Provisional Local Government Finance Settlement

Baroness Taylor of Stevenage Excerpts

Thursday 19th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Pidgeon (LD)]

I thank the Minister for the opportunity to discuss the provisional local government finance settlement. It is always an early Christmas present for finance departments in councils up and down the country.

Local government was brought to its knees under the last Government, with funding cuts happening at the same time as further responsibilities were given to our hard-working local government workforce. From the Liberal Democrat Benches, we welcome the move set out in the Statement for multiyear settlements—something my party has long called for.

The Statement suggests that funding previously allocated to rural local authorities under the rural services delivery grant will be repurposed under a need and demand basis. This is despite the grant providing rural local authorities with £100 million for the rollout of essential public services, including emergency services and the provision of social care in the last year.

From these Benches, we are concerned that this new system of allocation will not recognise—as has just been discussed—that the sparse and isolated nature of rural areas drives higher costs for the delivery of essential services, creates challenges in the recruitment of staff for key services, and of course requires local authorities to provide a greater public subsidy for the provision of services such as public transport.

Deprivation in rural areas would also likely be hidden through the use of this measure because it occurs over a wider geographical area. Using deprivation as an indicator of demand for services also does not consider local authorities with a higher number of elderly or vulnerable residents and the additional demands these residents place on services, as the noble Lord just outlined in his response.

I urge the Government to provide rural councils with a funding settlement which reflects the impact of the rurality and sparsity of the areas they serve, through the application of the fair funding formula. With additional pressure on councils to deliver further scrutiny in planning decisions, deliver further housebuilding and accept additional NICs changes, it is essential that they are funded robustly to achieve these aims. Can the Minister say what plans the Government have to ensure that local authorities in rural areas have the support that they need? These authorities face unique challenges and their funding settlement needs to reflect this.

We are also concerned about the funding of certain services such as special educational needs and indeed special educational needs transport. What assurances can the Minister give that the new funding settlement will allow local authorities to deliver special educational needs services at the level needed, as well as child and adult social care?

From these Benches we welcome the consultation on wider local authority funding reform, but we urge the Government to move as fast as possible with this, as 2026-27 feels a long time away and, the more time passes, the more the contents of this Statement will feel rather like a sticking plaster. Can the Minister say anything more today about the timescale of the consultation and whether genuine fiscal devolution will be considered, so we are not looking just at how the government funding is divided up but at powers to enable local authorities to raise funding to invest in services and infrastructure for their local communities, rather than always being reliant on the Government of the day?

Finally, given that we are on the final sitting day before the Christmas break, I take this opportunity to wish the entire local government workforce a very happy Christmas, and of course I extend that to all noble Lords as well.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (Baroness Taylor of Stevenage) (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, and the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, for their questions and comments, and I really welcome this opportunity to update the House on our plans to get local government finances on to a surer footing, both next year and beyond.

Our Labour Government were elected to deliver real change, and this must include change for local government. Local government delivers over 800 services to local people every day. Councils are the front line of public services, from waste collection to adult care provision, economic growth and housing. Yet we know that they are facing challenges as demand increases for critical services such as homelessness, social care and SEND, as mentioned by the noble Baroness. The Government cannot deliver our priorities alone. We have to reset and rebuild the relationship with an empowered local government—we spoke about that earlier today.

Yesterday, Minister McMahon set out the Government’s plans to get local Government back on track, both in 2025-26 and longer term, as the noble Baroness mentioned, to lay the foundations for long-overdue funding reform. We must move away from expensive acute crisis response and invest in the key longer-term preventive services, and the Government are committed to ensuring that taxpayers’ money goes where it is needed most.

Taken together, the additional funding made available at the settlement and the Budget delivers over £5 billion of new funding for local services over and above the local council tax, and in the provisional local government finance settlement we have an additional £2 billion in grant funding—a £700-million increase from the £1.3 billion announced at the policy statement.

This £700 million increase includes over £200 million extra funding for social care. It also includes £515 million which will be made available at the final settlement to support councils with the increase in employer national insurance contributions. I will come back to that in a moment.

Financial year 2025-26 will also see a new one-off and highly targeted recovery grant, already mentioned by the noble Lord and the noble Baroness. That is for those authorities with high deprivation but a low council tax base. This will be funded in part through repurposing the rural services delivery grant and the services grant and laying the groundwork for broader reform in the future. I will come back to rural authorities. We will provide funding certainty. No authority will see a reduction in core spending power after accounting for council tax flexibilities.

The noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, spoke about funding not keeping pace with the demands in local government. We are very well aware of the difficulties in funding that local government has experienced. This Government have done more to help with that than any of the work that the party opposite did in the last few years; I know that from personal experience. If he wants to criticise the 5% increase in council tax, I point out that it is exactly in line with what his Government had in place before us. We know council tax is a burden for people—we properly understand that—but we have to help local government with funding, and not allowing it to increase council tax would not help at all.

In terms of national insurance charges and the Government’s funding to help with them, we have chosen to make that £515 million of additional funding not ring-fenced, so the Government are enabling councils to choose how to distribute it, including how to meet the increased cost of externally commissioned services. We hope that the additional £3.7 billion funding available in the settlement for social care authorities will help with that. It will be clear to local authorities that specific funding for national insurance contributions being provided will not meet the overall cost to local government of the change to employer NICs, particularly given the expected increase in the cost of commissioned services, but that is why we have left that money un-ring-fenced: to try and help with the issue of funding. The overall increase in funding should help local authorities to meet the cost as they go forward.

The decision around national insurance contributions is a Treasury decision; it is not made in MHCLG, so I am afraid I cannot help the noble Lord on the responsibility for that. The national minimum wage increase is all part of the picture of making sure that no local authority has a reduction in cost funding, but it is really important that people who work in local government, as everywhere else, and particularly the brilliant teams that work in social care and across social care employment, have the right wages for the very valuable and important work that they do. The national minimum wage is the basic element of that. We welcome the opportunity to give them that increase, which they so much deserve.

The noble Lord mentioned kicking the can down the road on SEND. We have been in government for five months, so it is probably not us who have been doing that; it might have been somebody else. As part of the 30 October Budget, the Government announced an additional £2.3 billion for mainstream schools and young people with high needs for 2025-26, compared to 2024-25. That means that overall core school funding will total almost £63.9 billion next year, after accounting for technical adjustments.

The children with special educational needs and disabilities have been failed, with poor outcomes and parents struggling to get their children the support they need and deserve. I mentioned this morning the absolute outrage of parents having to take their own councils to court to get services that those children were legally entitled to. That happened in my own county of Hertfordshire, which is why it had such a disastrous Ofsted report on SEND. This Government’s ambition is that all children and young people with SEND or in alternative provision receive the right support to succeed in their education as they move into adult life. Any gap in SEND provision for children leaves a lasting effect on their life opportunities. The Government will strengthen accountability on mainstream settings to be inclusive, including through Ofsted, support the mainstream workforce to increase their SEND expertise and encourage schools to set up resourced provision or SEND units to increase capacity in mainstream schools. We are getting a grip on this, but it had been left—kicked as a can down the road—for a very long time, and it is going to take a while to get it back.

The noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, and the noble Baroness mentioned the issue of rural services. The Government really recognise the importance of our rural communities, and we want to support them. The funding reforms that we have announced are very much part of a comprehensive reform, and the Government are absolutely committed to tackling the issues that matter so much to those rural communities. Places with a significant rural population will, on average, receive around a 5% increase in their core spending power next year, which is a real-terms increase, and we are proposing to continue to apply area cost adjustment to account for relative cost differences between local authorities, including differences between rural and urban areas. The Government propose continuing to assess the same factors as the 2024 area cost adjustment, which seeks, for example, to account for increased costs as a result of travel times, and we will ensure the approach is informed by the latest data and evidence. We are inviting views from local government and the public on this approach and whether we should account for any other factors which could affect cost, as well as any evidence for including those. There will be an extensive consultation for this as we go into the spending review in in the new year.

Part of the doctrine of new burdens is that they are funded. On the new homes bonus, mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, there will be a new round of payments in 2025-26. In line with recent years, these will not attract legacy payments. New homes bonus allocations will continue to be made in the usual way, applying the same calculation process.

I hope I covered all the noble Baroness’s issues on rural and sparse populations. On the funding reform timescale that she mentioned, we have to do some consultation on this, but it is the intention to do that work in advance of the spending review in spring. Having waited several years now for fairer funding reform in local government, I am very pleased that we are able to bring that forward as quickly as we have. We must reform the way that councils are funded to ensure that local government can deliver for all people in the long term, including the most vulnerable. Fixing local government is a long-term challenge, and I hope that I have set out as clearly as possible the steps we have already taken to get local government back on its feet through this year’s settlement and in the future.

On the announcement issue, it used to drive me mad when I was a council leader that this announcement comes out on 18 or 19 December, and your poor officers are struggling to get the work ready. We could not do much about it this year, but I hope we will do better next year. I thank noble Lords very much.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I have sat on the Local Government Association’s resources panel for at least the last dozen years—it might be more—so I am fairly well acquainted with some of these things. Local government already had a mountain to climb, but, if I may dwell for a moment on the national insurance increase, I regret to say that that has made it even worse. I am grateful to the Minister for identifying that the £515 million grant for NIC is not to be ring-fenced, but not making it ring-fenced does not make it go any further. The LGA has already calculated that the costs of the NIC will be £637 million and of contractors will be £1.13 billion. The shortfall is £1.3 billion. How does she account for that shortage, and what should be cut? The noble Baroness mentioned the new homes bonus. Does she agree that that will not say much about the incentives to build homes? Finally, the noble Baroness mentioned funding reform. Will she commit to the no-detriment principle in the previously envisaged transition methods, whereby no council will be worse off during the transition than it is today?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord. One of the reasons why we have set up the English devolution programme is to get a more effective and efficient way of managing local government. We will not solve overnight the funding problems that have accumulated over 14 years. It will take a while to do that, but in this settlement we have ensured an increase for most local authorities and no local authority will get less funding than before. We will invite views on reforming the new homes bonus as part of the local authority funding reform consultation that will be published alongside the settlement. Although the Government proposed that next year will be the final year of the NHB, we will look at it so that councils can do their financial planning around it and we will consider it as part of the spending review. I cannot commit to no detriment at this stage because we have not even started the consultation on the spending review yet, but no authority received a worse settlement in this year’s settlement than it had before.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, we all know that 14 years of austerity have left local government on its knees and, in many cases, reduced local government to little more than an agent of the Westminster Government. Huge percentages—almost all spending—are forced to go on statutory measures: that is, what is decided here in Westminster, not what is decided in local communities. Can the Minister tell me, either as a percentage or as a figure, how much extra money will be available in this financial settlement to local councils to spend on the non-statutory elements of their duties, such as protecting local green spaces, supporting and funding local libraries and looking after the local public realm rather than having to make expensive bids for pots of money to be able to improve it? How much non-discretionary money will be in this settlement?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

The noble Baroness makes a very good point. I pay tribute to my colleagues in local government, who do an amazing job of continuing to deliver some non-statutory services in spite of the incredible financial pressures they have been under. For example, we still managed to keep a theatre open in my area. That happens all across the country, so all credit to local government for the work it does on this. The noble Baroness mentioned constant rounds of bidding for pots of funding. We think that is wasteful and unnecessary. It just sets authorities up against one another in competing for pots of funding. We will do our very best to get rid of that approach. As we develop the spending review proposals, we will build what local authorities need for the future into core funding.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, because the Minister is a very experienced and knowledgeable former local authority leader, she will know, in all fairness, that Covid, inflation, energy costs and demographic change were also issues that the previous Government had to face. Her Government will have to face some of them as well. On the specific pots of money to be bid for, I ask her to alight on the issue of planners. Is there any possibility that the Government might look to provide bespoke funding to enable local authorities to recruit and retain planners so that they can build the houses that are necessary, particularly for young working people, and that they can take forward very important regeneration projects in their local areas?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord for his kind comments. I do understand that a few issues arose in recent years, but an awful lot of money seemed to be wasted during Covid that might have been better spent delivering local services. On funding for planning, we announced alongside the NPPF announcement that additional funding is available to support local authorities’ capacity for planners. We recognise that, with an absolutely key mission on growth, the planning capacity in local authorities needs to be strengthened. Our colleagues in the Department for Education are working on skills and repurposing the apprenticeship levy into a skills and growth levy, and there is some direct funding support for local authorities. We hope that will attract around 300 new planners. I know you cannot go and pick them off trees, but that will help to support the planning that will need to be done to support the growth we need in our country.

