Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 4th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Best (CB)]

My Lords, this a very full group of powerful amendments and I find them all very appealing. I particularly support the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, in his brilliant Healthy Homes campaign with the Town and Country Planning Association, but a completely convincing case has been made from all parts of the House for his amendment. I will concentrate on Amendment 280, to which I have put my name in support of the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, on creating a road map for addressing embodied carbon emissions in buildings.

It has been a rather rude awakening for me to discover that, in concentrating on the energy efficiency of buildings once occupied and taking measures to cut their operational carbon emissions when in use, I have been missing the bigger picture: half buildings’ emissions come from the process of producing and maintaining the building—that is, from the embodied carbon generated by the whole construction process. Many of us in the world of housing have focused on improving energy efficiency in new homes and have failed to recognise that we could be doing far more to cut the carbon emissions that result from the construction of those homes.

Construction, which uses more raw materials than any other industry, is responsible for a quarter of all carbon emissions. Half of these come from embodied carbon, particularly in the production of concrete and steel. Half a million tonnes of building materials are used daily in the UK. Moreover, demolition and excavation generate no less than 62% of all UK waste, to say nothing of the consequences for landfill and the nasty impact of air pollution.

I am very grateful to Shaun Spiers and colleagues at the Green Alliance for their work on “circular construction”: reducing the type and quality of raw materials, reusing, recycling and regenerating, rather than demolishing and building anew. Their work shows that there are plenty of ways in which this huge driver of carbon emissions can be addressed without adding to cost. An example is British Land’s new headquarters in London, which went for retrofitting in place of new build and took less time, while cutting costs by 15% to 18.5%.

A new embodied carbon section in the building regulations, referred to as Part Z, would send the construction industry down the right road. The Environment Act 2021 gives the Government the power to take this approach forward. Some neighbouring European countries are already getting there: for example, the Netherlands is committed to reducing raw material consumption by 50% by 2030. But what is needed first in the UK is an agreed set of metrics—an approved methodology—as the basis for calculating the whole-life carbon emissions, both operational and embodied, of construction work. Big players such as Lendlease, Atkins and Laing O’Rourke stand ready to help in devising this. The amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, provides the basis for that essential first step, with proper regard to the need for full consultation.

Frankly, I have been pretty ignorant about the significance of embodied carbon in construction. I now realise that concentrating on energy efficiency in the use of buildings once built misses the point. Key players in the industry are ready to adopt new practices to cut embodied carbon emissions. This amendment would enable the Government to progress this change of emphasis, which is surely overdue. I strongly support the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I have an illustration—as ever, from Eastbourne—of what is going on with solar panels. We have in the middle of town about 400 hectares of grazing marshes. There is a proposal to build a solar farm on a chunk of that, right next to 100 hectares of industrial estate. None of the firms have solar panels and nor do their car parks. There is clearly a local demand for solar electricity and the grid connection needed for it, but nothing is happening to provide solar panels on the existing space, which could so easily be used for them.

The Government’s policy is pointing in the right direction, but it is inadequate. It needs reinforcing. They need to give a much harder shove to putting solar panels on existing commercial buildings and commercial space. I very much hope that, if the exact wording of the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, cannot be accepted, the Government will commit to bringing something back at a later stage or finding another way of doing something about it, because where they are at the moment will not do.

Exactly the same applies to the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, which I have great sympathy for. Therefore, I do not see the virtue in Amendment 191B, the wording of which seems very strange. I do not think that “should” bears the meaning that my noble friend tried to put on it; it is an imperative in legislation. Statements such as

“all new homes should be secure and built in such a way as to minimise the risk of crime”

mean that we would need to have eight-inch thick concrete blocks with tiny portholes for windows, because these are absolute words and not the much more open and discursive words employed in Amendment 198, which I therefore favour.

I also like the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale. We need to look seriously at embodied carbon. If that involves new construction methods, we need to learn from the lesson of reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete. It was the miracle of its time, but that wonderful new method of doing things has not worked out. If we are going to introduce new methods and new structures extensively in housing and other buildings, we really must go back to not only testing them to destruction but monitoring how they are working in the environment. We used to do that with new building methods; we need to get back to it now.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I rise very briefly to offer the strongest possible Green support for all these amendments, which really fit into the intersection of Green policies on public health, climate and poverty eradication. I will make just three brief points.

First, on solar panels on a suitable new homes and buildings, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, for pursuing this for so long. If I look on Twitter, the question I am asked most often is, “Why do new homes not have solar panels?” It seems such a no-brainer to the public, and they cannot understand why. Of course, the answer to that goes back to 2013 when David Cameron had gone from “hug a husky” to referring to “green crap”. The plan to bring in this effective regulation was abandoned a decade ago. This means that more than 2 million British households are now paying vastly more for their energy than they need to be paying, while also emitting more carbon than they need to be emitting.

Secondly, the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, and others have been extremely powerful on the parlous state of public health and the relationship that has to housing. It is interesting that if we go back to the start of the NHS in 1948, Aneurin Bevan was Minister for both the NHS and housing. Those two things were seen as intimately interrelated. Somehow or other, we seem to have lost the plot with this. To quote some figures from the Building Research Establishment, it is estimated that poor housing costs the NHS £1.4 billion a year—money that could be saved.

Thirdly and finally, I acknowledge the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Best, about his awakening to the issue of embodied carbon. This is something that has been largely ignored. There has been the shallow approach of “That’s a terrible building. We’ll knock it down and build something better”. I have just come from a conference in Zagreb—an international conference with a lot of European speakers. I was hearing of so many amazing projects that are happening across Europe and looking at how we can build in innovative new ways while using existing materials.

I shall quote just one example of this. If a building needs to be knocked down, how can we reuse those materials, rather than just throwing them away? In Copenhagen, there is something called Resource Rows: housing has been built largely with slabs of bricks cut from existing buildings that had to be demolished. Those slabs are cut out and put into the walls of the new buildings. They have recycled materials. The timber is coming from where they have put a new Metro extension in. The timber frames that went around the concrete pieces for the Metro then go into building housing right beside it. They have greenhouses for growing vegetables on site, made from old windows. This is the kind of innovation that is happening elsewhere because they have the regulations that demand it. We are lacking those regulations; we are lacking this guidance from the Government. Just look at what we are building now.