Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Carlile of Berriew Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 25th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

My Lords, before this debate started, I was confident that we would hear repeatedly the word “architect”, but in fact we have hardly heard it at all in a debate about housing. I want to talk about design and the role of architects and in doing so, I say that the speech I agreed with most was that of my noble friend Lord Best.

I should confess that for a time I was the unpaid chair of Design for Homes, the organisation that runs the Housing Design Awards, and therefore was exposed to the work of architects in great measure. I want to argue that building well-designed homes is a key aspiration to be realised through the Bill. I would like to congratulate the Government on their ambition to build so many dwellings, including, as I understand it, so many much-needed social housing units to enable young families, above all, to be able to remain in their own communities. That applies nowhere more than in rural areas, including the sort of community I once represented in another place.

I have been troubled by some of the grudging comments from parts of the Conservative Party. I can just about recall, having done a bit of research, what the Conservatives achieved in 1953 when Harold Macmillan was the Minister for Housing. In 1953-54, the Conservative Government built 301,000 new homes in one year, and most of those were council houses—something they trashed following the 1979 election, and I very much regret that.

In speaking about architects and design, I urge the Government to do a number of what I regard as very important things. First, have proper space standards within homes. The Parker Morris standards, now out of use for many years, served their purpose. Look at some of the best council houses—for example, in the Minister’s and my hometown of Burnley, where many council houses on the Brunshaw estate were built to Parker Morris standards, and good houses they were.

Then I would invite the Government to ensure—this is going back to my noble friend Lord Best’s speech again—that architects are not sidelined. Often in big housing developments, the architects are asked to do a design and then they are forgotten about until something goes wrong, and then if there is litigation, they may be the ones who are sued. But, actually, the truth is that architects should be there throughout, because it is only with good design that the Government will be able to build neighbourhoods predicated on creating places that people of all ages will want to remain in permanently and not leave because they cannot afford to live there or because there are only old people or young people there or other social mismatches.

I agree with the Government that compulsory purchase orders have an important role to play. If this ambition of the Government’s is to be achieved, then land should be made available, not at ridiculous prices, but certainly at fair prices. In order to achieve what the Bill is designed for, it will, frankly, be necessary to use compulsory purchase orders.

I agree too with the proposal to use development corporations, and I urge the Government to look at the equivalent of development corporations in areas where there are not per se development corporations to ensure that standards are kept up.

I would encourage the speeding up of the planning process by providing template standards and accelerated processes. I agree totally with the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, when he advised that there should be far more people trained to do the work in planning authorities so that it can be done thoroughly, quickly and decently.

Above all, I would encourage the Government to ensure that communities are involved in the design of their own neighbourhoods so that those neighbourhoods can stretch forward into the lives of the new generations who will be living there.

The Bill is about building to scale. Building to scale gives an immense opportunity to build good, because if you are spending a lot of money on a large scale, you can demand of those who do the work—the architects and developers—that they do it well. We should build with pride and give to the generations that follow us estates and areas to live in which will stand for them and their future generations for long to come.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Carlile of Berriew Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 4th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

I strongly support my noble friend Lady Scott’s amendments, particularly the one in which she requires the asylum provisions to be implemented immediately on the passing of the Bill. I congratulate my noble friend who, by gripping this, demonstrates the urgency of the situation we find ourselves in, in direct contrast to the ponderous approach from a Government, who appear to give greater weight to the process of international law than the well-being of our settled populations.

This is an infrastructure Bill. I alight on a simple truth that hotels are an essential part of an area’s economic infrastructure. Their importance exceeds the turnover of the business and the payroll for the cooks and cleaners behind the scenes and the front of house staff. Hotels accommodate more than weekend tourists. They enable commercial travellers to visit distant customers, provide shelter for tradesmen working on local building sites away from the main base, and drive a huge multiplier effect in holiday hotpots and conference cities. Local restaurants, tourist attractions, coach operators, florists and artisan food chains all benefit. Hotels are a huge economic driver.

 If you take away the liquidity in accommodation that hotels provide, local economies are damaged, especially in rural market towns that might only be able to sustain a single coaching inn. This is a matter of public interest. In the pursuit of growth, it is a matter of national interest. So, we cannot and must not carelessly allow the conversion of hotels into hostels after behind-closed-doors under-the-counter deals between the Home Office and local landlords. I do not blame the owners for entertaining these blandishments, but we cannot allow ourselves to sleepwalk into a situation where these decisions are taken—a connivance between the Home Office and the investors behind the hotels—over the heads of local people, whose justifiable concerns are swept aside and airbrushed away. That just will not do.

