Healthy Homes Bill [HL]

Lord Crisp Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 15th July 2022 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Crisp]

That the Bill be now read a second time.

[Lord Crisp (CB)]

My Lords, I thank noble Lords from all sides of the House who are supporting this Bill—and who, very nobly, I may say, have stayed in Westminster rather than starting their weekend early. I welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist, who will, I know, be responding at very short notice.

I will speak briefly about the contents of the Bill and rather more about why I believe noble Lords and the Government should support it. In short, it is about improving the lives, life chances and opportunities of our fellow citizens—particularly those who are most in need and have the fewest opportunities in life—and it is immensely practical.

There are four key elements to the Bill. The first is a duty on the Secretary of State to secure the health, safety, well-being and convenience of persons in or around buildings, which means in practical terms that all new homes have to promote health, safety and well-being, and help people to live well. The second part is to have 11 healthy homes principles. These are the principles of what makes a healthy home, and they address issues from fire safety to space, security, access to green spaces and managing climate risk. They would form the basis of any policy. The third point I want to draw out is the appointment of a healthy homes commissioner, to ensure promotion and implementation of the policy. Finally, the Secretary of State would provide an annual report to Parliament on progress with the policy.

The underlying issue behind the Bill is the intimate relationship between housing and health. Other noble Lords will describe many examples of how poor and inadequate housing damages health; from damp, cold and heat, poor air quality and overcrowding to dangerous stairs and electrical circuits—the list goes on. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, on his Bill and his powerful speech earlier.

The Bill is also by implication about the health of communities, wider society and the planet. They are all intimately connected. Poor housing blights communities and contributes to loneliness, isolation, depression and all the many aspects of social exclusion and the damage done by inequalities. Poor housing in neighbourhoods without facilities blights lives and contributes to global warming. Tackling these issues is central to any levelling-up agenda.

But this Bill is not just about the negatives or limiting the damage; it is also about the positives: improving lives and enhancing health and well-being across the whole arc of peoples’ lives. Housing is one of the key needs for all of us. For all of us, shelter and food are the foundation of our lives.

The Bill has been prepared by the TCPA, formerly the Town and Country Planning Association, and I particularly thank Hugh Ellis, Dan Slade and colleagues for their work on it. I also thank the officials in the Public Bill Office who helped streamline this final version. The TCPA is an organisation with a proud history, dating back to the 19th century and the promotion of garden cities. In many ways, this Bill is not a new and radical departure. We have known of the links between health and housing for years—think of Dickens and Disraeli, and the 19th-century rookeries and slum housing. This is in many ways a return to a much older British tradition of designing places to transform people’s lives, an endeavour at which this country used to excel. It is not just about the garden cities. At the end of the First World War, the Government published new and comprehensive design standards for public housing in order that they could build homes fit for heroes, and millions of new, decent homes resulted from this policy. Incidentally, the Minister of Health was then also the Minister of Housing.

People often talk about welfare provision as a safety net, stopping people falling to the ground, but if we want to talk about it in physical acrobatic terms, we should also think of it as a springboard, enabling people to reach higher. It is about not just the negatives of tackling problems but the possibilities and positives of enhancing and enabling lives, creating opportunity, and enabling people and the country to thrive.

Recent history has shown us how inadequate current planning and regulations are even as a safety net, as shown by the acute failures represented in the Grenfell Tower tragedy, where the most basic measures to secure individuals’ physical safety were not implemented. Moreover, look at some of the worst examples of the permitted development regime, where flats have been created from converted offices and commercial buildings with no windows or play space, or on industrial estates which expose residents to noise and pollution.

Even more recently, Covid has exposed the inequalities in our society and, as far as housing was concerned, revealed the problems many face: people were trapped during lockdown in inadequate housing, or overcrowded and ill-ventilated spaces ideal for spreading disease; there were schoolchildren with no space to study and no easy access to outdoor spaces; and some people were, very sadly, trapped with abusive partners. This is housing not acting as a springboard but stunting lives.

Let me deal briefly with two objections to the Bill. Will the proposals slow down development when we have a desperate need for more homes? The answer is that we must not offset quantity with quality: we will live to regret it. Standards matter, and the healthy homes principles matter, and we will pay for the consequences in the long run. Just reflect for a moment on the 1.5 million zero-carbon homes which would have been built to the 2016 zero-carbon standard if the standard had not been abolished. Those homes would now be cheaper to heat and would not require an expensive retrofit to deliver on a net-zero future.

Will the Bill add to the regulatory burden? It could, if implemented properly, reduce it. In the five years since Grenfell, there has been little practical action to change our regulatory approach or the wider culture of public policy on the built environment. Local authorities do their best in an environment where policy is heavily centralised. There have been incremental changes to building regulations and the application of some national housing standards to some aspects of planning. But this incremental tinkering with the system does not reflect the creative ambition we require if people are to be given the opportunity to thrive in healthy places. This Bill seeks to unify our regulatory approach around the single positive objective of securing the health, safety and well-being of individuals and communities. Implemented well, it will remove some of the current contradictions in the system, speed up development and reduce the regulatory burden.

