Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Lord Stevens of Birmingham Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 17th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stevens of Birmingham (CB)]

My Lords, as we may be about to hear from the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, the inequalities which divide our country are deep-seated and long-standing, so the Government are right to act, but there seems to have been a voltage drop between the 240-volt diagnostic clarity of last year’s levelling up White Paper and the flickering 12-volt legislative battery before us today. There is wide agreement in the House this afternoon that this is essentially a misnamed local government and planning Bill, which is strange given the Bill’s preoccupation with naming things. For people who do not like “Acacia Avenue”, it goes to great lengths telling them how to rename their street. It has nine pages telling mayors how to rename themselves “governor” but, on some of the most pressing levelling-up concerns, the Bill has zero pages.

What, for example, will the Bill actually do for people in Shard End, the part of east Birmingham where I was born? It is in the bottom 10% of most deprived wards in the country and is, as it happens, the most pro-Brexit area in Birmingham, so people there want change, but despite the Bill’s length you would be hard pressed to point to much in it that will practically benefit them. So, as well as amendments on housing, infrastructure and the environment, here are three further suggestions for perhaps more radical reform.

First, we could use the Bill to really drive inclusive and sustainable economic growth. Without it, levelling up collapses into a zero-sum redistributive arm wrestle. Taking my cue from the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Carlisle, I say that a good place to start would be tackling working-age poor health, which today’s Times reveals costs the economy a staggering £150 billion a year, equivalent to 7% of GDP. It is time to get more creative and more radical. For example, at a time when the economy has an acute labour shortage, consider national insurance tax incentives for employers offering evidence-based physical and mental health workplace support. At a time when the OBR has just hiked its forecast for future incapacity and disability benefits spending by an astonishing £7.5 billion extra a year—which, by the way, far outstrips any earmarked funding for levelling up—it is time to break with the Treasury orthodoxy of AME/DEL accounting. Instead, let us legislate to include a devolution deal option for mayors, combined authorities and local authorities to gain-share with DWP when local initiatives offset future benefits costs.

Secondly, let us use the Bill to help overcome political short-termism, by giving much stronger statutory teeth to the Government’s own levelling-up missions. That might force honest debate about what it will take, for example, to deliver the Government’s public health mission of five extra years of healthy life expectancy—because the Health Foundation says that, with current policy, that will take a mere 192 years to achieve. Or take social care. Last June in a Written Question I asked the Government how they track the required availability of social care across the country. The answer was, “We don’t, and we won’t.” Now the whole country is living with the consequences: ambulances are backed up and A&Es are at breaking point because 13,000 people are stuck in hospital. Instead of 40-plus new hospitals, we have the equivalent of minus 26. Let us use this legislation to make it harder for Governments of all stripes to duck difficult decisions as they wait for slow-burn problems to become national crises.

Thirdly, levelling up will of course take time to be felt, but there are direct levers the Government could use right now, and the Bill could help. They could, for example, legislate to distribute current public funding more fairly across the country. Some local government and policing allocations have not been updated for at least a decade, which the IFS says means that

“the amounts allocated to different places are essentially arbitrary”.

Why wait to do something about that until after the next election?

These are just three ways in which the Bill could potentially be strengthened. Last year’s White Paper in my judgment rightly argued for “root and branch reform”. Unfortunately, the Bill currently leaves the roots and branches of our difficulties largely untouched. In my judgment, it is more like a gentle rustling of the leaves.

Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Lord Stevens of Birmingham Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 22nd February 2023 Lords Chamber

This has been an excellent debate on something I feel strongly about. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

[Lord Stevens of Birmingham (CB)]

The contributions we have heard in Committee this afternoon get to the heart of the question as to whether the Bill, in practice, will have real-world impact. The discussions we have just been having on healthy life expectancy and homes really illustrate that general question mark. I suggest to your Lordships that two ways in which the Bill potentially could have impact would be, first, if, as amended, it forced a focus on the means by which the stated missions would be achieved; and, secondly, if it forced a more horizontal view across public policy to show how different aims connected in a shared way.

