Government have adopted this standard; it is lower than the standard that has been adopted in London; and it is already being adopted by an increasing number of local authorities in their local plans. All that evidence seems to fly in the face of the Government’s objection. I find it hard to accept that it is a burden that the housebuilding industry would not be able to cope with and that it would threaten the delivery of new homes; the evidence on that just does not stack up.
We are offered instead a review. As the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, said, the problem with a review—we have the evidence, but let us say that we agree a review—is that we do not have a clear date for completing it nor a clear set of actions that will arise from it, and a review would not add to what is required under Article 4 of the 2010 energy performance of buildings directive. I hope that the Minister will give us some tighter commitments on the nature of the review that the Government are proposing. When will it be completed? Who will take part in it? What actions will flow from it? How does it go beyond what is required in the 2010 directive?
I do not want to reiterate the arguments that we have had, but we have not heard any argument throughout the passage of this Bill that says that this is not the right thing to do. We know that it is the right thing to do to cut our greenhouse gas emissions and to help to resolve the issues of fuel poverty. All the arguments against it have been obstacles such as, “It’ll be too difficult. The industry won’t like it. It’s all going to need more analysis”—paralysis by analysis, as we often hear. We know that it is the right thing to do. We know that if we do not do it now, we will have to come back to those houses that have been built and retrofit them with improved carbon standards in the future. The Minister should give us as much hope as possible that the Government are really committed to cutting our greenhouse gas emissions through buildings as well as through other sources—in this case, through buildings—and she should go further than simply offering yet another review.
Baroness Parminter
My Lords, this amendment and the previous debates concern ensuring that the homes that we want deliver sustainable drainage, with the benefit of protecting home owners from floods and wider amenity benefits to communities and to biodiversity. I am disappointed that the Government and the Commons did not feel able to accept amendments that this House voted for to end the automatic right to connect for housebuilders. However, I thank the Minister for what is being proposed now in terms of a concession on the review, which we believe will demonstrate all too clearly that the evidence on the ground that we have heard about in this Chamber on numerous occasions shows that SUDS are not being delivered.
However, the amendment we propose is to ensure that the review will be thorough. First, it would ensure that the review looks not just at policy but at actual developments; and that there is a robust sample size, taking into account the proportion of new developments and the type of SUDS being implemented. Secondly, it would ensure that the review is timely. The Climate Change Committee will report to Parliament next June. I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, will want to say more about this. It will consider the penetration of sustainable urban drainage. It is therefore vital that any review undertaken can report so that the adaptation sub-committee has that information, can assess it and provide appropriate advice to Parliament by the time the report is published in June.
I hope that the Minister, in summing up, will be able to reassure the House that the review will indeed be thorough; that she will reassure the House that the Government accept the strength of feeling on this issue that the House has demonstrated on numerous occasions; and that we will be able to deliver the sustainable urban drainage systems that we all want to see. I beg to move.
Lord Krebs
My Lords, I should declare that I am the chairman of the Adaptation Sub-Committee, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, referred. Listening to what both she and the Minister said, I did not think there was too big a gap between their amendments. The Minister said that the review of policies would be robust and evidence-based. For me, part of the evidence base will be whether the policies are working on the ground. I hope that, when the Minister sums up, she will say that the review will also include looking at evidence of what is happening on the ground.
It is important to recognise that this is not just evidence from high flood risk areas. According to figures that I have been given from the insurance industry, 70% of claims for flood damage come from buildings outside high flood risk areas. This is because surface water flooding does not necessarily occur in the same place as coastal or fluvial flooding. If we could get confirmation on that point, it would be extremely reassuring both to me and to the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter.
On the question of timing, as the noble Baroness has said, my committee will submit its statutory report to Parliament next summer on the Government’s progress in preparing for the impacts of climate change. This includes the impacts of flood risk, which are likely to increase in future. In writing our report, it would be helpful for us to have the output of this review available at some time in the spring of 2017. I look forward to the Minister’s response.
