Housing Strategy

Lord Crisp Excerpts

Wednesday 24th March 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Crisp (CB) [V]]

My Lords, it is a real pleasure and privilege to join this debate and hear so many excellent speeches from noble Lords around the Room. I welcome this important and thoughtful report. It is wonderful to see the Church leading by example and making significant and long-term commitments about its own land and resources. Something that has come through in this debate for me, starting with my noble friend Lord Best, but also from other noble Lords, is thinking about which other major landowners could be persuaded to do the same. What a tremendous moment it would be if more land became available more easily from some of the great institutions of our society to create affordable housing and address the needs of millions, including many young people. The Church would really be blazing a trail.

The report reminds us that it is the responsibility of us all, not just the Government and the Church, to address what is a national scandal. I do not just mean an acute scandal, represented by the appalling Grenfell Tower tragedy, but a long-term decline in standards of housing, hidden from most of us, who are, as I think the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, pointed out, sitting here in our comfortable homes—I speak personally here, of course.

How is it that, in the fifth or sixth richest country in the world, so many people live in poor conditions that are damaging their health, and so many of them, and others, are worried about their housing for the future and where they will live tomorrow, next month and next year? For some, the question is where they will sleep tonight. Providing decent shelter for ourselves and our families is one of the most basic human needs and human rights. We have seen a long decline, described in many reports over recent years, and this report rightly calls for a long-term strategy. It rightly calls for affordable homes and stronger communities. The two are intimately linked and I, like others, support the values that the report contains.

Coming almost at the end of the speakers’ list, I will not try to repeat what others have said, but I want to pick up some of the wider issues of quality, health and planning. In doing so, I emphasise that this is about the quantity of houses as well as quality of houses—both are important.

Covid, as the most reverend Primate and other noble Lords have said, has shone a light on the great inequalities in our society, housing being one of them. How many people have been trapped by lockdown in poor, unhealthy housing—sometimes literally trapped with abusive partners? Covid may have emphasised these problems, but even in good times, as other noble Lords have said, poor housing causes major problems of damp, pollution, cold and much more, damaging the health and lives of the people who live there.

Taking this health perspective beyond the individual, housing is vital to the NHS care system and its functioning. I know from a report I did on mental health how many people are incarcerated in mental hospitals simply because adequate appropriate housing is not available to them. Of course, the NHS and other public services, including care homes, need key workers who need key workers’ housing.

Housing and health are intimately linked but surely we have some of this the wrong way round? At the moment, our houses should be enhancing people’s lives, rather than damaging them, and helping us thrive. I noticed that both the most reverend Primate and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester talked about flourishing and human flourishing, no doubt intentionally going back to pre-Christian times and to Aristotle and eudaimonia: enabling people to live a good life, a life worth living, human flourishing. I think this should be a great theme—going beyond housing—for our society at this time.

Things are connected to housing, not just health, which is something that the great Victorian reformers understood. Good housing is good for the economy and for society, as well as for the individual. We have a great tradition in this country, from those reformers and model villages via Homes for Heroes, garden cities and the Parker Morris standards, which meant that we built very decent houses in the first half of the 20th century. However, more recently we have gone down a different route. There are excellent houses being built, of course, but there is too much small housing, too cheaply built, that maximises land values and investment returns, rather than better-quality housing that improves individual lives and, in the longer term, has better long-term social and economic returns.

The Government’s current approach to planning seems set to reinforce some of these problems, taking away power from local planners and passing it to national politicians and, in some cases, effectively to major developers. The Minister will say that the Government have promoted design standards and encouraged planning authorities to set local standards, but there are too many ways to get round these, particularly for permitted developments. Can the Government really believe that these measures are enough to turn the tide and lead to a new generation of homes where people can flourish?

I believe that we need some mandatory basic standards in areas such as space, daylight, insulation—for sound as well as heat—access to green spaces and amenities, and more, if we are to see the transformation that is needed. Taking this further, I hope to introduce a healthy homes Bill after the Queen’s Speech—depending of course on the ballot. The Bill has been drafted by the Town and Country Planning Association and would create a new unifying duty for all new housing on promoting health, safety and well-being, and would introduce a small number of basic standards for all housing. I very much hope, of course, that the Church, as well as the Government, will support it.

This introduction of standards need not be bureaucratic: they can be simple and must be small in number, and must of course permit some local variation —for example, access to local amenities, as I mentioned, would be very different in rural areas from in the centre of cities. But the Government have already accepted the principle of standards by introducing some. For example, they have introduced space standards for permitted development—although, as I understand it, only in response to pressure from their Back-Benchers in another place, rather than as a matter of principle.

I have asked the Minister why space standards are there for permitted development but not for all new housing. From his response, I understand that local authorities have the option to include nationally described space standards in local planning policies, subject to demonstrating viability and need—it seems to me that that last qualification is very important and a major let-out clause. But I do not understand why, if mandatory space standards without that qualification are appropriate for permitted development, those same standards are not appropriate for all new housing. I would be grateful if he could answer that point today.

This approach could even save some bureaucracy. I am not an expert in this field, but I understand that there are real issues, and sometimes clashes, between planning and building regulations. A duty on health, safety and well-being would unify and could be used to simplify some of those regulations.

I finish by returning to the most reverend Primate. I congratulate the Church on this excellent report, all it contains and everything that it may lead to. It is vital that the Government now respond positively, making a commitment to literally build back better, creating homes that enhance health and well-being, that are good in the long term for our society and economy, and that promote human flourishing. As the most reverend Primate said, this is about the heart of our society: what it is, who we are and where our treasure is.