On the positive side, there will be positive impacts on other areas, including the NHS and education. Improving health through improved housing will save costs and reduce impacts on the health and care system. Indeed, the only way we will see pressure taken off the NHS will be by action in other areas, such as housing, education and the environment—but that is a debate for another time.

This Bill is being debated at a time of great frustration over housing. We have waited too long for improvement. It is five years since Grenfell. This Bill provides a coherent vision for the future and a framework for practical action. It is practical and direct. It must be central to any levelling-up agenda. It offers a springboard as well as a safety net, and people in the country will understand what it is all about. Indeed, there is already widespread support among many organisations for it.

Of all the arguments that commend this Bill, it is the simplest that remains the most powerful. Healthy homes are the foundation of hopeful lives, and that sense of hope is vital to the many communities struggling with health inequality, the cost of living and the climate crisis. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Crisp (CB)]

My Lords, this has been a very impressive debate, showing the deep experience of people from all sides of this House. There is an overall message in all this about learning from the past and thinking about the future.

I will just pick up a few of the themes that people have mentioned before replying to the Minister. I cannot possibly do justice to what has been said but I will start, if I may, with the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, and his deep experience. He made very practical points about how this covers more than one department and the difficulties that creates for effective policy and implementation, and the need to think about how we can get at least some of this adopted through existing powers. I will come back to that. I am grateful to him for his support and for the presumed support of his ancestor, Hilton Young, on this matter.

I am very grateful to everyone who has spoken and to the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, for talking about his personal experience. One theme I took from what he said was liberating people; houses are the foundation for liberating people to be all that they can be. The noble Lord, Lord Stunell, gave me one quotation that I will remember this debate for. He said, I think, that we are building homes that are deliberately substandard. I did not know that there is a policy to that effect, but that is obviously what he has found in his wide experience in this field. The noble Lord also stressed the importance of having safe and affordable houses, which is a theme that others have picked up as well.

My noble friend Lady Prashar talked about how thoughtlessly we sometimes make changes in housing, without considering the wider implications. This is one of the points about systems and systems-thinking that so many others have raised. I was grateful to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Ely for drawing attention to the tension between the rush to build houses, and quality and standards. Rushing to build poor houses leads to major problems in the longer term. The noble Lord, Lord Shipley, stressed the healthy homes principles and some of the outrageous results—only some—of permitted development rights and their implications throughout the country.

My noble friend Lord Best talked strongly about the welcome commission that he has chaired, and its wisdom. I think your Lordships’ House will be coming back to the links between health, housing and place, and the important issues that come together there. I was also struck by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, saying that we should not expect our homes to kill to us. That seems to me to be a pretty basic point. Another point that the noble Baroness made strongly was that we need to make the links between the healthy homes principles and other policies that are already in the Government’s agenda.

I very much welcomed the comments from the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, about system thinking and how we need to see this right the way through, understand the big picture and not just make marginal changes here that have knock-on effects elsewhere. I also welcomed her points about costs and benefits. While there are relatively low costs, in percentage terms, there are very substantial benefits in the longer term.

I was also very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, for her comments about what it means for disabled people and about making sure we future-proof our homes. Finally, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, who drew out the points about additional costs and brought us back to the north-south divide, the importance of levelling up and how this fits together. This Bill is fundamentally about bringing together a whole lot of issues around the foundation of people having a decent life in our society.

I turn to the Minister’s response. I simply do not agree that these issues are all covered by current government policy. I was not necessarily surprised and therefore not necessarily disappointed by her remarks, and she will not be surprised or disappointed by mine. Before I try to take this argument much further, one of the fundamental points here is that quite a lot of what the Government have been doing has been proffering guidance and not making it mandatory. I noticed that a number of noble Lords around the Chamber talked about the importance of having some mandatory standards. The noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, who I missed out in my run-around just then, made the point precisely that we need some mandatory things because, when they are in guidance, the good people do them and the bad people do not. We see the results of both the good—and there is some fantastic stuff happening in the country—and the bad.

I will take the advice of the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, and look for opportunities for this in current legislation. I will look to follow up a conversation I have been having with the noble Lord, Lord Greenhalgh, for whose time on this I am grateful, and look for opportunities to discuss the issues with the noble Baroness and the Government more generally. I will also look for opportunities for the levelling-up Bill to produce some of the aspects of this Bill. Indeed, it has been suggested to me that while this Bill has only four pages, the levelling-up Bill has 140, so perhaps we should have an amendment to include this as a schedule to that Bill.

[Noble Lords]

Hear, hear.

[Lord Crisp (CB)]

I am delighted to know that many noble Lords think that is a good idea. We will not forget this Bill even if we do not achieve a Committee in the House of Lords on it. Once again, I am extremely grateful to everyone for their support.

Bill read a second time and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.