Housing and Planning Bill
Debate between Baroness Parminter and Lord Krebs
Baroness Parminter
My Lords, the new homes we wish to be built must, at the same time, meet our greenhouse gas targets and contribute to lowering fuel bills. It is right that we help to ensure that those homes are financially viable for the people who are going to build them. As the Government have accepted, the on-cost for building homes to this standard is £3,000 for a three-bedroom semi. That figure, as the Government again have accepted, comes from a report in 2014, since when costs have come down dramatically. But we also need to ensure that we help the poorest in our communities to save on their energy bills. It is accepted that introducing these standards would result in a saving of £330 per annum for households, compared to houses built to existing building regulations. Equally, it would save those households any retrofit costs in the future, given that the Government have not ruled out raising building standards.
The Government have said that this is a regulatory burden on the small developer, although I remind noble Lords that these standards were agreed by the industry before they were withdrawn by the Chancellor. This was not the evidence given to the House of Lords Select Committee on National Policy for the Built Environment, where it was made clear that small housebuilders were saying that access to finance and the price of land were the major constraints on housebuilding. Let us be clear: regulations are not always to be seen as a burden. Regulations deliver a level playing field across the housing industry and drive innovation. It is regulations that will cut the fuel bills for the poorest in our community and help us to meet the greenhouse gas targets that this Government committed to so strongly and so welcomely in Paris. It is the job of this House to ensure that the Bills that leave here contain good regulation. That is what this amendment would do. I beg to move.
Lord Krebs (CB)
My Lords, I support the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter. As she has said, it is meant to be helpful in the context of our legally binding commitment to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. The important thing to remember is that the new houses which are to be built now will be around for a long time—probably 100 years or more. It is inevitable that over time, we will need to tighten our greenhouse gas emission standards and move towards a zero-carbon homes standard. If, in building them, we do not meeting that standard today, they will have to be retrofitted in future. It is all very well to say, as the noble Viscount did, that we will undertake a review, but in the time it takes to carry out that review, many homes will be built. We will be storing up trouble with the homes we build while carrying out yet another review.
In the other place, it was noted that this requirement would “slow down or prevent” the building of new homes. Let us look at the counterfactual: let us say that we do not implement this amendment and go ahead rapidly with building new homes, but that those new homes are not fit for purpose in the future. Surely, that cannot be a good principle. If we are to build new homes now, we should think about their long-term implications for both greenhouse gas emissions and, as the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, said, the energy bills of those who will live in them. Finally, we have the chance now to legislate to make greenhouse gas savings through this measure, and if we do not, the country will have to make them elsewhere. In the debates in Committee or Report, nobody has said, “Okay, we’re not going to make the savings here—but here’s where we are going to offer up savings elsewhere in the country”.
Baroness Parminter (LD)
My Lords, the purpose of the amendment is to ensure that the new homes that we want are built with sustainable drainage, protecting home owners against flooding and delivering wider environmental benefits to the community—and, indeed, for biodiversity.
At Report, the Government’s response was that we should wait to see how the presumption in planning works, given that it has been in place for only a year, but the evidence that we had in Committee, at Report and since is that it is not working. Since Report, Hampshire County Council, Essex County Council and South Tyneside Council have joined every water company and the National Flood Forum, which has links with local councils all around the country, to say that the problem needs sorting, and sorting now.
The amendment, which we proposed at Report, is a simplified version of an amendment that we moved in Committee. I humbly disagree with the Minister: the amendment does not increase bureaucracy but gives local authorities more powers in discussions about planning permissions to deliver the increase in SUDS we need. It gives them the power to talk to developers at the earliest opportunity about sustainable urban drainage solutions. That is what the amendment, which removes the automatic right of connection, would do: make sure that housebuilders consider urban drainage at the beginning of the process, not at the end.
There has been overwhelming support from a variety of organisations, which we cited at Report and which I will not, for brevity’s sake, repeat this evening. The House of Lords Select Committee on National Policy for the Built Environment supported such an amendment. Again, we must think of home owners. Yes of course we must think of home builders but, as I said, this is not extra bureaucracy; it is a reasonable amendment. The Government’s very welcome Flood Re initiative, which came into effect last year and will give low-cost insurance for home owners, excludes homes built after 2009. By introducing the amendment, we will be increasing the amount of sustainable urban drainage and providing what the Government accept is a low-cost route to the protection that householders need and which we need for our environment.
