Growth and Infrastructure Bill

Baroness Whitaker Excerpts

Tuesday 8th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Whitaker]

My Lords, I shall focus mainly on two areas of this disparate Bill: those dealing with affordable housing and the preservation of our national landscape. Outside those, my noble friends Lord Adonis and Lord Monks, and the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, have spoken eloquently about the folly and injustice of enabling businesses to buy the rights of their workpeople, which will have a particular impact on the position of women. To subordinate rights to a contract is a backward step indeed and I hope that there will be amendments to redress this.

Turning to my main concerns, the Bill’s provisions for renegotiating the proportion of affordable housing agreed under Section 106 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 are also a real step back from the excellent achievement of mixed housing developments, of which I have seen many successful examples. They spell ruin for the encouragement of sufficient, much needed new housing for the countless hardworking people whose pay does not cover market prices. Will the Minister say how enough new houses for people who are not rich can be assured? Of course, we desperately need growth and investment in infrastructure, but this Bill does not address the key issue in housing development, which is, of course, the bellwether of increased growth. The fact is that people cannot afford to buy and banks will not lend. House prices are rising at three times the rate of wages.

The Homes and Communities Agency wrote to my honourable friend Clive Betts MP, chair of the Communities and Local Government Committee, to say that it was,

“not aware of any current issues relating to section 106 agreement on the very small number due to start on site this … year”.

I reiterate my noble friend’s question to the Minister: how many of the Government’s claimed hundreds of thousands of stalled sites have Section 106 as the cause? Certainly, another cause seems to be the reluctance of local communities to accept more housing. Here I can do no better than to quote Liberal Democrat councillor Adrian Dobinson, who in a letter in last Friday’s Guardian said that,

“people will allow modern housing ... if building design of our age is considered building design as good as the period buildings found in villages, instead of awful little boxes demanded by planners and weak-kneed architects unprepared to stand up to them”.

What can the Government do about that?

I turn to the landscape. The powers in Clause 8 which seek to remove essential protection for our national parks are aimed at speeding up the introduction of faster broadband, facilitating tall poles, cabinets and overhead lines, as the Minister explained. A very large number of serious and representative organisations have asked us to remove this provision. I declare an interest as president of the South Downs Society, the co-ordinating NGO for that area.

The introduction of faster broadband for the countryside is very important, and I fully understand the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, but it is absolutely not necessary to do this at the expense of the potential desecration of our most cherished landscapes. The limited time allowed in the Bill for getting new structures up will be a further disincentive to a careful process for managing our irreplaceable beautiful landscapes. I am not aware of any evidence that it is the planning process in protected landscapes which is holding back the advance of broadband. Will the Minister please give the House examples, if any exist, in the national parks? As it happens, the national parks authorities are already active in ensuring that the relevant infrastructure is installed in a way which minimises visual impact. I could cite Northumberland, the Peak District, Exmoor, my own South Downs and many others.

It is of course quite true that there have been delays in rolling out superfast broadband in our countryside, but not because of the planning system. Receiving state aid clearance from the European Union was the main culprit: £530 million of expenditure on broadband has only just been approved, covering perhaps half of the local broadband plans, which would enable 90% of the people in the UK to access superfast broadband. Does the noble Baroness agree?

These provisions go against paragraph 115 of the Government’s own National Planning Policy Framework and defy the intention of the great National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949: to conserve and enhance our most important landscapes. I am sure the noble Baroness does not want to play any part in imperilling our natural heritage, which is already so vulnerable, or deprive future generations of the immeasurable benefits of the national parks’ beauty. I look forward to her response.