A friend of mine who operates a small seasonal seaside hotel with 29 rooms has been offered £40,000 per month for 12 months of the year for three years—£1.5 million in aggregate—for a property that might otherwise have achieved at best £500,000 at auction. She was then offered a fully expensed refurbishment at the end, while having to fire all her staff, who were already costing more because of the national insurance increases. She has not taken the bait, but others have. The contracts and values here are madness. They are economically illiterate. It is distorting whole economies with perverse incentives. These deals are being done right under our noses.

As my noble friend Lord Banner said, the conversion from a hotel to a hostel is not just planning semantics. People staying in hostels have no freedom to choose their accommodation. They stay for months, not days. They are required to check-in with a commissar each night. They share rooms with people they do not know. They do not pay the bill. They have nothing to do but wait. There are many other differences between them—

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for giving way. Does he feel a sense of humility given that, by 2023, a peak of 400 asylum hotels had been reached under the previous Government?

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

By June 2024, that had gone down to 213. At the moment, there are 2,500 more asylum seekers in those hotels than there were when the Government changed.

[Baroness Laing of Elderslie (Con)]

Will the noble Lord clarify the point? In particular, the argument before us is that some hotels in some places are not suitable for asylum seekers. The previous Conservative Government recognised this point and closed the Bell Hotel in Epping in April 2024. I know because I asked them to do so, and they did so taking into account the opinions and sensitivities of local people, which have been ignored by the current Government.

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

Since the noble Baroness provokes me to return to the question, I ask the noble Lord whether he agrees that 400 hotels were in use for asylum seekers in 2023 and that the reduction that took place was met with no change in asylum law that enabled the new Government to address the situation in a constructive way?

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

I am grateful to my noble friends for answering some of the technical questions for me. I was not aware of the numbers, but I am better apprised now. The point I was trying to make is twofold. First, I am trying to draw out the distinction between a hotel, a hostel and an HMO. In so doing, I am only repeating arguments that were made in the judgment referred to by my noble friend—the interim injunction in the case of the Bell Hotel in Epping. The noble Lord may wish to throw mud in my eyes, but I am only repeating the authorised judgment of the Court of Appeal and the points that were raised there, and I take no criticism for doing so. It is a matter of public record. There are many of my learned friends in this Committee, including my noble friend sitting to the side of me, and if I have erred in what I have just said, I am sure it will come up.

The point is, and the noble Lord gives me the opportunity to say so, that the movement of a hotel into a hostel is a material change of use for the reasons I just gave. The people who are staying there are not the sort of guests who pay their way and are there for a few days. They are mandated to be there by the state. That is the point we need to make. That is a material change of use. It is plain and simple. There is no denying it. As we have just heard from my noble friend, the planning system exists not just to regulate those changes in use but to arbitrate between the private interests of the hotel owner and the public interest. Let us be clear: there is no denying the public interest in this matter.

I want to make the distinction between the interim provision of accommodation for helping whole family units get back on their feet and the circumstance where that situation morphs in the building into the provision of bedrooms for single, mostly male, economic migrants. The conversion of a hotel to an HMO for the use of family groups is a bit of a lottery that shapeshifts with time. There are areas where a hotel might be converted into an HMO under permitted development rules—that is common—and thence separately from an HMO into a hostel. I want to paint a picture where a hotel has been converted into an HMO for family groups under permitted development but then without notice has flipped into a hostel when the Home Office decides to disperse families out and move in single, unrelated migrants. That is not just a theoretical possibility. It nearly happened in Diss in South Norfolk where I used to be the leader. In that town, a whole generation ago, arms were outstretched to welcome the Vietnamese boat people. Demonstrating that humility, under my leadership, the local council worked to welcome the largest group of Ukrainians in our county. More recently, migrant families—again, under my leadership—settled into a hotel which has, in effect, become an HMO. Please do not suggest that I have any ulterior motive; I have done my bit. Not only that but I have done my bit to smooth over some of the difficulties that certain people on social media and elsewhere have tried to make. You invite me to make these points.

