Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Evans of Guisborough Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 25th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Evans of Guisborough (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure and something of a challenge to follow the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, in this debate. Indeed, it is something of a challenge to follow the 50-odd other contributors whom we have had today, because there is little left to say that has not already been said. In that respect, I would like to go in to bat to defend council planning committees, notwithstanding the fact that several other people have done the job already.

I spent four years chairing the planning committee in the London Borough of Havering, on the north-east border of London, where the city meets the country. There was a great deal of pressure there between the housing demand and the green space that people wanted to build on, so it was quite a tough place to do that job. All my committee members were trained in basic planning law so that they could do their jobs better, so I do not think that is a bad idea; I think it is a bad idea to insist that they be trained and then to take their powers away from them and have them discharged somewhere else. That seems somewhat perverse.

I must admit to the Minister that, even though we were a good planning committee, occasionally we discussed people’s extensions and modifications to their homes. That was quite important because, in allowing something to change on one house, you created a precedent and the ones next door could do the same thing. You could pretty soon see whole streets, and whole neighbourhoods even, change substantially because of decisions made on a relatively small number of properties. Because of that, it is still a really good idea to allow some democratic involvement in those decisions, because people will look at their changing neighbourhood and say, “Where did I vote for this? Where did I have a say in what is happening?”

I also used to feel that it was very important to run a committee that was fair and gave people a say because, for quite a lot of the public, the planning committee was the only democratic part of the council that they met or encountered. If we did our job badly, were unsympathetic or were poorly briefed, that reflected badly not just on the committee but on the whole of the authority.

On occasions, we were quite independent. We even sent the council’s own applications back for changes to be made to them. A good committee should not be scared to do that. We had some challenges while I was there. We had a race for golf courses. Suddenly, there was a demand for lots of golf courses around north-east London—not because there was a demand for golf, but because there was a demand for space to dump inert waste from building sites without having to pay the landfill tax. It is that sort of perverse incentive that, if we are not very careful, badly drafted environment law creates. I urge Ministers to take a close look, particularly at Part 3 of the Bill, to imagine how it might be misused. If they do not take that look, I am sure people in the property industry will do so—and will take advantage of it. It is worth taking the time.

I was also impressed by the speech made by the noble Lord, Lord Best, at the start of the debate. He said some fairly strong things about the big housebuilders. The noble Baroness, Lady Levitt, said some good things about design and architecture in the future, but I think they could have been a lot more cutting than they were. I have lived in new-build flats in London for the past 30 years. There have been a considerable number of problems with not just the design but the execution of the build. We hear a lot about fire safety—quite rightly after the Grenfell disaster—but the shortcomings go much further than that. I can give the Minister, if she wants, a whole list of defects and problems that regularly occur in new builds.

I hope the Government achieve their target to massively increase housebuilding, but a wave of increased housebuilding must not come at the expense of the quality of the properties that are built. We do not want to see people who buy their houses and flats landed with the costs of repairing them and making changes to them a short time after they have been built. To allow that to happen is bad news anyway for the housing market in the UK in the long run, because people will not want to participate in it if they think that what they are buying is junk. I am really looking forward to taking part in the scrutiny of the Bill in the coming weeks. I hope we can do a constructive job of it.