Unadopted Roads: New Housing Estates

Caroline Nokes Excerpts

Thursday 1st December 2022 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)]

I am grateful to Mr Speaker for granting me this Adjournment debate on unadopted roads and the lack of facilities for new housing estates.

I know that new housing can be a controversial issue. Some of the biggest issues in my constituency relate to general practice capacity and police numbers not increasing sufficiently in line with the building of thousands of new homes. I want everyone to be well housed in well-designed communities with, crucially, adequate local facilities. I am sure we would all agree that safe roads to drive on, speed restrictions, traffic calming, street lights, pedestrian crossings, parking enforcement, and litter, dog and grit bins, and regular collections from them, are all things we have a right to expect in England and Wales in 2022. Asking for them is not asking the earth.

Yet the current position is that many hundreds of thousands of our constituents do not have those basic amenities, which those of us who are lucky enough to live on adopted roads take for granted. As I will argue, the lack of street lights, parking enforcement, pedestrian crossings, pavements, and speeding restrictions make living extremely dangerous at times for those residents. Unadopted roads are subject to surface drainage issues, leading to a higher risk of flooding, and mortgage lenders sometimes withdraw funds from prospective buyers if a road is not adopted.

[Caroline Nokes (Romsey and Southampton North) (Con)]

This is such an important debate. My hon. Friend highlights the issue of drainage. May I draw the Minister’s attention to the situation at Knights Meadow in North Baddesley in my constituency? The drainage there has been designed outside the parameters of adoptability by the drainage authority, so there is no chance of the highway above the drain being adopted either. We are left in the horrendous situation whereby the homeowners can expect no solution to it, while having to cope in the meantime with sub-standard facilities, roads and drains.

[Andrew Selous]

On the last visit I did with Anglian Water in my constituency, I learned that water companies are not actually statutory consultees in new planning applications. The good local authorities talk to the water companies, but in my view, the companies should be statutory consultees, to avoid exactly the issue that my right hon. Friend raises.

On the safety issue, are we going to let the situation continue like this until—God forbid—a child gets killed? Road safety is a real issue, as I will illustrate. The Fletcher Road estate in south Gloucestershire is not adopted, and the traffic regulation order to bring in a 20 mph zone will not come in until the entire estate is complete, which could take 10 years. Last year, a child was seriously injured on the estate, and the accident safety report concluded that if the road had been properly constructed, and had speed humps, surfacing and a 20 mph limit, it would have been safe.

The Levelling Up Secretary has quite rightly used his righteous anger to make massive progress on dealing with the cladding issue and, most recently, with the mould issue. My request to him is to make it a hat-trick on behalf of hundreds of thousands of people who are paying full council tax without basic facilities, many of which are designed to keep them safe. During the American war of independence, the cry went up, “No taxation without representation.” Why is it that we require residents on new estates to pay full council tax while receiving very much less than full council services? Many residents are now paying twice for identical services. On the Castle Mead estate in Wiltshire, residents will pay the equivalent of band D town council tax to a management company to use the open spaces around their homes, while still paying full council tax. That does not seem fair or right.

The last full survey of unadopted roads was conducted by the Department for Transport in 1972, when it was estimated that there were 40,000 unadopted roads in England and Wales, covering some 4,000 miles of road. It is very concerning we do not have figures for the situation today.

Let me take the Minister on a tour around my constituency. On Theedway in Leighton Buzzard, three street lights do not work—all close to an assisted living residence where many people have mobility issues—and there is no parking enforcement or road signage. All that is dangerous. In nearby Copia Crescent, one street light is on 24/7 while the other is broken. Local residents do not know which developer to go to for these issues to be fixed. In nearby Grebe Drive, Goldfinch Road and Fraserfields Way, residents report dangerous speeding, no traffic calming, no speed enforcement and churned up verges. One householder is having difficulty selling his property because his road is not adopted, so we are making people’s main asset more illiquid and reducing the ease with which they can move. Properties in Clay Furlong and Claridge Close were sold in 2003—when the first residents moved in—but nearly 20 years later, the roads have still not been adopted. That is simply not good enough.

In Dunstable, the residents of Harvey Road have never had street lighting, and they have to navigate round potholes—that situation has gone on since at least 1961. A resident of a new estate being built at Tilling Green in Dunstable tells me that she has no street lights and that parking on junctions is extremely dangerous. She has had no reply from her management company about those issues. A constituent from the new Eleanor Gardens development in Dunstable tells me that Taylor Wimpey told her that it had handed the estate over to the council, while Central Bedfordshire Council said that it was unable to help because the handover had not happened. Homeowners—with all their pride and excitement about their new homes—have been left in the lurch again, not knowing where to turn to have multiple problems sorted out.

[Caroline Nokes]

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way, and I assure you, Madam Deputy Speaker, that I do not intend to intervene all afternoon. My hon. Friend makes an important point about homeowners not knowing where to go. They assume they should go to the council, but then find that the road is unadopted. They then assume they should go to the developer, but then find that a management company was set up and that, in many cases—such as for several estates in my constituency—it simply does not respond.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister of State, Department for Transport (Lucy Frazer)]

I start by thanking my hon. Friend the Member for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous) for so powerfully articulating his constituents’ and many other constituents’ concerns regarding unadopted roads. He talked about constituents who are often paying full council tax but are forced to live on private roads riddled with potholes and devoid of basic necessities such as streetlights, road signs or litter bins. My right hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes) also raised the matter of Knights Meadow, which is causing concerns. I believe we all can agree that, irrespective of whether a housing estate is old or new, no one should be forced to live on a street that is so poorly maintained that it negatively impacts their quality of life.

First, I will directly respond to the recommendations that my hon. Friend the Member for South West Bedfordshire has made, especially in relation to section 278 and section 38 agreements, as well as the guidance in Wales to which he referred. Then I would like to identify some of the steps that the Government are already taking to strengthen the enforcement powers of local authorities and to make sure that roads are properly maintained. Then I will address some of the broader points raised by my hon. Friend.

I take this opportunity to reassure my hon. Friend that I am committed to working with him and Members across this House to make sure that we can find the right solutions to the problems he has highlighted. I am not only happy to, but would be delighted to meet him and share the benefits of his research and expertise and to discuss this issue in more depth so that we can find the right answers to these questions.

Turning now to my hon. Friend’s recommendations, he mentioned that in Wales a good practice guide has been adopted by local highway authorities and house building federations. He noted that in the pre-application stage, the highway authority is involved. If five or more properties are served by public highways, the highway authority serves an advance payments code notice on the developer within six weeks of building approval.

In England, the Department for Transport has issued clear and simple guidance to councils to help them navigate some of the complexities surrounding new developments and the adoption, maintenance and upkeep of roads. They can use that guidance in those initial conversations with developers before a road is built, and long before they become major headaches for parties, not least homeowners themselves.

The Department for Transport also published an advice note in 2017 on road adoption and made some significant updates to it in August this year, with some useful advice on bonds and fees. I would be happy and keen to talk to my hon. Friend about how we can further improve on this work that the DFT has done.

