Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Cromwell Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 1st September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, like many Members in the Committee, when I read the list in my noble friend’s Amendment 77 I was absolutely incredulous that we are in the position where planning permissions still have to be given for that scale of change to our electricity distribution system. It is incredible. I hope that whichever Minister is answering on this group will be able to give us concrete guarantees that action will be taken in this area, whether through accepting this amendment or through secondary legislation. We need to get on with this and with the Government’s own programme.

I very much welcome the boldness of the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, which is perhaps unusual coming from those Benches, and the tenor of the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey. One thing that strikes me, and she mentioned it, is that a lot of reservoirs, certainly in my part of the world, the south-west, are used as recreational facilities, and obviously we would not want to squeeze that out. The other thing that occurs to me, particularly this year, is that floating solar on reservoirs is very likely to become non-floating fixed solar panels, given the rate of rainfall that we have been having, or not having, over some of these summers.

I will be interested to hear the Minister’s response to these very positive suggestions for how we can move renewable energy forward in this country.

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

My Lords, with the solar energy that is reaching me at the moment, it is actually quite hard to see whether there is anybody out there, but I will take it for granted that there is and that they are all listening with rapt attention.

I apologise that I was unable to participate in earlier debates on the Bill, but I have been following it closely. I should declare that my family farm has some of what the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, referred to as “hideous”—or was it “horrendous”?—pylons and poles coming across it. My grandfather actually welcomed these as signs of the inevitable march of progress, but, even then, and certainly now, not everybody is quite as enthusiastic as he was.

While I see and support the logic of Amendment 77, it makes no provision overtly for wayleaves or compensation for those whose homes and businesses are affected by any additional poles et cetera. I hope that any amendment along these lines would accommodate such arrangements, as is the case with current power lines. Will the Minister, or perhaps the noble Earl himself, confirm that that is the intention?

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords, to pick up the point of the noble Lord, I remember my uncle getting pylons next to his house and how the compensation saved the day for his small business.

My own view is that it is good to have permitted development rights for minor changes, particularly if energy providers are calling for them. It makes sense to use this Bill to allow permitted development. My noble friend Lord Lucas said that it was hugely important, and I think it is hugely important to speed things up. As we have already heard, it is a surprise that some of these things require planning permission, and there is a lot of potluck as to whether you can get planning permission quickly in any particular area.

I just believe that we need to get things moving so I am not sure why the changes need to be in a regulation, as proposed in Amendment 77 from the noble Earl, Lord Russell. Can the Government not work out what can be easily excluded from planning control and put it in the Bill? That is how we used to do things in the Bills I remember presiding over in the 20th century when I was a civil servant. Is there anything that we can do to get rid of these things, rather than wait for further regulations and consultations, if it is straightforward?

I agree with my noble friend Lady Coffey that we should be careful not to allow multiple wind turbines through a back door. Clearly, the detail of this needs to be looked at; it has to be genuinely smallish things. I am less sure about permitted development rights for floating solar simply because I know so little about it; if we were to proceed with that, it should be in regulations. I am always asking the Minister how we can speed this process up. Permitted development rights here, and perhaps elsewhere in the Bill, can play a part.

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[Earl Russell (LD)]

My Lords, the amendments in group three are all on electricity distribution and cabling. I apologise that there is quite a lot of crossover between my amendment in this group and those in the other group; in retrospect, it might have been better to have kept them together. A lot of the overarching general points that I made in the last group apply to this group. I am introducing a series of practical measures that I would like the Government to take forward to help them achieve their stated aim, which I share, of getting to clean power.

My Amendment 78 is about land access rights. It would require the Secretary of State to consult on giving electricity distribution network operators powers in relation to the acquisition of and access to land. Land access rights need to extend to renewable energy operators as well, and that is my mistake; the drafting of my amendment was not as clear as it should have been. If the Minister, in responding to my speech, could also include the issue of renewable energy operators’ ability to access land in building renewable energy facilities, that would be greatly appreciated.

This is about using the opportunities the Bill provides. This measure, which the district network operators and industry bodies are calling for, is not in the Bill, which is why I have brought it forward. These are small, practical steps—like the British Cycling example I gave earlier—which, if implemented, would help to get done the things we all agree on.

If we do not address these issues, we will have delays, increased costs and issues in getting towards clean power. At present, electricity licence holders have fewer statutory rights when it comes to acquiring and accessing land compared with other utilities such as gas, water and telecommunications. I am not aware that the Government have done any consultation on this, but if the Minister could let me know when he responds whether consultations are ongoing, that would be greatly appreciated. We are looking to resolve the lack of parity, remove the unnecessary bureaucracy and make sure that we can get this stuff done.

