Subterranean Development Bill [HL]

Lord Selsdon Excerpts

Friday 10th February 2012 Lords Chamber

Moved By

[Lord Selsdon]

That the Bill be read a second time.

[Lord Selsdon]

My Lords, I am in something of a difficulty because I heard before this Second Reading today that it was set up entirely to extend the time of the House. I entered into a strange party-wall agreement with the noble Lord, Lord Steel. I said that we would probably need, if we were dealing with the Bill fairly, an hour and a half maximum, and that I would speak for 10 minutes and ask other people to confine themselves to six. The debate seems to be rather dominated by these Benches. This is because the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, who was going to speak, is off sorting out the railways, because he has some considerable experience in that field.

I want to go back to the beginning. The beginning for me is 1927. It was rather a difficult time, with a recession afoot, and my grandfather had just finished his period as the chief civil commissioner for the general strike. The financial world was in a state and then one day Commercial Union collapsed and brought down Lloyds Bank. This was a very serious issue. It was not a financial collapse. Commercial Union had dug too big a hole in the ground and the buildings had effectively collapsed.

This was the start of what was called the Pyramus & Thisbe Club, the name being based on Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”—two lovers on either side of a party wall, and I today represent the chink. I am the chink in the armour of those party-wall surveyors who expect to earn large amounts of money by way of more and more complex legislation.

The beginning was not 1927; it was probably 1066. The original party wall had to be three feet wide and 16 feet tall, and it was between two properties. It had to be connected to the roof and on top of it there was a gutter. This was to collect the rain which should be shared between two parties. What came out was called “eavesdropping”, which is the origin of the phone hacking problem that we have today.

Party-wall businesses go back into the mists of time. The mists of time, of course, are related to that great statue outside here, of Richard I. His mother, if I remember rightly, was Eleanor of Aquitaine, who owned the house that was later my mother’s family house. This has nothing to with what I am about to come on to, but it makes a point.

Time immemorial, therefore, was before anybody could remember and that, to some extent, was case history. If you had always walked to the church across somebody’s field for as long as anybody could remember, that was time immemorial. Garter and his team acknowledged that the origin of this was 1066.

This is a Bill which I to some extent drafted. The Pyramus & Thisbe Club of experts tried to pull it apart. It is a Bill that should not really be necessary because of past tradition, but when you come to people digging underground and disturbing and disrupting their neighbours, it becomes a social issue. The problem here does not lie necessarily in the construction—the damage you do to subterranean water flows and things of that sort—but it comes to organisation and proper controls. Although I shall deal first with smaller houses, my concern goes beyond that.

As your Lordships know, this great Palace is built on rafts of wood—it was on a place called Thorney Island—and the wood packed itself together with the clay and gravel and made an adequate substructure. As the right reverend Prelates will know, I was at school at Winchester, and Winchester itself and the cathedral are on rafts of wood and clay. That is all right, but once they start to move or the waters erode the subsoil, there can be movement as we have here. I am very worried about Downing Street. Downing Street, as your Lordships know, is built on faggots, which are bits of middle-sized wood packed together with smaller pieces. Throughout London, the footings or foundations are in general no more than three courses of brick or, as I said in the brief that I wrote, the height of a proverbial pint of Guinness. Does this matter? It probably does not if the structure that was built on it is not added to and there is not too much development without adequate foundations.

What is the subterranean situation in London? Your Lordships will know that there are many rivers. I apologise in the brief to my noble friend Lord Jenkin of Roding, because the Roding is a river that I missed out, and I am not quite sure where it goes to. Of these rivers, one will think of the Fleet, the Wandle and the Westbourne. The Westbourne moves near me. I should declare an interest in that I have over the past few years written to the council about a development on behalf of many neighbours and others in London—who seem to think that I know something about it—asking whether it will co-operate. The council has said that it is technically a permitted small development underground and that if we oppose it we may be sued and are bound to lose, and we cannot afford it.

The idea is simply to introduce certain rules and regulations. I will explain why they might be necessary in the broader plan. For example, the River Westbourne starts up at Westbourne Terrace. It then comes down and once went into the Serpentine, but the bathers got a bit upset and decided to divert it. It was diverted into a sewer or tunnel that became known as the Ranelagh sewer. It then crossed Knightsbridge—at the knights’ bridge—with a regular flow of water that is probably subterranean but still there today, and continued down. It was a great blessing to those of your Lordships’ House who owned bog land, such as the Cadogans at Westminster, because the Westbourne drained those bogs and then went on down to the Thames. You also have the Wandle at Wandsworth. When, in ancient times, we had steam engines, a mass of water was taken out of the ground, as it was by the breweries. There is a member of the House of the Lords staff who well remembers that when they shut the brewery at Wandsworth she had to wear Wellingtons for three weeks to go to work.