[Caroline Nokes]

My right hon. and learned Friend makes an important point about the guidance that the DFT has already published and given to major house builders. The point I want to make is that as in the case of my hon. Friend the Member for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous), the developers in my constituency are major house builders. These are people who should have had this guidance over many years and who know how to build roads of an adoptable standard. Will my right hon. and learned Friend use the considerable heft of her Department to summon them in and suggest that they start using the guidance already available to them?

[Lucy Frazer]

My right hon. Friend makes a very valuable point, and I would also be very keen to speak to her on this issue, because she clearly has the same issues in her constituency, as we all do, and is very interested in this point. We do raise many issues with house builders, and I can add this to the list to raise, because it is important that the guidance is followed and that we get solutions.

My hon. Friend the Member for South West Bedfordshire suggested that England needs more national standards. As he knows, under the Highways Act 1980, section 38 agreements allow new roads built by developers to become public highways, with the cost of maintenance falling to the public purse. It is certainly possible for local highways authorities to adopt streets for which they are not currently responsible, but this is usually agreed at local level, not national level, between the developer and the council. It is true that councils can use section 38 to step in if a developer fails to keep its promises regarding a new road or street. The legislation already gives highways authorities the power to do that, but there is no legal obligation on them to do so, so ultimately it is a question for the relevant council. I understand that the Department for Transport’s position is that it does not intervene in operational issues, and that it does not have powers to make statutory or impose national standards. That said, I do think it is important we continue to discuss this issue to ascertain what more can be done.

It is worth saying that the local highways authority cannot of course always adopt a road on a new development each and every time, not least because that may not be what residents themselves want. The road may also be incomplete or not built to the right standard, and the drainage may not yet have been adopted by the appropriate body. For whatever reason, when a road is not adopted by the local highway, liability for maintenance automatically falls to those who own the properties facing the road. What that looks like may vary depending on the housing development, but by and large estate rent charges are the main way in which residents pick up the tab for a road’s maintenance. The problem arises when homeowners are unexpectedly slapped with bills to maintain roads they did not even know they were responsible for and, worse, when they challenge the estate rent charges, they find that they have limited rights to do anything about it.

[Lucy Frazer]

I do totally understand the point. As a local MP, I have worked with developers and streets to get to the position where roads are adopted so that the local authority can take over. I totally understand the point my hon. Friend is making, and I look forward to the conversations we will have about how we can address this further.

Coming back to the estate rent charges, we and the Government recognise that this is a real concern for homeowners, and we are actually tackling it. We intend to legislate to give freeholders on private and mixed-tenure estates the equivalent rights of leaseholders, which means they will be able to directly challenge unfair estate rent charges. For the first time, they will be able to apply to the first-tier tribunal to appoint a new manager who can better handle the estate rent charges and is more responsive to what residents want, because as my hon. Friend said in his speech, they sometimes think they can do this better than the developers or agencies themselves.

My hon. Friend also talked about his concerns when developers fail to build roads to adoptable standards. When that happens, we want councils to take the toughest possible enforcement action. This is where the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill, which is currently going through this House, has a pivotal role to play in strengthening the hand of councils. Our reforms will remove the current four-year time limit that applies to some breaches; in future, it will be 10 years for all breaches of planning control. We are also doubling the maximum period of temporary stop notices from 28 to 56 days, and at the same time we are focused on closing existing loopholes that let developers obtain planning permission after a breach has occurred.

[Caroline Nokes]

May I just ask the Minister whether any of those powers will apply retrospectively, or is this just going forward? Will my hon. Friend the Member for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous) and I still be dealing with a 20-year-old case in his constituency and one that has certainly been rumbling on for 10 years in mine when the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill has passed?

[Lucy Frazer]

I am very happy to get back to my right hon. Friend, but I assume that in any event the maximum is 10 years for a breach of the planning controls.

[Caroline Nokes]

Very briefly on that specific point, we have existing problems, but my question is whether the new legislation will act retrospectively to tackle the existing problems, or is this only going to solve future problems that have not yet occurred in developments yet to be built?

[Lucy Frazer]

I am very happy to get back to my right hon. Friend on that specific point, but we do recognise that if developers flout the rules and breach conditions they will also run the risk of being hit with unlimited fines.

The status quo is that when a new development is granted planning permission, councils can use section 106 planning obligations to make sure developers build roads to an adoptable standard. It is important to stress that when residents have a complaint about the local planning and highways authority that has not been adequately resolved, they can also complain to the local government and social care ombudsman.

I want to finish by thanking my hon. Friend the Member for South West Bedfordshire and my right hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Southampton North for securing and taking part in this debate. It is an important issue, and we in the Government do not underestimate for a second the misery that unadopted roads can inflict on our residents. Be in no doubt that we get it that poorly constructed, poorly maintained and poorly funded roads and street lights blight neighbourhoods, erode people’s pride in the place they live and, ultimately, can ruin lives. Where loopholes have been exploited, councils have been lacking enforcement powers and homebuyers have found themselves powerless to challenge unfair bills, we are already changing the law to put things right. I am very grateful for the constructive thoughts of my hon. Friend the Member for South West Bedfordshire on where there is further room for improvement, and I look forward to further conversations.

We are committed to working with councils, the housing industry and hon. Members from both sides of the House to raise the bar on the quality and safety of roads and streets in all developments, and to level up communities by ensuring that vital infrastructure and services are right there on the door step when they are needed. That is our ambition, and that is what we are determined to do.

Question put and agreed to.

Section 21 Evictions

Caroline Nokes Excerpts

Tuesday 25th October 2022 Westminster Hall

[Kevin Hollinrake]

That is an interesting point. The vast majority of people in the private rented sector are happy with the shorter-term nature of rented accommodation. I wish the hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton, would not shake his head and would listen to what I say. There is a cohort of people who want to live in rented accommodation permanently. They want it as their family home. I absolutely agree that the Government should provide accommodation for those people. The Government should invest in this much more, and provide long-term, affordable rented accommodation and social rented accommodation. That is definitely the Government’s job where there is market failure.

I concede that there are market failures for people who want to live in permanent rented accommodation. I am not against the Government stepping in and ensuring that can happen. However, if they step in, tell the private rented sector to ensure that, and set out the rules that apply to someone who wants to make an investment in the sector, the reality is that we will get a reduction in investment in the private rented sector, which will mean a reduction in supply, which will make it more difficult for the tenants on whose behalf Members are speaking. That is the reality of the situation. So, yes: we should make greater public investment in long-term rental accommodation to deal with this issue. However, we should not tell landlords, who invest their private money in the private rented sector, that they have to let their property for life, which is what the hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton is considering.

If the hon. Gentleman wants the private rented sector to do that, a way of dealing with the issue would be to offer incentives for that. We could look at capital gains tax, for example; perhaps people who are willing to rent their property for a much longer period—for five or 10 years, or maybe even for life—could get beneficial capital gains tax treatment. Alternatively, we could reverse some of the changes we made in the Finance (No. 2) Act 2015, in which we restricted mortgage interest in the private rented sector; that was pretty damaging for lots of landlords in the sector. We could say to landlords, “We are no longer limiting the way you can deduct interest against your annual rental income, as long as you’re willing to rent your property out for longer, or for life, to give security of tenure to those kinds of tenants.”

