Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Lord Foster of Bath Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 27th March 2023 Lords Chamber

To close the circle, I will say that I live in a house that was built in 1678. When I first went to live there, many would have regarded it as a rather large heat sieve. I have gone around plugging most of the bigger rat holes that have occurred in the interim, post construction. But this is not just about energy use, although that is a very important thing. Energy use is probably the major net present value of energy component; that tends to be the situation. I see my noble friend Lord Ravensdale nodding at that. But, if we can make sure that the buildings we build today will last at least as long as some of those Victorian buildings—so they are built in a robust style with things that do not fall apart, so people feel that they are not then threatened by continual recurring costs of making good and patching up—we will tick boxes in terms of energy, on the one hand, and human satisfaction and commitment for the long term, on the other. That must make a lot of sense.

[Lord Foster of Bath (LD)]

My Lords, there appears to be a clear consensus across your Lordships’ House that we need to improve the mental and physical health and overall well-being of citizens, and that we can do that, in part, by improving the area around where people live and the homes in which they live.

Amendment 241, to which I have added my name, and which was powerfully introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, deals with the issue of the area around people’s homes and how it could be improved. A very good example of that is access to nature, and it is worth remembering that the Environment Secretary, Thérèse Coffey, very recently said:

“Nature is vital for our survival, crucial to our food security, clean air, and clean water as well as health and well-being”.


So access to nature is important for health and well-being purposes, as well as the other things that she mentioned.

When I was a Minister in what was then the Department for Communities and Local Government, I had a responsibility, for a while, for green spaces, and I had an opportunity to see some tremendous work being done by some planners. However, I was very acutely aware of the enormous pressures that they were under to achieve further access to green spaces. They faced huge conflicts, where many other issues often took priority over access to green spaces, and therefore priority over citizens’ health.

As part of the Government’s recently announced plans for nature recovery—which, in part, we were discussing in relation to earlier amendments—the House will know that the Government have set a target to ensure that everyone will live within 15 minutes of a green space or water, but, unfortunately, there is very little detail expressing how that will be achieved. So one of the benefits of Amendment 241, it seems to me, is that it will help the Government achieve that particular objective. However, as others have said, in particular the noble Lord, Lord Stevens, and the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, this is about more than just access to green spaces: it is about access to amenities and being able to get to them easily by walking, wheeling or cycling, which are all forms of exercise that improve health.

It is worth noting that in 2021 Sustrans carried out a survey that found that walking, wheeling and cycling together prevented almost 130,000 serious long-term health conditions every year. Yet we are still building developments that are far from existing settlements, and where you cannot even buy a pint—perhaps I should say a litre these days—of milk, or at least you will not be able to until a later phase of development. So people have to resort to using their cars or, where it is available, public transport, thereby again reducing exercise opportunities.

Planning departments can play a role in enabling people to exercise as part of their everyday lives, but they need help. We know from the Sustrans survey that 64% of planners who responded called for “robust … guidance or regulation” to help them prioritise health and well-being. I believe that this amendment—which is based, as we have heard, on the 20-minute neighbourhood approach—would help achieve that, while also providing the flexibility that planners need because they know their area best.

As we have heard, subsequent amendments in the group look at ways in which we can improve the housing in which people live in order to improve their overall well-being. Like others, I pay enormous tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, for the work he has done leading so many of us in the direction he has taken us with his string of amendments, which I very much hope will be incorporated, in some form, in the final version of the Bill.

I will pick up on one aspect that is not covered by his amendments, but is covered by Amendment 504GF, which was very well introduced by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, and to which I have added my name. It does not deal with new homes being built but looks at existing properties and how they could be improved to help the health and well-being of their residents and to achieve our net-zero target.

One of the reasons I am particularly attracted to this amendment—there are many others—is that it introduces into legislation targets for improving the energy efficiency of existing properties. As the Minister knows, this is an issue that I have raised on very many occasions in your Lordships’ House. I am always pointing out that there are 17 million homes that are currently below the acceptable energy efficiency level. In one of my many attempts to do this, I referred three years ago to the report by the Climate Change Committee, UK Housing: Fit for the Future?, which assessed the preparedness of our housing stock for the challenge of climate change. It concluded that the measures to reduce

“emissions … from the UK’s 29 million homes”—

responsible for 17% of all carbon emissions—had

“stalled, while energy use in homes”

had increased, and adaptations of housing stock to meet the impact of climate change were

“lagging far behind what is needed to keep us safe and comfortable”.

Three years on, the CCC’s most recent report shows that the situation is still dire. The decline in work to retrofit existing properties has hardly been halted. It says:

“Installation rates for building insulation have plummeted over the last decade, and are far below the level they need to be”


to deliver on UK climate targets.

Of course, as I have said in your Lordships’ House on previous occasions, I welcome a number of recent initiatives by this Government—ECO+, for example, and the announcement only three days ago of £1.4 billion to improve energy efficiency in social housing, although it is from a pot that was previously announced—and I look forward to hearing plans from the newly established Energy Efficiency Taskforce.