[Lord Sentamu (CB)]

I declare my interest as chair of the Living Wage Commission, which recommended, along with the Resolution Foundation, what a living wage should be in London and the rest of the country. As it was voluntary, a lot of companies in the FT 100 decided to pay it. Then one day, George Osborne called it the national living wage, but it was simply an enhancement of the minimum wage. In his first Budget, the right honourable Jeremy Hunt raised the minimum wage to a living wage, and this Government have also adopted that sort of living wage. When she was answering, the Minister called it the minimum wage. I suggest that we use the correct language. It is no longer the minimum wage because the living wage is compulsory. It is no longer voluntary.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I thank the noble and right reverend Lord for the important work he has done on this. I hope the Government have demonstrated in these early days, by bringing forward a new Employment Rights Bill, that not just what people are paid but the way they are treated at work are of primary importance to us. I apologise if I said the national minimum wage; I should have said the national living wage. In local government, we have always welcomed it, and we celebrate the work our workforce does; they do an amazing job in difficult circumstances. The noble Lord, Lord Jackson, mentioned Covid. I want to reflect on that period and how comforting it was to residents across the country to see local government teams still going out and doing their job in spite of the very difficult circumstances they were in. They should be properly paid for what they do and have proper working conditions. I welcome the findings of the Living Wage Commission.

[Lord Porter of Spalding (Con)]

I draw the attention of the House to my interest, as set out in the register, as a vice-president of the Local Government Association.

I have nothing but sympathy for the Minister. She is having to do a very difficult job in very difficult circumstances, and to put a shine on something that we know is not worthy of being shined at the moment. I wish her good luck in her attempt to resolve the local government funding settlement battles she will face over the next couple of years. The same Treasury people who made the decisions last year will almost certainly be making the decisions next year, so the reality is that she will not have a bigger cake to cut. If she is going to choose to divide that cake slightly differently, she will have to make sure that she at least says sorry to the people who are going to lose.

It is quite obvious that stopping the rural services delivery grant in this settlement is £110 million of essential money for a lot of councils. On the back of it, people will almost certainly be getting “at risk” notices in the new year, until the Government come up with some sort of compensation for taking that money away, if nothing else. When you go to the new homes bonus the year after next, a lot of people will be put at risk because many small, underpaid councils rely on that payment to pay staff wages.

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[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Porter. He has a great deal of experience in this area, as I know only too well. The funding reforms are part of a comprehensive set of reforms for public services to fix the foundations of local government. We are working with the sector on that, and the principle of giving forward notice and certainty and allowing time for councils to plan for the future is now baked into the way we are doing this.

In 2025-26 we will begin targeting additional funding to places with the greatest need and demand for services. We have used deprivation as a proxy for that, for those areas that have less ability to raise income locally. That is the new recovery grant that I spoke of. Broader redistribution will follow from 2026-27 to provide long-term certainty and enable local government to focus on its priorities.

We are inviting views from the local government sector through the local authority funding reform objectives and principles consultation, which is open from today until 12 February. It seeks views on all aspects of local authority funding reform, including aspects of rurality, the new homes bonus and anything else that people want to send views in on. I hope people will contribute to that, because we will have a better spending review the more input we get.

I thank all noble Lords who have participated in this and all those who have spoken to me outside the Chamber about local government finance. It is always a pleasure to work with so many experienced noble Lords who have years of experience in local government, and local government finance in particular, so I welcome that. I extend my good wishes to all the officers and councillors across the country, as well as to all noble Peers. I wish them all a very happy Christmas. I am sure we will be back to do more arguing after a bit of rest at Christmas, but for now, a peaceful and happy Christmas to all.

English Devolution

Baroness Taylor of Stevenage Excerpts

Thursday 19th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I note that the Statement says:

“We will deliver a new constitutional settlement for England”.


That is a very ambitious claim. What we have in the White Paper is a great disappointment by comparison. There is a deep confusion between what is “local” and what is “regional”, which are used interchangeably and loosely throughout the White Paper. We are promised “regional Mayors” who will, we are told, also be “vital local leaders”. They will take part in the Council of the Nations and Regions alongside Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland Ministers; they will also sit on a separate Mayoral Council with the Deputy Prime Minister. There is no link with Parliament here, I note, nor any link to Gordon Brown’s proposal to reform the Lords as a second Chamber to give us a role in representing the nations and regions in UK-wide debates. This looks to the Liberal Democrats like a plan designed in the Treasury both to save money, by shrinking local democratic institutions, and to convert elected mayors into agents of central government, spending funds that they hope to obtain by negotiations with the Treasury—the integrated settlements—without taking into account the importance of embedding democratic government in local and regional networks.

Chapter 4.1 of the White Paper begins:

“England is made up of thousands of communities—towns, cities and villages”.


It then proposes to squeeze those thousands of local communities into somewhere between 30 and 40 combined authorities, with fewer than 100 unitary authorities beneath them, each containing between 500,000 and 1 million people. That is not a unitary system; it is a new two-tier system in which strategic decisions will be taken by the upper mayoral tier—in effect, by one elected person. Local democracy rests on the relationship between voters in their communities and the councillors who represent them. It is the bedrock of democratic politics and of political parties, which draw their campaigners, their members and, often, their recruits into national politics from these local activities. But here is a proposal to cut further the number of elections and elected councillors and to remove them to a much greater distance from those they try to represent, with 15,000 voters or more in each ward.

England’s voters tell pollsters that they deeply mistrust Westminster politics and trust their local representatives more. This measure risks deepening public mistrust of democracy further and weakening political parties; it asks voters to identify with one elected mayor overseeing some millions of people and quite possibly elected on little over a quarter of the votes cast. I remind the Minister that, in July’s election, five parties won more than 10% of the national vote in England. First past the post risks producing some remarkably unrepresentative mayors elected on perhaps 27% or 28% of the vote.

We will need to strengthen the really local tier—the town and parish councils—to compensate for this shift of power upward. I could not find any discussion of parish and town councils in the White Paper. Did I miss some passing references? No other democratic state in Europe, North America or Australasia has such a thin framework of local and regional government. England will remain the most highly centralised state in the democratic world.

Chapter 4 declares:

“There is clearly an appetite for reorganisation in parts of England”.


We are given no evidence of such an appetite among the public. We have had multiple reorganisations in the past 50 years. Now we are going to have another one, which will cost additional money—as all reorganisations do—and disrupt services during the transition. Has the Treasury budgeted for the costs of transition? It then goes on to propose that there should be new rules on remote attendance and proxy voting for councillors at meetings. This is not surprising, given the size of some of our new councils. In the new North Yorkshire Council, it takes some councillors 90 minutes or more to drive to council meetings, so remote attendance and proxy voting are necessary. That is not local government or local democracy, however.

Lastly, in chapter 5 we are told:

“Established Mayoral Strategic Authorities will be held to account for the outcomes associated with their Integrated Settlement”


by “reporting to central government”. That is mayors acting as agents of central government, not responding to local and regional issues. The Government seem to want to rush through this reorganisation without waiting for local consultation or the agreement of other parties. This is not the best way to deliver a long-lasting constitutional settlement for England at a time when trust in our local democracy is lower than it has been for a very long time.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (Baroness Taylor of Stevenage) (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who attended the drop-in session on the White Paper yesterday.

The English devolution White Paper sets out what I will not apologise for being an ambitious new framework for English devolution, moving power out of Westminster and back to those who know their areas best as part of our plan for change. We want to see all of England access this devolved power by forming strategic authorities that can make the key decisions to drive economic growth, with a clear preference for mayors. We will do this with areas and will launch a devolution priority programme for those that want to be on the fast track to mayoral devolution. We will legislate for a ministerial directive for areas that are not able to agree, so that no part of England misses out on that programme.

We have created a new devolution framework to be put into statute through the English devolution Bill, which will give areas a range of new powers across planning, infrastructure, transport, skills, business and energy, with consistent voting arrangements to allow effective decision-making.

We will also clearly set out the criteria by which all mayoral strategic authorities will be able to access further powers, including integrated settlements, to allow greater flexibility of funding by becoming established mayoral strategic authorities. This framework will grow over time, including through suggestions from strategic authorities to be discussed at the Mayoral Council.

We recognise that devolving power requires us to fix the foundations of local government so that we can empower communities at all levels. We will give communities a new community right to buy for valued community assets.

As councils are the foundation of our state, we will fix their foundations through fairer funding and multiyear financial settlements to give councils the certainty they need. We will also end the destructive “Whitehall knows best” mindset that micromanages their decisions and replace it with the principle of constitutional autonomy and partnership—so devolution by default.

It is important that councils are the right size and shape to serve the people they represent, with simpler structures that people can understand. That is why we will facilitate a bold programme of local government reorganisation for two-tier areas and for smaller, failing, unitary councils. We will invite proposals for reorganisation from all these areas and phase delivery—a point made by the noble Baroness and the noble Lord—taking into account where reorganisation can unlock devolution, where areas are keen to move quickly, or where it can help address wider failings. We will work closely with areas to deliver an ambitious first wave of reorganisation in Parliament.

Before I answer the specific questions, I would like to say that I am not going to take any lessons from the party opposite about the management of councils. When we came into power, many councils were going bust and issuing Section 114 notices, with a growing queue behind them of councils struggling with their finances. The lack of fiscal discipline in the audit regime left a backlog of 1,000 audits and £100 million that the previous Government could not account for. How has that helped democracy and local accountability? There was also a deepening crisis in adult social care. Parents were having to take their own councils to court to get the special needs provision their children were entitled to. There was a homelessness emergency that has seen the utter scandal of 150,000 children living in temporary accommodation, and councils having to use up to 40% of their net revenue budget to fund it. I am taking no lessons about the stewardship of public finances or efficiency of local service delivery.

I turn to the specific questions. It is not taking away local powers to give a range of new powers from Westminster to local areas so that decisions can be taken locally. I have already outlined what some of those areas will be. Making sure that decisions on health, transport, skills, workforce and so on can be taken at a local level is an increase in local powers, not a reduction.

The noble Baroness asked about the mayoral tier and whether that would waste money. Of course, she spoke about Labour-run mayoral precepts. I suppose if your principle is to deliver worse services with more cost, we could look at the previous Government’s management of funding. In a Statement later today, I will make a number of announcements about local government funding, making sure that local government is funded properly to deliver the services it is charged with delivering.

The noble Baroness also said that no councils should be bullied or blackmailed into doing this. This programme has been driven by local government; the demands have come from local government ever since we started the devolution programme. It is local councils that will work together with partners in their areas to pull together the programmes. This is a locally driven programme.

The noble Baroness made some points about the green belt and the grey belt. I am afraid that the assumption she made is just wrong. There is a specific proposal to protect those areas of green belt that are nationally protected areas or have sites of special scientific interest. There is a specific proposal about brownfield first. A sequential approach to the use of land is set out in the National Planning Policy Framework.

The noble Baroness raised the new calculation on housing targets. When the previous Government withdrew the requirement for mandatory housing targets, we immediately saw a reduction in supply. We have made a new calculation based on affordability and housing need. Everywhere needs to contribute to the delivery of housing. It is really important that that happens. The new assessments are fairer from that point of view.

The noble Baroness asked about time to consider the proposals. The letter that went out—the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, has asked some questions about this letter too—clearly set out the programme. Councils and areas that want to go faster can submit proposals, but there will be more time, for those who feel they need it, to take the time they need.

On consultation with residents, it will be a legal requirement to have a consultation and the department will undertake that consultation through MHCLG resources.

Turning to the noble Lord’s questions, I am not apologising for the ambition of this plan. I think it is an ambitious plan. It is certainly not a plan from the Treasury; it has come from local government. But it is true to say that it is the problems in local government funding that mean we have to consider more efficient and effective ways of delivering service.

I understand the noble Lord’s points about local representation. When surveyed, only 23% of people felt they could have any influence over decision-making in their local areas. That is not good enough. We need to improve that rate. Whatever the system is now, it is not giving people a feeling that they can influence decisions in their area.

When you look at some of the activity of our mayors, they can use their mandate for change to make difficult decisions and drive growth in their areas, as Oliver Coppard has done in taking the Supertram back into public ownership in South Yorkshire. Mayors provide coherent leadership for their place. We have seen this already, with mayors such as Tracy Brabin leading trade missions to drive growth in their region. We want every part of England to take its place on the Council of the Nations and Regions and to have strong, effective partnerships with councils and other partners to deliver the missions we have set out to transform the country.

There is some wording about town and parish councils in the White Paper. If the noble Lord wants to contribute more on that topic, we would be pleased to hear that. I have been talking to the National Association of Local Councils and its officers about how we use them in this new system, and how the parish and town councils respond. There will be a vital role for them. There will be a vital role for front-line councillors as conveners of their neighbourhood areas in order to drive this programme forward. Mayors will certainly not be agents of central government. I know some of them quite well and it is a long stretch to describe them as such. They work very hard for their local areas and deliver really well.

I thank noble Lords for their comments today. As the former Secretary of State for Wales, Ron Davies, said about devolution to another of the United Kingdom’s countries, devolution is

“a process, not an event”.

We have a way to go yet. This devolution offer is the floor, not the ceiling, of the Government’s ambition. We want to continue to deepen devolution across England, developing policy with regions, including through the Mayoral Council. The White Paper is very explicit about engaging with the sector, seeking proposals from areas for devolution and local government reorganisation in their area, and engaging with mayors and councils on policies for the English devolution Bill, which we intend to lay in this Session. We welcome your Lordships’ input on how, but the aim is clear: a devolution revolution that helps us rebuild the country, deliver growth and change the politics of our country.

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[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend for his support for the overall programme. London already has a devolution arrangement, but I am assured by colleagues that we will look at the GLA and how it works. I am sure that we will take account of his comments about the City of London in that programme.