I will conclude very shortly, Ms Nokes. The other unintended consequence of what the hon. Gentleman proposes is that private rented sector landlords will prioritise the best tenants. They will not take a risk because of concerns about non-payment of rent. You are going to disadvantage the people you seek to protect through the measures that the Government are planning and that the Opposition—

[Caroline Nokes (in the Chair)]

Order. Not “you”—that would be me.

[Kevin Hollinrake]

I am ever so sorry. That is the first time I have done that in seven years in this place. What is being proposed will disadvantage the people the hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton, seeks to protect.

I am fully convinced the Government will push ahead with the proposals, and that the Opposition will double down on this if they ever get into Government. I am just saying that they should be careful what they wish for, because this would be very damaging for the people they seek to protect.

Future of Small Cities Following Covid-19

Caroline Nokes Excerpts

Tuesday 26th April 2022 Westminster Hall

[Caroline Nokes (in the Chair)]

I will call Daniel Zeichner to move the motion, and I will then call the Minister to respond. There will not be an opportunity for the Member in charge to wind up, as is the convention for 30-minute debates.

[Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the future of small cities following the covid-19 outbreak.

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Ms Nokes. Let me start by saying that the pandemic clearly is not over—this debate is very much looking ahead. I am grateful for the opportunity to raise a huge subject, about small cities in general. I have a particular interest in Cambridge, my own small city, and in the future of the community that I represent and in which I live.

There are many things that could be said on this topic. I am conscious that it is a short debate and there are other Members who want to make a contribution. I therefore offer a warning to any watchers or readers: be aware that this will be a very narrow account, dealing particularly with issues of work and innovation. There is much more to be said on a whole range of issues, such as housing, fairness, mental health, transport, environmental sustainability, and air and water quality, but for today only, I will just touch on many of those issues.

The stimulus for this debate is the report by Cambridge Ahead entitled, “A New Era for the Cambridge Economy”. I pay tribute to the many Cambridge thinkers who have started the ball rolling on this discussion as we think about the world beyond the pandemic. I will mention in particular Jane Paterson-Todd and her team, Metro Dynamics, who were the lead authors, and the chair, Dr David Cleevely—there were many others.

The report sits in a wider framework. I have long felt that our goal as leaders should be to make Cambridge the best small city in the world. For me, when we are seeking to understand what that might look like, the idea of one city fair for all must be at its heart—social justice is essential. I am delighted that that runs as a golden thread throughout the report.

That goal will inevitably be delivered through the work of local leaders. I will name just a few: Councillor Anna Smith, the city council leader; Councillor Katie Thornburrow on the local plan; and Dr Nik Johnson, the Mayor of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough. I have named some of my Labour colleagues, but I well appreciate the work of many others within and beyond local government. Future success will only be achieved in partnership; I look to the Government, and the Department in particular, to work with us to find constructive ways forward.

Let me turn to some lessons from the pandemic. A leitmotif for many of us was, “You’re on mute!”—I think many of us will remember that for years to come—but the report picked up on many more things. When it was launched a few weeks ago, I could not help noticing that it was picked up in the national media, by the Daily Mail and The Times, and it was almost as if the only issue was whether people should go back to the workplace—that is an ongoing conversation in Government, as I understand it.

However, those reports missed the core point of the report; frankly, the paradigm has shifted and the world has changed. The question is how to adapt and turn that change to our advantage. Let us be clear that for many workers in Cambridge and elsewhere, there is no choice. The street cleaners, the cabbies, the bus drivers, the hospitality workers, the cleaners, the health workers, the lab workers, the manufacturing workers and many people in schools and universities did not have a choice—all those people had to be in their workplace all the way through the pandemic and will continue to be there.

The knowledge economy is different. In some ways, historically, Cambridge has evolved in a unique way to foster networking. Those who are familiar with the college system will know that it has its pluses and minuses, but one of the great bonuses is the sense of people being together and meeting in human-sized communities. When one looks at the way the science parks, innovation centres and networking organisations, such as Cambridge Network, Cambridge Ahead and Cambridge Angels, have grown up, along with many of the consultancies that have emerged in Cambridge, one can see that it is key that those opportunities for people to meet and discuss continue as they have in the past.

David Cleevely talks passionately about what he calls the serendipity of the chance meetings that so often lead to breakthrough ideas. I have lost count of the number of people who have told me they were padlocking their bicycles in Cambridge and a chance conversation led to an investment opportunity, a discussion or a new idea. Those moments—in other places they are the water-cooler moments; in Cambridge, they are the bike-locking moments—are crucial.

The report argues that policy makers need to understand how these changes will work for city economies, so that we can respond positively and take advantage of them. Our places must not only be resilient to the shocks of the future but evolve, adapt and mature through the process, taking the opportunity to do things better than they were done before. To achieve that, we must be on the front foot and experiment to help us understand what new demands we need to make of our cities, and how resources could and should provide for all.

Cambridge Ahead is a business-led and academic membership organisation. It has been looking at the structural changes that have occurred in Cambridge during and after the pandemic, looking at internationally competitive companies, and bringing together world-leading thinkers to identify the impacts of the pandemic and the opportunities it might present. Clearly, the report was produced through the lens of Cambridge, but I believe much can be learned for other great small cities across the UK. Cambridge Ahead concluded that the UK is on a new path and that the changes we are seeing are substantially changing the city’s dynamics in a number of ways. I will touch on three points.

First, transport patterns have altered. It is pretty clear that private vehicles are still being used in preference to public transport. Public transport numbers have recovered, but not to pre-covid levels. The timing of people’s journeys has also shifted. That offers both a threat and an opportunity. There is a danger of gridlock, frankly, but if we can spread the peaks and understand that road spaces are a precious commodity, there is an opportunity to do something differently—to develop active travel in a city the size of Cambridge. There is a genuine opportunity to shift to things such as electric bikes—I am a passionate user of an electric bike myself; they are ideal for small cities such as Cambridge—and reliable, affordable mass transit into and out of the city to make sure that those outside the city are not disadvantaged.

This is a time of real opportunity, but to realise it, we have to resolve the vexed issue of financing such a transition. I make no apology for referring the Minister to my very first speech in this place, back in 2015. Perhaps slightly unusually in a first speech, I talked about tax increment financing and how close Cambridge had come to securing a truly innovative deal a few years earlier, until the dead hand of the Treasury descended, as it so often does. It is time for the Government to look at that again.

Secondly, the demand for space is changing. Perhaps counterintuitively, demand for office space in Cambridge continues to grow, even though not everyone is back. The report details why that is: people want to maintain a space, and with social distancing and so on, we do not necessarily have people back together in quite the same way. At the same time, people are also working from home. The report concludes that it looks as if we are going to settle back at somewhere between three and four days a week in the office for most people, meaning one and a half days working at home.

That means that people are working in places that were never originally designed as workplaces, which raises some real challenges, not least the need to develop far more neighbourhoods—or quarters, as one might call them—with services nearby. Academics are talking widely about the 15-minute city. We need to do that and find a way to create it. We also need green spaces for people to be able to enjoy those new workplaces. That is a very big planning issue and there are many ways to address it, but I gently suggest—this might be slightly controversial at home—that for Cambridge, where many of our green spaces are locked behind college walls, sharing that space more equitably with citizens of our city should be high on the list for those who have the opportunity to make these decisions.

