Building Safety Update

Lord Stunell Excerpts

Tuesday 14th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for introducing the Statement, which we welcome. I am sure that all noble Lords would want every possible step taken to support leaseholders and to speed up the remediation of unsafe buildings.

We have worked constructively with the Government throughout the drafting of legislation to improve building and fire safety and will continue to do so. The issue now, seven months after the original deadline of 10 August 2022, is for all major housebuilders to sign up to the building safety contract and bring an end to the limbo in which too many leaseholders still find themselves trapped. The fact that 39 developers have now signed a remediation contract is a significant step forward.

Can the Minister assure us that the terms of the contract will be properly enforced and that leaseholders affected by this will be kept informed and updated on progress? Remediation to date has been far too slow. Considering that the contract stipulates that repairs and remediation must be carried out only as soon as is practically possible, can the Minister explain what action is to be taken to ensure that leaseholders do not face any additional delays? I ask this particularly in the light of reports that have suggested that some signatories to the contract are planning to carry out new fire risk assessments to determine what defects will now need to be fixed and whether any will not. Surely leaseholders need clear assurances that all defects will be sorted. What are the implications for leaseholders in buildings out of the scope of the contract? Do the Government have a solution for them?

As the Statement rightly says, those who are responsible must pay. It is extremely disappointing that some builders have refused to sign. I commend the Statement for naming and shaming them. I am aware that the Secretary of State has been pretty robust in his language in trying to bring builders who have not yet signed the contracts into line with those that have. I hope that his approach is successful. If not, the Secretary of State has clearly stated that such developers will be prohibited from further development. It would be helpful to understand how such a ban would be enforced.

The Secretary of State referred to the responsible actors scheme in the Statement and in his response to questions asked in the other place. We need clarity on when this will come into force.

We also have a particular concern regarding the number of buildings covered by the contract. As the Statement says, the commitment is to fix at least 1,500 buildings. Comparing that with the department’s estimate of between 6,220 and 8,890 unsafe buildings in the 11 to 18-metre height range, it is tackling only a small part of the challenge faced. How does the Minister envisage this being resolved, and what are the timescales? How many of the outstanding buildings above the 1,500 are the responsibility of those developers who have refused to sign the contracts?

Leaseholders living in buildings with defects that do not come within the scope of the contract are also going to fall by the wayside unless the Government have a plan for these buildings to be remediated as well. Can the Minister provide any assurances on this? During the passage of the Building Safety Act, we said that all leaseholders in unsafe buildings below 11 metres must be protected from costs. The Government said that they would provide support on a case-by-case basis. Does the Minister have a progress update on this? Leasehold is clearly not a good system. I am sure that the Minister agrees with me that we really need to bring it to an end. Is there any action coming from Government any time soon?

To reiterate, we welcome the Statement and encourage the Secretary of State to be as robust as the Statement lays out in dealing with those who are not looking to do the right thing and live up to their responsibilities.

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for the Statement that she has repeated. On this side, we welcome it and the determination shown by the Secretary of State to deliver the outcomes that he has reported.

We welcome the decision of the leading housebuilders to put their shoulders to the wheel, to make things happen at long last and to relieve the anxiety and stress of many innocent householders. Surely the Home Builders Federation—an organisation that I do not always see eye to eye with—and Stewart Baseley should get a mention for facilitating the process in a very difficult climate.

There are some big buts, however. The firms named in the Statement are failing to deliver their fair share of the massive costs of remediation. That is disgraceful. We endorse the action that the Secretary of State proposes to take to limit their capacity to cause more damage and heartbreak in the future. I appeal to those firms, even if they do not recognise their duty to society or to the families that they have traumatised, to at least now recognise their duty to their shareholders, and to get their pens out and get some signatures on paper PDQ. I note that, in the Statement, the Secretary of State is very much of the same opinion. I assure him that there will be a unanimous view across this House, urging him to get on and achieve that.

We should also recognise that, even after five years, this horrific saga is not over. This settlement is welcome but only partial. There remain, and will still remain, many families traumatised by the terrible failures right across the country which were exposed by the Grenfell inquiry.

Those terrible failures are now for the building industry to rectify. The industry has built homes that should have been places of security but were in fact death traps and that should have been places of warmth and comfort but instead have been left uninhabitable and unsaleable.

When can we expect to see the defaulting contractors finally accepting their liability and playing their proper part in helping desperate families to rebuild their lives? Will the Minister give noble Lords a timescale for further action and some hope for those families left stranded now for five years and growing?

The Statement says this programme will fund repairs for 1,100 buildings. How many homes are in those buildings? What assessment has the Secretary of State made of the gap between this programme of restitution and the enormous further cost of repairs still outstanding on building after building across the country which are not covered by it? How do the Government plan to close that gap? How many homes will remain unrepaired after this scheme comes to its end?