The amendment would ensure that electricity distribution network operators are given carefully defined powers to acquire rights over land for overhead lines and cables, to purchase land for new substations, to enter land for the maintenance of existing equipment and to carry out vegetation management critical to the safety and reliability of the system. These powers will not be unlimited; they will be subject to both proper consultation and fair compensation for the landowners concerned, but they will mean that we can proceed with essential infrastructure works in a timely, straightforward and cost-effective way, in line with other utilities.

I welcome the fact that the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero has launched a consultation on land rights, published last month. However, it falls short of what is required to make clean power 2030 a reality. It does not extend to renewable electricity generators themselves, despite their central role in the energy transition. Without legislative reform in this Bill, we risk kicking the issue down the road.

As I said, the amendment enjoys the backing of the sector, which has been lobbying Members of this House—and, no doubt, the Government, including the Minister—on it. It has long been called for by the Energy Networks Association. These are the people operating on the front line, investing in green power and taking the risks. They are the people with the contracts to deliver this stuff for the Government, so it is important that the Government do what they reasonably can to help these companies succeed, so that we can share that joint ambition and achieve things together.

To conclude, my intention is to help the Government; I share their intention to hit our clean power targets. I want to work with the Minister; I am happy to look at amending my amendment and to speak to him between now and Report. The intention is for further consultation with the industry to look at these things and try to find some practical solutions to these relatively easily surmountable issues. I hope that is possible. I will circle back to the other amendments in this group after they have been introduced. I beg to move.

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

My Lords, I would like to ask for a point of clarity from the noble Earl, of which I gave him due warning earlier today. As neither he nor the Minister picked up my question in the debate on Amendment 77, I hope that I will be luckier in this debate on Amendment 78.

Subsection (1)(a) of the proposed new clause in Amendment 78 refers to

“the acquisition of rights over land”

by network operators. Will the noble Earl confirm that he does not have in mind compulsory purchase powers? We will hear a lot about them later in the Bill—in fact, they probably should have had a Bill on their own, but we are where we are. Will he just confirm that? Giving operators compulsory purchase powers, in effect, has been a disaster in the radio mast arena. I would not want to see it happen again here.

[Earl Russell (LD)]

That is not my intention. I apologise for not being able to respond to the noble Lord’s email this morning. It is not my intention to give compulsory purchase powers. This is wayleaves, not compulsory purchase.

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[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 79A in the name of my noble friend Lord Swire about the presumption in favour of burying cables as the default method. He spoke of insanity, but I did not think I was going mad—I believed and agreed with every word he said. Not only is burying cables less visually intrusive but, storms notwithstanding, as we have seen in the Ukrainian conflict, surface infrastructure is more vulnerable to malign and military disruption. I have not seen any calculation anywhere that takes that national security angle into account. That is an omission that should be corrected, and would be if my noble friend’s amendment is accepted.

I do not stand entirely shoulder to shoulder with those who accept the construction of pylons in any circumstance but I am not the Luddite who is in denial about the difficulties of strengthening and hardening the grid. We all need to be realistic about what it takes for the lights to come on when you flick that switch, with fluctuating renewables on the one hand and new demands from electrical vehicles on the other. But that should not give National Grid a right to be judge and jury in its own court and carte blanche to ride roughshod.

My interest in the amendment has been piqued because I have experienced at first hand the process undertaken by National Grid when it seeks to promote a new pylon power line, in this case from Norwich to Tilbury to transport electricity from the wind farms off the Norfolk coast down to the smoke. At that time, I was leader of the South Norfolk Council, an area to be bisected across its entire height by new HV power lines. What I experienced was institutional arrogance from National Grid and its agents. It thought that a single consultation event, offered at short notice on an afternoon in a remote village hall for an area of 400 square miles, was sufficient. It had a boneheaded refusal to accept that burying was even an option—even just in part across the picturesque Waveney Valley or the Roydon Fen county wildlife reserve.

National Grid exhibited a steadfast refusal to demonstrate or explain why the option of providing a future-proof offshore ring main, connecting the existing infrastructure that used to serve the redundant Bradwell nuclear power station, was even a possibility. The suggestion that offshore was impractical was wholly disproven by the offshore link that is currently proposed from Sizewell to the Richborough marshes—I am stood next to the noble Lord, Lord Mackinlay of Richborough, and I expect him to intervene in a moment to say how wonderful that part of the world is and how it should not be despoiled.