--- Later in debate ---

[Anthony Browne]

The hon. Member is making an excellent speech. As he said, I am a neighbour of his; I am the MP for the bit of Cambridge that is not in his constituency. I pay tribute to Cambridge Ahead, which does excellent work—this is an excellent report.

The hon. Member makes a lot of interesting points about the changing nature of Cambridge. I just want to highlight a couple of other things. You mentioned quite a range of workers who could not work from home, but I do not think you included laboratory workers. A lot of those who work for life sciences companies, particularly in my constituency, have to go into laboratories to work, and they often stayed there throughout the pandemic. You mentioned the shortage of office space—

[Caroline Nokes (in the Chair)]

Order. I did not mention anything.

--- Later in debate ---

[Daniel Zeichner]

I am grateful for those contributions—they are all important. I mentioned lab workers in passing at the beginning, but the hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. The Cambridge economy is perhaps slightly different from other parts of the country, but many of these lessons, particularly those relating to reinventing the high street, will be key. The report picks up on the fact that a number of companies are looking at setting up work spaces in other areas, not necessarily in the city centre, so it is likely that there will be a different pattern to the way in which people work in future.

The third and final point that I will pull out from the report—this is, inevitably, a brief summary of a long, complicated report—is that the biggest thing for innovation in Cambridge is, as I have already hinted, how networks work and may change. New working patterns affect the frequency and manner in which we interact with people. There are generally many benefits to homeworking. At the document’s launch there was a discussion about our need—I think we can all appreciate this—for places where we are not being constantly interrupted and where we can think and work through ideas. Homeworking provides an opportunity for such a productive space, and it can clearly boost people’s quality of life.

However—and this is key for innovation—we still need to create moments of value where people come together. The report describes that as making “serendipitous encounters” happen—in other places, that could be the water cooler moment—which has been key to Cambridge’s success. Many people over many years have asked why Cambridge has done so well. This is one of the key understandings that we have learned over the years. We have to ensure that, in the transition to different working patterns, we do not lose that. To be frank, that is important not only for Cambridge. Cambridge is a key, significant driver not just of the regional economy but of the wider UK economy, so it is very important to the Government.

That is a brief summary of a much longer argument, but lessons can be pulled out for other small cities, too. Cambridge has a proud tradition of innovation and we could be an ideal test bed for new approaches. Our economy continues to grow and there are opportunities to observe, measure, experiment and learn. That will require selecting projects to monitor proactively, publish data and test ideas, so that other cities can benefit and share in the experience, with an emphasis on generating societal benefit for every community.

We are asking Government to work with Cambridge and perhaps other like-minded cities to take the work forward to the next step. I hope the Government will follow up on this discussion and agree to meet us to discuss the creation of what might be called a multi-disciplinary test bed: a framework for implementing experiments and studies, covering health, education, climate, retail, town and city centre offers, transport, housing, business models and the evolution of office and industrial space. Cities across the UK have different characteristics and face different challenges, and they will want to experiment in different ways. Of course, an experimental approach is not without risks. Some experiments will fail, but the vital thing is to have the mechanisms to monitor and learn.

In conclusion, our cities have changed substantially and will continue to do so. There will be no return to the way things were, so let us take action together to take advantage of these changes and give our cities the resilience they need to face the future.

[Caroline Nokes (in the Chair)]

I call the Minister to respond to the debate.

[Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)]

rose—

[Caroline Nokes (in the Chair)]

This is a 30-minute debate and we have not had notification that the hon. Member for Gloucester wanted to speak.

[Richard Graham]

My understanding was that my office had put me down to speak in the debate.

[Daniel Zeichner]

The hon. Gentleman certainly sought my permission.

[Caroline Nokes (in the Chair)]

Thank you for making that clear. I will allow the Member to speak, but only for two minutes.

Ukraine Sponsorship Scheme

Caroline Nokes Excerpts

Monday 14th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his support for the scheme. He made the point about ensuring that we speed up all the security and visa checks as quickly as possible. As I mentioned, my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary has already acted in that regard.

From tomorrow, anyone with a Ukrainian passport will be able to apply online. Thanks to a surge in the number of caseworkers in the Home Office, they should be able to have permission turned around and granted very quickly. A PDF will be sent straight to them and they can then fly into this country to a warm welcome. As a result, the surge of staff in our visa application centres will be able to deal with individuals who, for whatever reason, do not have a passport or the capacity to secure one quickly, which means that we will be able to more quickly process the number of Ukrainians who wish to come here. As was pointed out earlier, 4,000 visas have been granted and the numbers are due to surge this week.

The hon. Gentleman made the point that charities, churches and community groups have all stepped up. We want to ensure that we are working with all of them this week to facilitate their role, not just in matching individual sponsors and Ukrainians who might benefit but in extending the reach of the support we give so that it is not just a roof over someone’s head but the valuable interpersonal support of which so many are capable.

When I was chatting to faith groups earlier today, I had the opportunity to talk to representatives of not just the Ukrainian Churches, but the Church of England, the Church of Scotland and the Roman Catholic Church, including the Roman Catholic bishops in Scotland, all of whom are anxious to ensure that we do everything that we can to help. For individuals who, for whatever reason, find that a sponsorship solution does not work for them, we will ensure that the local government partners and charity partners with whom we are working receive the resource that they require. The £350 is there for individuals, but charities and community groups will have a vital role to play in helping to marshal individual offers.

The hon. Gentleman made a point about unaccompanied minors, orphans and others who need our support. We are working with those on the ground to ensure that we can have the right solution for them.

Finally, the hon. Gentleman asked about working with the devolved Administrations. I was grateful to the First Ministers of Scotland and Wales for their generous offer to act as super-sponsors, and we are doing everything we can to facilitate that. My officials are working with those in the Scottish and Welsh Governments to ensure that we can do that in a way that enables everyone to live up to their responsibilities.

[Caroline Nokes (Romsey and Southampton North) (Con)]

I welcome my right hon. Friend’s statement. He has answered many of the questions that arose over the weekend, but may I press him specifically on when he expects phase 2 to start and what work is already going on with non-governmental organisations? Those organisations make the point that they have many people who have already been checked by the Disclosure and Barring Service, but the volunteers coming forward in my constituency tend not to have been. We know that there are already backlogs in DBS checking, so can he assure me that that will be sped up?

I have a practical question about people who are planning to move home over the course of the next six months. Will they still be able to take part even if their address changes?

[Michael Gove]

My right hon. Friend makes three good points. We are working this week with civil society and NGOs. Indeed, Lord Harrington and I met them in order to ensure that we can expedite phase 2 as quickly as possible, and we will update the House in real time over the next few days. On the second point, about safeguarding, we are working with the Home Office. We do not believe that we need to have full DBS checks in order to ensure that someone is an appropriate sponsor. Very light-touch criminal checks will often be sufficient, and then local authorities can be supported in order to ensure that people are safe, in line with the points made by the Opposition—points that my right hon. Friend made much more sharply, of course. If people are moving house, which is something I have had to do recently, we will do everything possible to facilitate their support.

Building Safety

Caroline Nokes Excerpts

Monday 10th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

I know that the hon. Gentleman, not least as a former council leader, has considerable experience in this area. He is right that the fire in New York reminds us of the range of risk, and he is also right that we need to take appropriate action to ensure that registered social landlords, housing associations and others are not hit adversely. We need to balance a set of competing goods, but ultimately—as he will appreciate—the most important thing is to make sure that people are in decent, safe homes and that there are more decent, safe homes built where people need them.