This is all by way of background. The Bill says, “Don’t dig down more than a certain area and a certain space without permission”. I have said that we should look at the normal developments of this sort: terraced houses or terraced mews houses in the London area. To some extent, as the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, will point out, it also happens in Sandbanks near Poole and maybe a little in Liverpool, but it is not a national problem at the moment—it is a London one.

The Bill says, “Look, if you are allowed to put in a garret room above your top floor, why should you not be allowed to put extra space down below, provided always that it is no bigger or wider than the footprint of the house and no deeper than 12 feet or four metres?”. Of course, if you go underground, it is not habitable accommodation unless you have external air. That is difficult because people make these developments and put beds down there. When the council inspectors come, the beds have miraculously disappeared. You have what could be called amenity accommodation but not necessarily residential accommodation. While some of the problems that will be raised are structural, internal problems include that if you have water down below you need to pump it out. If you have sewage or lavatories down below, you need to pump them out. One pump is not necessarily sufficient in case it breaks down so you may need two pumps. You also have air handling problems. Many of these things can to some extent be overlooked. The Bill says that if you follow certain rules and procedures it is perfectly all right to dig down below your own house in the footprint.

Here we come to the arguments. This is not about just accommodation but also money and added value. If you take a three-storey house with 700 square feet of floor and you add 700 square feet down below in the basement, you increase the size of that house, the footprint and the volume, by a third. That increases the value of that property—not by a third but probably two-fifths. That is quite significant. This is where we get the rules. Some genuinely want more accommodation for themselves but other people in the same terraced streets want to know that they have the same rights. The Bill says that there should be a code of conduct. This is fairly simple to impose for any development that is on the same footprint down below, excluding the gardens. The biggest that I could find was a garage that had three Ferraris, two Bentleys, a couple of Rolls-Royces and a Range Rover. It was of course to be slightly smaller than the proposed gymnasium, museum and swimming pool. Those sorts of development need careful control because they could create an interruption to subterranean areas.

Over the last few years, health and safety have identified problems—and they had a cause. They found that roughly 40 per cent of developments underground did not conform to health and safety standards. There were two deaths and plenty of other injuries and problems that were hushed up. There is no problem if these things are done properly and the Bill sets out a code of conduct that the Pyramus & Thisbe gang worked out. I suggest that the Bill becomes an example of what it is possible to do reasonably. [Interruption.] Having been in the Navy as a signalman, I know that that is the signal for an emergency situation and I have only half a minute left. I suggest that noble Lords look at the Bill, enjoy it and think, “How could it possibly be helpful that we ignore the problems of these vast subterranean developments that need proper control?”. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Selsdon]

My Lords, no one could have received better support than I have received for the Bill. However, the credit belongs to all the people outside the House who have been concerned—so concerned that I set up a second e-mail address because I was receiving so many complaints and proposals. The Minister's response was just what I hoped for, as was the response from the noble Lord opposite. I am grateful to all my noble friends who spoke. I regret that we have gone seven minutes over the time specified in my party-wall agreement with the noble Lord, Lord Steel, but I think it may have been helpful.

Finally, I will declare a couple of interests. I wrote everything that I wanted to say. I typed every word in the Bill and used up government cartridges. That is probably acceptable, but two cartridges is practically the cost of a new printer. Talking to my noble friend here, who is a great surveyor, I learnt that he had been in the Department of the Environment. My mother was the first lady to be Lord Mayor of Westminster. She had a House in Tufton Street. This problem started with a hairline crack on the top floor, which got bigger and bigger until you could put your hand into it. Some people called it heave and hump. I was told that it was probably the responsibility of the Department of the Environment for building an enormous building nearby. I wonder whether, if I wrote the Minister a letter, we might be able to make a retrospective claim for damages.

I have referred to the first part of the Bill. In the brief, I referred to the impact that the Thames tunnel may have. I declare an interest here. Noble Lords may not know that I started my life in water and sewerage. I also got very worried about cholera when I worked in a research company in Broadwick Street, which was the source of the original cholera outbreak. I went to Egypt and got gyppy tummy. I wrote to the Egyptians and to the Prime Minister. She kindly gave me £50 million and other people gave me £2 billion. We set up British Waste Water to do the greater Cairo waste water project. It was the biggest subterranean development ever in the world. I did not want to put that before your Lordships earlier because the surveyors would have pulled me apart.

The details of the Bill are on the website of Pyramus & Thisbe, who are a really great gang. I have said everything I can. I hope that we can now have a period of consultation. In Committee noble Lords will be able to let off steam and take the heat out of the argument. We will produce yellow jackets and hats for any noble Lords who may wish to go and conduct inspections. I will probably have an argument with the Clerks about whether we can have our symbol on the hat. The idea is to get rid of sheet piling and make people take everything out by hand. If the heat can be taken out of the argument, we will get a long way.

Bill read a second time and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.