Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Baroness Thornhill Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 18th April 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

Can I put the question the other way around? The noble Lord used phrases like “councils can choose” and “in conjunction with their local authority”. Can I ask about councils that choose not to provide supportive housing for people in need, that choose not to provide places for ex-offenders, and that rely on councils with a conscience to do those things? It seems to me that councils can choose to do very little if they want, including building homes, and certainly to not provide for the other groups that we have heard about—that is what worries me. We need more compulsion across all councils to provide for all of the population.

[Earl Howe (Con)]

In those circumstances, local plans can be checked against the assessment of need and can be shown to be defective where that is deemed to be the case—so it is not as if there is no oversight of what local authorities are doing. What we do not want to do—and I hope the noble Baroness agrees—is to get perilously close to a one-size-fits-all, top-down target mode of acting. We are trying to strike a balance between showing local authorities how to do the job that they are there to do and have been elected to do, while at the same time not being guilty of dictating or second-guessing local circumstances.

We do already have a clear policy in place on these issues, and we are proposing to clarify and strengthen this further. I hope my noble friend will feel comfortable in not moving his amendments when they are reached.

Before I finish, I will respond briefly to the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, on his points about buildout. In large part, he was anticipating the debate we look set to have in a later group, which begins with Amendment 261 to Clause 104, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Stevenage. However, I just say that the Bill already contains provisions to tackle slow buildout by developers. Clause 105 gives local planning authorities powers to determine planning applications made by a person connected to an earlier permission on that same land which was not begun or has been carried out unreasonably slowly. Developers should know that planning authorities expect new residential developments to come forward at a reasonable rate.

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We support Amendment 274A in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, which makes provision for small sites to be used for affordable development. My noble friend Lady Hayman’s amendment— Amendment 504GJA—inserts a new clause after Clause 214 to ensure that information on rogue landlords and property agents is made public. With renters now spending huge sums of money to secure rental properties— some of it just as a finder’s fee—it seems only fair that they should be able to access data that is already held to reassure themselves that the landlords and property agents they are dealing with are bona fide and will not put their money at risk or deliver the associated risks of them being housed in substandard properties. This will also help ensure that the majority of landlords who act in good faith do not see the market undermined by rogue landlords and agents who do not act in the interests of their tenants. I beg to move.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

My Lords, I think I could possibly make the shortest speech with regard to the amendments that have just been discussed and just go #MeToo. In fact, I want to say—and I hope that the Minister takes this as a compliment—that I feel that among the people who work within the local government parameters in the House, and particularly with housing, there is an amazing consensus about what needs to be done. What we will argue about is how quickly it needs to be done and why it has not all been done yesterday. Therefore, the noble Baroness should perhaps take heart from our belief that we know she understands where we are coming from. We probably sense that she is sometimes as frustrated as we are, considering her own background.

On the rogue landlord register, will the Minister tell us, if there is to be such a thing and if it is to be effective—which is the really important point about data and who goes on any register—whether it will be public? The question should really be: why not?

It is a pleasure today to speak to Amendment 274A, tabled in my name. In short, it would introduce new requirements to encourage the development of small sites. My motivation is twofold: I was the elected mayor of the smallest geographical council area in the country, so we never had large sites. Every single attempt to meet the needs of our community was always on small sites, and those can be particularly problematic to build out. We also have a demonstrable shortage of affordable homes, as we have all said—again, there is a huge consensus on this—which, as we know, is well evidenced.

Secondly, as shown by reports from the Barker report to the Letwin report, as well as by recent evidence from across the housing and construction sector, small and medium-sized builders have been really squeezed out of building homes over the past decades, yet they can and should be part of the solution to the housing shortage—and indeed they want to be. I see this amendment as a simple, straightforward way of achieving that, and I believe that the Government wish to see more SME builders contributing to resolving our housing problem. We can do this by changing how we deal with small sites, while at the same time bringing forward affordable housing as a sort of Brucie bonus.

As I said, I have chosen to focus on small sites because, in my view, the case for enabling easier and more streamlined development of these small areas of brownfield land is a strong one. We are currently underutilising such sites, which are often the areas of blight in neighbourhoods. They are the disused garage sites or the place where the old industrial warehouse building was. They really blight certain areas.

I recently came across some interesting research by Pocket Living, an award- winning SME developer in London that specialises in delivering affordable homes. Its research shows that there is currently the potential to deliver 110,000 homes on brownfield sites across the country. Despite their potential, these sites are not being developed—they are just not coming forward. Less than a quarter of small brownfield sites suitable for housing are coming forward, and half of councils allocated fewer than 15% of their potential small brownfield sites.