[Caroline Nokes (Romsey and Southampton North) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend spoke earlier about lifting the cloud that is hanging over leaseholders. Can he provide reassurance to residents such as those in Banning Street in Romsey, where the building is sub-18 metres, the freeholder is a housing association and the defects are cladding related, that they will be swept up in his reforms? They are looking at costs of £15,000 to £20,000 per leaseholder for new fire escapes, which may well not even be needed. Can he provide reassurance that they will be helped?

[Michael Gove]

I will absolutely look at that specific case. I do not want to say any more at this point, but my hon. Friend raises a very important point. One of the things with housing associations and other registered social landlords is that we need to make sure that the balance of responsibility is appropriate.

High Streets

Caroline Nokes Excerpts

Tuesday 19th October 2021 Westminster Hall

[Caroline Nokes (in the Chair)]

Before we begin, I encourage Members to wear masks when they are not speaking, in line with current Government and House of Commons Commission guidance. Please also give one another and members of staff space when seated and when entering and leaving the room. You will all have seen that it is a very heavily subscribed debate, so I will impose a time limit. Janet Daby will move the motion.

--- Later in debate ---

[Margaret Ferrier (Rutherglen and Hamilton West) (Ind)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing today’s debate. Over the past few years, as the hon. Lady has said, we have seen an increase in businesses moving away from physical retail space to an online model. The move has benefited retailers at the top levels of their companies, as it comes with associated savings in areas such as business rates or, for us Scots, non-domestic rates. Such moves, however, have a heavy impact on local communities: fewer jobs, for example, or a lack of accessibility.

[Caroline Nokes (in the Chair)]

Order. I remind hon. Members to keep interventions brief.

[Margaret Ferrier]

Yes, Ms Nokes. Would the hon. Member agree that the Government should incentivise retailers to maintain a physical presence?

--- Later in debate ---

[Janet Daby]

I was in primary school at the time that my hon. Friend Gentleman mentions, but I thank him for the intervention. We need a fair tax system, and I will address that in my speech.

I see the effects of the system of business taxation play out in my constituency of Lewisham East. Taxation is simply too high for small and medium-sized enterprises, especially after an insurmountable fall in revenue since March 2020. The current system of business taxation is outdated and unfair. It punishes small businesses aspiring to serve local communities and allows online empires to grow only stronger. In 2019, it was estimated that the eight largest tech companies operating in the UK avoided a combined total of £1.5 billion in tax.

A House of Commons public survey found concerns for our high street and ideas for improvement. Clair said that

“it’s sad to see so many town centres looking deserted, as many shops have been forced to close due to rents and rates.”

Kate said:

“There are empty units which make the town look dead”.

Nobody wants a dead town. Jags was concerned about antisocial behaviour rising on high streets when shops are boarded up. When asked what the Government could do to turn around prospects for high street businesses, Jane simply said:

“Slash taxes for small businesses. Make it worth our while to work the hours we do.”

I agree and Labour agrees.

We need a Government who demonstrate that they are pro-workers and pro-business. A review of all tax breaks needs to happen. The Government need to be serious about investing in a sustainable way that allows home-grown businesses to flourish and ensures the best value for the taxpayer. The local high street is for leisure, but for some it is a lifeline. Almost half of the people living in London use their local area daily. My constituents rely on local shops. They do not want to have to do a laborious journey on public transport or drive through busy London to run their errands. This applies especially to those living with disabilities or pushing prams, or to elderly people struggling with walkers. Why should their lives become more difficult when people wish to shop local and local people wish to work local?

It is not just a problem in cities. High streets that are a centre point for towns across the country are being neglected. A thriving high street can be a source of great pride and a declining one can be shameful. When an area is in decline, property prices fall, the young professionals move out of the area and the local environment begins to decay. We see poverty intensifying and becoming more visible.

The recent trend of high-street bank closures is especially concerning. According to the House of Commons Library, in the past nine years almost 40% of high-street bank branches have closed their doors. In the year between March 2020 and March 2021, 700 branches have closed. That is staggeringly high. I can see the effects in my constituency. The Catford HSBC branch always has queues going out the door, yet it is due to close, which is absurd. The branch is needed because not everyone can adapt easily to online banking. Not everyone has broadband or the support to make the transition to online. It excludes a huge swathe of vulnerable people. All of those customers now need to go into the centre of Lewisham, adding pressure to that branch. A branch of Barclays in the area has already closed. I wonder why the Minister thinks this trend is developing and whether he agrees with it. Will he support my call for HSBC to reconsider this closure?

We should not expect the general public to be comfortable with doing everything online. Local places closing means familiar and trusted people and services are disappearing. It also deprives people of those small moments of human contact, which may seem like nothing to one person, but to another are the tipping point into social isolation. It is essential to people’s wellbeing that in-person services continue. I would be grateful to hear from the Minister what can be done.

While I want to focus today on the burden that the Government’s tax rates place on our struggling businesses, we cannot ignore the impact of the shortage of HGV drivers on our high streets. This is a Brexit-induced crisis that was completely foreseeable. Coupled with the lack of workers to tend to our crops and farm animals, shops have experienced dire product levels on their shelves. High-street cash and carries are struggling to serve their customers. We are also hearing reports of pressure building towards Christmas. When it comes to Christmas, we know it is serious. Most British households want a turkey—I want a turkey—but not every family that wants one will get one, and that is the headline. This comes at the same time as the shocking news of a labour shortage, meaning that pigs are being slaughtered and their meat is unsellable. We all need supply chains freed up and workers trained up so that the embarrassing lack of stocks can be resolved and a Christmas dinner crisis averted.

The Mayor of London has put vision into action to inject new life into our high streets. He is creating vibrant shopfronts for vacant properties, supporting start-ups and keeping the streets clean and appealing. However, there is only so much that local leaders can do. We need a Government to show up and show that they back businesses, workers and communities.

[Caroline Nokes (in the Chair)]

There are not as many Members as I first feared, so an informal guidance for about five minutes would be very helpful.

--- Later in debate ---

[Neil O'Brien]

I am afraid I will take no further interventions—[Interruption.]

[Caroline Nokes (in the Chair)]

Order. The Minister has made it clear that he is not taking interventions.

[Neil O'Brien]

Despite being a Huddersfield boy, I cannot take further interventions, because we are pushed for time.

In Worcester, support from our future high streets fund is being used to renovate several iconic and beautiful buildings, including the local corn exchange, driving footfall and preserving the community’s heritage. My hon. Friend the Member for Hyndburn and Haslingden (Sara Britcliffe) also talked about the good that such schemes are doing in her constituency. Those are the kind of transformative projects that hold the key to restoring local pride and laying the foundations for our long-term economic recovery. That is exactly what underpins our levelling-up fund, which will be available to local areas across the UK.

Greenbelt: Local Plans

Caroline Nokes Excerpts

Tuesday 19th October 2021 Westminster Hall

[Caroline Nokes (in the Chair)]

Before we begin the next debate, I again encourage Members to wear masks when they are not speaking, in line with current Government guidance and that of the House of Commons Commission, and to give each other and staff space when seated and when entering and leaving the room.