Given that Ministers have been quoting other industry sources, I end by quoting the Construction Industry Council, which states that, “Maintaining the automatic right provides a get-out for developers by not requiring them to think about how they manage surface water”. It is time to end that automatic right. I beg to move.
Lord Krebs
My Lords, I shall be very brief in speaking in support of this amendment, because we have heard the arguments in Committee and on Report. As chairman of the adaptation sub-committee of the Committee on Climate Change, I simply make the point, which I made before, that this is about looking not just now but into the future, when we understand from the climate models that flash surface-water flooding will become more of a problem. It is already a major problem and one of the major sources of flooding in this country and it is going to get worse. So it is rather like the zero-carbon homes amendment that we discussed a few minutes ago. Why on earth would we want to build new developments now that are going to present the residents of those developments with problems with flash flooding in future, when we know that there are straightforward solutions? There is the solution of sustainable urban drainage, not removing the right to connect to the drains altogether but making a presumption—because that right is not automatic—that developers will use sustainable urban drainage where possible.
If, as the Minister said in the introduction, this amendment is both unnecessary and unworkable—and he gave various reasons—I ask myself why so many professional bodies and why the water industry itself, as the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, said, support it. Those are the people who really understand, and who are real experts, and it is clear that they think that that is workable and desirable and will achieve greater sustainability for the new developments that will be built in the coming years as a result of the initiatives in this Bill. So I hope that noble Lords will listen to the argument that the noble Baroness made and will recall the arguments heard in Committee and on Report and will support the amendment.
Housing and Planning Bill
Debate between Baroness Parminter and Lord Krebs
Baroness Parminter (LD)
My Lords, the aim of this amendment is for new homes to contribute to meeting our greenhouse gas targets and to help lower fuel bills. In Committee the Minister argued that homes had to be financially viable to build, yet conceded that the extra build costs to meet carbon compliance standards are under £3,000 for a three-bedroom, semi-detached house. That figure comes from a Zero Carbon Hub report published in 2014, which forecasts a continuing reduction in those costs until 2020. Indeed, the managing director of Zero Carbon Hub said last month that today’s costs are dramatically lower than in 2014 due to the industry’s greater proficiency at building energy-efficient low-carbon homes.
The Government also argued that the amendment imposed a regulatory burden, but these standards, withdrawn by the Chancellor last year, had industry-wide support. If the Government’s priority is to support small housebuilders, it should be noted that they themselves cite that the major constraints on their building more homes are land prices and access to finance. This was the evidence given last October to the House of Lords Committee on National Policy on the Built Environment by representatives from both the Home Builders Federation and the Federation of Master Builders. The committee concluded:
“We disagree with the Government’s decision to remove the zero carbon homes policy and the Code for Sustainable Homes. These decisions are likely to add to long-term housing costs through a reduction in energy efficiency, and we have heard no clear evidence that they will lead to an increase in housebuilding”.
Since the Committee stage, the House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee has added its voice to the call for a reinstatement of the zero carbon homes policy.
Let us not forget home owners in all of this. The annual energy bill for a family living in a zero carbon three-bedroom, semi-detached house will be £1,220 less than that for a Victorian home and £330 less than for a home built to existing building regulations. The amendment would also avoid retrofit costs, given that the Government are not ruling out raising energy standards in the future. It is a long-term saving not just to the home owner but to the environment.
Higher regulatory standards should be considered not as burdensome red tape but as a requirement that is essential to reduce both energy costs and to tackle the threat of climate change. As Mike Roberts, the MD of small housebuilder HAB Housing, said, there should be no exemptions: volume housebuilders have the scale and resource, whilst smaller companies are light on their feet and more able to react quickly. We urge the Government to back up the commitment that the UK made at COP21 in Paris and make higher carbon standards mandatory as soon as possible. I beg to move.