[Lord Porter of Spalding (Con)]

I bring Members’ attention to my registered interests, and I thank the Minister for the briefing yesterday. Can she confirm, now that we are in a public session, that the intention for 500,000 as a guide size for reorganisation is not a hard and fast rule but that some bids with a population under 500,000 will be allowed? Can she confirm that authorities already in the unitary system with populations of less than 500,000—all the councils in this country, bar 11, will be in scope—are also in scope for the reorganisation conversation? This is not an attack just on the Conservative-majority controlled two-tier areas; this is for the whole of the local government sector to be a representative size of approximately 500,000. That means that most of the boroughs of London are in scope and not excluded. Finally, I have a word of advice. If the Government are going to try to stick to a 500,000 unit, I tell them to forget about the number and the size of the council when they go to Rutland, because the Government have previously had some very bad experience of trying to remove Rutland.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for his advice on Rutland. I am happy to confirm that. On the 500,000 number, it is very strange: ever since July, people have been saying repeatedly that we need a guideline number, but when we give a guideline number, they say, “No, not that number. That is not the right number”. I hope that was not how the Conservatives did the accounting, because that would be a problem.

The 500,000 figure is intended as a guideline; it is what works best for local areas. I imagine that some sort of de minimis size will be incorporated in the Minister’s thinking as we go through this programme. We feel that 500,000 is around the right size to get the effectiveness and efficiency of delivery and the scale of managing the strategic requirements in a local area; that is why we have said 500,000. We are looking for councils to come forward with their own proposals about how this works for their local areas. On the other question, this is intended to cover all areas of England, so they are all welcome to come forward with proposals—including Rutland.

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for this Statement and I congratulate her and the Government on entering what are very difficult areas, as I remember well. One thing that has happened in the last 14 years—I know some noble Lords on the other Benches approved of this—was the abolition of the Audit Commission. Whatever people’s view about that, it has left nothing to give guidance and understanding to the combined authorities about audit. I hope that the Government will introduce something that gives clear guidance and authority to the audit process in these areas. Local people have the right to know that money invested there is being spent well and according to best value. Had we had that, I believe that the mayoral authority in Tees Valley may not have had the real problems that it has had, where we have ended up with 90% of the money that is invested, or of the contracts that are given there, being invested in two men who now live in Dubai. That is not best value for the public or what anybody intended in setting these issues up. I hope the Government will take hold of how we audit combined authorities.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My noble friend makes a good point. It is impossible to overstate the importance of having an accountable and transparent process for local government. I mentioned in my opening remarks that it is an absolute scandal that we have found ourselves in the position we have in relation to local government audit, with 1,000 audits outstanding—that is just not good enough. Accountability is absolutely vital. As well as a complete review of local government audit systems, and making sure that we have an audit service for all of local government that is fit for purpose, we will consult on something for mayoral combined areas. I do not know what it will be called, but it will be the equivalent of a local public accounts committee. We think that the work of the Public Accounts Committee in Parliament is helpful and useful, and we will consult with local government on whether a local public accounts committee, along similar lines, would be useful.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I remind the House of my declared interest as chair of the Cambridgeshire Development Forum. The Minister will know that I share her enthusiasm for strategic planning, but will she acknowledge that it may be some time before strategic authorities are established, or indeed before some strategic authorities have the necessary capability for strategic planning? In order to maintain momentum, will the Government issue guidance that will enable local planning authorities to go ahead with spatial strategies at a sub-regional level as quickly as possible?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord for that comment. It is important that we get development moving as quickly as possible. The New Towns Taskforce will make recommendations to government on the best delivery approach when it reports in July next year. The appropriate delivery vehicle will always be place-specific, and we expect development corporations to be used in most cases. Mayors, local authorities and government can establish development corporations, and we look forward to engaging local partners to understand what will be the best delivery approach for them to support future growth. If these need to come forward sooner rather than later, we will work with local areas to make sure that we facilitate that as best as possible.

[Lord Inglewood (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, if I understand the Minister right and the policy, there is to be no financial disincentive for authorities that do not wish to go in this direction. That being the case, will any other inducements and/or sweeteners be offered in order to try to take this forward? If not, what incentive is there for an area that does not have a mayor to do this?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, there are two absolutely key incentives to this programme of going forward with a mayor. Mayors will get new powers, devolved from Westminster, in a number of areas of competence. With the patience of the House, I will repeat those again: transport and local infrastructure; skills and employment support; housing and strategic planning; economic development and regeneration; environment and climate change; health, well-being and public service reform; and public safety. We are already setting out integrated budgets for the more established mayoral authorities to enable them to do that. There is a huge incentive to do that, as well as a seat around the table of the Council of the Nations and Regions. I hope local areas will see that as a positive opportunity. If they want to take more time to get there, that is fine, but it will be a great opportunity for our local regions.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

My Lords, I have the dubious distinction of holding a job as a directly elected mayor for 16 years, in the role that my party wished would never exist, so we have had an interesting debate. I absolutely understand some of the positives of the mayoral model—she would say that, wouldn’t she?—but I also appreciate the issues about democratic deficit. When Tony Blair imagined and brought into being directly elected mayors, he saw that the democratic deficit and the electoral process worked against a mayor having a real broad consensus in an area to be the chosen person. So he rightly ditched first past the post and brought in what we would consider to be an inferior PR: the alternative vote system. As we know, that was abolished by the previous Government—and one can only think about the reasons they might have had to do that. Genuinely, if you want a super-mayor with superpowers to really command authority and respect over an area, people must feel that their vote counts. At least in an AV model, the vast majority of people actually get their first or second choice candidate to win. Under first past the post, the winner, as we all know, can actually receive fewer votes than the rest of the field put together, which cannot be right if you are devolving that amount of power.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

The noble Baroness provided a wonderful role model for mayors going forward. Some of the innovations that she introduced during her time as Mayor of Watford are legendary, so I thank her for that service.

Mayors can use their mandate for change to take the difficult decisions needed. As the noble Baroness will be aware, they have both standing and soft power to convene local partners and tackle shared problems directly, exercising devolved powers and attracting inward investment. They have a platform for tackling obstacles to growth that might need a regional approach. Mayors are accountable to their citizens, as she rightly points out, and have the profile to stand up for them on a national stage and to partner with and challenge central government where needed—and of course it is needed sometimes.

As for the electoral system for mayors, we are not proposing to change that just now.

[Baroness Winterton of Doncaster (Lab)]

My Lords, my noble friend the Minister will be aware, I hope, that as a former Minister for Yorkshire and the Humber I am a huge supporter of devolution and I welcome the White Paper. However, I also know that, for devolution to work, it needs strong support through organisations such as the sadly abolished regional development agencies. To avoid what she called micromanagement, can she assure me that there will be proper support from the Civil Service, perhaps even by moving civil servants out of London to the regions to deliver the devolution settlement?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend and she is quite right. I remember very well the regional development agencies, back in the day. Some of the departments in government already have a regional presence. My own department has offices in each of the regions, and we intend to extend that and offer a widespread programme of secondments to regions. I think it will be of real benefit to the Civil Service to be working in our regions and then bringing that back to central government, or the other way round: working in central government and going out to the regions. I look forward to seeing how that programme develops. My noble friend is right to say that it will be very important to see that the offices in our regions are fit and well equipped to serve the mayors and combined authorities.

[Lord Jamieson (Con)]

My Lords, we are the most centralised country in the OECD. Can the Minister enlighten the House on the real powers and fiscal devolution that this will lead to? In particular, what is the Government’s target for the proportion of taxation that is devolved? Secondly, I appreciate the Minister’s comment on the letter. However, it is causing confusion to a number of councils, which have been told that they need to submit a letter by 10 January. Many believe that, if they do not, they will miss out on devolution and it will be imposed on them. What is the deadline, what is expected of those who do submit and what does it mean for those who do not meet the deadline? Can this be clarified to councils?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for his questions. This is about real devolution of powers and funding, and there are real benefits there to those who take up the offer. The earlier they start to get established, the more powers they will be able to take on. That is a really important step for councils to take.

In terms of the letter, I have looked closely at it and it is asking for expressions of interest only by 10 January. For those who want to move quickly, we will ask them to submit their proposals by May—that is, full proposals for reorganisation and devolution. For those who want to move more slowly, they can do that at their own pace. We would hope to get proposals across the board by autumn this year.

[The Earl of Devon (CB)]

My Lords, as a feudal hereditary being thrown out of Westminster, I am quite excited at the prospect of devolution. I have been Earl of Devon for 10 years and, in that role, have tried to understand how local government works across Devon. It is complicated and very difficult, with eight district councils, two unitaries, a county council, et cetera. I was with Exeter City Council on Monday as the announcement was being made, and people there were incredibly uncertain as to the implications for the city council and their plans going forward. Lots of people across the region are confused about the implications of this.

There is so much work to be done at local government level, not least the 1.5 million new homes—and later we are going to debate economic development. I am concerned that, with yet another change in local government, and another step in devolution, people simply will not understand where they have recourse and how it works. I still do not understand it, and I wonder what effort the Government will make to inform people, educate them and make sure that local people really feel that they understand what is happening.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I thank the noble Earl. I have already started a series of meetings with councils in local areas to understand where they are with this programme. I am happy to meet with any of them, so, if he wants to encourage his colleagues in Devon to meet me, I would be more than happy to do so. I shall take back to the department the comments that the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, and the noble Earl have made about the letter, and see whether we feel that any further clarification should be made.

Of course, there will be a programme of communication with the public, but the point about this is that it is a White Paper, so it is for consultation. If there are points in it that need clarification, I urge people to get in touch with the department, because we want to get people’s responses to this and, if there are elements that need clarifying before people feel that they can respond, we are happy to do our best to clarify those—so I do urge people to contact myself or the department.

[Lord Grantchester (Lab)]

My Lords, in this age of black holes, will mayors’ offices be adequately resourced to fulfil their potential? The newly elected mayor for Warrington and Cheshire is warmly encouraged by business locally, ensuring greater accountability and focus from local leadership on local growth plans. Previously, mayors have been targeted mostly on urban areas. The ambition from Warrington and Cheshire, with a higher proportion of rural communities, is to reach out to market towns and include prosperity across the rural economy. Can my noble friend the Minister assure us that the wider concerns of subregions in the countryside will be adequately addressed by a well-funded devolution process? For example, transport solutions beyond town boundaries need to be integrated with rural areas, with planning powers suitable for the needs of rural communities.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend. I warmly welcome the extension of mayoral arrangements into parts of our country outside metropolitan areas. I thank my noble friend and all those in Cheshire and Warrington—I met some of them earlier this week and I met them with him a couple of weeks ago—for the spirit of co-operation that has got them where they are in this process. We believe that there are huge benefits to urban and rural areas in having more powers and funding devolved to enable decisions to be made locally about what will work best for their citizens and to drive their local economies.

I can confirm the Government’s commitment to ensure that new powers are matched with real devolution of funding. On the proposed integrated settlements, we will start with Manchester, Liverpool, the north-east, South Yorkshire, the West Midlands and West Yorkshire combined authorities. All of them will receive consolidated budgets so that mayors do not have to slalom between the complex funding pots to deliver the right solutions for their communities. I look forward to this exciting programme of devolution and to continuing to work with noble Lords on the White Paper as we go forward.

Housing: Permitted Development Rights

Baroness Taylor of Stevenage Excerpts

Wednesday 18th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Crisp]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what is their policy on creating additional housing units through permitted development rights.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (Baroness Taylor of Stevenage) (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, for his Question and for all the work he has done on healthy homes. Under nationally set permitted development rights, a wide range of commercial and other buildings are able to change use without the need for a planning application. The Government acknowledge the concerns that exist about the quality of residential units created through permitted development rights, particularly office-to-residential conversions. We will continue to keep permitted development rights under review, and we are grateful to the National Housing Federation and the TCPA for highlighting some of the issues arising from poor-quality PD schemes.

[Lord Crisp (CB)]

I thank the noble Baroness for that response and for the fact that this is being kept under review. I was also pleased to hear from a government spokesman last week that there is to be

“no trade-off between supply and quality”

in respect of housing. However, as the noble Baroness said, PDR has a poor record. Some very good conversions are made but a large number suffer from safety and other problems. I want to ask two questions. How will the noble Baroness ensure that that poor track record is not just continued into the future? Also, in reviewing it, will she meet some of the people who have already done so and come to conclusions about it to ensure that there is indeed no trade-off between housing supply and quality?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, the Government’s aim in the delivery of the 1.5 million homes is to deliver good quality, well-designed, sustainable homes and places that everyone can be proud of. I have already met both the TCPA and the National Housing Federation, which have been campaigning on this. I am very aware of some of the poor practice that has occurred, and we will continue to advocate for the principles of good design, as set out in the National Design Guide and the National Model Design Code. As I say, we keep permitted development under review.

