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.

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[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.

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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.