Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Duke of Montrose Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments
Wednesday 25th October 2023 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Lytton (CB)]

My Lords, I shall comment on each of the amendments. First, I commiserate with the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering. I do so as a past president of the National Association of Local Councils, the parent of parish and town councils in this country, which would dearly have loved to have had the facility to vary the way in which it deals with meetings. I am sorry that the Government have not seen fit to acquiesce to any of this. The Minister suggested that the measure went too far and that it would open the floodgates to local government holding virtual meetings as a matter of course. Were that his fear, the Government’s fear or that of the other place, it seems to me that it would have been perfectly possible to come back with a proviso that the Secretary of State would make regulation.

One matter that has never been explained to my satisfaction is the juxtaposition—the fact that, by definition, accountability is somehow measured by physical presence. I do not get that, and I do not think there will be many Members of this House present today who will get it. This issue will come back through sheer force of practicality and necessity. We have to move into the modern age, in that sense. I will leave my comments on that there.

I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, on his success in getting what I can only describe as the obvious provision into this Bill, namely that we have to take climate change seriously and that it underpins everything that we do. To that extent, it was inevitable—if not in this Bill then in very short order—that something would have to be included somewhere in primary legislation, but I congratulate him on his persistence in getting this far. Even if it is not the whole bun, it is certainly more than a currant in the bun and he is to be congratulated.

In that context, there are other things in the Bill that have been left on the cutting- room floor. I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, is not here at the moment. His amendment on healthy homes is about something that is inevitably going to come back. It is not going to disappear; this is going to have to be the benchmark whereby society expects homes to be created.

The series of amendments which I have been trying to get through unsuccessfully was to do with building safety remediation. The fact is that so many leasehold homes are unprotected yet are faced with remediation costs and liabilities, without which they will not get insurance at any sensible cost. These homes are not excluded from the necessity of remediation by virtue of their height, whether it be 11 metres and below or above 11 metres, because the Building Safety Act 2022 says that it will cover all these other buildings.

It is simply not correct that somehow these homes escape the inevitable consequences of that. That is going to come home to roost because there is an entire market sector—an entire financial sector—that is dependent upon that being resolved. If it is not resolved now in this Bill, as it clearly will not be, then it will come back in short order because this is a matter of an existential threat to leasehold tenure, or indeed whatever tenure there might be instead of leasehold. If you have a building in multiple occupation, where different parts are apartments, this problem is going to come home to roost so long as there are defects caused in the original construction and the constructor and developer are able to walk away from that liability.

In congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, on getting his motherhood and apple pie amendment passed, let me remind your Lordships that other bits that have been left behind are also going to come back and haunt us as things go forward.

[The Duke of Montrose (Con)]

With the leave of your Lordships, I will touch on another small point. In Monday’s Hansard, the heading for this Bill said that legislative consent had been obtained from the Welsh Government but that the Government were still looking for legislative consent from the Scottish Government. In fact, a Scottish Government paper relating all the trials and tribulations that my noble friend had been through—it had 26 pages—was still operating. Are we still looking for more consent from that direction?

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

My Lords, this Bill has been improved by the assiduous work of this House over the last 10 months. Some significant and welcome changes have been made during that process.

I turn first to the two Motions left on the Order Paper. I regret that the Commons has failed to perceive the benefit of enabling some meetings of councils to be in a hybrid form. Like the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, I feel sure that this issue will resurface as the Government move towards the creation of even larger units of local government, which will put additional pressure on those elected to attend meetings in person.