I take the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, on healthy life expectancy. He quoted the position that I think existed in 2000s, when health life expectancy in this country was growing by about five hours a day. That is an extraordinary fact when you think about it. It means that, since the House has been sitting this afternoon, your Lordships would have gained about half an hour extra of life expectancy. Sadly, that no longer obtains, and the slightly draining sensation noble Lords may have had this afternoon more correctly corresponds to our physiological prospects.

The question is: does this Bill, in any way, in setting missions for healthy life expectancy, force a debate within the country and in government about the means by which you would actually do anything about it? My concern is that even having a mission and metrics potentially on the face of the Bill does not get you to the skin of the onion, peeling away the chain of causation by which you would reverse the unfortunate position we now find ourselves in. Looking at the amendments in this group and throughout the Bill, the question for me is: do they drive a focus on what real-world implementation would need to be to get the result we all want?

In relation to this, I was with the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, on her point about 250,000 homes and the need to deal with the supply side. I thought “My goodness, this is a speech from the noble Baroness I can actually agree with”—until she spoiled it at the end with gratuitous remarks about how we do not need green planning for housing, when of course that is precisely what we need. That is not the impediment to housebuilding in this country. We would be committing a historic error if we embarked on the necessary scale of housing construction without designing in congenial neighbourhoods and healthy lifestyles. The fact is that, in many developments that have been built, we are designing in, for example, car dependency. Your Lordships may be astonished to be reminded that, according to one estimate a few years ago, on average in this country we spend more time each week on the toilet than we do exercising. We are not going to change that fact just by the recitation of that rather startling insight; we are going to change it by doing precisely the opposite of what the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, suggested.

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

I want to know who measured that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

There may be more questions but I am coming on to some of that.

That is why my department has established a new spatial data unit, transforming the way in which the UK Government gather, store and manipulate subnational data so that it underpins transparent and open policy-making and delivers decisions. This will include improving how we collate and report on UK Government spend and outcomes, including building strong capabilities on data visualisation and insights. Working closely with other departments, the unit will consider differences between geographical areas, such as regions, counties, councils, council wards and so on, according to the needs and objectives of specific missions or policy areas. I am more than happy to have a teach-in about this, as it is important.

[Lord Stevens of Birmingham (CB)]

Is the Minister willing to consider her department publishing for each local authority area the gap between the need for and availability of adult social care? That data is available already, and if the department started to publish it, it would build confidence across the House that the department would advance this agenda without the need for placing requirements in the Bill.

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

I would like to go back on that specific issue because we would need to work with the Department of Health and Social Care and get its agreement. We are quite early in the establishment of the unit in order to do that, but I will take back that issue and come back to the noble Lord.

Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Lord Stevens of Birmingham Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 27th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, has put before the Committee a powerful programme, which is actually a renewal programme for our country and for every community and household within it. He set out a compelling case for doing so, obviously based on a lot of campaigning skill and professional skill as well. Other noble Lords have added a lot of detail about the benefits that would come.

I have put my name to seven of the amendments. I do not plan to say everything that has already been said. However, I will pick up one or two points that have already arisen. First, we can anticipate that the Minister is going to say, “Don’t worry, it is all fixed. Everything is already included”. I say to the Minister that our confidence in that would certainly be improved if we did not have a record of permitted development rights which have put into play not just a few but tens of thousands of homes that are deliberately below the standards mandated for and expected of all other new homes. The Government apparently support the Healthy Homes Bill in principle, but you have to get past the principle. All the work has been done by the noble Lord, Lord Crisp. It is all here. All the Minister needs to say is, “That’s fine, we will accept the amendments”.

The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Derby spoke about the impact on health in communities. I would add life expectancy in communities. There is a very significant connection between well-being and life expectancy and the number of healthy years that people can expect to live. It is surely the essence of the levelling-up agenda that those discrepancies and disparities are put right. I hope to hear some favourable words from the Minister, particularly as it is the next big step needed at a time when the traditional reliance on economic growth as the sole measurement of a country’s strength and resilience is losing traction.

It is losing traction not just with pale green fringe operators such as me but with tens of thousands of ordinary households around the country, which have seen all the economic growth bypass them completely. They have seen a standstill in their living standards, with little hope of progression. Building their resilience and well-being, leading to community growth, is the way ahead. It is, surely, a direction of travel that the Minister can accept. Almost by definition, the biggest losers of the mirage of growth of the last decade are those most in need of levelling up, which this Bill is supposed to be delivering. I urge the Government to listen to this debate with great care and convey to their colleagues in Whitehall the urgency of responding in a positive way to all that they hear today on this pivotal issue.

