Infrastructure Bill [HL]

Lord Best Excerpts

Thursday 10th July 2014 Grand Committee

Moved by

[Lord Best (CB)]

79A: Before Clause 17, insert the following new Clause—
“Housing as nationally significant infrastructure
Within 12 months of the date on which this Act is passed, the Secretary of State shall introduce a bill to change the definition of “nationally significant infrastructure project” in the Planning Act 2008, to include development programmes that contain over 1,500 residential units.”

[Lord Best (CB)]

My Lords, after hearing about Louis XVI, possum whisperers and a plague of locusts, I think that Amendment 79A might bring us rather down to earth.

Amendment 79A seeks to include major housing developments in the projects that can be defined as “nationally significant infrastructure projects”. The amendment would pave the way for the Bill to address one aspect of the acute problem of housing shortages in the UK. I am grateful to the National Housing Federation for its briefings on this and also for the advice from one of the UK’s foremost planners, Professor Kelvin MacDonald.

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I hope that in my response I have been able to reinforce the Government’s absolute commitment and the priority that they attach to increasing the supply of housing. In this first debate on this part of the Bill, I hope that I have demonstrated how much effort at a high level is being applied in this area. No doubt we can talk about some of the specifics in later groups, but I believe that the fundamental difference is the Government’s strongly held view that decisions on housing should be for local authorities to make. While I support the principle of what the noble Lord, Lord Best, and my noble friend Lord Tope are trying to achieve, we feel that the measures we have in place are the right way forward. I hope the noble Lord will withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Best]

I am very grateful to noble Lords for their contributions to this little debate. The noble Lord, Lord Tope, made the point that something has to change. There has to be something a bit more dramatic, I think, than the measures we are currently working on. He also made the point that it is about quality, not just quantity, and one of the great things about a major development is that you can get the quality. If you are building just 40 houses and cramming them into the space that you have, the housebuilder often sacrifices quality. If you have a master plan working to create a garden village or even a garden community—I like that—on any scale, you can make it work because you have the numbers there.

The noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, was supportive of the need to do more but had his doubts about this particular way of helping. He made the point that it is important to identify who is going to initiate major developments. The use of development corporations, with consortia of local authorities, is absolutely the way to create the vehicles that could then take advantage of an easier, fast-track planning system. They would be the chief beneficiaries. It might be through local enterprise partnerships’ city deals. The Olympic Village was a wonderful example of how the growth boroughs in that area collaborated and achieved what remains a very important piece of housing.

[Lord Jenkin of Roding]

The noble Lord mentioned the Olympic Village. He is quite right to give credit to the local authorities in the area. Having read the report by the London Borough of Newham on what it has achieved through that, I think it deserves the highest praise for what it has done. I have in fact written to the Mayor of Newham to express that view to him.

[Lord Best]

I agree entirely. The noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, was very supportive but had some doubts. It was important to hear the plans that are now being formulated by the Labour Party. I know that Sir Michael Lyons’s review is due out fairly soon. I think that will be a creative and important contribution to the debate. The noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, made the point that long-term consensus is going to be essential and we have to work our way towards that, even though he has some reservations about this particular approach.

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, very much for her response and for underlining the Government’s commitment to increasing supply, which is the essence of this. My suggestion is by no means a silver bullet, that is for sure. Loans, guarantees, et cetera, are all good; it is whether or not the volume that we need is going to be achieved by the measures that are currently there. With regard to reliance on local plans—remembering that you have no duty as a local authority to meet the needs of your neighbours or of the nation—your local plan must relate to the requirements of your own locality, and that may not encourage you to believe that a very major development is within your remit.

I take the point entirely that the pre-application process adds another year or so to the whole, so in total from beginning to end, with the 28 days from the Secretary of State at the beginning, one may well reach three years. But believe you me, three years for a major development is a triumph in relation to the time that we now must wait to get things done.

This is a proposal for a Bill, not a proposal in itself.

[Lord McKenzie of Luton]

How does the noble Lord see the issue of the use of the infrastructure planning regime for garden cities and new towns, given the scale of what they entail—very big developments over the longer period? The TCPA thought that the infrastructure planning process did not really suit that. That is why I thought we almost had three situations. There is the local authority with its usual planning role and responsibilities for housing. There are new town development corporations with the much needed mega-expansions. My reservations were about the extent to which intermediate positions would be best dealt with by the infrastructure planning regime or by some other route.

[Lord Best]

I am sure that that distinction is exactly right. A development corporation need not necessarily go for 15,000 homes, which I believe is the target for Ebbsfleet, the first of these new garden cities. We are looking here at the more modest proposals; ones that are none the less enormous in relation to the place. It may well be that the development corporation model works just as well with a master plan for 1,500 homes as it does for 15,000 and the opportunities that that brings with it, requiring something in between the mega and the everyday that can be encompassed within the local plan.

The amendment is a proposal for a Bill within a year of this Bill becoming an Act. That would give an opportunity for that Bill to take forward all the detailed aspects of this, things such as who exercises compulsory purchase powers in these circumstances or whether one requires a national policy statement as for other aspects of infrastructure that would go with this measure. That is all to play for. At this stage, I thank all those who joined in and beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 79A withdrawn.

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[Lord Tope]

My Lords, in moving Amendment 83A, I wish to speak also to Amendment 83C, with which it is grouped. In many ways we now return to the debate we had on the amendment proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Best, and the question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, about who would implement large-scale housing developments. Certainly, one solution that was offered was that of local development corporations. The Mayor of London already has that power as regards mayoral development corporations. This amendment seeks to extend that possibility to the rest of the country.