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, it must make sense to use redundant buildings to provide good-quality accommodation for those in need, but is there not a loophole in the current fire safety regulations? These apply when a commercial building is converted into flats but not when industrial buildings or storage units are. Should we not use the Renters’ Rights Bill to close this loophole?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, the Planning Gateway One fire safety requirements apply to applications for planning permission for relevant buildings. To apply some of the principles to permitted development, there was a prior approval on fire safety impacts in 2021 that applies to class MA: commercial, business and services to residential. It is not, however, as detailed as the requirements for a planning application. For example, it does not require the completion of a fire safety form. We need to continue to look at these issues and to make sure that permitted development is completely safe from fire.

[Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate the Government and my noble friend the Minister on the ambitious housing targets to meet housing need. What assessment has been made of mixed funding models using private, public, and banking and hedge fund sources to construct those houses in order to provide for the great housing need throughout the country?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My noble friend makes an excellent point about funding for affordable housing. Even in a very tight budget round, the Government have allocated an additional £500 million towards affordable housing, which brings the total up to around £3 billion altogether. But we need to consider all sources of funding. I spoke to a housing investment forum in the City of London just a few weeks ago, and there is great interest in this area; and of course, we still need to look at pension funds further for local investment to drive the housing market.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

My Lords, surely it is the Government’s mission to create decent homes and not the slums of the future, and I am at a loss to know why the Government are procrastinating on this. Surely it is time to insist on full planning permission for the larger schemes, or at least to revert to the regulations that were in place before 2012.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I take the noble Baroness’s point; we need to keep this continually under review. Some of the permitted development homes have been of fair quality and have provided homes for people. But we need to continue to press that all new homes delivered through permitted development rights must provide adequate light, meet nationally described space standards and be decent, fit and safe for the people who live in them. We will continue to do that. Where there are bigger schemes, equally, they must meet those requirements.

[Lord Ravensdale (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as listed in the register. Running through the creation of additional housing are upcoming policy decisions on regulating embodied carbon. Can the Minister update the House on the research under way in her department, when it will report and when the associated consultation will be published?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord, and for his time in meeting with me to discuss embodied carbon. We have been talking to the construction industry and to developers across the board, and there are some complex issues involved. I know the noble Lord is doing work with stakeholders as well, and I look forward to working with him further in the new year. I believe we have a meeting scheduled for early in 2025 to discuss this further.

[Lord Jamieson (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a councillor in central Bedfordshire. To deliver the housing this country needs, we need to ensure that planning permissions and allocations are being built out in a timely manner. Yesterday, I asked the Minister whether the Government will provide local councils with adequate powers to ensure that allocated and permissioned sites actually get built, and she responded that there is a whole section on sanctions in the report. Can the Minister tell me which section that is in the NPPF, as I could find in it no meaningful additional tools being provided to councils to ensure build-out?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord and apologise for misleading him yesterday: it is not in the NPPF but in the accompanying notes. There are powers that local government can use, including completion orders and so on, to encourage developers to build out when necessary. I will provide him with a detailed written response about all the powers that are available to local government to do that.

[The Lord Bishop of St Albans]

My Lords, can the Minister tell us what steps her department is taking to ensure that enough of the homes being built under the PDR are affordable for local people in rural areas?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I thank the right reverend Prelate for that question. PDR tends to apply where there are brownfield sites to be developed because they are conversions, usually, from existing buildings. There has been a change to introduce that principle for agricultural buildings as well. I will try to get back to him with a specific answer on whether the department knows how much take-up there has been of that provision. We have made provision in the new national planning policy framework for ensuring that planning policies and decisions are responsive to local circumstances in rural areas and support housing developments that reflect local needs. That is a more general requirement. I will get back to him on whether the agricultural permitted development has had any traction.

[Lord Taylor of Goss Moor (LD)]

My Lords, I refer the Minister to the issue of rural businesses—shops, in many villages, that are a vital part of the vibrancy of those communities and services—which are being converted through PDR without permission and against the will of local communities. Shops are not protected beyond one within a kilometre.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

It is very important that we focus on the facilities in local areas, but this is a commercial market and where shops are not able to achieve the market they need, permitted development regulations will occur. In reviewing the PDRs, that is one of the issues we need to focus on—whether any further protections are necessary, particularly for assets such as rural assets.

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

Referring back to the original Question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, can my noble friend confirm that the code will include noise insulation as well as other measures that are crucial to good health, on the grounds that noise nuisance can be deeply detrimental to the well-being of individuals and lead to much anti-social behaviour?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

There are a wide range of issues that we need to think about in terms of permitted development, and noise nuisance is one of them. All new homes are required to meet current building regulations, including on fire safety, irrespective of the route to planning permission. However, some building regulations differ or do not apply where homes are delivered through material change of use rather than new build. That applies whether homes are delivered through permitted development or following an application for planning permission. All these issues—noise, fire safety and so on—need to be considered in the light of permitted development regulations.

Building Homes

Baroness Taylor of Stevenage Excerpts

Tuesday 17th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

My Lords, I too have relevant interests, primarily as a councillor in a metropolitan authority in west Yorkshire.

This is the season of good will, so I am going to start by sharing the areas of agreement with the Minister. There is an agreement in principle on the fundamental need for considerably more housing units, and we on these Benches broadly agree with the total numbers being proposed. We agree that housebuilding is a stimulant for economic growth, although not on its own. We agree with the notion of strategic planning at a sub-regional or mayoral level, and we agree that all councils should have an up-to-date local plan. I am still shocked that only 30% do; how that has escaped past Governments, I have no idea.

Now I will have to move on to the areas where there is less agreement. First, on strategic planning, there has to be a greater element of democratic and community involvement in making judgments about areas and sites within a strategic plan. The single mayor and leaders system simply does not enable that. Will the Minister spell out how the Government anticipate community involvement and wider democratic involvement in developing such plans?

The second area of less agreement—the Minister will not be surprised to hear me say this—is that there is a constant confusion in government thinking, probably deliberate, between so-called affordable housing and social housing. There is a need for about 150,000 homes for social rent every year. That is essential, and it must be a priority, so why is it not? Why does the plan not say that, within the 370,000 homes the Government are committing to, they will commit to build whatever number they choose—I would choose 150,000—of homes for social rent?

That brings me on to land use, which we are now colour-coding, apparently. Who thought we would colour-code land use? Green belt, grey belt and brown belt—well, brownfield. The NPPF accepts that green belt has a role to play. That definition of green belt is being nibbled away at, though, and, as the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, suggested, in rural areas there could be considerable use of green-belt land where there is not already brownfield or grey belt. I am not sure how acceptable that is going to be to those local communities. Local plans currently have to consider the green-belt boundary. How do the Government anticipate that that will now work, given what is said in the NPPF?

The grey belt, our next colour, is very grey because it is not very well defined. I was at a seminar this morning on all this, where it was suggested that it is so poorly defined that it will be open to constant legal challenge as it stands. Perhaps the Minister will spell out how the Government will get greater definition of the grey belt.

It must be 25 years ago or so that I first heard the phrase “brownfield first”. That is interesting, because in my own town there is still a large area of brownfield land that has planning consent but has still not been built on.

I shall now move away from land use and on to the planning process. It seems to me that we are moving to a more top-down planning approach, and I do not think that is acceptable to local people and their democratic representatives. Power currently remains in the hands of landowners; they can still offer up their sites in the system and challenge local plans, as has been said. The major housebuilders have the power to determine what is or is not built. How will the Government influence or constrain that power, so that the types of housing tenures defined by local councils are actually built by developers? Unless we do that, we are not going to get, as the Statement says, houses in the numbers and types of tenures that we need.

I turn to the issue of the five-year supply, the lack of which leaves local councils open to speculative building. It has always struck me that the five-year supply ought to include sites that already have permission but have not been built or even started. That is a game developers play: they get planning permission and then they can say, “There is not a five-year supply”, and more sites are allocated but we still not have the homes we desperately need. I hope that the Government are considering dealing with that sleight of hand by developers.

Finally, I emphasise that we on these Benches will completely oppose any suggestion that reduces the democratic nature of our planning committees. Planning committees have an important role to play. They enable a local voice to be heard. They enable the experience and knowledge of local people to be shared, and I will give one example. Where I am, of course, there are a lot of Victorian mineshafts, which are not recorded. Fortunately for a builder, some local people knew exactly where they were, which is not where he thought they were. That would not have come out unless there had been a planning committee where they could speak. We need a local voice, local decisions and local influence. I hope that the noble Baroness agrees.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (Baroness Taylor of Stevenage) (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to both the noble Lord and the noble Baroness for their questions. I have only six minutes left, so I shall probably struggle to answer all of them in the time allotted, but please be assured that I will respond in writing to anything that I do not manage to cover.

In our first month in office, we proposed this bold set of reforms to overhaul the planning system. We have met our commitment, following extensive consultation, to meet publication by the end of the year. This will support our ambitious target of building 1.5 million new homes this Parliament. We needed to grasp the nettle of planning reform to both boost housing supply and unleash the economic growth that we want, and I hope that is incontrovertible. We received over 10,000 responses and have had extensive engagement with housebuilders, affordable housing providers, local authorities and other organisations, which led to the publication yesterday of this plan.

Before I set out a number of the important areas in which we have made changes, I will touch on some of the proposals that we intend to implement unamended, because they answer some of the questions raised by the noble Lord and the noble Baroness. First, we have reversed the anti-supply changes introduced by the last Government a year ago and reverted to mandatory housing targets. In response to the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, I say that we have done detailed work on how to set up these targets, and I will come on to some more information about how we are doing that in a moment.

Secondly, we have made explicit the importance of growth supporting development, from labs to data centres, to supply chains and logistics. In the same vein, we have made it clear that the default position for renewable energy deployment should be “yes”. Thirdly, we have strongly promoted mixed tenure developments, reflecting the robust evidence which attests to the fact that they build out faster and create better, more diverse communities.

Fourthly, we have made a series of changes to bolster affordable housing delivery and enable local authorities to determine the right mix of affordable housing for their communities. That includes separating out houses for social rent and affordable housing, so local councils when making their plans are now able to do that. That will support our commitment to deliver the biggest increase in social and affordable housing in a generation.

Then there are four important areas where we have refined our proposals. I will speak first about housing targets. We made it clear when we launched the consultation in July that restoring a mandatory standard method for assessing housing needs would be insufficient if the method itself was not up to the job. We proposed a bold change, increasing the total annual target from 300,000 to 370,000, ending the reliance on the decade-old population projections and removing the arbitrary 35% urban uplift that resulted in the skewed national distribution.

We fully intend to maintain that level of ambition set out in July, but we heard a clear view that we should do more to target housing growth on the places where affordability pressures were the most acute, and that is the way we have designed the formula. We have made the method more responsive to demand, redistributing housing targets towards those places where housing is least affordable, while maintaining the overall target envelope.

I turn next to reforms to the green belt, another subject on which noble Lords questioned me. Ours is a “brownfield first” approach to development. As a result of a number of targeted changes we are making to the framework and our proposals for a brownfield passport, we are prioritising and fast-tracking building on previously developed urban land wherever possible, but we know that there are simply not enough sites on brownfield land registers to deliver the volume of homes that we need, let alone enough that are viable and in the right locations.

In the summer, we proposed that local authorities should take a sequential approach to releasing land to meet their housing needs—so brownfield first, followed by low-quality land in the green belt, and only then higher-performing land. We have therefore set out a clearer description of how to assess whether land meets the definition of grey belt, and we will provide further guidance to local authorities in the new year—a point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson—to support them with green-belt reviews.

At the centre of our green-belt reforms lie our golden rules. They are designed to make sure that where green-belt land is released, the public derive real benefit from development on it, including more affordable housing to meet local need.

Our final policy takes a different approach to managing variation in land values. We have adjusted social housing need due to consultation responses so, rather than a single 50% target, we are introducing that 15 percentage-point premium on top of the targets set in local plans. That will be up to a maximum of 50%. Because that means the target itself will be responsive to local circumstances, we will be restricting the ability for site-specific viability assessments until such time as we have amended viability guidance in spring next year.

The noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, referred to changes to the presumption in favour of sustainable development. The presumption sits at the heart of the NPPF and means that where a local authority has underdelivered or an up-to-date plan is not in place, the balance of decision-making is tilted in favour of approval. We are determined to ensure that where the presumption applies, it will have real teeth. At the same time, we are clear that development consented through it must be consistent with the clear requirements in the national policy relating to sustainability, density, design and the provision of affordable homes. The changes we have made deliver on both these fronts.

Finally, in respect of the local authorities at an advanced stage of plan making, we have sought views on how to deal with those and have made proposals on transitional arrangements for local authorities in those late stages. We recognise that we are asking much from local authorities. The noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, referred to capacity and capability. That is why across dedicated local plan funding, the planning capacity and capability support announced at the Budget—income raised from fees—will inject more than £100 million into the system in the coming year.

With focus and determination, we have pushed on to ensure that we put in place a planning system geared towards meeting housing need in full and unleashing economic growth. I understand the points about community engagement; there are no real changes to the involvement that communities are able to have in plan-making processes. In fact, there is a specific part of the National Planning Policy Framework that refers to neighbourhood plans, and we want to support and encourage further engagement in those as well.

As I said, I did not think that I was going to get through all the questions in the time permitted, but anything that I have not picked up on I will respond to in writing. In terms of the buildout that the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, referred to, there is a whole section in the report setting out what sanctions are available to local authorities where developers have failed to build out.