In July—I am no longer the leader now I have taken my place in your Lordships’ House—the Home Office announced without notice that the families that had become settled would be dispersed, meaning that 42 children were going to be removed from the school roll just a few weeks before the start of the new school year. Their families would be taken away from the local GP practice and from the networks that they had created among themselves and with the local community, together with the infrastructure that had been wrapped around them. Again, something put in under the budget that I set was to be removed. No wonder local people were cross. They could see the injustice in that approach. If there was a crime, it was from the Home Office, which thought that sort of behaviour was acceptable. But we were lucky, because it had not been four years since the families were initially welcomed, so the council was able to issue a stop notice to prevent the forced removal of those family groups.

Elsewhere, with the slippery slope from moving from hotel to hostel, a stop notice cannot be issued. That is why I completely support the amendment which would stop the limit on stop notices so that there is no sleepwalking into a system where a hotel goes to an HMO then to a hostel without due process. We should put local people at the heart of decision-making and prevent those with an axe to grind claiming that they do not have a say, which is the source of the community tensions we seek to stop. If they do not have their say, they should just not be smeared as far right activists for expressing proper concerns. This problem has been created by national politicians, but local people need to be heard.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Banner (Con)]

My Lords, as this debate has progressed, there has been increased heat and perhaps a commensurate decrease in focus on some of the issues that were raised. I hope noble Lords will appreciate that I chose my own words extremely carefully when I outlined my legal views on the consequence of these amendments.

I reiterate that one of the key issues of the status quo is the uncertainty due to the fact that currently, there are no bright lines as to whether a change from hotel use to asylum accommodation or an asylum HMO is or is not always a material change of use. There is an advantage in having certainty one way or the other, and I am very deliberately not expressing a view on which way or the other it should be. It is simply that the ambiguity is deeply unsatisfactory. I stress that the extent of that ambiguity has increased in recent years, months and days. The case law—not just in the Epping case, but in earlier judgments by Mr Justice Holgate, which were earlier in the High Court concerning Great Yarmouth and other locations—has developed in such a way that the uncertainty has got greater, which has exacerbated the problem. Very respectfully, I invite any remaining speakers to deal with that point objectively and in a focused and unheated manner.

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

My Lords, I agree with the noble Lord, who brings to this House a greater knowledge of planning law than the rest of us added together. It is absolutely right that there is uncertainty, and the uncertainty should be resolved by the Government having a look at whether the changes that he has suggested need to be made, not by the amendments that have been moved. What we have heard this afternoon sounded much more like the other place in action, where constituency issues have been brought to bear to try and deal with what really ought to be rational arguments.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Carlile of Berriew Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 9th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I have not been in your Lordships’ House for that long, but this is the most outrageous amendment possible. It is a baseless smear against somebody. The noble Baroness says that it is a safeguard, but this is a stunt that will do nothing to improve transparency in politics. The last two speakers talk about trust in politics while suggesting back-hands and under the counter deals are the lingua franca of planning and that there is some sort of corruption at play.

I have been a council leader for 20 years. I can tell you that, when I ran my council, while it was easy to have cheap remarks in the local newspaper about brown paper bags and so forth, on not one occasion was I ever aware, either colloquially or in practice, of even the suggestion of bribery or corruption. That is what is at the heart of this.

The noble Baroness mentioned a former Secretary of State in the other place and suggested that money passed hands. The suggestion was that he happened to meet a person at a dinner who subsequently donated through his company, quite properly and with a full declaration to the Electoral Commission. That is not improper. In politics we need to meet people outside the Westminster bubble to find out where we are.

That aside, the substance of the amendment is nonsense. We already have an organisation—a trusted public body that is outside the organisations that the noble Baroness seeks to smear—called the Electoral Commission. Every few weeks, and certainly every quarter, a summary is provided of any donation by any individual or company that exceeds £500, not just to an individual but to political parties in general. That is where people should look if they want to find malpractice or malfeasance. The hard-pressed local planning officer and his support team are not the people to act in judgment on this.

This is just a stunt. I hope that, even before the Minister stands up, the noble Baroness will think about withdrawing the amendment without further debate. This is an assault on the political integrity of our country. It is a smear that should be beneath the noble Baroness and those who speak in favour of it.

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

My Lords, I am not sure that this amendment hits the target of potential corruption in relation to planning. In my view, the central problem is not with central government but with local government. We are all becoming accustomed to the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, who is very eloquent, describing the council that he has been involved in as a paragon of perfection over the last 20 or 30 years, and I accept what he says about his council down there in Norfolk. However, those of us who have been in legal practice over the years, and/or have been Members of the other place, and/or have had to deal in other ways with allegations of corruption, are well aware that there is a centuries-long history of local government corruption in relation to planning issues above everything else. I accept that there are protections and that most councillors, such as the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, would never consider being involved in corruption. But my experience of doing criminal corruption cases in relation to local government is that the people who commit the corruption, whether they are councillors or officers, are not the ones who subscribe to the regulations and the registers that have been set out.