At this hour, I do not need to go into great detail as it is fairly obvious that Amendment 83C speaks for itself. It seeks to enable the Secretary of State to create local development corporations at the request of local authorities. Amendment 83A requires that any such development corporations so established,

“shall include at least one local authority elected member who shall have full voting rights”.

I hope that is self-evident and that it would happen anyway. I move that amendment as a probing amendment at this stage but hope to receive at least an encouraging response from the Minister. I hope that she and noble Lords opposite will at least support the intentions here. I beg to move.

[Lord Best]

My Lords, I declare the interest that I did not need to declare in my previous amendment, which is that I am president of the Local Government Association, which supports both these amendments. I see them as complementary to our earlier debate on nationally significant infrastructure projects.

I very much hope that wherever a local authority wants to get on with it and do these things, we should give it every possible encouragement. I hope that these amendments are both acceptable to the Minister but would just add that it is likely that housing associations would play a very significant role in the development corporations. Many local authorities will not themselves be undertaking development on such a scale, and co-operation and partnership with housing associations will also be incredibly important in making the development corporations work.

[Lord McKenzie of Luton]

My Lords, we are happy to support these amendments. I say only, in relation to the proposal to have one local authority elected member, that the key thing is not so much status on a board and voting rights but the imperative of engaging with the local authority. That is probably behind the amendments, which I am happy to support.

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[Lord Tope]

My Lords, I have tabled Amendment 83B to enable us to have what I hope will be a short but interesting debate on custom-build housing. This will give the Minister an opportunity to respond with examples of the Government’s enthusiasm for it, which I know is there. I am conscious that this time on a Thursday evening is probably not the best time to initiate such an enthusiastic debate. I am not suggesting for one moment that this is the answer to the housing crisis we discussed earlier today. Plainly, it is not but it is a small and useful part of the answer. There is a growing interest in custom-build housing so perhaps I should be clear for the record what is meant by that. It includes both self-build housing, where the owner builds it himself, and those where individual commissions for building are of a house. I think that the phrase custom-build housing has now been adopted to cover both.

The LGA tells me that one in 10 new houses in the UK is custom-built. If that is the case, as I am sure it is, it is a small but significant part. It is one which is growing and in which there is considerable interest. My part of the Government are certainly very keen to encourage it and if this fairly simple amendment—which, as I said, was intended to create a debate—were enacted it would encourage local authorities to make provision for custom-build housing in their assembly of land. It would give further stimulus and encouragement to what is, as I say, a growing market and make a contribution—perhaps a relatively small contribution but a useful one—to meeting the housing need. It would also meet it in a way which most directly meets the needs of those who wish to use that housing, because it is their housing in every sense of the word. With that brief explanation and introduction, I beg to move.

[Lord Best]

I will not prolong the debate late on a Thursday, but I add my support to this amendment and note again that the LGA is keen on it. The major housebuilders have moved up from building 46% of the nation’s housing to building 70%. We are becoming incredibly dependent on a handful of very large housebuilders and we need to get back to having the SMEs, the small and medium-sized housebuilders, getting back into business. Many were wiped out during the credit crunch, the recession, and we need them back again. This is a way of ensuring that they can come back, because what they lack is the opportunity to get their hands on land. This is made easy for them by the use of the custom-build technique and this amendment would help in that process. In Germany, they build something over 40% of all their housing on this basis of land being assembled and housebuilders building sometimes a single house but sometimes several houses on the plots that are made available.

There is a slightly sinister aspect to the bringing back of the SME housebuilders, which is the notion that the smaller housebuilders and those developing smaller sites—smaller housebuilders and smaller sites often go closely together, because the big players do not want to deal with small sites—would not in future have a requirement for the provision of affordable housing attached to the consent. It is a government concept, which has yet to be enshrined in any way but is subject to consultation, that sites with perhaps fewer than 10 homes would not be required to have any affordable housing within the mix. One might think that with 10 homes that does not much matter, but in rural areas nearly all the village schemes for affordable housing for local people are of fewer than 10 homes. Something like 70% of all rural schemes are of fewer than 10 homes. The thought that this will help small housebuilders to do more is misguided.

It is the land, which is the subject of this amendment, which is preventing the small players doing the kind of housebuilding they used to do. They cannot get their hands on sites. It is not that they need to have special concessions and reduce the amount of affordable housing that they build, just as it is not the case that smaller schemes should have the requirements removed from them for sustainable housing for the move towards carbon neutrality by 2016. This amendment seeks to bring back those small and medium-sized housebuilders. Those amendments which seek ways of lowering standards or of removing the requirement for affordability are missing the point. It is this one which would help bring back those housebuilders in such a way that we do not make any sacrifices in terms of quality.

[Lord McKenzie of Luton]

My Lords, I am happy to support this amendment and I support the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Best. Doubtless, the Government will make reference to their custom-build fund, which was announced a couple of weeks ago. As for our plans for custom build, we support an actual requirement on local authorities to include a higher proportion of small sites in their five-year land supply, in order to boost small and custom build, and to guarantee access to public land for smaller firms and custom builders. As I think I said before, to make sure that we give people the chance to sign up to a waiting list for custom build, co-operative homes or community land, trust projects with local people have been the priority. We are certainly supportive of custom build, but we await with some trepidation the outcome of the Section 106 consultation for smaller sites.