I hope I have set out as clearly as possible what we have been doing with the National Planning Policy Framework and thank noble Lords very much for their contributions.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I remind the House of my declared interest as chair of the Cambridgeshire Development Forum. Indeed, I am glad that the Minister has seen for herself the scale and the quality of the developments taking place in Cambridgeshire. Among those building out on those sites, one of the principal difficulties is that the Section 106 agreements for the delivery of affordable housing are not often able to be supported by contracts with registered providers.

Has the Minister seen the report from the Home Builders Federation today, which says that there are 17,000 such affordable homes that are not contracted for by RPs? Will she respond to that report? The Home Builders Federation is asking for a Written Ministerial Statement that would encourage local planning authorities to use cascade mechanisms under the Section 106 agreements to promote the delivery of those affordable homes. Will she and other Ministers direct Homes England to step in and take over these contracts, and themselves maintain the delivery of affordable homes?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, for that question, because in a housing crisis where we have so many people in need of affordable homes, it has been such a shame that Section 106 homes that could have been funded were unable to be picked up because of the lack of capacity within affordable housing providers.

The Government have been very aware of the problems affecting the sale of Section 106 affordable housing. Alongside the National Planning Policy Framework, Homes England also launched a new clearing service to help unblock the delivery of these homes. This is a great role for Homes England to fulfil. The Government are now calling on all developers with uncontracted Section 106 affordable homes to proactively and pragmatically engage with this new service. We hope that this will be able to unlock some of the stalled Section 106 affordable homes which we know are there, waiting for those families who are desperate for housing. I hope that this service will take things forward.

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, this Statement is about building the homes we need, but it talks about housing targets, not targets for homes, particularly homes for families to live in. What is the Government’s view on office conversions, potentially of poor quality, masquerading as homes when they are not and are simply contributing to a 370,000 a year housing target? What steps will the Government take to ensure that homes are of sufficient quality to merit the term “homes”, as opposed simply to being part of the achievement of a housing target?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord for his question. We have an Oral Question on exactly the same topic tomorrow, when I am sure I will be able to give a fuller answer.

The noble Lord is quite right. As I come from a new town, I recognise the benefit of not just designing the homes but planning the areas where they are to be situated. They should, of course, be sustainable, healthy and have all the infrastructure that everybody needs. The Government are committed to taking steps to ensure that we not only build more homes but that they are high quality, well designed and sustainable. That is why we have made changes to the NPPF to make clear the importance of achieving well-designed places, and how this can be achieved holistically through local design policies, design codes and guidance. We will be pushing this forward further in the new year.

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, that there is much in the Statement to be welcomed. It is right that the Government should have a target of 1.5 million, although it is an ambitious one. If any Government are to hit a national target, they must have the levers through setting mandatory targets for local authorities. This was my Government’s policy until 2022. Of course, I take the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, that these targets must be right. I welcome the recognition that, without some erosion of the green belt, we are not going to get anywhere near the target.

Where I have some difficulty with the Statement is reading it in conjunction with the plans for devolution. Under the Statement which the noble Baroness has repeated, the basic unit is the local plan, and all the districts have to get ahead with theirs. Under the devolution White Paper, they must find partners—other districts—in order to reach the 500,000 target; then, presumably, there will have to be a new district plan for that. At the same time, the Government want to impose mayors everywhere. We read on page 48 that the mayors will be responsible for strategic planning and housing growth. Later on, it says that mayors will have

“an increasingly central role in housing delivery.”

Then, of course, the mayor can set up a development corporation and override the objections of any district. On top of this, the Government can set up a new town corporation. It is not absolutely clear to me how all the moving parts of the planning system fit together.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

There are clear links between the new National Planning Policy Framework and the English devolution programme. The English Devolution White Paper, which was published yesterday, is a consultation document, and we will be taking views on it as time goes on. The noble Lord, Lord Young, is right to say that there is a proposal in that White Paper for mayors to have strategic spatial planning powers. Across those sub-regional areas—we are talking about areas with a population of around 1.5 million—they will be looking at transport, infra- structure, probably housing numbers across the whole area, and other issues that are strategic in nature.

I do not believe that this undermines in any way the status of local plans. Where there is local government reorganisation, there will be some consolidation of plans to make this work at the level of the new councils. The strength of the local plan will be retained in determining where the allocations in the strategic spatial plan will be located. I do not think the intention of spatial planning is to undermine local plans. I remember the days of regional planning; we are not going back to that, because people felt it was too big a scale. It makes a lot of sense to do this at sub-regional level. When planning an economy, infrastructure and housing growth, you start at sub-regional level and then the local plans fit in with that.

[Lord Sikka (Lab)]

My Lords, the average house price is 8.6 times the average household disposable income. Last week, the ONS said that only about 10% of the population could afford to buy a house. This means that the Government will have to find ways to drastically reduce property prices and/or drastically increase the workers’ share of GDP, which cannot be done without reducing the capital share of GDP. It would be helpful to know how the Government are going to proceed.

The second part of my question follows from a Question I asked last week. On 11 December, I drew attention to some of the resource constraints on housebuilding and asked the Minister to

“publish a detailed report showing how each of the constraints on housebuilding is to be alleviated”.—[Official Report, 11/12/24; col. 1762.]

The Minister did not directly answer that question. I am assuming that someone somewhere has done some kind of risk analysis. If so, can the Minister now assure the House that the report will be published?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend for both his questions. We are very aware of the point he raises about the affordability of housing, which is why, in spite of a very difficult Budget round, we have put a great deal of money into enhancing the ability to deliver affordable housing and social housing—a total of around £1.3 billion, with £500 million announced in the Budget. Some of the changes we have made to the planning process—for example, to require local authorities to determine not just how many homes they need but the tenure of those homes—will help with that as well.

To identify the obstacles to housebuilding, the housing accelerator programme has, with the industry, local authorities and other stakeholders, looked at what the key barriers have been to delivering the homes we need. It is working with specific sites where building has stalled and more generally to look at the barriers and how we overcome them. We have identified capacity in the planning system as one of those barriers, which is why we have put in additional funding this year to improve the capability and capacity of planning departments. We will be working further with our colleagues in the Department for Education to improve the number of planners coming through the training system. We have made changes to the planning fee process as part of this which will increase the quantum of funding that local authorities will have available in the planning process. The new homes accelerator has looked across all those barriers.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, you cannot live in a planning permission and you cannot wish new homes magically into existence. All the encouragement in the world will not help if builders cannot find the staff, materials and finance to put roofs over people’s heads. I have led a council, and I really want to ensure that we can put this rhetoric into reality.

In cities where Labour tells us that people want to live, the targets have been reduced. That makes the mountain to climb elsewhere even steeper. I will highlight the case of Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole, where the new targets are nearly three times the best housing delivery that that district borough has ever achieved. Does the Minister think that setting these unachievable targets brings the planning system into disrepute?

I want to place on record a story I read in the Financial Times this week about the best quarterly housing completions ever in the last 50 years. In 1978, 75,000 houses were completed in a single quarter. The targets mean that, for the rest of this Parliament, a sustained completion of 90,000 is needed. The Minister and I have worked closely over the years to get homes built. I have helped her in a small way with PINS; she has helped me with parishioners. My concern is that the Government are pinning the blame on councils. That is unfair, and I think she knows that.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

What steps will the Government take to ensure that the national agencies that have single-handedly held up hundreds of thousands of homes being delivered over the last three years—such as Natural England, Highways England and National Rail, or whatever it is called nowadays—will roll up their sleeves and stop blocking building so we can get the nation building?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord. I gave an explanation of how we set the targets in response to the question from the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson. The fact is that everyone and every area has to play a part in this if we are to deliver these challenging housing targets. It is important that the new formula takes account of affordability and the demand for housing in local areas. Where they have challenging targets, it is because there is a demand in those areas, including a demand for more affordable housing.

We all know that statutory consultees play an important role in the planning system, providing advice on technical matters to ensure that new development is good quality, safe and situated in the right place. It is important that statutory consultees play their role too, to ensure that the planning system supports the housing and infrastructure development that we need. We will work with them over the next year to achieve that. Part of our work on the new homes accelerator will be to look at the statutory consultees to try to understand why the delays have come into the system, in relation to the responses of statutory consultees, and to see how we can work with them to alleviate some of those blockages and barriers.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I declare my position as a vice-president of the Local Government Association. My first question follows on from that of the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, and her focus on social housing and genuinely affordable housing. The Green Party has a target of 150,000 homes a year for that. This Statement is all about so-called affordable housing. Have the Government taken account of the housing Select Committee report from March this year, which looks at the increasing and deeply concerning problems with shared purchase, also known as “part rent, part buy”? That is very much included in those so-called affordable targets. The report finds that

“rents, service charges, and the complexity of … leases make shared ownership an unbearable reality for many people”.

Will the Government take action to deal with this issue, which surely has to be a big part of the affordable housing target?

On the other side of the target issue, are the Government taking adequate account of the physical limits of this country? In Cambridge, a major development was recently turned down because there was no water supply. Many places are thinking about building on flood plains. The flood plain is not beside the river; it is part of the river. Where will we find suitable locations and how will we have the resources needed to make this possible?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I thank the noble Baroness. She will know that we are working through a process—for example, some changes were made to leasehold arrangements. She is quite right to say that the tenure of a property is critical, and we do not want to trap people into tenures that cause them problems. We are working through the process of designing a new Bill on commonhold. Where there are issues with shared ownership, we will look at them. We are trying to eradicate some of the more knotty issues people have had with that type of property ownership. Sometimes people think that they are buying a home, but some elements of leasehold tenure mean that they do not have the ownership of the property that they thought they were buying into. We are very aware of that and have taken account of it, and we will work on that further in the new year as we make our way towards the new commonhold Bill. There will be plenty of opportunity to comment on that as we go through the process.

I turn to the physical limits that the noble Baroness described. I made two recent visits to Cambridge: one to visit the development forum of the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, and another to look at South Cambridgeshire. The great thing is that some very good and innovative solutions are coming up there to look at the water issues. That does not mean that that is everything we need to do, but solutions are coming forward. I do not have time to repeat it all now, but there is a big section in the report about flood mitigation and how we are tackling the issue of flooding. That is all contained in the new NPPF. I hope the noble Baroness will look at that. If she has further questions afterwards, she can by all means come back to me.

These problems are not going away. We need to be creative with the solutions we provide, because we have to build the homes that people need. I add that about 10% of the country is currently built on, while 13% is green belt. There should be land to build these houses on.

Planning Committees: Reform

Baroness Taylor of Stevenage Excerpts

Thursday 12th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jamieson (Con)]

My Lords, the Government committed in their manifesto to involving local authorities in the planning process. However, the Deputy Prime Minister recently announced that applications that comply with local development plans will not have to get approval from local planning committees. Given that sites in local plans often have very little detail associated with them, how will the Government ensure that local voices are heard throughout the planning process?

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (Baroness Taylor of Stevenage) (Lab)]

My Lords, I want to be clear that I do not think local authorities should have the finger pointed at them for holding up planning. However, applications can get stuck, and we need to do all we can to make the processes as efficient and effective as possible. We recognise the great importance of democratic oversight of planning decisions. This is a working paper for discussion with the sector, and the changes we propose will support that plan-led system by ensuring that planning committees operate as effectively as possible and encourage better-quality development that is aligned with local development plans. The paper puts forward for discussion with the sector three models for how this could work. It is not the intention to exclude local authority members but to get them, and the public, more involved at local plan stage, so that they can influence things at an earlier stage in the process before detailed applications come forward.

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

My Lords, strategic planning is very important but very difficult for members of the community to grasp. Often, local residents do not get involved until there is a real planning application in front of them, on an allocated site in the local plan. Does the Minister agree that it is at that practical level that local residents have local knowledge that can positively and constructively influence the outcome of a planning application at that stage? Does she agree that we should not deny this useful way for local people to help shape their area?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I agree with the noble Baroness that the voice of local people and local councillors in the planning process is absolutely vital. There is no intention to change the consultation rules on planning applications. Representations will be considered by any decision-maker in the process. The best way for councillors and communities to engage in the development proposed for their areas is through the local plan process, which will be agreed by the council. Where a controversial development is proposed that has not been planned for, councillors will continue to play a key role in representing the voice of their communities. There will be no change to the ability of local people to inform and make their views known about planning applications; this is about speeding up the decision-making.

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, is not one of the problems with the planning system that a planning application is made which is in clear conformity with the local plan, the planning officers recommend approval but, because it is unpopular locally, the planning committee turn it down in order for the Secretary of State to take the blame? That just wastes a lot of time. Will the proposals that are being considered deal with that?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

The noble Lord is quite right to pick up this point. It is the intention that, where applications are in conformity with the local plan, a speedy decision should be taken. The whole point of these reforms is intended to make that much easier, without removing the ability of local councillors and communities to make their views known on it. This is a working paper for discussion with the sector, and we hope that the sector will put its views forward. The intention is to speed up the process, not to have planning applications stuck in the system.