Lord Krebs (CB)
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, for introducing this amendment, and I thank the Minister for meeting us last Thursday to discuss this and other amendments.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, has already mentioned, the UK has signed up to the Paris agreement on climate change and, importantly, we have our own national legislation—I declare an interest as a member of the Committee on Climate Change, established under that legislation—which commits us to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In a few weeks’ time the Government are due to accept the fifth carbon budget proposed by the committee, which will commit us to reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 57% below 1990 levels by 2030—on the cost-effective path to our ultimate target in 2050.
At the end of June, the committee will publish its annual report on progress towards this target. The analyses are still going on, so I cannot leak the final results, but I can inform noble Lords of one fact that is highly relevant to this amendment. Last year—2015—emissions from buildings actually increased by 4% and, even adjusting for annual variation in temperature, the decrease was only about 1%. This is not a one-off. There has been very little reduction in emissions from buildings over the past 10 years. If we are to meet our legally binding obligation, emissions from buildings will have to decrease substantially, and at a much higher rate in the years ahead.
Part of the problem is that we have old building stock and many poorly built houses that are energy inefficient. This underlines the importance of not adding to the problem with new homes, when we do not need to. That is why this amendment is so important, not just for the short term but for the long term. If we do not require the zero carbon homes standard today, we will have to introduce it at some point in the future.
As we discussed in Committee, there are differences between what the Government are proposing and the standard in this amendment. For example, in the 2006 Part L requirements, the Government’s proposal amounts to a 44% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, while this amendment suggests a 52% reduction for attached homes and a 60% reduction for detached homes. How would these greater reductions be achieved? An important element is on-site renewable energy generation—for example, by solar panels or other renewable sources.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, mentioned, there was considerable discussion of costs in Committee. We know now that from October this year in London all new homes will have to meet the zero carbon home standard and the GLA has calculated that for a three-bedroom semi the extra build cost will be between £978 and £2,702. For this additional investment to be cost optimal, the savings, discounted at an appropriate rate, should exceed the initial investment through the life cycle of the building. The calculations show that even with modest savings on energy bills of £100 a year, the investment would be cost optimal, and if the price of carbon is included—as it should be, according to the Treasury Green Book—the balance shifts even further in favour of zero carbon homes. The cost argument simply does not stack up if we take a life cycle view.
There was also a suggestion in Committee that making homes zero carbon would introduce an additional problem: if we make our buildings too energy efficient, they may be prone to overheating. It is true that one consequence of future climate change is that we probably will have to make our buildings more resilient to hot weather. However, this is not incompatible with zero carbon home standards. Professor Philip Eames of Loughborough University, an expert in renewable energy and building physics, says:
“The problem of overheating in new build can be an issue if the design is not appropriate ... we can quite easily improve the energy efficiency of new build significantly without suffering from this problem. It just needs attention to detail in terms of design”.
Finally, we have heard—as indeed the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, has mentioned—that the requirement would be too onerous for small builders. Here, I would make the following observations. As has already been said, at least some small builders do not see it as a problem. Furthermore, given that one of the simple measures to achieve the zero carbon home standard is the installation of rooftop solar panels, it is hard to see why this is a regulatory burden, since it is a routine procedure. Even if the amendment would pose a challenge to some small builders, we should be asking them to up their game.
There are compelling reasons to accept this amendment, in terms of both our climate change commitments and cost effectiveness. The objections raised in Committee seem to me to not stand up to scrutiny. I very much hope that noble Lords will agree that this amendment should be accepted.
Housing and Planning Bill
Debate between Baroness Parminter and Lord Krebs(8 years, 4 months ago)
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Baroness Parminter (LD)
My Lords, I am grateful that we have the opportunity to discuss these amendments this evening. While my name is to both of them, I shall speak only to Amendment 119.
