Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 9th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Coffey (Con)]

My Lords, I look forward to spending 11-hour days with the noble Lord, Lord Carlile of Berriew, on important legislation that this House is considering.

I rise to speak to this because it is absolutely vital that we get going with the building of social housing. There are good examples of where we can be creative in considering this, but the underlying element of what has been put forward in speeches by noble Lords already is absolutely right. When a housing developer makes a commitment, this House, and this Parliament, have to strain every sinew to make sure that councils do not let them off the hook. It matters in terms of local communities and local plans. The whole essence of a large part of this Bill is that a lot of decisions are being removed from elected councillors by this Government. That is when confidence and trust in our local government starts to fade away: when promises made by developers—on housing and other issues, including health and other Section 106 issues—evaporate.

My noble friend Lord Markham has, in effect, set up a housing association in Ealing, being creative with how the financing of that can be done, to make sure of ongoing sustainable homes. The noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, referred to the fact that there has been a net change of just 700 homes when it comes to social rent. My noble friend Lord Young of Cookham started to refer to the fact that registered social landlords were not taking up some of the homes that are being done. In the east of England, we have the social landlords Flagship pro-actively selling off social rent housing and not replacing it—certainly not locally—but potentially doing some aspects of that elsewhere, many miles away from where that social rented housing is being displaced.

On what my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham said about lifetime tenancies, the law was of course changed so that councils should consider shorter-term tenancies, proactively considering the composition and demographics in that local community. Very few councils took that up, and I understand why to some extent, but, as has been pointed out, these are homes that people want to have but they are also precious uses of space. Thinking of the next group, there is a good intention to have design for lifetime. Some other, perhaps cruder, economic policies have come through in the past that have not always been welcomed. But I suggest that the Minister looks back at policy from just a few years ago with the two-pronged “benefits to bricks” approach.

The Government today are spending at least at least £35 billion a year on paying rent through the benefits system. We constantly need to think about where resources are being deployed. While recognising that we desperately need more homes—and we are coming on to land banking later—let us make the most of every single home that we already have today, including social housing, and consider what we can do to hold on to them. Apart from that, I will always continue to defend the right to buy.

[Lord Inglewood (CB)]

My Lords, thus far in this debate, we have been thinking in terms of solving the problems that we are discussing by building more houses, but I would like to raise a point that I will describe in a little more detail in a moment: building more houses is, I think, quite the wrong way of approaching the problem.

I am talking, of course, about the national parks and areas of nationally important landscape. The noble Lord, Lord Young, referred to his time in local government 60 years ago. I cannot go quite so far back down memory lane, but I was involved in the Lake District Special Planning Board 40 years ago. The problem we had then is a problem that still exists—indeed, in a more exacerbated form—despite our efforts to try to address it. The problem was that people who lived and worked in this community were unable to find any accommodation as their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents had before them.

It is not simply a matter of social implications. The kind of people who were, and still are, finding it very hard to find accommodation in—or even, in many instances, quite close to—these kinds of important landscape areas are the very people who are essential for looking after it properly. There is a real problem. If we do not resolve the difficulty in some sensible way, there will be even more problems.

Let me illustrate this. In the hamlet of Chapel Stile, up Langdale—which, as many of your Lordships will know, is one of the most admired, visited and esteemed parts of Britain’s premier national park—approximately 80% of the housing stock is second homes. The one thing you must not do to resolve the problem of housing up Langdale is to build more and more houses, because that would completely destroy the very rationale for the place being so special.

Against this background, I think it important that this relatively niche problem—I use those words advisedly but not disparagingly—is looked at carefully, because it does not lend itself to many of the kinds of solutions that have been canvassed in the context of the problems elsewhere in the country. We do not need more housing stock in the Lake District. What we want is more of the housing stock that exists to be occupied and used as the basis for looking after the national park itself. That in turn is in the interests of everybody else who comes to it and enjoys it, and the rest of the country.

It is not a question of social housing or affordable homes. We have to be much more imaginative about the way we do it. We have to find a way of taking quite a bit of the existing housing stock out of the open market. In my view, you would probably have to use planning covenants to put it into a restricted local marketplace where local people could afford to buy homes, or lease them, and, in turn, commit their activities to looking after the area in question.

I have raised this point on a number of occasions over the years and have never got anywhere with it at all. I know perfectly well why: it will cost quite a bit of money. But these places matter. Widespread degradation through building is something that I do not think any of us condone. Some of your Lordships may have seen in the Sunday papers a description of what the Egyptian Government are proposing to do at Saint Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai, which, in my view, is totally outrageous and a monstrous way to treat a world heritage site.

Many bits of the rural economy feel very let down by housing policy, because it is not addressing the particular problems that they are facing. Many of the solutions that have been canvassed I have no trouble with at all, but they are essentially—not entirely, but essentially—for urban areas. There are different issues and problems in rural areas. As I said, many people there feel let down, and you can see from recent opinion polling that many of them are pretty disillusioned with the existing political classes.