Beauty and Wellbeing Sector Workforce

Caroline Nokes Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd June 2021 Westminster Hall

[Caroline Nokes (Romsey and Southampton North) (Con)]

May I say what a pleasure it is to see you back in the Chair, Sir Roger? You have been much missed.

I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris) for her phenomenal work, both as chair of the APPG and in repeatedly highlighting the hair and beauty sector in the main Chamber, emphasising, as she has done again this morning, the particular challenges that it has faced during the pandemic. She has also given us a really healthy reminder of what a strong sector it has been, which is important to reflect on.

We went into the pandemic with somewhere in the region of 300,000 employees in the sector, the vast majority of whom were women. Hon. Members would expect me, as Chair of the Women and Equalities Committee, to emphasise that we are talking about a sector that employs women, but it does not simply employ them; it trains them and gives them opportunity. Many of them will do years of training in college or an apprenticeship, then move into working in a salon or studio. They might then consider taking the plunge and going self-employed; that is always a risk, but many of those brilliant and brave women do exactly that. After a few years of being self-employed, perhaps on a mobile basis, they rent their own salon—an enormous financial commitment, involving business rates and rent. For all of them, it is about risk and a cost-benefit analysis. They are brave and ballsy—as I have previously said and established, that is not unparliamentary language—women, who go out, take the risk and benefit from it, and in turn they become employers of other women. That is a model that we should absolutely be encouraging, celebrating and promoting.

I will tell a little anecdotal story. As Chair of the Women and Equalities Committee, I get all sorts of interesting panels with fascinating people, including one gentleman who is one of the leading educationalists to whom the Government turn when they are looking for advice and interesting reports on everything to do with education. He talked to me about the veterinary profession and said that the veterinary profession was full of clever white girls. Then, he said, “But when educationalists find not-so-clever bright girls, they shove them off just into the beauty industry,” at which moment I had one of my moments of rage. Through the medium of Zoom, he undoubtedly got the famous death stare, because the reality is that the beauty and wellbeing industry is not “just” anything. It is a fantastic, thriving industry that provides training, employment and the opportunity to go off and become an entrepreneur.

Over the course of the last 12 months, I have been blown away by the stories I have heard from young and not-so-young women who have told me how their boyfriends, fathers or brothers have regarded them as “just” beauty therapists. I have always gone back to them and said, “You are not ‘just’ anything. You are an entrepreneur, and you know what? This country thrives on the entrepreneurial spirit of people like you, who have the guts to go off and become self-employed, to set up your own business, to rent your own studio, and to contribute to the economy in myriad ways.” I have got that off my chest, and I feel lot better about it.

The hon. Member for Swansea East mentioned that the industry sometimes gets ridiculed and people laugh at it, which makes me really angry, because they are laughing at the hard work of women who have skill, ability and the determination to give back to others the confidence that some of them may have lost. I know there is nothing more boring than somebody who stands up in this place and says, “When I was a Minister,” but I am will say it. When I was a Minister, I spent a very happy year at the Department for Work and Pensions. We talked about the challenges of getting women back into employment, perhaps after a long career break, and the thing that was missing from so many women was confidence. I would speak to women in jobcentres up and down the country, and I learned that they did not have the confidence to go back into the workplace; they felt their skills were lacking and they were old and past their sell-by date. These were women of 40. For the record, let me say that no woman in her 40s— I declare an interest—is past her sell-by date. It is crucial that we look at this sector, which can give the female workforce confidence.

The hon. Lady mentioned some of the services that can be provided, but I always highlight services such as ayurvedic facials that help with migraines, or the ability of specialist—indeed, brilliant—cosmetic tattooists, who put eyebrows back on people with alopecia or tattoo nipples back on women who have had breast reconstruction surgery. All these things give people the confidence to go back into the workplace, go back to work and take up a productive and useful role in society, in the community, and of course—I would say this to a Minister at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy—in the economy. That is crucial, because ultimately these are people who will pay tax and help the rest of us to recover from the hideous fiscal crisis caused by the pandemic. I recognise and want to reinforce the comments made by the hon. Lady about the promotion of the sector. This is not just “hair and beauty”; it is a really important sector, worth £28 billion, which can give women back their confidence.

I have a specific plea, which I hope the Minister will listen to and act on. The thing that struck me after talking to the National Hair and Beauty Federation and the British Beauty Council, among other organisations, and perhaps specifically after talking to individual providers of beauty services both large and indeed very small, including one-woman-band enterprises, is that they talk about the VAT break that was given to hospitality. Treasury Ministers always say that it was very easy and straightforward to do that because hospitality was on a separate VAT code and could be easily and distinctly hived off from other sectors, but the same does not apply to the beauty sector. Well, it should, and it would not be difficult to give it a separate VAT code. Will my hon. Friend the Minister undertake to have a conversation about that with the Treasury? We do not know whether covid will be back, or what the next pandemic is coming over the hill will be, or indeed what future financial challenges will arise. I think that it would be of benefit to the sector to have a separate VAT code, so that we will not be in the same situation in the future.

This is a very competitive, enterprising and determined sector, and one that is phenomenally good at self-promotion. What is lacking is regulation. We need a way of making sure that people are accredited, that training is understood and recognised, and that we can understand who is providing what to whom. I remember having a fantastic conversation with the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care on this subject. He rang me on a Sunday to talk about it and I explained to him there and then that he and I could set ourselves up as a pair of beauticians with absolutely no training, no accreditation and no regulation—although we would not survive in business very long, because we would be very bad at it. The reality is that there is not the sort of oversight that one might expect for an industry that uses, in some instances, interesting and even challenging chemicals and machinery, and all sorts of products that need to be used by expert hands, particularly in services such as cosmetic tattooing. I say that because we can all open the Daily Mail’s Sidebar of Shame and see some of the horrors that have been carried out on people’s faces.

Fundamentally, it is vital that the Government recognise that, as we come out of the pandemic, there is a challenge in female employment. My Select Committee, the TUC and the Women’s Budget Group—a range of experts, up and down the country—have reflected upon the fact it is predominantly women who have been employed in the sectors that have been locked down longest and hardest. The hon. Member for Swansea East mentioned the fact that the beauty and wellbeing sector has rightly had to put in all sorts of provisions to prevent covid spread, but increased gaps between chairs reduce capacity, and businesses must have 15-minute breaks between customers so that facilities can be wiped down and disinfected, taking hours out of a day that could instead have been productive, income-generating hours.

We have seen the same in retail. We know that 58% of non-essential retail workers are women, and my horrific prediction is that when furlough comes to an end, we may well see a massive increase in the number of women being made redundant. That will have a consequential impact on the work of the Department for Work and Pensions to make sure that interesting, challenging and sustainable opportunities are found for those women in the future. It is crucial that we look at our recovery and how we build back better in a feminine way.

I will leave the Minister with that thought. When we look at how we build back, we have to make sure that we do not forget the female workforce, who are so vital in the hair and beauty sector, and indeed in other sectors.