National Grid had unevidenced assertions relating to the unaffordability of burying lines, as opposed to having them overhead, without either explaining or quantifying the quantum of those extra costs for the whole line or just per kilometre. There was a failure to consider parallel running to the existing pylon line to minimize visual impact, with the result that the wonderful and historic market town of Diss is now proposed to be fenced in on all four sides by huge steel pylons to an unacceptable degree. This lack of understanding, further, that the mooted community compensation schemes for overhead lines, but not for buried cables, might undermine the business case for pylons now turns out to be the case because it stands as part of Clause 26 of the Bill. There were other questions to answer, which I will not detain the Committee with.

Now, of course, there may have been good reasons why National Grid might be right on all the points I mentioned, though I struggle to see how, but with friends like these, who needs enemies? National Grid has gone out of its way to pick fights rather than bringing people together. As a council leader, I met officials from National Grid and put the points privately, to try to have a neutral forum where it could make an improved case for the proposals and build consensus. That olive branch was spurned, so it is little wonder that there is now widespread resistance to new pylon routes. Opposition has been carelessly and recklessly whipped up by a ham-fisted approach from the people who need all the friends they can get.

I like this amendment in the name of my noble friend Lord Swire because it would set the default expectation that new lines will be buried. Of course, that does not mean that they must be buried, but for the operator to go above ground as the preferred option, he will need to make the evidential case and have it scrutinised, and to build friendships and not enemies. That is a much better approach and balance of power, literally, between the parties than the regrettable and aggravating behaviours that we have seen thus far, where the lazy overhead option is chosen and everybody else be damned.

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

I just underline that the missing ingredient in this debate is actual numbers on the costs. There is a lot of theoretical toing and froing this afternoon but what we really need in this discussion is a hard number cost for, say, 100 metres of buried cable as opposed to, say, the cost of a pylon. I asked a Written Question about a pylon some months ago and got a wonderfully “Yes Minister” Answer: “Of course, all pylons are different and some pylons are more equal than others, but it is all very difficult so I can’t give you an answer”.

I hope that we can do a bit better than that. It would be great to know the cost of, say, 100 metres or 500 metres—whatever is the right metric—of buried cable and pylon with the equivalent cable. Until that answer is before us—I suspect that it will be a lot more expensive—we are not going to lay this debate to rest. I think that everybody, on all sides of this Committee, would like to see the cables buried. The question is at what cost and whether that cost is worth it. Until we have that number, we are just talking theory.

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

My Lords, Amendment 78 from the noble Earl, Lord Russell, and Amendment 79A from my noble friend Lord Swire deal with the critical issue of grid capacity and connectivity, which sits at the heart of the Government’s ambitions to decarbonise the UK’s energy system and deliver the infrastructure necessary to meet their ideological clean power 2030 target.

Amendment 78 would place a duty on the Secretary of State to consult on and implement measures to give electricity distribution operators new powers. The distribution and transmission of electricity is intrinsic to the production and utilisation of clean energy. Without access to the grid, energy infrastructure remains little more than an expensive stranded asset.

The case for action is clear. As we know, the great grid upgrade is a vital part of our pathway to net zero, yet, at present, new energy developments such as wind farms and solar parks are experiencing unacceptable delays when it comes to grid connection. Some projects face waiting times of up to 10 years—delays that threaten both investor confidence and the credibility of our decarbonisation goals. That is why the previous Conservative Government took decisive steps in commissioning the Windsor review, which examined the obstacles to timely grid connectivity. We are of course proud to say that all 43 recommendations of the Windsor review were accepted by the Government—a clear signal of our commitment to reforming the system and bringing forward vital improvements.

Yet we must recognise the scale of the challenge. Even with those reforms under way, projects without current grid connectivity may not come online until the mid-2030s. That is simply not compatible with the Government’s aim of a decarbonised grid by 2030. It is essential that the development of the national grid moves in lockstep with the pace of renewable energy production and infrastructure delivery.

Therefore, Amendments 78 and 79A raise serious and timely issues. We must ensure that our grid strategy is not only fit for today but future-proofed for the decades to come. The principles of transparency—clear delivery timelines and strategy—and strategic planning for capacity must be at the core of that effort. That said, I note that Amendment 78 would require the Secretary of State to consult on and implement measures to establish these new powers. There is perhaps a case to make for Parliament to have a say before the Secretary of State takes steps to implement powers that have come up as part of the consultation. I would be interested to hear whether the noble Earl, Lord Russell, might be open to strengthening parliamentary oversight here.