We must continue to be extremely vigilant about corruption in relation to planning. There is an enormous amount of money involved. I hope that the Minister is of the view that to call this kind of amendment an appalling stunt is to lose oneself in the backwoods of local government and to be not a frequent reader of newspapers.

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My Lords, this has gone a different way, has it not?

I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, for tabling Amendment 120. Not knowing which way it would go, and not totally agreeing with my noble friend at the back, I think this raises an important point of principle that deserves to be considered.

At first glance, this is a very specific proposal, but the noble Baroness is right to highlight the broader issue that lies behind it, without the political point-scoring. It is the need for transparency, integrity and public trust in the planning system. We all recognise that planning decisions, as we have heard, are among the most contentious and sensitive areas of government, nationally and locally. Undue influence or even the perception of it can do damage to public trust in local communities and in Ministers and government. The noble Baroness is therefore right to remind us that we must be vigilant about conflicts of interest and that transparency is the best safeguard against suspicion.

The principle that the noble Baroness presses is a sound one, but there is a question of whether it is practically deliverable. Do our local planning authorities —which are, as we hear every day, underresourced—have the skills and capacity to deliver on this requirement? I am not sure that they do. Perhaps we should consider whether MHCLG should take on this responsibility, as it has greater access to the information that would be required. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s reply on this one.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

My Lords, I share the aspiration that we should build sufficient affordable housing in order to house those who need it. I do not propose to repeat what has been said in the three excellent speeches we have heard so far in this debate. I want to turn to a particular issue, with which I hope that the Minister who replies will agree.

One of the ways in which we ensure that affordable housing is built in sufficient numbers is to ensure that the contractual relationship between builders and the councils that give them planning permission is a fair one and does not give undue advantage to the contractors. It has not always been the case that that is so; indeed, there are very recent examples, and I will refer to one very major one.

Some years ago, one of the things I did in my legal life was act as a part-time chair of the Competition Appeal Tribunal, the UK’s anti-trust court. One of the cases on which I sat and gave judgment was a case in which a number of household-name builders had entered into cartel arrangements in order that it was ensured that one of them would win each contract. It was so endemic in the building system that an academic, who I will not name, from a respectable university, which I will not name, wrote a book on how to enter into these cartel arrangements. He did not do the builders much good, because the tribunal which I was chairing fined them a very large amount of money, each related to their world turnover.

They have not learned their lesson from that Competition Appeal Tribunal case. This year, a group of the largest housebuilders in the UK have agreed to a series of legally binding commitments to ensure that they are acting lawfully and to prevent anti-competitive behaviour. They have done that following an investigation by the Competition and Markets Authority—the CMA. I should say to your Lordships that the CMA took a very pragmatic view and did not make a finding that they had been cartelists. I will leave it to your Lordships’ judgment as to whether that was the case or not, under the parliamentary privilege that I have, by telling you what the housebuilders have agreed to.

They made the following commitments to the CMA. The first was not to share competitively sensitive information with competitors, specifically including the prices for which houses are to be sold. If you are a builder, you do not need to make an agreement with the CMA to know that you should not share competitively sensitive information in a competitive contract situation. They then agreed to support the Home Builders Federation and Homes for Scotland to produce guidance on information exchange for the housebuilding industry. Ditto what I said about the first commitment. They further agreed—I am very pleased that they did—to pay £100 million in aggregate to programmes supporting the construction of affordable housing in the UK. Somebody will have done a calculation of how much they had gained from their anti-competitive agreements, and I have no doubt that the £100 million was a conservative—with a small “c”—estimate of the gain that they had made. Then they decided, generously, to introduce enhanced in-house compliance measures and training programmes, no doubt to deal with corruption among individuals within the industry.

Given that case and the one I mentioned earlier, surely one of the most important things—I am sure that the Government will agree with this—is that we should be alive to the risks of corruption in the building industry, so that housing is built without giving the housebuilders money which they do not deserve and have not earned legitimately.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

I have a meeting with them next week; perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, would like to join me.

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

I thank the noble Baroness for the invitation but, looking at the parliamentary programme for next week, I suspect that I am going to be here for about 11 hours a day.

