Impact of Environmental Regulations on Development (Built Environment Committee Report)

Earl of Lytton Excerpts

Friday 19th April 2024 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Lytton (CB)]

My Lords, I very much welcome the opportunity to debate this hugely important subject. I declare an interest as a resident in the part of Sussex affected by water neutrality. I am also a supporter of the local group Save Rural Southwater—SRS—which focuses on excessive residential development in contravention of a made neighbourhood plan. Noble Lords will know that I am a chartered surveyor by profession and a former member of the Built Environment Committee. I pay tribute to its work in this area, in which I was not involved. I also pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Banner, on a most thought-provoking speech. He is no stranger to my profession or the hallowed portals of 12 Great George Street.

My first wider point is to reinforce the report’s implicit query as to how it has come about that damage to ecology, derived in my area from excessive water abstraction by a privatised utility under the noses of the Government’s Environment Agency and nature conservation adviser, has somehow alighted on the development control system rather than dealing with the supply-side mechanics and consumer demand management. That seems quite extraordinary. The report refers to a siloed approach, but it is more serious than that: it is bad public administrative architecture and a basic failure to co-ordinate environmental, economic and social factors.

I will start with a bit of data. A comment has just been made about housing. The report rightly describes the number of out-of-date local plans, but it does not query, at least in that context, the Government’s own data for household formation and thus housing need, which dates from 2013. My case rests on that point, but I question what we are doing about the inventory versus the flows in what we might call the creation of wealth.

In focusing on water neutrality, I acknowledge that this is not the only area of critical provision at issue. Communications, energy supply and distribution, waste and critical social infrastructure sit alongside air, water, light and sound pollution, many of which are difficult to price, but almost none is being planned for on a predictable basis or even consistently and objectively measured, let alone managed effectively. I am all for saving water. We are profligate in our use of it, which must be dealt with, but it is a wider societal issue.

The exemplar used in the report, which is the water off-setting scheme of Crawley Borough Council—14 miles from where I live—is apparently now being accepted by neighbouring local authorities as the model for dealing with this. However, it is a classic example of greenwash and is not fit for purpose. It devises an off-setting arrangement based on an aspirational water consumption metric of 85 litres per person per day. That is slightly more than is allowed in the desert Kingdom of Jordan. Although theoretically achievable, it is ludicrous in terms of current domestic practice. Data from Southern Water, our local utility, shows an average domestic daily per capita consumption of 136 litres per person per day, and the long-term objective of Part C of the building regulations is 110 litres. To see how absurd this is, I recommend that noble Lords visit the SRS website. Crawley’s own pilot scheme showed a consumption of 166 litres per person per day. You could scarcely make this up.

If this is to be the general way in which environmental regulation is to be circumvented or worked around, I am extremely fearful for where we may end up, with no objective metric for evaluating offset equivalence. In the limited circumstances of Crawley borough’s social housing, verifying ongoing compliance is absent, with no enforcement provision, no sanction for failure to perform and no authority possessing the intrusive powers necessary to achieve these. This is a recipe for profligate overconsumption, which will end up in tears.

This is an irresponsible approach and a dereliction of public duty. It will result in critical attrition of essential resources: not only water but nature and other things that are of extraordinary value to us. A holistic process is needed. When the report suggests shifting the balance between ecology and development, I reject that on the basis of the current situation, because it needs to look at the problem in a different way. The noble Lord, Lord Best, referred to balance and engagement. He is absolutely right, although I take that point from a different standpoint from his.

Ultimately, this is an issue for central government, utility companies and their regulators, for pricing into consumption the true costs of environmental compliance. We need a demand-side approach and the sort of thing that has encouraged consumers to save electricity and gas, recycle waste and gain a better understanding of the role that we all have to play as citizens.