Amendment 79A from my noble friend Lord Swire is a good and thoughtful probing amendment. I recognise his continual efforts in drawing this issue to this House’s attention. It seeks to explore how the planning system might better encourage the use of buried cabling as an alternative to overhead powerlines. This is an important point, particularly for rural communities where overhead transmission infrastructure can have a significant visual, environmental and social impact. Although undergrounding is not without cost or technical complexity, the long-term benefits in certain locations can outweigh those challenges. My noble friend is right to raise this. I hope that the Government will consider whether there are planning reforms that could help to support a more strategic and locally sensitive approach to powerline deployment.

The Minister may not be aware of the very active groups in Wales resisting the march of pylons through the Teifi and Tywi valleys. These groups are uniting the opposition parties against the Senedd Labour Government. The one I know particularly well is the Llandeilo Community Group Against Pylons.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Cromwell Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 4th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I am not a planner, but I do have the joy of owning a small property in Cornwall, which is part-listed. I took a lot of advice when I wanted a new kitchen at the back of the building on whether I needed listed building consent. The answer was, “If it’s in Cornwall, yes, but if it’s in London, no”. There are many differences between areas of this country, which we have not talked about this morning but will come into the assessment of how the criteria are done.

In Cornwall, they are trying to keep the villages and towns looking good and beautiful, which is fine. However, you then hear comments from people like a friend of mine who wants to put a summer house at the far end of the garden, away from the listed house, and must get listed building consent. Everybody is moaning about that and the cost. On the other hand, if you do not have some criteria like that, you will have a mess. On Amendment 97, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, it is a great idea to say that these charges should be waived, but an awful lot more needs to go into it. Frankly, the amount of money needed to pay for listed building consent for the average small house is not that great. Therefore, I do not support Amendment 97. I hope that we can accept that there will be pros and cons but that the need to have listed building consent in a reasonable way overturns everything.

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 95. Nobody likes to see fees going up, and I totally support the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, in her concern about calculation and control. I also support the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, in her very well-reasoned cry for support for the SME builders.

I want to put my weight behind Amendment 95, because quite often in this House I have said how much we like to make legislation and how little we then resource the enforcement of it. This Bill seems specifically to exclude money for enforcement. I cannot let it pass without asking the Minister to explain why and to lend my support to Amendment 95.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell. I agree that enforcement of legislation is almost as important as legislation itself.

I support the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, in her quest for lower fees for SMEs, even if that means that other fees must be a trifle higher. We worked on the problems facing SME builders and the dire decline in their market share when we sat together on the Built Environment Committee. I also agree with my noble friend Lord Parkinson on that subject. It is clear from the forensic contribution of my noble friend Lord Banner that the appeal system would also be a nightmare for SMEs.

In her summing up, I very much hope that the Minister will advise on what the Government are doing to help SMEs more broadly, and whether it is enough, and for those building houses on their own—which my sister did successfully in Vermont, USA, but which is extremely rare in the UK.

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[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, it is nice to see amity break out across the Committee after the previous group. I imagine a digital twin of the House of Lords would get to Amendment 135 by 7 pm.

Digital twins offer such an ability for local councils and their officers and members, and members of the public, to really get to grips with a plan. Otherwise, you are presented with something static that is really hard to change. It is just, “Shall we push it through or shall we retreat?” With a digital twin you can adjust, look at different ways of doing it and absorb comments as they come through, at a really low cost, and arrive at a much more evolved, much better, solution at the end of it.

I urge the Government, given that digital twins are part of the industrial strategy, to use this as an example to develop the Government’s role as a partner/customer, as a way of helping new small businesses and technologies cut their teeth and get a worthwhile first contract or two out of the way, and not to stand back but be part of the development of a strong new British industry. There is an opportunity here to do that, particularly with the Government’s new town programme. I really hope they take it.

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

My Lords, I endorse completely the speeches by the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, and her supporters. She introduced it engagingly and comprehensively. I have therefore scribbled out most of what I was going to say. She has done the Committee a double service in that respect.

A common difficulty for those citizens who wish to examine or question a development proposal is the scarcity of information, expertise and resources they have, often when up against a large professional development company. Planning authorities have the same problem, and the risk of very expensive and protracted discussions and inquiries to get to grips with the proposed project. Some applications that I have seen seem almost designed to overcome planning authorities and public resistance through the sheer volume and number of boxes of paper that arrive, within which people have to try to find where the bodies are buried.

If such projects were obliged to produce a digital twin model, as the amendment proposes, not only would we have a more equitable process but it would also save a great deal of time, resources and money. I could say a great deal more, but I will not because we all dread the phrase, “My Lords, a lot of good points have been made” and I shall not repeat it. I genuinely shall not. I support these amendments, and I will now sit down.

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, from these Benches I support this amendment and thank other Lords for their support. One thing the noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth, said is that if we had had a digital twin model earlier, the bat tunnel we talked about would probably never have been necessary in HS2.