[Baroness Coffey (Con)]

My Lords, I look forward to spending 11-hour days with the noble Lord, Lord Carlile of Berriew, on important legislation that this House is considering.

I rise to speak to this because it is absolutely vital that we get going with the building of social housing. There are good examples of where we can be creative in considering this, but the underlying element of what has been put forward in speeches by noble Lords already is absolutely right. When a housing developer makes a commitment, this House, and this Parliament, have to strain every sinew to make sure that councils do not let them off the hook. It matters in terms of local communities and local plans. The whole essence of a large part of this Bill is that a lot of decisions are being removed from elected councillors by this Government. That is when confidence and trust in our local government starts to fade away: when promises made by developers—on housing and other issues, including health and other Section 106 issues—evaporate.

My noble friend Lord Markham has, in effect, set up a housing association in Ealing, being creative with how the financing of that can be done, to make sure of ongoing sustainable homes. The noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, referred to the fact that there has been a net change of just 700 homes when it comes to social rent. My noble friend Lord Young of Cookham started to refer to the fact that registered social landlords were not taking up some of the homes that are being done. In the east of England, we have the social landlords Flagship pro-actively selling off social rent housing and not replacing it—certainly not locally—but potentially doing some aspects of that elsewhere, many miles away from where that social rented housing is being displaced.

On what my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham said about lifetime tenancies, the law was of course changed so that councils should consider shorter-term tenancies, proactively considering the composition and demographics in that local community. Very few councils took that up, and I understand why to some extent, but, as has been pointed out, these are homes that people want to have but they are also precious uses of space. Thinking of the next group, there is a good intention to have design for lifetime. Some other, perhaps cruder, economic policies have come through in the past that have not always been welcomed. But I suggest that the Minister looks back at policy from just a few years ago with the two-pronged “benefits to bricks” approach.

The Government today are spending at least at least £35 billion a year on paying rent through the benefits system. We constantly need to think about where resources are being deployed. While recognising that we desperately need more homes—and we are coming on to land banking later—let us make the most of every single home that we already have today, including social housing, and consider what we can do to hold on to them. Apart from that, I will always continue to defend the right to buy.

--- Later in debate ---

Finally, there is the disposal point. There are no recycling facilities for plastic grass in the UK; it all simply goes into our waste system. I think that Amendment 227, a simple review amendment, is something that the Government really should look at, and I very much hope that the Minister will indicate that the Government are prepared to look at it.

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 185SA. I have put my name to a number of other amendments; I support those and welcome the speech made by my noble friend Lord Crisp. He referred to this as the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Levitt, and I should say of my noble kinswoman that 48 hours and about 31 minutes ago, she was asked to go on the Government Front Bench and by the time we got here yesterday morning, it was too late to remove her name from the amendment in the conventional way. But what I have learned in those 48 hours and now 32 minutes is that if at home you say, “Yes, Minister” often enough, you can get your own way much more than you used to.

My intellectual inspiration for this amendment comes in fact from a man, a wonderful friend, David Levitt OBE, who is also my father-in-law. He is a very distinguished architect who, recently, in his 90th year, was given a lifetime award by the Architects’ Journal for his service to social housing, and I pay tribute to his work. I know from my time as a barrister and part-time judge and as an MP how inadequate housing—the lack of a decent home in which to live—blights the lives of all too many of our fellow citizens, and all too frequently plays a large part in their coming before the courts, so to me, decent housing is essential to the reduction of crime, especially among adults. In four words: “Good housing brings justice”, and this amendment is designed to achieve that on a large scale.

What is striking about this otherwise inspiring Bill is that it says little about the design—the architectural design—of the 1.5 million homes that the Government are going to build. I think we all agree that nobody wants to build badly. National planning policy already makes it clear that poor-quality design should not be allowed. Yet the general quality and design standard of much volume housebuilding in this country continues to be poor. I spoke earlier about financial irregularities, but it is not just that; it is the way in which the thinking about building takes place that leads to poor design. Not only does that affect the people inhabiting the houses, it contributes to local dissatisfaction with local government and opposition to further development. So, while there is widespread support for streamlining our slow and expensive planning processes—words I use cautiously with the noble Lord, Lord Banner, in the Chamber—there are legitimate concerns about the quality of new development if existing checks and standards are weakened.

