National Policy for the Built Environment

Lord Hunt of Chesterton Excerpts

Tuesday 24th January 2017 Grand Committee

[Lord Hunt of Chesterton (Lab)]

My Lords, I was pleased when this committee was formed after the debate on the Farrell report published in 2014. I commend the report of the House of Lords Select Committee on National Policy for the Built Environment and am pleased that the Government have finally responded. Curiously, both the report and the government response rather emphasise the challenges but do not report much on some of the recent achievements of the UK in urban development, of which my noble friend Lord Howarth reminded us. The UK can be proud of some of the new developments in Liverpool and the Docklands area. There is Canary Wharf and the Olympic legacy—which was a world first—as opposed to Olympic achievement, with new buildings, structures and green spaces. Regrettably, as other noble Lords have mentioned, pollution is as bad in the UK as elsewhere in Europe, and we need to do something about that.

The new urban transportation systems in our big cities are a considerable achievement. I declare an interest as a professor at UCL and a director of a small company, CERC, which provided environmental modelling for the Beijing and London Olympics. Overall, as the report and the government response emphasise, there are many deficiencies in the UK’s built environment. The Select Committee’s report suggested solutions, but the government response is not optimistic.

One of the challenges is dealing with old buildings, as the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, emphasised. I declare an interest as a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and I am very pleased that the Minister is also from Trinity—he is wearing the tie. Many of the college buildings are from the 1830s. The college has recently restored the rooms on the cold, damp staircase where I used to live as a student with an open fire. It has become a technological first, which people are coming to see. It uses the latest building materials, such as thermally insulating and water-resistant bricks, which are much more effective and energy-efficient than standard materials. These methods are spreading, which is exciting, but regrettably many of these new building materials are imported, and efficient heating and ventilating techniques are not being used in most of the new housing developments in the UK.

We debated the lack of ventilation in restored buildings when the coalition Government’s Green Deal energy plan was introduced. The Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Marland, admitted, I think, that he had never heard the word “ventilation”, but it was certainly not in the Bill. It is a very important aspect. The German technique for ventilation is becoming standard. Other countries in Europe, with their excellent low-cost housing, continue to beat the quality of UK housing. I saw that when I was a Cambridge city councillor in the 1970s and visited Karlsruhe, which was followed by a rather humiliating visit to Cambridge by the German councillors, when we had to explain why things were as bad as they were. We blamed it on the Treasury, of course, as Treasury cuts made it very difficult to have the kind of decent buildings that our continental friends were used to.

One hopes that newly replanned housing, with newer technology where appropriate, which many universities and institutes are now looking at, will have more efficient heating and ventilation, reducing net carbon emissions, which are a strong feature of the report. Will the Minister tell us about progress? Will he also tell us about the greater use of UK-constructed building materials and new techniques?

An important role in the development of UK building has been played by the Building Research Establishment. It was a premier laboratory, and many of us worked there, but a couple of years ago it was privatised. I am afraid that when that laboratory and other government laboratories were privatised or run down, many of their classic reports were destroyed and put into tips. It is said that the BRE thought that it would earn more money by repeating earlier studies if it threw away the previous ones.

This report and the government response underline the housing problems associated with flooding in urban areas, as other noble Lords have mentioned. The Environment Agency recently had an exhibition in the House of Lords showing improvements in the forecasting of floods, particularly those in hilly terrain, which is quite complex. However, the ground floors of many houses in villages are flooded quite often. It may take many months for the bricks in the houses to dry out, and it may take even longer where the insulation in cavity walls has become saturated. Sometimes the walls and others parts of buildings have to be rebuilt.

There are technical solutions using better materials and designs, but the training of many building employers and employees is inadequate in comparison with other European countries, as set out in paragraph 352 of the report. Do the Government have a plan to improve technical capacity in the housebuilding industry, and will the new technical capacity and different legal or financial structures, such as in France, lead to a rate of housebuilding comparable with the rate in that country?

However, I have to criticise strongly my German colleagues. I am not sure that they are my colleagues; the Green Party used to be colleagues. However, they have been destroying some of the green environment in that country by digging for brown coal because they do not like nuclear. France has nuclear energy, so it has very low carbon emissions and maintenance of green areas.

The other important point in the report is about housing and planning regulations. Those relating to cities need urgent alteration to prevent large numbers of houses and apartments being empty for a part or the whole of the year. That is a particular problem in parts of Westminster. Will the Minister explain how this housing and planning deficiency is to be dealt with?

Finally, perhaps the Minister will answer the question raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, who asked about the real explanation for the deficiency in housing. Is it because there is an oligopoly of a few major companies and landholders combined with a supply chain of providers of UK building materials that excludes the availability of advanced materials? Is the DCLG looking into this endemic problem? I look forward to the Minister’s response.