Clearly, there are issues around this on data privacy, keeping information up to date, legacy systems and so forth. But one of the positives is that once you have a model, you do not just discard it once the project has finished; you continue using it into the future and update it. It allows you all the benefits into the future.

We on these Benches are very interested to hear where the Government are in the development of this area, which I certainly hope is an area where the UK, with its IT prowess, will move ahead of our competitors and use it for the kinds of not very successful infrastructure projects that we have had in recent years.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Cromwell Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 9th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baronesses, Lady Hodgson and Lady Parminter, and to offer support for Amendment 115, to which I attach my name, and for the general intention of Amendments 116 and 117. In the interests of time, I will restrict myself to Amendment 115.

I do not often take your Lordships’ House back to my Australian origins, but as this amendment has come up, I really have to. I am going back about 35 years to a place called Quirindi in north-west New South Wales. Somewhere out on the internet there is a photo of me sitting on a horse in a field, or paddock as we would say, that is dead flat and dead dry, without a blade of grass on it—that is Quirindi.

As an agricultural science student, I remember the farmer explaining how to live there. He took me out the back to the water tank, which was a very large tank that caught the water off the farmhouse roof. There was no town water in Australian farming, so that entire operation and household depended on the water that they caught off the roof. I still remember the farmer rapping on the side of the tin tank and saying, “That’s where the water is; we’re in trouble”.

Noble Lords might think, “Oh, that’s Australia—that’s far away; that’s a very distant place”. Quirindi has an annual average rainfall of 684 millimetres a year. There are parts of south-east England that have an annual rainfall of 700 millimetres a year, which is essentially the same amount. There is also the impact of the climate emergency and the fact that we are seeing more weather extremes and more drying out.

There is something Britain can learn from the Australian practices that have been enforced over history and that can be imported here for a win-win benefit. No one loses from the proposal in Amendment 115. As I think has already been mentioned, we in the UK use about 150 litres of water a day per capita. That compares with France, which uses 128; Germany, which uses 122; and Spain, which uses 120. This is expensively treated drinking water that we are using for all kinds of practices that we do not need to use drinking water for.

I am going to quote Mark Lloyd, the chief executive of the Rivers Trust:

“We also need to finally implement the use of rainwater rather than drinking water where we can, such as car washing, gardening, washing pets, filling paddling pools, and flushing the loo. Other water-stressed countries have used this approach for decades and we need to join that party.”


I really stress the “party” element. I do not think we have mentioned the issue of flooding yet. Many of us have been speaking about the need for land management to slow the flow. What could be a better way to slow the flow than to catch that water so that it is not flooding out into our drains, water treatment plants, rivers and seas and so that we can have it available for use?

Often, when we talk about water use, there is a lot of finger-waving: “People should switch the tap off when they’re brushing their teeth and people should have shorter showers”. But what we really need is a system change that makes doing the right thing the easiest, cheapest, simplest and most natural thing to do. That is exactly what this proposal is putting forward. So this is a win-win all round: for householders, cutting their bills; for preventing flooding; for protecting the environment; and for saving energy—we do not think about this much, but moving water around and treating water uses a great deal of energy. I looked up the stats, and we do not seem to have any good stats in the UK, but globally, the United Nations says that 8% of energy use goes towards treating and moving water. That is such a waste when you have water falling on your roof that you can use right there in place. Pumping it out to a reservoir, treating it and pumping it back in—all that uses energy. This is a common-sense measure; why on earth not?

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

My Lords, I assure the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, that many good things come from Australia, and she is one of them. The tapping on the tank she describes is exactly what I have been doing in Leicestershire in recent weeks. I have some experience of water harvesting, both from domestic roofs and from commercial buildings, and actually it is not very difficult, because roofs are all designed to channel water into pipes, and it is simply a matter of intercepting that water and using it.

I do have a couple of practical concerns. The first is that, as anybody who has done this will know, even a modest rain shower will give you an awful lot of water. As a result, any housing development or business premises is going to find itself with a very large need for water storage somewhere on that site, either underground or above ground. My second concern is how that water is recycled. I am not squeamish about drinking or using non-mains water. I raised a family on water drawn from an underground stream, not on the mains at all. But water left standing in a tank will grow bad and grow algae very quickly. If that is the solution, we need to find out how to treat it.