--- Later in debate ---

[Paul Scully]

The hon. Gentleman, as ever, predicts the next few paragraphs of my speech. Yes, we want to encourage and work with the sector, and incentivise it to take on more apprentices. I am aware of how highly skilled and valued practitioners are, but they are tempted to start careers in different industries because they have lost confidence in the sector’s future viability. That is why it is important that we talk about it, support the sector and demonstrate how viable and flexible it is, and how it very much has a key role in the high street ecosystem that I talked about earlier.

[Caroline Nokes]

My hon. Friend was quick to respond that he wishes to support apprenticeships and demonstrate how important they are in the sector. Can he outline what specific work he is doing with the Department for Education to make sure that it, too, promotes them?

[Paul Scully]

I can indeed, and I will come to that in a second. We also have to examine why apprenticeships were in decline before the pandemic began. We can look at it holistically across Government with the Department for Education, the Department for Work and Pensions and BEIS.

We have provided a range of support for the beauty and wellbeing sector. For example, the sector is eligible for the kickstart scheme, which provides a fully funded six-month job for 16 to 24-year-olds on universal credit and at risk of long-term unemployment. I am pleased to say that 600 high quality industry-designed apprenticeship standards are now available. I want to work with the sector to increase the number of small and medium-sized beauty businesses offering apprenticeships.

The Government have recently increased the cash incentive to £3,000 for every apprentice that a business hires, and that helps to maintain and attract the sector’s future workforce. It is good to see sector initiatives aimed at upskilling the workforce. For example, I commend L’Oréal on its education platform, Access, which I am told 54,000 hair professionals have used. We will continue to work with the sector to advance the reputation of beauty and wellbeing as an invaluable, skilled and highly rewarding career path.

I have talked about some of the issues that the hon. Member for Swansea East raised in her speech. I was pleased that she was forthright in mentioning the benefit of holistic treatment to the menopause. It is important that we do not shy from talking in this place about a treatment that can be of so much benefit to so many women across the country. It is great to see that issue highlighted.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Southampton North talked about the entrepreneurial spirit, as did the hon. Member for Strangford. My right hon. Friend is absolutely right that we should not talk about just beauty therapists and just the beauty sector. As we have heard, the hospitality sector, for example, has a low bar to entry, but that does not make it a low-skilled sector. The hair and beauty sector does not have a particularly high bar to entry, but someone cannot just pick up a pair of scissors and expect to walk into a hairdresser’s and say, “Can I start work, please?” It is really important to demonstrate the skills required in the sector.

The hon. Member for Bradford South talked about regulation, and we are working with the Department of Health and Social Care to look at regulation and what needs to be done for particular treatments. We will continue to make sure that we can work with the Department, the APPG and the sector to ensure the safety of customers. They need to see not just a certificate on the wall, as she said, but that there are skills behind it. We have to be really careful in those areas.

The hon. Member for Strangford talked about people—specifically, women—setting up businesses. We have talked about the fact that this is largely a female-led-business sector. He is absolutely right when he talks about female entrepreneurs. This fits into a wider piece of work that we are doing in my Department. What are the barriers to female entrepreneurs? They include access to finance, peer-to-peer networking and mentoring. The issue there is not just having the big beasts—the Deborah Meadens, the Richard Bransons and all those people. It is how you get mentors for people who have perhaps just opened their first salon, having been a mobile worker for a number of years; perhaps they have just taken on their first employee—it is about all those kinds of things. That is the kind of example that women want to see—someone in their mould, speaking to them about their issues. It is a question of getting consistency across the country, but also, as I have said, access to finance.

Alison Rose, the chief executive of NatWest, led the Rose review a few years ago. I chair the Rose Review Board with her—we have a meeting next week—and we talk about access to finance. We have 100 signatories to the “Investing in Women Code”, which involves a number of venture capitalists as well as lenders. We are trying to get them to change their teams so that they can get diversity of thought in their investment decisions. That will lead to having diversity in their investments and ensure that they are investing in more women, and that has to be brilliant for the UK economy.

We also have the start-up loans, available for anybody to set up a new business, of up to £25,000, alongside free mentoring. That is run by the British Business Bank and has been since 2012, and 40% of those loans are going to women. That is clearly far lower than the percentage of women in the population, but compared with some other lenders, it is going in the right direction. We still need to do more, so I am pleased to be able to encourage that. The Budget in March from my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer was focused on helping those most affected by the pandemic, including small businesses and vulnerable groups such as young people, women and those from disadvantaged groups in our communities. It is really important that we continue to do that.

In conclusion, we will continue to listen to the sector to understand its views and concerns. As we move to step 4 on the road map, we will work together to address the key problems facing the beauty and wellbeing workforce, discussed in the debate today. We will keep on reviewing the data; we will keep on making an assessment against the four tests at least a week in advance and will announce whether we proceed to step 4 on the new date of no later than 12 July. I want the sector to fully open as soon as that is safe, so that it can bounce back and recover from the restrictions and the financial pressures caused by the pandemic. That will help to address the issues relating to jobs and the skills gap. There is clearly more to do, after we reopen, to address the longer term challenges for the sector, but we need to keep making the point that the beauty and wellbeing sector is a fantastic industry to work in because of the people and the skills that they bring.

Planning System Reforms: Wild Belt Designation

Caroline Nokes Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd June 2021 Westminster Hall

[Caroline Nokes (Romsey and Southampton North) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Cummins, and I extend my congratulations to my hon. Friend the Member for East Surrey (Claire Coutinho) on securing this important debate. She has clearly struck a chord.

I will always claim that the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Wildlife Trust is visionary and ahead of the curve, and I should declare an interest as a member of it. The trust does brilliant work in my constituency, specifically around rewilding. Fishlake Meadows on the edge Romsey, a bog in North Baddesley, and, of course, the Wilder Wallops project, which it has supported, are brilliant ways to inspire local communities not just to visit nature, but to volunteer and become part of it, and to ensure that facilities in those areas improve and increase. A specific designation could do exactly that.

I want to turn the clock back 10 years to when the chief executive of the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Wildlife Trust came to visit me and spoke of wildlife corridors—perhaps the forerunners of wild belts. That was a recognition that a belt in itself is not adequate: we need areas where wildlife can spread, move and migrate, and we need to ensure that they are linked so that where there is development, green corridors can surround that development to make sure that our wildlife can thrive. That is why a new planning designation could really help, giving strategic planners the opportunity to look at things holistically and work out how to integrate development and green areas in a managed way.

We know that nature, when left to its own devices, can be incredibly rich and can provide some of the solutions to climate and pollution challenges. In Romsey and Southampton North, we have some important designations. We have national park, SSI, SINC—site of importance for nature conservation—and ancient woodland, but no green belt. I will always make a pitch to the Minister to consider having some green belt in Hampshire. We have farmers who have embraced high-level stewardship and have pioneered environmentally friendly techniques and low plough strategies to prevent soil erosion. We have the Broughton water buffaloes, which are used as part of a regenerative farming policy that enables carbon to be captured and has built biodiversity.

None of that happens by accident. People take deliberate, carefully thought through decisions to improve the local environment. I am extremely envious of the green belt that my hon. Friend the Member for East Surrey has in her constituency. I also want to pick up the comment about enforcement made by my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon (Dr Offord). In the valley of the River Test, we have seen over the last few days a horrific pollution incident, which I sincerely hope agencies such as the Environment Agency will seek to remediate as quickly as possible. That incident reinforces the message that where we put in protections for our environment, we must also give authorities the power to enforce when accidents happen or, indeed, when deliberate acts cause pollution.