Why are they not being better utilised? In short, the planning system itself is a major barrier—no surprise there—and does not take into account the complexities of complying with many local plan requirements on a small site. Most of those come with a price tag attached that prices out a lot of SME builders; we know this because they tell us that this is their main reason for not being in the market. I deduce from that that we need to treat them differently if we want them to contribute more. Small sites are by their very nature tight and constrained, and they cannot possibly achieve every development management policy set out in the London plan, the local plans or even neighbourhood plans—I am looking at my noble friend Lord Stunell. At present, small sites take an average of 60 weeks to gain a planning determination, which is almost five times the statutory period. This is not beneficial to our economy, our pipeline of affordable housing or the millions of young people unable to get on the housing ladder due to a lack of appropriate housing supply.

The amendment seeks to encourage councils to bring forward small sites for development, and in reality it would say that we are tilting the balance in favour of development on small sites below 0.25 hectares where it is believed that high levels of affordable housing can be demonstrated. Therefore, as the pay-off it would provide a fast-track route for viability assessment and would incentivise a more streamlined delivery across the country. The sites would need to be a specific size and contain more than 50% affordable housing. The important pay-off for communities is that it is used for this in order to get their fast-track permission.

This change could potentially free up tens of thousands more sites for development in suitable locations, particularly in urban areas where this kind of development is most needed. It would also give the SME housebuilders a vital boost. Since 1988, the number of SMEs actually in operation and building has decreased by 80%—I was staggered by this figure. I welcome the inclusion of the small sites reform within the most recent NPPF consultation but believe there is an option right here and now, through Amendment 274A, to act sooner and faster to get homes delivered and to give that boost to our SME sector.

This amendment also has huge support from across the development sector and housebuilding industry. I am grateful that a coalition of more than 40 high-profile organisations are supporting it, including Barratt Homes, Optivo, the National Housing Federation and a range of SMEs. Small sites have incredible potential to improve both the supply and the diversity of market stock, but without policy intervention it is an underutilised resource just sitting there, looking a mess. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill. I will not say anything more on Amendment 274A because the case for it has clearly been overwhelmingly and comprehensively made. I will briefly focus on Amendment 208 and the final amendment in this group—which is something of an alphabet soup.

First, on the role of SMEs and small sites in local plans, I have come across many cases where I have been pleased to see that Green councillors around the country have been able to look at that classic development we see now: a new block of what is almost invariably labelled as luxury flats, in the basement of which is a single, fairly extensive shop that is one of a handful of supermarket chains—one more piece of dominance in our economy of what is already an oligopoly in our food supply. But what sometimes has been possible, and should be encouraged and supported through the development of local plans, is dividing that space into three. You can then have a small independent greengrocer or a small independent hardware-homeware shop that stocks that kind of thing that you suddenly find yourself needing, which can be almost impossible to find in our residential retail deserts where you just see identical supermarkets again and again. Maybe the third of those shops could be something we urgently need to see—earlier today I was at an event with the University of Manchester talking about scaling up the green transition—namely a repair shop, where, when something is broken, you can go and get expert help to fix it instead of throwing it into the rubbish: the circular economy in action. That kind of simple, clear thinking about what we need in our communities, building not just homes but communities, can really work.

I also want to draw on the work of my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb from her London Assembly days. She produced a report, The End of Industry in London?, in 2015. In the previous seven years London had lost the equivalent of 750 football pitches of sites where many small industrial businesses were based. That was in a situation where flipping industrial land into residential land could see a doubling of the price. I would be surprised if, since that report was published, we have not seen a continuation or even an acceleration of that trend. We need those small independent businesses as part of our thriving, strong, local economies.

Finally, on Amendment 504GJA—if I have that right—this is important and it is, in a piecemeal way, already being done. Here in London there is the London Rogue Landlord and Agent Checker, but Green London Assembly member Siân Berry did some research on this and found that only 3% of tenants had used it, although 20% of tenants had complaints that were relevant to it. If we had a situation where this was expected and everyone knew, wherever they moved in the country, that this resource would be there for them—something that could be publicised around the country and was built into the requirements for all local authorities—that would be a useful and practical tool to help us know how much private renters are being exploited. I have just come from the debate on the economic crime Bill and the problems of fraud and the way in which people are literally being robbed of cash, such as their rental deposit. We need to tackle these issues and this is a practical step towards that.