Furthermore, there is a real issue that I run into: the water companies and Ofwat will not even contemplate the danger of mingling water collected by a third party with mains water—in a header tank, in your pipes or anywhere else—because they are liable for the quality of that water. So, if you mingle it with rainwater, they will not allow you to draw mains water. The golden thread here is to find a system where rainwater is the norm and the mains is the back-up, but we are a long way from that at the moment and will be until the regulatory and practical storage issues are solved. To be clear, I thoroughly support this amendment—the spirit of it—but the practicalities of it need to be worked out effectively into the design of water systems supplying domestic and commercial premises.

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[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I ask the noble Earl, and indeed the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, perhaps rhetorically, whether they are aware of the One Million Cisterns project in Brazil, which aimed to deliver what it said on the tin and indeed has done so and was expanded subsequently. This is in the semi-arid area of Brazil, home to 18 million people. Brazil, of course, has a lot less infrastructure and is much economically poorer than the UK, yet it has been able to deliver a programme that has won United Nations awards and had all sorts of impacts. I hope the noble Lords will acknowledge that since other countries have achieved this, maybe it is not an unreasonable expectation for us to achieve it too.

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

I should just quickly say that we can learn a lot from Brazil as well as Australia. I am in favour of the amendment; I would just add that I did not realise that water butts were a declarable interest, and if they are, I had better declare that I too have some.

[Lord Sentamu (CB)]

My Lords, the greatest example of the gathering of rainwater that we can learn from is in Bermuda. They have stepped roofs made of limestone, so when the water lands on them the possibility of purifying the water is high—the sunlight also works as a purifier. The water then goes through the tunnels into cisterns under each house, and that is how they get their water. It is clean and pure, so if you want to capture more water to be used for drinking, it is not by mixing it with what comes out of the taps, but by recreating the miracle of Bermuda and its water. It is an island, there are no rivers—there is nothing. The only thing they have is rain. When it comes, everybody is very glad, and all their tanks are filled with beautiful water. If you want to capture more rainwater, why not learn from Bermuda?

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I finish with the suggestion that we should really not compete against each other when thinking about this issue on Report. We should think about an amendment that can incorporate all the elements in this group and bring them together—and, if the Government have not already seen the light, let us make sure that the Committee sends them a very strong message incorporating all these elements.

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

My Lords, I shall be very brief, as nearly everything has been said very much more eloquently than I would have done in support of Amendment 149. I have scrapped most of what I was going to say.

I just add that we talk about the benefits of being grounded. There are few better ways of achieving that than working with the soil, the weather and the seasons on an allotment. However, that privilege can be enjoyed only if there is an area accessible to cultivate. The allotment movement in the UK is a long-standing tradition and it should not be squeezed out simply to create more spaces to put houses on in a limited area.

I would go a little further than this amendment. The allocation of area should reflect the number of houses and the expected population. Currently, allotments are included in the 10% biodiversity net gain requirement, which is completely different from allotments. There is some overlap, but it is a different requirement. I ask whichever Minister is going to cover this whether they agree that we need some sort of metric within the planning system that says: “x population; y land allocated for allotments”—otherwise we are just in the land of good intentions, and we know where they lead.

[Lord Crisp (CB)]

My Lords, I will add three completely new points from a health perspective, and one that may I think have been covered.

The first point is that we are going through a major transition in thinking about health and in the way to create health and prevent diseases. People may well be aware that the links between nature and health and activity have been known for years, going back to the Greeks—and one could quote them. The key difference today, which I think has not yet come out yet, is the quality of the evidence that we have about that impact. It is due to researchers, including my noble friend Lady Willis, that we now understand the physiological evidence about the impact—how being in nature actually affects the body, and the biological mechanism behind this. Importantly, as the noble Baroness has shown herself and as she quoted earlier, there is evidence that green space in urban areas is even more important than in rural areas. That is the first really significant point—that the quality of evidence is now there.

The second point is that the health system is starting to act on that quality of evidence. If I say that the evidence for this is now as good as for many medicines, based on the same sort of considerations and published in the same sort of journals, there is no reason why we should not be thinking, as many people are, about how we go beyond pills. I need just to state a very simple point —that last year alone 8 million people were prescribed anti-depressants. That is an astonishing number, and this is one area where one might well think that being in nature and the activities involved would have an impact.

The third area I want to point to is government policy. It is very clear, is it not, that the new NHS plan, with its transitions from hospital to community and treatment to prevention, describes that it needs to create the sort of healthy environments that this amendment and others in this group envisage. I should have said at the beginning that I have put my name to Amendment 206 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Willis, which I am particularly speaking to. There are some very strong health considerations here that are different from those that have been around before. There is policy, there is evidence and there is action actually starting to happen within our health systems. It seems to me that, if this Government have the ambition to leave the country in a better place than they found it—beyond simply numbers of housing units—then they need to catch this tide and make sure that there is implementation and that we are creating healthy homes and neighbourhoods.