There is widespread disquiet about whether the housebuilding industry has the ability or the incentives to make the change needed to deliver both the quantity and the quality of homes that are required. If it does have the ability, is it willing to make that change? The problem lies not with national planning policy, which is pretty clear. The fact that the guidance is currently under revision demonstrates ongoing commitment by the Government to achieving good design. In my view, the difficulty lies at local level. As a result of the erosion of skills over time, inadequate training, which has been discussed earlier, and pressure on budgets, few planning authorities have sufficiently strong policies and processes to allow them to require effective change confident in the knowledge that they will be able successfully to resist planning appeals.

Without enforceable design standards, local authorities have no firm policy footing to reject inadequate schemes, so such developments are frequently approved on the basis that they meet housing needs. Thus, an all too familiar scenario is that outline planning permission is sought and granted on the basis of some attractive early visual impressions, but where all the important design matters are reserved and thus the images produced in fact have no contractual force. Because of national housing targets, councils feel under pressure to approve outline permission. The site is typically then sold to a housebuilder and later the reserved matters submission proposes a generic design based on standard house types on a typology that has nothing to do with local circumstances and places too much emphasis on roads and cars and too little on people and their needs.

What we are trying to achieve is that if somebody lives in new-built social housing, they will say in the years to come, “I come from such and such a place”, and they will try to live there for as much of their life as is economically possible. When the final scheme looks nothing like what was promised, many residents and councillors feel misled, and this leads to a built-in resistance to future applications. To allow this situation to continue would, I suggest, be a betrayal of the excellent vision which has led to the promotion of the Bill.

The good news, as this amendment reveals, is that no radical change is needed. The tools already exist within the existing planning system. All we are proposing is basically a tweak, an adaptation which will set the threshold for good-quality design and will give the already excellent national standards more traction at local level. Doing this will embed consistency and predictability, which will help local authorities, the community, developers and landowners. Consistency and predictability will simplify and thus speed up the planning process and reduce the need for appeals. Thus, the quid pro quo for housebuilders is that those which comply will get their planning permission much more quickly and will therefore be able to maximise their profits by building well within the permitted period.

Simply, what this amendment proposes is a code of practice which requires a set of templates incorporating core design standards. If these are given greater weight through the National Planning Policy Framework, that will make it easy for local authorities to apply the principles at local level. This amendment has been developed with a team of leading architects and planners whose publication, Placemaking Not Plotting, will probably be published tomorrow—I have actually seen a draft of it during the debate.

Once these core quality standards are embedded at local level, local authorities should require compliance with them at the earliest practical stage in the planning process and ensure that they are not left to the reserved matters stage. Clear, predictable and measurable design requirements would enable officers to sign off significant components of planning applications, leaving much-streamlined areas which would then be the subject of proper democratic debate and decision-making in the council chamber—proper local accountability but much more quickly and efficiently. That is exactly what the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, would love in his council chamber in south Norfolk, and he would have good cause to speak of it proudly in this Committee if so he wished.

So enacting a code of practice would allow applications which demonstrate compliance with the standards to be processed speedily within the current system. The promise of speedy approvals will provide an incentive for housebuilders to incorporate these measurable standards in their application.

The aim of this amendment is to find a practical way to use the best of architecture to provide the best in housing design quickly and efficiently. I hope that this approach will appeal to the Minister, who has such long experience of local government and the planning process and has demonstrated extraordinary understanding of it to us in the Chamber in recent days. I observe that this amendment is one of several related to design and quality, and I urge Ministers at least to include the basis of our amendment as part of the planning procedures at local government level to follow this Bill.

[Lord Banner (Con)]

My Lords, I will say a few words in support of Amendment 132 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, concerning the purpose of planning. To my mind, there would be some advantage in following the precedent in Scotland, where a similar purpose clause exists in its planning legislation. It would provide a guiding light to remind everybody involved in the planning system what planning is for and why we are doing all this.

There are two advantages in practice to this. First, it would remind those responsible for planning decision-making that that is not only about those who shout loudest, who very often tend to be the vocal minority as opposed to the silent majority who may wish to live in an area, and work in the area, but cannot find or afford a home there. It would provide a daily reminder that planning is about long-term public interest and not short-term expediency. For reasons I outlined in a previous debate, it would—in combination with the proposal for a statutory chief planning officer that was discussed in the debate on my noble friend Lord Lansley’s amendment—buttress the independence of professional planning officers from undue influence. That would be all the more important in the world where the national scheme of delegation exists, to give full effect to that scheme and for it not to be undermined by undue pressure from members or officers. I have a few quibbles with the drafting—that is not for today, but maybe something we can take up later. I urge the Government to consider this amendment very carefully.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Carlile of Berriew Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 22nd October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Best (CB)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 72, which addresses the issue of affordable housing delivery. I am grateful for the support of the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, the noble Lord, Lord Carlile of Berriew, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, and I know the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, wanted to add his name to this amendment. I declare interests as vice-president of the LGA and the Town and Country Planning Association, honorary member of the Royal Town Planning Institute and honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects. I pay tribute to Shelter for championing this amendment.