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

My Lords, I had the honour to chair the Select Committee on the review of the Licensing Act 2003. One of our most powerful conclusions was that planning and licensing committees should be merged, and that there should be consistent and frequent training of planning and licensing officers before they take their place on these committees. Is that something that the Government might look favourably on introducing? It would increase the effectiveness of the local voice and the way in which planning and licensing committees operate.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

The noble Baroness is absolutely right. I must admit that, at my local authority, you had to have training before you went on the planning committee, and I had assumed that that was the case everywhere. It is not. Part of the consultation on the working paper is the introduction of mandatory training. We are considering a wide range of implementation options, and we look forward to working with stakeholders. There are great examples of training around the country. However, it is inconsistent—more inconsistent than I had realised—and we need to find out where the best practice is so that we can work nationally on that issue. I totally agree with her point that the public will have more confidence if they know that people have had training.

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)]

My Lords, I agree with my noble friend that local plans are central to the whole planning process and a vital way of involving local people in what the overall future of their area should look like. Is she able to tell us how many of those local plans are actually up to date? What work is outstanding from local authorities to make sure that they all are up to date?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My noble friend is quite right to mention that. The Government have a stated intention of making sure that all local authorities have an up-to-date local plan in place. That was not the case when we came into government. A great deal of work has gone on with local authorities to ensure that they are making progress on their local plans. In the National Planning Policy Framework publication today, we see more enforcement steps that we intend to take if local authorities have not produced their local plans. The Secretary of State has been quite clear that, if encouragement does not work, we will use our powers to step in and do it for people. I hope local authorities will realise that the best way to make their local plans is with their councillors and their local communities.

[The Lord Bishop of St Albans]

My Lords, I welcome many of the announcements from the Government today in the NPPF, especially on flooding-risk policy. However, I am concerned about the protection of agricultural land, not least around the vital need to keep the highest levels of food security in this country. Therefore, why was the decision made not to include in the NPPF explicit protection of the best and most versatile land?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

When authorities do their housing needs assessment, they will have the opportunity to state why they think that the housing numbers they have been given are too high. If one of those reasons is that they have high-grade agricultural land for food production then they can put that forward as part of their mitigation for having some reduction in the housing numbers. The process is in place to allow authorities to do that; in the same way as would be done for large areas of national landscape in an area, they will be able to put that forward as a mitigation.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords, the Minister helpfully said at Question Time that she would be looking at blockages to housing development. Today, she has emphasised that the proposals we are discussing are out for consultation. As part of that, will she examine whether judicial review is overused in planning cases? This can cause delay and increases local authority costs, and other costs, to almost the sole benefit of the legal profession involved in the judicial review.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I thank the noble Baroness for her question. I am not a lawyer, so I do not want to get involved in discussions about the merits of judicial review. People need to have some recourse to law at some stage. I will take her question back, because she makes a very good point. If she wants to put in a submission as a response to the working paper, I would be very pleased to consider it.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

My Lords, the Deputy Prime Minister has flagged up the role of elected mayors of combined authorities. As someone who lamented the coalition scrapping regional spatial strategies, I see this as a possible way of replacing those. Can the Minister perhaps flesh out a little how she sees that layer working?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I thank the noble Baroness for her question. There certainly needs to be a strategic planning level above the level of local plans. She can expect to see more news about that in the English devolution White Paper that will be coming out shortly.

Housebuilding Targets

Baroness Taylor of Stevenage Excerpts

Thursday 12th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jamieson]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what tools they will provide to local authorities to support the delivery of mandatory house-building targets.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (Baroness Taylor of Stevenage) (Lab)]

My Lords, the Government have announced a £46 million package of investment into the planning system to support capacity and capability in local planning authorities, including the recruitment and training of 300 planners and the development of the skills needed to implement reforms and unlock housing delivery. We have also consulted on proposals to increase resources in the planning system by increasing planning fees and empowering local authorities to set their own planning fees so that they can carry out their vital role in supporting economic growth and delivering 1.5 million new homes during this Parliament.

[Lord Jamieson (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as laid out in the register. I thank the Minister for her Answer. My particular concern is houses that have planning permission and sites that have been allocated that are not being brought forward. The LGA estimates that there are around 1 million houses with planning permission and around a further 1 million allocated sites that have not yet been brought forward for planning permission. What will this Government do to help councils get landowners, promoters and developers to bring forward those sites?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

The noble Lord is quite right to raise this. I am pleased to say that we have today published the National Planning Policy Framework, which sets out a broad framework of advice for local authorities. This is a particular issue, and we have set up our acceleration scheme to make sure that those sites that are stalled can be brought into use as quickly as possible. The department will work with all areas that have stalled housing sites to find out what the blockages are and make sure that we support them as they work to get those sites released as quickly as possible.

[Baroness Winterton of Doncaster (Lab)]

My Lords, my noble friend the Minister referred in her Answer to the issue of local skills, particularly for young people, which will be absolutely essential to fulfil the targets. But this will require cross-departmental working to assist local authorities to draw up strategies involving local employers, schools, UTCs and colleges. Can she assure me that this work is taking place at governmental level to help with devolving powers?

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend. I am happy to assure her that we are working across government and with industry to deliver sufficient high-quality training opportunities and build a diverse workforce that is fit for the future. She is quite right to identify that this is a real issue in getting the 1.5 million homes built. To support business and boost opportunity, we are transforming the apprenticeship levy into a growth and skills levy, which will allow employers to invest in a wider range of training and empower them to train and upskill workforces for current and future challenges.

[Baroness Grender (LD)]

My Lords, does the Minister agree that the large housebuilding companies have too much power when it comes to deciding what homes to build, where to build and when to build? Can she tell us how her Government’s NPPF can possibly be delivered without strong and effective “use it or lose it” sanctions to get the 1 million homes built that are shovel-ready, with planning permission already given?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

The noble Baroness is quite right to point to that as an issue. We have set up the housing acceleration unit in the department, which I mentioned earlier, to help with that. We want to be quite clear within the National Planning Policy Framework that, where sites are allocated, they should be built out as quickly as possible. There will be follow-up where that is not the case.

[Lord Anderson of Swansea (Lab)]

My Lords—

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Manzoor (Con)]

My Lords, what consumer protection is in place for those buying properties off-plan that are never completed? I understand that this issue is currently unregulated. Will the Government think about bringing this under regulation so that those consumer protections are in place?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, I understand the point the noble Baroness is making. It is important that consumers are reassured that, when they purchase a property, they are going to receive it as purchased. There is a long-standing property law, caveat emptor, which means it is for the buyer to check out these issues and make sure, through their legal advice, that they are getting what they pay for. I will take back the issue about consumer protections and see if there is anything further that can be done.

[Lord Anderson of Swansea (Lab)]

My Lords, what are the assumptions about the average time it will take before the welcome new numbers of planning officers are in place?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, my noble friend is right that there is no planning officer tree out there that we can go and pick planning officers from—I wish there were. Highly skilled planners are fundamental to running a proactive, efficient planning service for the communities they serve and ensuring that new developments are well-designed and facilitate local growth. We have set up a scheme with the Local Government Association to make sure that we are recruiting and training 300 graduate and apprentice planners, and encouraging some of the planners who have stepped out of the public planning sector to come back in wherever possible. That has proved successful so far, and we hope we will continue to increase recruitment at a level that will support planning for local authorities.

[Baroness Browning (Con)]

My Lords, has the Minister had discussions about the landholdings owned by the Church Commissioners and the Duchy of Cornwall, something very important in the West Country? Is there going to be equal compliance on those landholdings as elsewhere in the country?

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords—

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, I understand that the Church Commissioners are keen to have discussions, and that will be the case. All land within a local plan area is ready for consideration, but I understand the point the noble Baroness is making. I know that the most reverend Primate who was on the Benches previously was very keen to encourage those discussions, and we will continue those. I hope the Church will continue to be keen to support us in our aim to deliver the housing that the country needs.

[The Lord Bishop of St Albans]

My Lords, if the potential of rural exception sites were to be fully realised, it would make a transformative change for small rural communities, not least in providing the additional affordable housing that is desperately needed. It is frustrating because just before I came in I was trying to read the NPPF response to the consultation but I could not find it. Are His Majesty’s Government committed to introducing a national development management policy for rural exception sites?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I am grateful to the Right Reverend Prelate for that question. We understand the need for particular consideration of rural sites and rural exception sites. I apologise that he was not able to access the NPPF on the GOV.UK website. I hope it is there now and that he will be able to look at it later on today. In the spring, we will produce a long-term housing strategy that will contain detail of how we think rural sites should be considered. In order to give him a specific answer on the NDMP, I will go back and make sure he has a written answer.

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, what are the Government doing to ensure that small construction firms play a full part in providing the housing that is needed? Further to the question from the noble Baroness, Lady Winterton, how they will have access to the skills they need to fulfil that role? I apologise for my earlier overenthusiasm.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

We are taking a number of steps to encourage the use of SME building companies. Homes England has considerable control of the funding for affordable homes, and we have encouraged it to break down the packages on large sites so that they are suitable for SME builders. We will be providing funding to support SME housebuilders as well. In relation to skills, I refer to my earlier answer. They apply equally to the smaller builders in the sector as they do to large housebuilders.

[Lord Cashman (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, housebuilding is part of the process of dealing with those who are homeless. However, I have deep concerns about the range of evictions, particularly those faced by houseboat owners and residents. I have already raised this issue with the Government. What plans do they have, if any, to deal with the appalling eviction notices faced by people the length and breadth of the country, particularly at Chelsea, an historic site where people are now being forced from their homes—houseboats—where they have lived for decades?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I am grateful to my noble friend for raising this important issue, on which he wrote to me this morning. I do not have an answer for him yet, but I will write to him on that subject. I drove past the site at Chelsea the other day, and the driver mentioned to me that this was a big issue in that area. If my noble friend will bear with me while I get a written response for him, I will give him a full answer.

Homes: Existing Communities

Baroness Taylor of Stevenage Excerpts

Thursday 12th December 2024 Grand Committee

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (Baroness Taylor of Stevenage) (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very pleased to respond for the Government on this important topic. What an interesting debate it has been. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson, for leading on the debate and for the ideas he expressed. I am grateful to all noble Lords for their contributions. I hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, will take our best wishes back to the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill; I hope that things are better for her over the weekend.

Our country is in the midst of a housing crisis after decades of not building enough homes. The impacts of this undersupply of homes can be seen in rising rents and housing costs, placing the dream of home ownership out of reach for too many and increasing homelessness, overcrowding and poverty. We have a crisis of affordability, making it harder for people to live and work where they want to and hampering economic growth across the country.

The noble Lord, Lord Wolfson, referred to the thorny issue of hope value. I thank him for his positive response to our targets and share his frustration about the system. In fact, the CMA report on housebuilding set out clearly that the market has not worked for housing. Leaving it to the market just has not worked—but if Next built homes, perhaps, who knows? To address the housing crisis, we need historic levels of housebuilding, but it is vital that the homes we deliver are well designed and contribute to strong and healthy communities where people can work and thrive.

I will respond thematically first then cover the issues that were raised with me. On housebuilding, I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Mendelsohn for his comments. The Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister have been clear that delivering 1.5 million homes over the Parliament is stretching. We know that it is a challenge but we make no apology for the scale of our ambition. We need to pull every lever to deliver the homes that this country desperately needs. To do so, we will make more land with planning permission available and reform the market so that it is more competitive and delivers more homes faster.

We will not achieve our aims if we remain reliant on a speculative model of development that fosters slow build-out and poor competition. Next year, we will set out our vision for a reformed, more diverse housebuilding system in a long-term housing strategy. At the heart of our ambition is delivering the biggest boost to social and affordable housebuilding in a generation. That is why we have made a down payment on this through our £500 million investment in the affordable homes programme in order to deliver 5,000 new social and affordable homes, taking its annual budget to more than £3 billion next year.

The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, mentioned the development opportunities in releasing grey-belt land and supporting communities through our planning golden rules. That is how we will unlock some of this development. We are taking the important step of reviewing the post-war green-belt policy to make sure that it better meets the needs of present and future generations. I think that the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, may have misunderstood the policy. We have made it completely clear that development must look to brownfield first. I totally agree with him about the density of building but we know that brownfield alone will never be enough to meet our needs, even if we provide the brownfield passports we have been talking about. This is why we are introducing reforms that will make it clear that local authorities otherwise unable to meet their development needs should review their green belt in order to identify opportunities to create affordable, sustainable, green and well-designed developments. In doing so, low-quality brownfield and grey-belt sites in the green belt should be prioritised as opportunities for development before we even look at proper green-belt sites.

I turn to the important topic of housing quality. Noble Lords have made a number of points on this; I will come to them in a moment. It is essential that people’s homes are safe and secure. We will consult early next year on an updated decent homes standard, which will apply to both the private and social rented sectors; this will ensure that safe, secure housing is the standard that residents can expect in both tenures. It will complement our consultations on introducing minimum energy efficiency standards to the rented sectors and will help both to give people warmer homes that are affordable to heat and to tackle damp and mould.