Fundamentally, I want to leave the Minister with one thought: we need planning policies and strategies that will help nature and our environment, and the proposal for a wild belt could do exactly that.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister for Housing (Christopher Pincher)]

Thank you, Mrs Cummins. It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. I will certainly leave as much time as I am able to my hon. Friend the Member for East Surrey (Claire Coutinho). I congratulate her on bringing forward this debate and on assembling such a passionate, wild bunch in favour of her wild belt designation proposals.

I will say a few words about our planning proposals before I turn to my hon. Friend’s proposals. We have said that building back better from this pandemic means ensuring not only that new developments are greener and better for the environment, but that they support healthy, happy and flourishing communities and habitats. I want to be absolutely clear that one of the key purposes of our planning reforms is to leave a legacy of environmental improvement.

Our new planning system will improve both the quality and the standards of development. It will secure better outcomes, including for our countryside and the environment, alongside increasing the supply of land for new, beautiful homes and sustainable places—not least by getting local plans in place; as my hon. Friend the Member for Bosworth (Dr Evans) rightly noted, that is a significant contributor to preventing speculative development and building in the wrong places, rather than the right ones.

To deliver on our ambitions, we have announced a number of proposals for driving forward environmental benefits, through both the Environment Bill and our proposed reforms to the planning system. The Environment Bill, which has already come before the House, mandates, for the first time, a 10% net gain for biodiversity as a condition of most new developments. We are now proposing to extend that to the nationally significant infrastructure regime.

Recognising the relationship between the environment and development, we want to broaden the use of measurable environmental net gains beyond biodiversity to include wider natural capital benefits, such as flood protection, recreation and improved water and air quality, as my hon. Friend the Member for North Norfolk (Duncan Baker) suggested. Alongside existing regulations that protect our most threatened or valuable habitats and species, that will allow us to establish a strategic, flexible and locally tailored approach that focuses, above all, on positive outcomes. We want to capitalise on the potential of local nature recovery strategies, including opportunities for new habitat creation, as we seek to make the system clearer and more responsive.

To complement this, we are examining the current frameworks for environmental assessment. They are often complex and lengthy, and we believe they lead to unnecessary delays, hindering opportunities to protect the environment and open up appropriate development. Our intention is to bring forward a quicker, simpler framework that encourages opportunities for environmental enhancements to be identified and pursued early in the development process. We will embed this approach through further updates to national planning policy, ensuring that environmental considerations feature fully in planning decisions, including their role in mitigating and adapting to climate change.

As several hon. Members have suggested, our reforms also encourage the sector to think more creatively about biodiversity and about how bee bricks, green roofs and community orchards can improve the quality of our air and the quality of our lives. We are taking action through the national planning policy framework to set the expectation that all new streets will be tree-lined, aspiring to the beauty of green infrastructure such as we see in the cherry blossom trees that line the streets of Bonn in Germany.

Protecting and enhancing the green belt is very much part and parcel of this. I said that yesterday in the debate on planning brought forward by the Opposition, and I say it today specifically to my right hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes), who is keen on the green belt—she said as much in her speech. I trust that she will encourage her local council to be equally keen on the green belt. I can certainly assure her, as I assure the shadow Minister, that it is our intention to undertake a wholesale reform of local authority resourcing, including looking at the fee structure to ensure that local authorities have the wherewithal do the job we ask of them.

[Caroline Nokes]

rose—

[Christopher Pincher]

If she will be very brief, I will give way to my right hon. Friend.

[Caroline Nokes]

We have no green belts in Hampshire, and it would be lovely to have some. Would my right hon. Friend the Minister consider it?

[Christopher Pincher]

In consultation with local authorities, I am happy to have that discussion with my right hon. Friend.

Before I turn to the issue of wild belt designation, our White Paper proposes a new approach to the categorisation of land, reflecting its potential for growth, for renewal and for protection. We are now considering responses to our consultation carefully, so I hope that hon. Members will understand that I cannot say overmuch about the proposals while they are still being digested. I can say, however, that I am open to some of the proposals that my right hon. Friend has suggested, but with this word of caution. It is not only roots and vines that creep; the scope of Government Departments and their arm’s length bodies also creeps. We must be very careful that by giving statutory powers to such bodies, we do not allow them to make use of land—or rather, designate against development of land—that could be good brownfield sites, such as land close to railway lines. That simply places the weight of expectation of development on other places, such as greenfield sites. We need to be careful about what we wish for.

What we want to do is to build on more brownfield sites to protect the sort of land that my right hon. Friend the Member for North Thanet (Sir Roger Gale) talked about. That is why we have increased the local housing network calculation for the 20 largest cities in our country; that is why we increased brownfield regeneration funding by £500 million; that is why we have introduced an urban taskforce; and that is why we have introduced PDRs, to allow better and easier gentle densification of urban and town centre landscapes.

We are determined to support our environment through our planning reforms, we are determined to build on brownfield first and we are determined to take forward the views and aspirations of all in this Chamber who want wildlife to be placed first and foremost at the heart of our planning reforms. I appreciate that the fickle finger of time is ticking down the clock, so I am very happy now for my hon. Friend the Member for East Surrey to retake her rightful place and close the debate.

Oral Answers to Questions

Caroline Nokes Excerpts

Monday 19th April 2021 Commons Chamber

[Eddie Hughes]

The green homes grant is of course a BEIS initiative, but I can tell the hon. Lady that although it was making encouraging progress—with over 96,000 applications, and 39,000 vouchers had been issued via the scheme—given the fact that it was not progressing quickly enough, we have taken stock and decided to reconsider our approach. Last month, the Secretary of State for BEIS announced £300 million of extra funding for green home upgrades through the local authority delivery element of the green homes grant scheme and the social housing decarbonisation fund. This brings the total spending on energy efficiency to £1.3 billion.

[Caroline Nokes (Romsey and Southampton North) (Con)]

What steps he is taking to support the re-opening of hospitality venues as the covid-19 lockdown restrictions are eased.

[Matt Vickers (Stockton South) (Con)]

What steps he is taking to help high streets recover from the covid-19 outbreak.

[Caroline Nokes [V]]

In Romsey and the surrounding villages, much use has been made of the planning easements by pubs, cafés and restaurants to install temporary awnings, marquees, gazebos and so on. Please can my right hon. Friend reassure me that plenty of time will be given to pubs and so on before these structures have to be removed? In many cases, they will continue to provide additional capacity even when indoor socialising is allowed, and our hospitality sector has had a very tough year.

[Robert Jenrick]

I am delighted to hear that my right hon. Friend’s constituents, like millions of others across the country, are making use of these easements to enjoy the summer sunshine and to support local pubs, cafés and restaurants. When the first lockdown began, we inherited a planning rule called the 28-day rule, which enabled a business to set up a marquee or another temporary structure for just one month without seeking planning permission. We doubled that, and now we are bringing forward the legislation to ensure that that will remain in place for at least the whole of the summer, and I hope perhaps significantly longer. That will enable small businesses the length and breadth of the land, like those in my right hon. Friend’s constituency, to put up those marquees and gazebos, and get the full benefit of them.