Queen’s Speech

Lord Kerslake Excerpts

Monday 17th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kerslake (CB) [V]]

My Lords, it is an enormous pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Morse, in this debate. I warmly congratulate him on his excellent maiden speech. It will not surprise the House that I particularly endorse his comments about the Civil Service.

Most of us will know him from his decade as Comptroller and Auditor-General of the National Audit Office, which he stepped down from in 2019. However, the noble Lord, Lord Morse, had a long and distinguished career before that at the Ministry of Defence and PricewaterhouseCoopers. He brings a forensically sharp mind and a fearless willingness to speak it. His passion, as Comptroller and Auditor-General, was to improve the way the public sector did things. However sharp his criticisms might have been sometimes—and they were—it was always clear to me, as head of the Civil Service, that he had its best interests at heart. His subsequent actions in becoming chair of two trusts demonstrates this. We are very fortunate that he has joined us in this House.

Before going on to comment on the Queen’s Speech, I should declare my interests as chair of Peabody, Be First and Stockport Mayoral Development Corporation, and as president of the Local Government Association. My other interests are listed in the register. These interests are very relevant to what I will focus on in my short speech—the Government’s proposals on planning.

The Government’s legislative programme contains the usual mix of the good, the bad and the very bad, as well as one frankly disgraceful omission, namely, the lack of any plan to respond to the growing crisis in social care. The planning Bill, if it follows the proposals set out in the White Paper, will fall into the “very bad” category. This is not to say that everything in the White Paper is bad. We certainly need to simplify the local plan process, improve design and increase the use of digital technology. However, it is based on a completely erroneous view that the way to more and better housing is yet another reform of our planning system.

As someone who is passionate about the need for more housing, and chair of three organisations that are collectively responsible for building thousands of new homes a year, I can say with a fair amount of confidence that planning is not the main problem. Of course, a few schemes take longer to get approved than they should do, and some councils are better than others. But, in the round, the Local Government Association’s figures tell the real story: nine out of 10 planning applications are approved by local planning authorities, and there are more than 1 million application permissions from the last decade that are still to be built.

In his independent report, Oliver Letwin also found that the planning system was not the main barrier. Viability, infrastructure, grant rate for affordable housing, delivering zero carbon and developer caution on build-out rates for larger sites are much the bigger issues. Yet, based on a completely incorrect understanding of the true barriers to building new homes, the Government plan to remove a basic democratic right of local councils to make decisions on individual applications, and to replace it with a zonal system and a single national infrastructure levy.

The comments by former Prime Minister Theresa May in the other House are worth noting. She said that the proposals

“would reduce local democracy, remove the opportunity for local people to comment on specific developments, and remove the ability of local authorities to set development policies locally … the White Paper proposals would also lead to fewer affordable homes, because they hand developers a get-out clause … I fear that, unless the Government look again at the White Paper proposals, what we will see is not more homes, but, potentially, the wrong homes being built in the wrong places.”—[Official Report, Commons, 11/5/21; col. 39.]

I could not have put it better myself.

There is still time for the Government to listen and take a different path on this. I sincerely hope the planning Bill that comes forward retains the sensible parts of the White Paper and ditches the rest. If not, both Houses will have a lot of work to do.