We will also apply Awaab’s law across both rented sectors, setting clear legal expectations about timeframes. This will ensure that all renters in England are empowered to challenge dangerous conditions. Together—this is the point I want to stress—these measures will ensure that homes are safe, secure and hazard free, tackling the blight of some of the poor-quality homes that we have seen.

On communities, which were raised by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, the Government are committed to the plan-making system. It is the right way to plan for growth, by bringing local authorities and communities together to agree the futures of their areas. That is the important thing about plan-making: this is what it is intended to do. This will ensure that local communities get the houses they need in the right place at the right time, reflecting the principles of sustainable development. Local plans provide the stability and certainty that local people and developers want to see the planning system deliver, which is why it is very important to us that we see universal coverage of ambitious plans as soon as possible. That has not been the case in the past. The Deputy Prime Minister has made it quite clear that, where plans do not appear, she will exercise her powers to make them come through.

The Government recognise that providing homes and jobs alone is not sufficient to create sustainable, healthy places. Our communities also need to be supported by an appropriate range of services and facilities. The proposals in the recent government consultation on changes to the National Planning Policy Framework include changes intended to support the provision of public infrastructure and to create sustainable, healthy communities. They include changes to ensure that the planning system supports the increased provision and modernisation of key public services infrastructure, as well as the availability of a sufficient choice of early years and post-16 education places. Alongside this work, we are committed to strengthening the existing system of developer contributions in order to ensure that new developments provide the necessary affordable homes and infrastructure.

I turn now to some of noble Lords’ comments, and pick up on those by the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson, on the three principles. I love, in principle, the “love thy neighbour” principle; unfortunately, my long experience of planning—I was a councillor for 27 years—means that I know that the harm that developments can cause is often quite a subjective issue, as the noble Lord, Lord Young, pointed out. The principle is good in principle, but I need to think about how we might employ it in practice.

On the “carrying weight” principle, infrastructure should be available in all developments through Section 106 or the community infrastructure levy. That does not always happen as it should, and we are looking at that system to see whether we can improve it. Land of community value can already be designated in local plans, noticeably where there are national parks and habitat sites, but the point of a local plan is that such areas can be designated locally.

The noble Lord spoke about pre-1947 as though it was a golden era. It certainly was for my town because it was designated in 1946. I do not think that the people then thought it was perfect because when John Silkin came to announce the development of the new town, he was shouted at in the town hall and people put “Silkingrad” up across the railway station sign. I do not think that people were that happy about planning in those days. I also wonder about how the people of Aspley Guise reacted when Milton Keynes was proposed almost on their doorstep. Yet, now, it is one of our most successful new towns. We have to think about how time moves on in that way.

The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, talked about ensuring that our new towns are built to high standards. We are committed to ensuring that the new towns we are looking at deliver attractive places where people actually want to live. New towns will be governed by a new towns prospectus developed in partnership with the New Towns Taskforce. Developers will be required to meet theoe standards.

The noble Lords, Lord Wolfson and Lord Godson, referred to beauty and design in planning. The Government are committed to taking steps to ensure that we build more homes and places that are high quality, well designed and sustainable. When we did the consultation on this, consultees raised concerns about the additional references to “beauty”, which they viewed as subjective in nature and difficult to define and thought might lead to inconsistencies in decision-making. It is possible to set standards for design quality that reflect the context and character of an area and address layout, nature, heritage, public space, street design, active travel and so on, as outlined in the National Design Guide, all of which, when considered together, can contribute to well-designed places.

Land value was referred to by my noble friend Lord Mendelsohn and the noble Lords, Lord Best and Lord Wolfson. We have implemented the reforms in the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act to provide for the removal of hope value from the assessment of compensation for certain types of compulsory purchase orders where there is justification in the public interest. We will bring forward further reforms in the forthcoming planning and infrastructure Bill.

My noble friend Lord Mendelsohn talked about construction skills. I have commented on this a number of times in the Chamber. We were very grateful for an investment of £140 million from the industry to help us with capacity in the building sector. We will have more trainees and increase capacity. We have invested in increasing the capacity of local planning authorities and in helping the market to thrive by supporting SME developers. We take all those issues on board.

The noble Lord, Lord Best, referred to CPO powers. As I said, they are coming forward. We are committed to making sure that we expand the powers that local authorities have, particularly for new towns, but also to generate the development that they want to see.

I reiterate my thanks to the Committee and to the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson, for a particularly interesting and important debate. I have listened very carefully to the points made, and I hope that I have set out the vision with which our Government will deliver the right types of home in the right places and that work with communities rather than against them. This Government will get Britain building again to unlock economic growth and ensure that our country delivers for its people. The reforms discussed today in the National Planning Policy Framework and the further detail will be set out in the long-term housing strategy. We will deliver change for our communities and kick-start the decade of renewal that our country needs.

New Homes

Baroness Taylor of Stevenage Excerpts

Wednesday 11th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (Baroness Taylor of Stevenage) (Lab)]

To deliver 1.5 million homes over this Parliament the housebuilding sector will need skilled and competent workers, efficient planning and a reliable materials supply chain, as well as certainty for the construction industry. We started on planning immediately, and we will publish the revised national framework tomorrow. We are working with industry to provide high-quality training opportunities and create a more diverse work force to build the homes that the country needs. The industry also needs access to sufficient quality safe materials. We have set a clear direction of growth for the housing sector, so suppliers can be confident in increasing their capacity to meet the demand.

[Lord Sikka (Lab)]

I thank the Minister for her reply. A target of 1.5 million homes is commendable, but Governments do not actually build houses, local councils are disempowered, and the private sector simply does not have the capacity. The UK is the world’s largest importer of bricks—about 500 million a year—30% to 40% of cement is imported, and the construction industry says it needs another 251,000 workers to get anywhere near the housebuilding target. In addition to the publication tomorrow, can the Minister also publish a detailed report showing how each of the constraints on housebuilding is to be alleviated?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend. He is right, to the extent that we recognise the constraints. We spent a lot of time early in government identifying what they were, working with the sector. We expect housebuilding activity to double in four years, but the supply of construction materials would need to increase by only about 20% to meet the demand, because housebuilding makes up only about 20% of the construction sector. We expect demand for construction products primarily used in housing, such as bricks, and green tech, such as PV panels and heat pumps, to increase at a high rate, and we see that as an opportunity for great British innovators to get going and improve the supply chains with us.

[The Earl of Devon (CB)]

My Lords, during the passage of the Environment Act we introduced the excellent principle of biodiversity net gain. In Committee we voiced concerns over the lack of qualified BNG assessors both in the private sector and, more importantly, in local government. The Minister—the noble Lord, Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park—assured me that the markets would provide. I was sceptical then, and I am sceptical now, given local government finances. What update can the Minister provide us on the availability of those qualified to assess biodiversity net gain?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

We are increasing the support for the planning system, but the specific point about biodiversity net gain assessors is, I appreciate, a different issue. We expect that planning officers will take a role in this, but we need a specific increase in BNG assessors, so if I may I will reply to the noble Earl in writing on that matter.

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, mentioned a shortage of 251,000 skilled construction workers if the Government are to hit their target. Modern methods of construction have the potential to help meet that shortage and drive up productivity, but have had a mixed reception in this country because of a lack of sustained demand. As many of the 1.5 million houses will come from the public sector, can the Government use their purchasing power to relaunch modern methods of construction with a sustainable level of demand, to meet the productivity requirement and give the country the homes it needs?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for giving me the opportunity to say that I went to visit British Offsite with Weston Homes in Braintree earlier this week. What a fantastic example of British innovation, using recycled steel to build MMC products. MMC is an important opportunity to improve productivity in the construction sector, to deliver quickly the very high-quality energy-efficient homes we need, and to create new and diverse jobs. We are working to address the strategic barriers to the further uptake of MMC, including improved supply chain confidence, clarity for warranty and insurance markets, and planning reform. We will say more about that in the long-term housing strategy next year.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

My Lords, there are currently tens of thousands of Section 106 affordable homes with detailed planning permission waiting to be built out on active sites, but stuck because the registered providers will not take them on due to the current financial capacity in that sector. Will the Government as a short-term emergency measure consider the use of Homes England grant funding specifically, so that registered providers can afford to take up these much-needed affordable homes on these stuck sites?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

The noble Baroness is quite right about the stuck sites but, in spite of the very difficult Budget round this year, the Government have put £500 million more into affordable housing. That takes the total for affordable housing up to about £3 billion. Homes England is working through its programme of how it is going to support the delivery of those affordable homes. I am sure that support for registered providers will form part of that.

[Lord Best (CB)]

My Lords, does the Minister agree that it would be very unwise to rely on the oligopoly of volume housebuilders to produce all the homes that we need? Has the time come and are the Government now ready to promote the model of the development corporation? It is an arm’s-length body controlled by local authorities which buys the land. It then has a master plan and parcels out the sites—yes, to the volume housebuilders, but also to housing associations and those building for students and older people and the SME builders. Is not that model now really necessary rather than reliance on those major volume housebuilders?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I am sure the noble Lord is aware of my great passion for development corporations and the way that they work. It is true that we are encouraging Homes England to break down the great big contracts it had been issuing more, so that there is more opportunity for smaller developers to take those on. As well as that, we recognise the very challenging conditions that SME housebuilders have faced to deliver homes in recent times. They are essential to our housebuilding targets, build out quickly, train the workforce and are embedded in local communities. We will announce further support for SMEs next year, but this breaking down of the great big development organisations is key to delivering the homes we need in the places that people want them.

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

My Lords, we all agree that more homes need to be built but, with the introduction of the higher local authority housebuilding targets, which will be mandatory, including on “ugly” parts of the green belt, can the noble Baroness define what ugly means? Is this not entirely subjective, where “ugly” is not just a grey-belt issue but a completely grey area? Are those living in such areas not going to be left wringing their hands in despair as the bulldozers roll in without genuine protections in place?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

There is no intention for bulldozers to bowl in without any local say in this. By strengthening the housing targets and allowing development on that poor-quality grey-belt land, we will get Britain building again. We will set out tomorrow in the National Planning Policy Framework the definitions of “grey belt” and how we intend to move things forward. Making those housing targets mandatory will reverse the decline we saw when the targets were cancelled last year.

[Lord Krebs (CB)]

My Lords, can the Minister reassure us that these 1.5 million new homes will be resilient in the face of future climate change? I am thinking particularly of the risks of flooding and overheating.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I am working daily on that task at the moment. We are looking at the future homes standard with the future homes hub, which involves the whole construction industry, to make sure that we make homes as resilient to climate change as we possibly can. Of course, there is a balance to be struck in delivery of homes but we want to make sure that we do not end up with a whole generation of homes that need retrofitting in the future. We will do our best, working with the industry, to make sure that they are as fit for the future as we can possibly make them.

[Baroness Bryan of Partick (Lab)]

My Lords, I return to the issue of the impact on the environment of importing building materials. I understand that the use of 500 million bricks—whatever they are used for —has resulted in nearly 300,000 tons of carbon emissions. Will the Government consider what roll they will play in ensuring that we develop alternatives to building materials, to be produced in the UK?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

It is important that the Government support the development of the supply chain that we need in this country in order to enable the building that we want. There are, of course, many areas of the supply chain which we need to develop. That is why the Government have supported the development of an electric arc furnace at Port Talbot so that we can continue to produce steel. We need to think about the solar panels, the ground-source heat pumps and the battery storage: these are huge opportunities in our economy that will contribute to the growth that the country needs.

Housing (Right to Buy) (Limits on Discount) (England) Order 2024

Baroness Taylor of Stevenage Excerpts

Tuesday 10th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley of Knighton (CB)]

My Lords, from listening to this debate, I recognise that there is a certain amount of agreement around the Chamber. It seems, as we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Porter, that this is very much a question of balance. Of course right to buy was a wonderful thing for many people, but the right to have a roof over your head is also pretty important. Therefore, if you take it too far and there are no council houses to put vulnerable people into, you will have a real problem. It seems there is a consensus that could lead to the right way forward—namely, the right amount of houses being available for right to buy but preserving enough and, as has been said, building more to protect fragile communities.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (Baroness Taylor of Stevenage) (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Earl for bringing this debate. We are in the middle of the most acute housing crisis in living memory. Too many are left without access to a safe and secure home.

To the noble Lords who have been leaders of councils, I say: so have I. For many years as a council leader, I struggled really hard to persuade our treasurer to find the funds to build homes, only to see them sold for less than it cost us to build them. That is why the Government are committed to working with councils and other providers of social housing to deliver the biggest increase in social and affordable housing in a generation.

We have heard much about aspiration. For the over a million people sitting on those waiting lists for a long time and the 117,000 families in temporary and emergency accommodation, social housing is their aspiration. Our job as a Government is to get the balance right between offering homes for sale and retaining stock for social rent. That balance is critical to solving our housing crisis.

Housing Supply and Homelessness

Baroness Taylor of Stevenage Excerpts

Thursday 5th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (Baroness Taylor of Stevenage) (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very pleased to respond for the Government on such an important issue. I grew up in social housing and I was very proud of my new-town pioneer parents who allowed me to do so—that was the housing of the 1950s and 1960s, referred to by my noble friend Lord Snape. I have campaigned on housing in general and social housing in particular for over 30 years, and this is the first Government I have known, in all that time, to show the level of ambition that we need. I thank my noble friend Lady Warwick for her ongoing work on housing and homelessness and for leading this debate today with her extremely powerful and thorough speech. One thing she said was that the facts are truly shocking, and shocking they really are.