The Government have rightly launched a national flood resilience review, which is due to report in the summer, but that review will come too late if the Bill paves the way for 1 million new homes without due regard for their flood resilience. New homes increase flood risks for developments and for surrounding communities. Concreting over a catchment speeds up run-off, increasing the likelihood of flooding. After the 2007 floods, the flooding review by Sir Michael Pitt recommended sustainable drainage as a way forward, which moved the Government to bring forward the Flood and Water Management Act. It was suggested in the Act that there should be further use of SuDS, with soakaways such as swales, ponds and other natural means to ensure that sewer networks were not overwhelmed during periods of heavy rainfall. We all know that well-designed SuDS can contribute to water quality, to coping with overheating and to biodiversity. But this Government delayed implementation and then abandoned that approach altogether, in favour of an “expectation” that major planning applications would include SuDS.
This was not because of the costs. Defra recognised, in its own consultation document, that,
“sustainable drainage systems are generally cheaper to build; and maintaining them will be cheaper (or need be no more expensive), than the … cost … required”,
in conventional drainage. The result of this expectation that the SuDS approach would work is that last year Barratt Homes, the UK’s leading housebuilder, included no provision whatever for sustainable drainage in a third of its developments. The Committee on Climate Change has analysed 100 planning applications in areas of flood risks and found that fewer than 15% proposed SuDS. If the Government wish to challenge that evidence, what monitoring are they doing at a national level of the uptake of SuDS?
The National Policy for the Built Environment Committee of the House of Lords, on which I and other noble Lords sat, has looked at this issue. In its report last month, it argued that the Government should take a more proactive approach to the provision of SuDS. In legislating to provide for new homes, we must seek to contain the time to plan for them—absolutely. But we need a process ensuring that new homes are built to a standard that will protect them from flood risks and not exacerbate risks for established communities. I shall not list the many organisations which have written to the Minister in support of this amendment, because we do not have time. I will merely beg to move and hope that other Members might pick up some of the points that I know need to be raised.
Lord Krebs (CB)
My Lords, I shall speak briefly to this because the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, has made most of the points that I would want to make. My name is also on Amendment 119 and I would like to go on to refer to Amendment 120, on which my name comes first. But to add briefly to what the noble Baroness has said, the real problem is that developers still have the automatic right to connect to the existing sewerage system. We know from estimates that more than half the existing sewers are already overloaded. While developers have the automatic right to connect, they are not incentivised to look at other ways of managing surface water flooding. Furthermore, when SuDS are installed, there is no clarity in the current regime about who should pay for the maintenance once they have been built. In any case, the current guidance applies only to developments of 10 homes or more, so small urban infill developments which could be creating some of the biggest long-term problems are not covered. Around 100,000 minor planning applications are approved each year which are not subject to the new safeguards.
So the aim of this amendment is to ensure that SuDS are the default option in new developments and to help achieve this by removing the automatic right to connect to existing sewerage systems. Connecting new developments to existing sewers should be the absolute exception, once other options have been exhausted.
I turn to Amendment 120 on developer liability. This amendment focuses on the long-term costs for society arising from continuing development in the flood plain and presents a simple, workable proposal to address the current lack of incentive for developers to make new properties safe and resilient to flooding. We know that, at the moment, more than 100,000 homes have been built in the flood plain since 2008—28,000 of these in areas at a greater than one-in-100 annual chance of flooding, taking into account the protection provided by any flood defences. The consequences are that, in the long run, owners of new homes are being exposed to unnecessary flooding risk.
A one-in-100-year chance sounds very small. We have to remember that this is the chance of flooding in a particular place. If there are 100 such places, then there is the likelihood that someone will get flooded every single year. In fact, in this century, we have already had 12 significant flood events in 15 years. If we carry on as at present, we can more or less guarantee that someone, somewhere, is going to suffer the trauma of flood damage each year.
Data are not collected on whether or not new homes that are built in flood plains are made resilient. I declare an interest as the chairman of the adaptation sub-committee of the Committee on Climate Change As has already been mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, our data suggest that fewer than 15% of new homes have been built with sustainable urban drainage systems.
Are we putting too much faith in flood defences to protect new developments, when they are typically built to a one-in-100-year standard? There is evidence that developers and planners are taking what might be called a compliance approach to flood risk— following the process but putting too much faith in limited protection from flood defences and not taking into account the uncertainty in even the best flood models.