I shall add one final point, which has already been mentioned, about the importance of allotments and of growing—the importance not just of being engaged with nature and physical activity but of being engaged in social networks and in the activity that surrounds that. These things come together to create healthy neighbourhoods and at the heart of it are the sorts of measures that have been set forward in all these amendments.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (Baroness Taylor of Stevenage) (Lab)]

My Lords, I hope that noble Lords will forgive me if I just take a moment to thank my noble friend Lord Khan for all the work he did while he was a Minister in our department. I am afraid that I will not step on the toes of the great Lancashire-Yorkshire debate, but it was true to say that my noble friend’s unfailing good humour and his ability to convene and effect collaboration, even across barriers of faith and religion that are deeply historic in nature, gave him what I think bordered on a superpower, which was great. He did so much work on the faith and communities aspect of our department’s work, as well as on elections. I especially commend his work during the passage of the Holocaust Memorial Act, which was very difficult to navigate. He dealt exceptionally well with the work on that Act. I hope that he will continue to use the networks he has built and developed, because, in a time when there are forces trying to divide us—we see that every day—we need more Lord Khans to bring us all together. I pay tribute to the work he did in that respect. I will of course continue to work with him, but he is a loss to our department.

I also thank my noble friend Lord Wilson—very briefly, because I know he will hate me doing it—for stepping in at very short notice to support me with some of the work on the Bill.

I want to thank all noble Lords who have tabled amendments relating to the provision of green and blue spaces. Of course, as we drive forward—your Lordships will have heard my new Secretary of State urging us to “build, baby, build”—it is important that we maintain the aspects that have been raised in a very interesting and important discussion this afternoon.

There is a growing body of evidence illustrating the crucial role that green space plays in supporting healthy and inclusive communities, and we recognise the importance of providing these alongside new homes. I want to pay tribute to the Members of this House who have contributed to the evidence base in this regard, and particularly to the noble Baroness, Lady Willis, who was also kind enough to give me a copy of her book, and very thorough and insightful it is too. I am very grateful to all Members of this House who contribute to this evidence base. That is why existing policy and provisions already in the Bill are intended to achieve just that.

I turn first to Amendment 121, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, who I know has a passion for protecting green spaces and ensuring that local people can use their voices to shape development in their own areas. National planning policy plays a powerful role in the planning process, as it must be taken into account both in the plan-making process and in determining individual applications.

The National Planning Policy Framework—I am sure we will talk about this lots during the Bill—requires local plans to make sufficient provision for green infrastructure and to be based on up-to-date assessments of the need for open space; it is not an optional extra or just an encouragement to do it. The designation of land as local green space also allows communities to identify and protect green areas of particular importance to them.

We will of course have national development management policies coming forward. The noble Baroness, Lady Scott, asked me whether they would vary between urban and rural sites in terms of provision and what they specify about provision; I will take that back because it is a key point. We expect in due course—that phrase that we all love so well—to have further revisions to the NPPF. Additionally, new major housing developments on land released from the green belt must be accompanied by accessible green spaces. The green infrastructure framework, published by Natural England, supports local planners, developers and communities to plan for high-quality and multifunctional green spaces.

These policy provisions provide a strong basis for securing green spaces alongside new developments. However, they also allow local planning authorities to take pragmatic approaches where necessary, which rigid legal requirements would prevent. Local planning authorities can use planning obligations and conditions to secure the long-term stewardship of green spaces, and we have heard a bit about that this afternoon. As local government funding was cut, that was a disincentive to local authorities to provide green spaces, but we continue to work with them to urge securing that through planning obligations and conditions so that it covers the long-term maintenance of these spaces as well as their initial provision. We recognise that there are too many examples of poor maintenance or of residents left facing excessive charges. We will consult this year on arrangements for maintaining communal facilities as part of ending the injustice of the fleecehold estates that we unfortunately have so many examples of around the country.

On Amendments 138, 138B and 149, I acknowledge the intent to ensure that green spaces, green and blue infrastructure, community gardens and allotments, and even ducks—I greatly appreciated that point from the noble Baroness, Lady Fookes—are all given consideration at strategic level. The National Planning Policy Framework, which new spatial development strategies are required to have regard to, sets out that development plans should aim to achieve healthy places which promote social interaction and healthy lives: for example, through the provision of green infrastructure. I think the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, mentioned social interaction around allotments. Having been a councillor for many years, I can say that sometimes that social interaction on allotments is not quite as positive as we might want it to be, but I absolutely take his point.