It has been a great privilege to listen and respond to a debate in which the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury gave his valedictory speech. He was present at one of the most terrifying experiences I have had since I joined this House. He has been a great champion of housing, as many noble Lords have said, and introduced the Homes for All report, which had a good launch in your Lordships’ House. I thought I was just going to attend, but I arrived to find my noble friend Lady Warwick asking me whether I would speak. As I walked into the room, he was already speaking and I had to quickly gather my thoughts together and make a speech there and then.

The most reverend Primate has done such fantastic work. His deep and thorough knowledge of the banking system from his earlier career enabled him to speak out powerfully in 2013 against payday lending, which was a great passion of mine as well. He launched a campaign in favour of credit unions as an alternative. The annual Archbishop’s debate, under his watchful eye, has seen him raise the following areas: banking standards, soft power, reconciliation, education, British values, housing, freedom of speech, migration and families. His book Reimagining Britain, published in 2018, set out his thoughts on areas for specific social change and reform, including social care, housing and families—issues on which he and the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of York founded policy commissions.

The most reverend Primate also has extensive knowledge of overseas issues through his travel around different countries and has made informed contributions in debates on foreign policy, including on Sudan, Afghanistan and Israel and Gaza.

Of course, in the 12 years that the most reverend Primate has been the Archbishop of Canterbury, he has offered spiritual counsel to six Prime Ministers and overseen many significant royal events, presiding at the Coronation of His Majesty King Charles III and delivering the sermon at the funeral of the late Queen Elizabeth II. He has also baptised Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis, and married Prince Harry and Meghan at Windsor in 2018.

During his great speech on housing this afternoon, the most reverend Primate spoke about affordability, which I will come to later. He also spoke about community and building places for people, a topic that is very close to my heart in terms of planning. I thank him for the way that he has steered the Church Commissioners, if it is possible to steer them—he says no; I thought that was probably the case—because I believe there are extraordinary opportunities now regarding Church land. The Government welcome the opportunity to have that dialogue with the Church Commissioners.

There is no doubt in my mind that in my parish, as elsewhere in the Church, safeguarding is infinitely better than it was before his time as Archbishop. While we understand his very honourable reasons for resignation, I know that this House and the Church will miss him greatly. I can do no better than to quote his own words back to him:

“People of loving service are rare in any walk of life. Leaders of loving service are still rarer. But in all cases those who serve will be loved and remembered when those who cling to power and privileges are long forgotten”.


I thank him.

I turn back now to the important issues of our debate. The causes of England’s housing crisis are multiple, as so many noble Lords have pointed out, but among the most important is our failure to build enough homes for decades. We see the impact of this in rising rents and housing costs, with 35% of private renters and 43% of social renters living in poverty after they have met their housing costs. There are, as many noble Lords mentioned, 1.3 million people languishing on social housing waiting lists, while millions of low-income households are forced into insecure, unaffordable and, far too often, substandard private rented housing. We know that homelessness can have a devastating impact on those affected. At the sharpest end of the crisis are the 123,000 households, including a record 159,000 children, in temporary accommodation. This is unacceptable. Everyone should have access to a safe, decent, affordable and secure home.

The sheer scale of the housing crisis demands a radical response. That is why this Government have committed to delivering 1.5 million homes in this Parliament, including the biggest increase in social and affordable housebuilding in a generation. It is why we are committed to a new generation of new towns, and it is why we will get back on track in Britain by ending homelessness. Both my noble friend Lady Warwick and the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, spoke about homelessness. I will speak in more detail on homelessness later on, but it is why we will produce a long-term housing strategy in spring 2025. We know that addressing these issues will take some time, but we have taken the first decisive steps and are committed to taking the long-term action needed to tackle the scale of the challenge we face and to get Britain building.

I assure the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, of both my and the Secretary of State’s intention to create a revolution in social housing. The noble Baroness made the point that I often make: we must stop conflating the terms “affordable” and “social” housing. They are different things. We will be asking local planning authorities to consider the tenure of the homes that they are allocating as part of their planning processes.

I am grateful for the support of the noble Earl, Lord Effingham, for the work we are doing, but the housing crisis we inherited has given us an enormous task to tackle. He raised the issue of capacity for building in the system. I answered that in my response to an Oral Question earlier today, but there is a great deal of work going on to build that capacity and we are very grateful that the industry itself has produced £140 million to help start tackling the skills crisis.

I thank my noble friends Lady Warwick and Lord Hain, the noble Lords, Lord Best, Lord Young, Lord Shipley and Lord Hollick, and the noble Baroness, Lady Grender, for comments and questions on housebuilding and housing supply. We know that our commitment to building 1.5 million homes is an ambitious one, but we are already taking action to ensure we can deliver it. Only historic levels of housebuilding can begin to drive the changes we need to see. We have already announced the new homes accelerator to unblock stalled housing sites and have committed to a new generation of new towns.

A critical part of that building is reforming our planning system, which too often holds back development. We have already taken steps towards reversing the damaging changes to the National Planning Policy Framework that had undermined our growth ambitions. We aim to publish the new framework by the end of this year. I am told that that will be before the Christmas Recess, so let us keep our fingers crossed. It will include updating the standard method, reintroducing mandatory targets, releasing more green and grey belt land, where it meets our golden rules, and seeking views on a “brownfield passport” to ensure development on brownfield sites is straightforward to approve.

We are also giving local authorities the capacity support they need to drive forward the delivery of new homes. At the recent Budget, we announced over £50 million of new spending to expedite the planning process by recruiting an additional 300 planners and boosting local planning authority capacity to deliver the Government’s wider planning reform agenda. Next year, we will introduce a planning and infrastructure Bill, which will play a key role in promoting economic growth, unlocking a new scale of delivery for both housing and infrastructure across the country.

Alongside reform of the planning system, we must also see reform in the market. The current speculative development model, referred to by many noble Lords, dominated by a few big builders, has led to slow build-out and lack of competition. We will support SMEs, work with industry to grow mixed tenure models and ensure we have the right skills and supply chains. I know the Secretary of State has already spoken to Homes England to request that it breaks down some of its developments into smaller packages that are suitable for SMEs. At the Budget, we provided an additional £3 billion of support for SMEs and the build-to-rent sector in the form of housing guarantee schemes, allowing developers to access lower-cost loans and support the delivery of tens of thousands of new homes.

Our commitment to delivering the biggest increase in social and affordable housebuilding in a generation is a critical part of our housebuilding strategy. At the Budget, we made a down payment of £500 million to the affordable homes programme in 2025-26, increasing the annual budget to £3.1 billion, the biggest annual budget for affordable housing in over a decade. We will go further, with details of new investment to succeed the 2021-26 affordable homes programme to be provided at the spending review.

Alongside our direct investment to build new homes, the Government have launched a consultation on a new long-term social housing rent settlement of CPI plus 1% for five years. That will give the sector the confidence to build tens of thousands of new social homes. We are reducing maximum right-to-buy cash discounts to pre-2012 levels, allowing councils to keep 100% of the receipts generated by right-to-buy sales. That should ensure that we are investing in new supply to replace the stock sold—something that, in my humble opinion, should have been done right from the start of the right-to-buy programme.

I am afraid I just do not agree with the assertion of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, that we intend to put quantity before quality, that we are ignoring the importance of community and place making or that we are not providing for diverse needs. This Government’s reform of the planning system, reforms to private renting and leasehold, remediation acceleration action plans, the future homes standard, et cetera, are part of what we are doing to just get on with the job.

I turn now to some of the specific points made by noble Lords. I am sure I will not get to all of them in the few minutes I have left, but I will try to cover as many as I can. I think I have covered the points on housing supply. Key points were made by my noble friend Lady Warwick, the noble Lords, Lord Shipley, Lord Young, Lord Best and Lord Jamieson. The Government have already taken swift action to kick-start the delivery of the 1.5 million homes, including the NPPF consultation, the accelerator and the new towns task force. We are seeking views now on a “brownfield passport” to ensure that suitable projects get swift and straightforward approval for development. We are working together with industry, including housing associations, local authorities and developers, to unlock economic growth and give the country the homes it needs. Working with mayors and councils across the country, we have set up a dedicated interministerial group, which the Deputy Prime Minister chairs, bringing together Ministers from across government to develop a long-term strategy that will put us back on track to end homelessness.

The most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury spoke powerfully about the affordability of homes, and that is a key issue for us. Our work in tackling the housing needs of the country includes making housing more affordable for all. The most sustainable long-term method of achieving that is to help people into home ownership and increase the supply of housing generally; that is why we will deliver the biggest increase in social and affordable housing. However, we recognise that new supply alone will not address the issues of affordability that face us today, and that is why we are strengthening rights for those in the private rented sector. In addition to increasing the supply of new homes of all tenures, the Government are committed to helping more people into home ownership by introducing a permanent, comprehensive mortgage guarantee scheme, and to giving first-time buyers the first chance at new home developments.

My noble friend Lady Warwick and the noble Lord, Lord Young, raised the issue of the planning reforms that are taking place. Local plans will have to identify specific housing for special needs, such as supported housing, and the package announced in the Autumn Budget is the next step. To meet these planning requirements, we will provide billions in government support and certainty for investors. I am hopeful that the new National Planning Policy Framework, which will be published shortly, will have the potential to deliver the uplift in housebuilding that we need.

On social and affordable housing, points were raised by my noble friends Lord Hain and Lady Warwick, and the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, who gave out the killer fact of 2 million homes being sold under right-to-buy, which is a shocker—it would not have been, of course, if they had been replaced, and that is the point. The Government want everyone to have a place to call home and are taking the necessary steps to fix the economy so we can get on with building. We have introduced the changes to planning policy and have set out the details of an immediate one-year cash injection of £500 million to top up the affordable homes programme, which will deliver up to 5,000 new social and affordable homes.

On social housing targets, the noble Lord, Lord Hollick, referred to the commission on social housing. Many of the points raised by the commission have already been considered by the Government and steps are being put in place to tackle the issues it raised, and we are very grateful for the commission’s work.

My noble friend Lord Hain and the noble Baroness, Lady Grender, made points on the right to buy. I have already set out the Government’s plans to change right-to-buy. It is an integral way for social tenants to get on the property ladder, but the point is that councils are losing homes to right-to-buy more quickly than they can be replaced. We are also looking at removing discounts for new homes, so, when a new home is built, there has to be a period of time before it qualifies for right-to-buy.

There were some very powerful contributions to this debate on homelessness, and I am very grateful to all those who made them: my noble friend Lady Warwick; my noble friend Lord Griffiths, who gave a powerful personal testimony on homelessness; the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans, who spoke about rural homelessness; and the noble Baroness, Lady Grender, and the noble Lord, Lord Hardie. I say to the right reverend Prelate that we do want to encourage rural exception sites and we will be looking more closely at that. The housing strategy is not in draft yet, but it will come out in the new year. I am sure that the point that he made about it having specific issues in it on rural housing will be taken on board, so I thank him very much for making that point.

There is no doubt that homeless levels are far too high, and that this has a devastating impact on all those affected. We want to take a long-term approach to this, working with mayors and councils across the country. That interministerial group which the Deputy Prime Minister chairs will bring together Ministers from across government to put us on track to ending homelessness. We have put in additional funding of £233 million for this for next year, and that increased spending will help prevent rises in the number of families in temporary accommodation. Not only is it a tragedy for those families in terms of their family life, but it puts a huge burden on local authorities, as we have heard.

We are also tackling the root causes of homelessness, which is the delivery of further housing. With the introduction of the Renters’ Rights Bill to Parliament, we will abolish Section 21 no-fault evictions, preventing private renters being exploited and discriminated against. In my experience as a councillor, Section 21 was one of the biggest causes of homelessness, so we need to get rid of it as quickly as possible.

The noble Earl, Lord Effingham, mentioned the fact that mental health services are very important in dealing with people who find themselves homeless, and I agree. In my own town, we put together a housing-first package which includes support for complex needs. We need to look at areas of good practice and encourage others to participate in those. The noble Earl also spoke about veterans, and I was very pleased to hear the Prime Minister’s announcement on veterans recently.

I knew I would not get through all the points. Great points were made on temporary accommodation, on older people and homelessness and on youth homelessness, and particularly on rough sleeping and poverty from the noble Lord, Lord Bird. I will write to all noble Lords who I have not been able to respond to in the debate. But that is an indication of just what a wide-ranging and thorough debate we have had this afternoon, and I am grateful to all noble Lords who have taken part.

I ask noble Lords to please be assured that our Government are committed to tackling this issue. We have made huge strides since we assumed office, but we will not be able to solve the housing crisis overnight. In the long-term housing strategy and the homelessness strategy, both to be published next year, we will set out our vision for a housing market that works for all, and how we will get back on track to ending homelessness. Together, we will ensure that everyone has a place they can call home. I thank all noble Lords for their support in doing that, and particularly thank my noble friend Lady Warwick for instigating this debate this afternoon.