A recent example, of which I am sure noble Lords are well aware, is Bridge End Court, a residential care home and sheltered development in Cockermouth. It was built in the meander of the River Derwent, on land that had flooded badly in 2009, on the very edge of a flood zone 3, where it would not have been deemed appropriate development. After the 2009 flood, the local authority had the chance to require the development to go elsewhere but it allowed it to go ahead in the same place. In spite of the ground floor supposedly being set above the height of even a one-in-1,000-year flood, the care home was flooded in December and the residents had to be rescued.
What constitutes a one-in-1,000 standard is highly uncertain. This is where developers come in. Developers are required to produce a flood risk assessment for a site, but they bear no liability if they take risks or simply get it wrong. The assumptions in the flood models that underpin a flood risk assessment can be selected either to increase the assessment of flood risk or to make it appear lower than reality. I should emphasise that I have seen no evidence that developers are manipulating flood risk assessments but, in principle, they could.
It is worth noting some Environment Agency figures. The Environment Agency has to be consulted on developments and it objects to about 3,000 applications per year on grounds of flood risk. In a sample of nearly 1,700 objections between 2009 and 2013, 20% of those objections were because the developer had produced no flood risk assessment whatever and 54% of them were objected to because the flood risk assessment was unsatisfactory. Among the reasons they were unsatisfactory were that they did not take into account future sea level rise, future increases in river flows or future increases in surface water flooding.
Housing and Planning Bill
Debate between Baroness Parminter and Lord Krebs
Baroness Parminter (LD)
My Lords, the Government’s attempt to solve the current housing crisis needs, at the same time, to address the issue of what types of homes are built. They should be of high quality and high energy efficiency standards which drive down future energy bills, help to protect against fuel poverty and provide healthy living environments. The Explanatory Notes to the Bill make it clear that its principal aim is to bring forward proposals that make homes more affordable. This laudable aim was dealt a serious blow by the scrapping of the zero-carbon homes policy by the Chancellor last July. Without this standard, which until last July had cross-party and cross-industry support, the new homes promised by the Government will not be as affordable as they might be. They will lock their owners into a cycle of higher fuel bills and the need for costly retrofits. The amendment requires that all new homes built in England from 1 January 2018 achieve the previously agreed zero-carbon homes standard.
Reinstating this housing standard will not only help keep homes affordable for the long term, it will help meet our legally binding climate commitments. We are committed to reducing UK emissions by 50% by 2025. Buildings accounted for 34% of the UK’s total greenhouse gas emissions in 2014, with 64% of building emissions coming from homes. It is in the building sector that most of the cost-effective potential carbon savings are to be found. Housebuilding must, of course, remain financially viable for the private sector, which will deliver the bulk of future housing. Yet the scrapping of zero-carbon homes by the Chancellor was not accompanied by any evidence that building homes to that standard would affect the speed at which the UK can build new homes. Indeed, evidence to the House of Lords Select Committee on National Policy for the Built Environment showed that the removal of the zero-carbon homes requirement has generated uncertainty for homebuilders. Moreover, they were provided with no clear evidence that the removal would lead to an increase in housebuilding. This evidence persuaded the committee—and I declare an interest as a member—to call on the Government to reverse the decision to remove the requirement for new homes to generate no net carbon emissions.
Reinstating the zero-carbon standard would help deliver affordable homes for the long term, and not burden occupants with needlessly high energy bills. This would also make the UK’s statutory greenhouse gas emission targets more achievable. Post-Paris, it is surely time for leadership and not backsliding. I beg to move.
Lord Krebs (CB)
My Lords, I support the amendment. I put my name to it because I believe that, as the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, said, we have an opportunity to ensure that the proposed 1 million new homes are not just suitable for their immediate occupants but for the long term. I declare an interest as a member of the Committee on Climate Change and the chair of its adaptation sub-committee. The committee, established under the Climate Change Act 2008, is the statutory body that provides advice to the Government on how to achieve the legally binding target, already referred to, of reducing our greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. The adaptation sub-committee advises the Government on how to prepare for the inevitable impacts of climate change.