Furthermore, where strategic planning authorities consider such spaces to be of strategic importance to the area, they are already able to set policies which reflect this. New Section 12D(4)(c) states that a spatial development strategy can specify or describe infrastructure relating to

“promoting or improving the … social or environmental well-being of that area”,

which we expect could include community gardens, allotments and green spaces. Equally, policies in relation to allotments and community garden land could be included within the terms of new Section 12D(1), which covers policies in relation to the development and use of land.

As I mentioned at Second Reading, we need to keep the contents of spatial development strategies high-level to allow for local planning authorities to set more detailed policies and site allocations through their local plans. The way that we are shaping the planning system, as I mentioned in previous sessions on the Bill, will, I hope, allow local councillors to spend more time thinking about local plans. We believe that policies to secure open space in specific developments are better set at local level, where the needs and opportunities in each area can be considered.

I turn to Amendment 194, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Grender, and Amendment 206, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Willis. These amendments would place duties on development corporations in respect of the provision and maintenance of green and blue infrastructure. I thank the noble Baronesses for acknowledging the important role that development corporations have in the delivery of housing and other infrastructure, including those green and blue provisions. As a lifetime resident of Britain’s first new town, built under a development corporation, I know that what always surprises people about my town is how green it is. They think it will be an urban jungle; it certainly is not that. In terms of blue infrastructure, the wonderful facility we have of 120 acres of parkland, including four lakes, in the middle of the town is, without a doubt, the most popular asset our town has. I really take on board that people truly value these spaces.

Development corporations are crucial to growing the economy and delivering much-needed housing. Large-scale development and regeneration projects must go hand in hand with green and blue infrastructure. We do not want to see just houses, we want to see thriving communities, and we know just how many benefits those provisions can bring to individuals’ mental and physical well-being, social interactions and, importantly, the climate and wildlife. That is why it is crucial that development corporations take forward the provision and stewardship of green and blue space.

It is worth highlighting that development corporations are already subject to the same provisions in the National Planning Policy Framework that underpin requirements to plan for and provide open space elsewhere. Where development corporations take on local authority planning powers, their planning policies and decisions need to be informed by the National Planning Policy Framework. Although some development corporations do not take on those powers, delivery of the property projects co-ordinated by those development corporations will also ultimately be subject to the provisions in the National Planning Policy Framework.

I have already set out the role and benefits of the framework in relation to green infrastructure, but it is also worth underlining its role in relation to plan making. The framework specifies that plans should set an overall strategy for the pattern, scale and design quality of places, making sufficient provision for conservation and enhancement of the natural environment, including green infrastructure. The noble Lord, Lord Crisp, talked about evidence, and he makes a key and important point there, because fundamental to local plan production and to the future strategic plan production will be that evidence base—it really is critical. Any local councillor who has sat through a public inquiry on their local plan will know that that is inspected in great detail by the Planning Inspectorate, and the evidence base is absolutely key.

The National Planning Policy Framework must be taken into consideration when preparing the development plan. We have seen this work very well in practice. For example, in Ebbsfleet, the Ebbsfleet Development Corporation has a strong track record of providing almost 15 hectares of parks in recent years, and this year is aiming to provide around 10 hectares of new parks and open spaces. I think this kind of model is what we are looking for with development corporations. I therefore believe that up-to-date local plan coverage will ensure that green space, such as community gardens, play areas and allotments, is planned for the right level and reflects local need.

I am not entirely convinced that it would help if the freedoms that local authorities currently have to shape the green, blue and brown space in the way that best suits their communities were removed. The noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, talked about empowering communities, while the direction of travel of the amendments could be that we impose conditions on them from national government. I am not sure that that is entirely helpful. I am sure that this dialogue will continue as we go through the Bill, and I am happy to have conversations—some Members have asked for meetings and I am happy to have those conversations. I also thank the noble Lord, Lord O’Donnell, for his very practical suggestion of talking to Treasury colleagues about the Green Book supplementary guidance on well-being. I hope that the Treasury has a focus on well-being, because if it does not, we are all in trouble. I will take that back to the Treasury.

For all those reasons, I kindly ask the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, to withdraw her amendment.

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

I accept completely the relevance of local input and that we must not tie people’s hands. But given that the supply of allotments is far less than the demand for it, does the Minister agree with me that there needs to be a slightly firmer approach —I suggested a metric, perhaps that is too aggressive, but at least some sort of norms in planning policy as to the quantity of allotment area to be given for a given amount of population? Without that, I am worried that this is going to be just like affordable housing, which is in the next group, which, as soon as planning permission is given, is haggled down to the minimum that the developer can get away with. I hope that we can be a bit firmer on this; otherwise, we are back to good intentions again.