The amendment introduces a new clause providing for regulations to ensure that affordable housing actually gets delivered where it is a condition of planning consent, usually through a so-called Section 106 agreement. In Committee, I noted the problem—only too familiar for many of us—that housebuilders agree to provide a quota of affordable homes for local people, but these homes fail to materialise in the developments that actually get built. The housebuilders back out of delivering some or all of the affordable homes they promised, with the excuse of “changed viability”. They say they have encountered unexpected problems, choosing from a long list of possibilities, from increased interest rates to unexpected site conditions. They claim it is no longer possible for them to make a clear profit of 20% or more, and it is the affordable housing element that they insist must take the hit, despite that having been a condition of planning permission.

The Minister may say that this is a matter for local authorities to handle but, as a report from the National Audit Office set out in June this year, negotiations between local planning departments and well-resourced developers are hopelessly unbalanced, with the latter employing expensive consultants and legal experts to find ways of negotiating their contributions down. Cash-strapped councils are unwilling to fight expensive legal battles and feel obliged to give in.

This amendment would bolster the position of the planners by ending the arguments and making the agreed affordable housing element non-negotiable. It aims to ensure that developers actually deliver the affordable homes that were a fundamental reason for planning consent being granted in the first place. The amendment adds a safety net by obliging the house- builder to provide a minimum of 20% of new homes in relevant developments to be for social rent, or the percentage set out in the local authority’s policy framework—the local plan, where it has one—if that is higher. Importantly, the definition of social rent housing is that used by the Regulator of Social Housing in its rent standard. Although planners may also require some other forms of affordable housing, such as shared ownership and near-market renting, the baseline of no less than 20% for the all-important social rented housing is secured by this amendment.

The 20% minimum for social rent is also a figure recommended by the New Towns Taskforce, which reported last month. Its report recommends a total of 40% for all the various kinds of affordable housing put together, with at least half of that—20%—for social rent. This important requirement could be applied not just to new towns but to all major developments; this amendment provides for that outcome. Nearly half the nation’s current programme of affordable homes comes from these planning obligations on the house- builders but, as the noble Lord, Lord Young, noted in Committee, the CPRE has found that, despite agreements by the housebuilders to produce an average of 34% of relevant developments as affordable housing, the actual figure has turned out to be just 18%.

Shelter’s research has also shown that, in relation to the core social rent product, rather than the more upmarket versions of affordable housing, over the last 20 years less than 3% of developers’ housebuilding has been for social rent. This is despite the fact that, in most parts of the country, only the social rent accommodation is within the means of households in the lower half of income distribution.

The constant reneging by housebuilders on the contributions they agreed to make at the outset makes this amendment an urgent one. Indeed, I wonder whether it is worth all the time, money and effort to achieve so many new homes if so few of them can meet the acute needs of those suffering most from the nation’s housing shortages. Instead, enforcement of an obligation that delivers at least 20% social rented housing would substantially enhance the value to the nation of building 1.5 million homes by 2030. I hope the Minister will feel able to accept this amendment, at least in principle, and I beg to move.

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Best has given an empirical and quantitative justification for this amendment, which I support, and I will not repeat what he said. What I will say, however, is what social rent housing does and why it is a necessity.

It is a living instrument that improves our society in many ways. It creates the opportunity for stability for young families, and for continuing education for young people in those families. It also creates loyalty to the town where they live, and a history that is developed into the future by those who live in social housing. These days we often hear people commenting on the fact that they are the first person who went to university in their family. Many of those people went to university because they lived in social rent housing with the stability that enabled them, with the support of their parents, of course, to be educated to go to university. I believe that in this Parliament there are many people who fall into that category. This is a living instrument that we are trying to create—a system of social rent housing that produces the growth that creates the flowers of our society, or at least many of them, and gives our society a future we can be proud of.

