Neighbourhood Planning Bill

Lord Judd Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 17th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Judd (Lab)]

My Lords, people should be essential to our consideration of the Bill because if anything is about people, it is planning. I have shared this story before with Members of this House but it seems appropriate to remind them of it now. During the nine years when I was president of the YMCA, I saw the front line of this issue. My God, the need for housing could not have been more obvious. The sterling work done by so many staff and volunteers in an organisation such as that is fantastic. One of the things that always impressed me was that we had a youth training centre on the shores of Lake Windermere in which a great deal of exciting work was done. I was told by one of the workers there that a few days previously, a young girl had caught her attention because she was looking so animated and excited. The worker said to her, “What did you do today?”, and the girl said, “Oh, I saw far”. A couple of days later, because the girl was looking even more excited, she said to her, “And what did you do today?”, and the girl said, “I saw very far”. That was from someone whose home was in the centre of one of our own great cities.

The environment is every bit as important as the housing itself—of course it is. What kind of upbringing, development and fulfilling of the soul and spirit will be possible among our young unless they have a chance, a vision and imagination? That is why the concern with ecology, the green belt, areas of outstanding natural beauty, sites of special scientific interest and national parks is crucial. I have been for a long time involved in the voluntary organisations around national parks.

We want people to have a chance to live a good life and to expand. In the end, this is related to social behaviour and we would be foolish to overlook it. Everyone knows that we desperately need houses and we must get on with it. However, we have made big mistakes in our recent social history. We had to build houses and we built high rise. We then discovered that we had created hell in our midst because high rise was not the answer for people’s good lives. If we look further back in our history, the Industrial Revolution raped the countryside through wilful ill-being and industrialisation, for which all kinds of rationales were presented and invented. Of course, given a great deal of hindsight, it could all have been done so much better.

It always strikes me that in the building of houses we have so often made another mistake. We keep talking about how we want to be one nation together and to break down social stigma and so on, but we built places that could be nothing but council estates. They were council estates and people came from the council estates. We also built industrial barracks. When I was MP for Portsmouth, some of the worst housing was the virtual barracks in the name of council housing in the centre of the city.

We must think about these matters as we tackle speeding up the numbers. I hope the Minister, who is a civilised man, will take the opportunity as we consider the Bill to reassure us on these points, and that the existing legislation for the protection and enhancement of the things I have been talking about will be strengthened and preserved.

I am glad that we have heard about the efforts and battles of those who are trying to devise neighbourhood plans. The discouragement they sometimes feel is because, in the end, they are not certain that anyone is listening or is going to respond. That is a crucial point. I ask all noble Lords who have great experience in local government to remember, as they bring their expertise to bear on the Bill, that it is about people and how, with imagination, we can break down some of the social barriers. I have seen it done, for example, in places where council housing has been provided in an imaginative way that fits in with the local community extremely well.

I want people to have houses, and lives they can fulfil from those houses. That means we must keep this dimension constantly in perspective.