I have also put my name to Amendment 484 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale. The noble Lord made a compelling case for improving our 23 million homes and all other buildings in England to support the health and well-being of those who live in them and to make them carbon-neutral. If I had spotted it in time, I would have certainly added my name to Amendment 504GF in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman. I agree with every word she used.

I remind noble Lords that I am an honorary fellow of the ICE and an honorary president of the National Home Improvement Council. I also lay claim to steering through the Sustainable and Secure Buildings Act 2004 in the other place, which set in train the subsequent uplifting of building standards on energy performance. However, that does not give me any grounds for complacency.

As the noble Baroness said in introducing her amendment, we have been building homes to a lower standard in energy-efficiency terms than we needed to, because in 2016 the new Conservative Government scrapped the move to zero-carbon standards which the coalition Government had signed off. We have built, pretty slowly and with lots of hiccups, 1 million new homes since then to lower standards than would have been the case if those proposals had come into force in 2016. That means that those 1 million homes themselves will have to be upgraded before we get to the standard required by 2050.

Of course, I have already mentioned the rush of converted homes under permitted development rights. It is not just energy performance that is bad but even basics such as daylighting may be missing in their case. The Town and Country Planning Association drew attention to that in its brief. Again, I have been pre-empted by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Derby quoting the Building Research Establishment figures of the millions of people living in unhealthy homes with hazardous conditions far away from the well-being that should be the case—all of whom would be beneficiaries of a fresh start with a healthy homes policy.

The noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, pointed out that the existing regulations are not tough enough even to capture all operational carbon emissions, which are responsible for about 30% of our carbon emissions. It is not a small slice, but he is also right in saying that the slice is declining because slowly we are decarbonising the way that we run our homes. However, the still provisional date of 2025 to finally catch up with the standards that were going to come in 2016 means that every lost year is adding more poor-quality housing stock and building in costs for the future.

Amendment 484 aims higher and goes further in requiring the Secretary of State to get cracking on the regulations to measure and limit the whole-life carbon emissions of buildings. The noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, has laid out very clearly what that is and how it can be achieved. This is not a wild swing at an impossible task; it is based on serious and important work by those who have been developing the Part Z initiative to be a new part of the building regulations. It has, as he said, the backing of the industry as well as many others. I hope again that we can hear the Minister say that there will not be any more dilly-dallying in the department, that it is moving forward to see what its version of Part Z would be and will be bringing it to us in the form of regulations very shortly. Just for once I will not make my traditional complaint about too many regulations. This is one that is needed, and it is needed very quickly.

That is a practical first step to cutting carbon emissions from our built environment. It opens the way to thinking in new ways about how to use and reuse existing buildings—a point that the noble Lord, Lord Best, also made. I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say and I look forward to hearing that he is going to take back to the department and to his officials that the route to zero carbon needs to be taken seriously and that the need to level up by adopting the healthy homes standards set out in these amendments should be followed through. If, in response to all of this, the answer is no and the intention to act is “not at all”, Ministers can expect to hear more about all these issues on Report.

[Lord Stevens of Birmingham (CB)]

My Lords, I was pleased to add my name to Amendment 241 tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham. I support the various amendments that the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, has tabled on healthy homes, and other amendments in this group.

I start by taking my cue from the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, who said, rightly, that we need to be open and explicit in what we are asking for. That is quite a straightforward challenge. I suspect that most people in this country want to live in congenial and liveable neighbourhoods where kids can walk to school, where there is somewhere to play outdoors in the holidays, where older folks can pop along to a local shop, perhaps bumping into a neighbour along the way; neighbourhoods in which we design out pollution, obesity and crime. All of that is the art of the possible. Not doing so, even though in the short term it may appear that it will be more costly to get it right, has hidden long-term costs for the taxpayer, which a number of noble Lords have mentioned—whether that is obesity, pollution or crime. The fact is that these decisions, when they are made in the built environment, have consequences which last for a generation. Bad decisions have consequences which spill over for many years to come.