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.

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[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.