[Baroness Grender (LD)]

My Lords, I support the noble Lords, Lord Best and Lord Carlile, on behalf of my noble friend Lady Thornhill, who is unable to be here this evening—she has been got by the lurgy that everyone is coming down with. I will make some of the arguments that my noble friend would have made.

At its core, this is about trust between developers, local authorities and communities to deliver what the developers have said they would. Does it not make your blood boil to hear and learn how often social housing has been promised and how often it has failed to be delivered? Research from Shelter shows that, in some parts of England, as many as 40% of the affordable homes initially promised are never delivered. The Local Government Association has estimated that, over the past decade alone, more than 100,000 affordable homes have been lost because of renegotiations and that absolute panto villain, the viability assessment, which is used and prayed in aid to stop the delivery of social homes for rent, which are so critical and important to society.

The amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Best, would bring much-needed transparency and restore faith in a promise that has been broken again and again over successive Governments. It would give councils the confidence that when they negotiate for affordable homes, the homes will actually materialise.

I know it is late, but if the noble Lord, Lord Best, moves to a vote, we will be there with him, and I am very hopeful that the Conservative Benches will join him as well. This is an absolute scandal that has gone on for too long. We need to restrict developers to deliver on their promise of social homes for rent.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Carlile of Berriew Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 27th October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wigley (PC)]

My Lords, I will speak very briefly on this, because the Hillside case arose in Merioneth in 1967, where I happened to be the parliamentary candidate in the 1970 election. I remember the considerable controversy there was about the application for 400 houses to be built in the vicinity of Aberdyfi, a scheme that was totally out of proportion to the nature of the community and the village there. It is not surprising that the thing did not go ahead, and it should not have gone ahead.

I assume that what the noble Lord who moved this amendment is seeking is clarity for the sake of the development industry for the future, not any revisiting of the Hillside case itself. In fact, what happened there was that some 41 houses were built, but the rest of the 400 houses were not pursued. The 41 houses that were built were built to planning specifications different to those that had been in the original case. In other words, there were all sorts of complications arising in the Hillside case.

There is also the fact that the Welsh Senedd has powers over planning and has its own rules in the 2015 legislation that it brought through, which brings another dimension in. Therefore, all I seek tonight is to know that, in moving this amendment, the intention is not to be revisiting the Aberdyfi case, which would cause an outrage, but rather to get clarity in the light of the court case, which, of course, I perfectly well understand.

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

My Lords, in the early 1970s when I was a very young barrister practising from chambers in Chester, I had the good fortune to do a lot of planning cases around north Wales and Cheshire. I have not done anything like the number of planning cases done by the very distinguished noble Lord, Lord Banner, but I remember them well and I would have been with the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, personally, in being totally opposed to the Hillside development. However, these amendments are not about the Hillside development; they are about a legal principle that emerged in connection with the Hillside development.

In his speech in Committee, the noble Lord, Lord Banner, enjoyed a moment of self-sacrifice characteristic of his profession and mine when he revealed that, if these amendments were passed, they would actually remove a very large amount of work from him. He is very distinguished, but he is not the only planning Silk in the country by any means, and he told your Lordships that, between 2022 and 2025, he had written between 200 and 300 opinions on this principle. Many barristers do not write such a number of opinions in the whole of their careers on a whole range of subjects. So it illustrates, because there are many other planning Silks, that this has become an enormously difficult and challenging issue. The noble Lord gave the example of what could have been extremely disruptive to the Liverpool Waters development, which is where the new Everton football stadium is.

I must say that I am very surprised that the Government have not come forward at this stage with an amendment of their own to deal with this situation, because if they do not deal with this now, then they are looking a gift horse in the mouth in the form of, particularly, the second of these amendments, which was drafted to meet whatever objections there were—not very well explained—in relation to Amendment 105.

Hillside has to be dealt with as soon as possible because it is reducing the pace of growth, it is resulting in fewer homes, it is reducing urban quality and it is diminishing neighbourhoods. To refuse to accept these amendments or give an undertaking before the end of Report to produce their own amendment to deal with this issue seems to me to fly in the face of government policy for growth, and I do not begin to understand why. For reasons that were given just now by the noble Lord, using other and existing legislation just will not do the trick.

The Government having accepted the principle of a legislative solution to Hillside, and having been given one that is an improvement even upon Amendment 105, the original version, that the noble Lord said was drafted by the Chancellor’s own planning adviser, it seems to me that this is a total no-brainer. We should not have to vote on this. We should not be here at 11 o’clock discussing this; it should be resolved, and it could be resolved with the assent of the whole House.