Finally, I will ask the question I know my noble friend Lady Pinnock would ask if she had been able to be here. Do Ministers still stick to their promise that not a penny of the costs of restitution will fall on the families who live in these homes—the completely innocent victims of this tragic episode? If Ministers do still stick by their word, when will we be told how that promise is to be delivered?

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My Lords, today’s announcement is an important day for thousands of leaseholders living in buildings afflicted by fire safety defects. The Secretary of State announced that 49 developers had pledged to take responsibility for remediating unsafe buildings that they developed over the past 30 years. The pledge committed them to fix life-critical fire safety defects and reimburse the Government for grant funding paid out on their behalf to fix their buildings.

I had a lot more to say, but because of the late time I will just answer noble Lords’ questions—I am sure they will be happy with that. The most important thing is the impact that this will have on leaseholders and residents. They are the most important people in this. Once signed, the contract requires developers to take responsibility for addressing all life-critical fire defects arising from the design and construction of buildings over 11 metres in England and that they have developed or refurbished over 30 years. The developers will be expected to keep residents in those buildings informed of progress towards meeting this commitment. Monitoring and auditing provisions will ensure that the Government will hold developers to account to make sure that they are completing the work properly and at pace.

Talking about pace, we expect the developers to remediate their buildings at pace at all times. Some developers have already started assessing and remediating buildings, which is very welcome. Under the contract that we published this week, developers will be required to set out their plans to identify, prioritise, assess and fix defects as soon as reasonably practical. We will hold those developers to account to make sure that they are completing the work properly and at pace. Developers will be required to report to the department quarterly on progress against their remediation plans and to keep those leaseholders informed of that progress as well. That is an important part of the system.

Another part of the system that is important is the recovery strategy unit that we are setting up. We are further cracking down on those who fail to do the right thing and pay to fix building safety issues through a new recovery strategy unit. The unit is dedicated to pursuing firms that have failed to do the right thing and pay to fix the problems that they have created. It will take forward the most serious cases, holding the worst actors to account and delivering for leaseholders where other routes are not available. There will be some that fall outside all the issues that we have talked about, and the unit will be there to follow those cases. The unit contains an intelligence function to help to identify such cases, which is important. I am happy to say it is being run by Colonel Cundy—who sounds the right person to do it—and it is very happy if any Peers would like to be briefed on the work it is doing, because that is an important piece of work.

Noble Lords have asked about those not signing the contract. It is quite clear that if you fail to sign the contract and comply with its terms then you will not be able to operate freely in the housing market in this country, and more details of that will come out. The Government are committed to laying regulations under Sections 126 to 129 of the Building Safety Act 2022 to implement a responsible actors scheme for residential developers, supported by a system of building control and planning prohibitions that will impose serious consequences on eligible developers that do not sign up.

Both noble Lords said that they would support a robust response to this issue. I do not think I need to assure them that the Secretary of State can be very robust when he wants to be, and he will be very robust over this. He is passionate about the fact that those people should be doing the right thing for the people who live in the houses that they built which were not up to standard. I assure noble Lords that everything will be done, and more information will come out in the next weeks that will add to this Statement today. This is just the first Statement that needed to be made, because the Secretary of State promised he would let people know as soon as the six weeks were up.

I know that the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, would have wanted me to mention buildings under 11 metres in particular. It is generally accepted that life safety risk is proportional to the height of the building, as the noble Baroness knows, but a fire risk assessment and a fire risk appraisal of external walls conducted in accordance with the PAS 9880 principle will often find that lower-cost mitigations are more appropriate in low-rise buildings. We stress again that the responsibility for the costs of fixing historic building safety defects should rest with the building owner. They should not pass those costs on to leaseholders but should seek to recover them from those who were responsible for building unsafe homes in the first place. It is important that any leaseholders in this situation look for support and information on how to ensure that those responsible for their unsafe houses get in touch. I know that many people in this situation have written to the department and are being supported by it. That is an issue, and I thank the noble Baroness, as always, for bringing it up.

I hope I have answered most of the questions. If not, I ask noble Lords to let me know. I will go through Hansard in the morning, but I think the major issues that noble Lords have brought up have been answered.

Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Lord Stunell Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 13th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

No, the noble Baroness did not misunderstand. It is important that we wait for those regulations to come out. There could be a point where the mayor stood down a month before an election; there may be a period of time when there has to be a decision, as you would not have two elections close together. The regulations are what is important here. We will wait to see further detail that is being worked up, but I assure her that it is expected that there would be a by-election.

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

The Minister has mentioned that we should wait for the regulations. It might be helpful in this instance and several others if it were possible to bring forward some draft regulations to help us understand the direction of thought that the Government are taking. We are all well aware that, by the time regulations are laid before the two Houses, the opportunity for parliamentarians to make informed and useful comments will be very limited. A quick look at the Government’s direction of travel on this and, I may say, many other matters, in the way of draft or outline regulations would be helpful.

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

That is understood. I will take that back and do what I can; I will see what we have already.

On Amendment 115 tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Stevenage, I agree with her that the decisions of a mayor of a combined county authority should be—as I said earlier—subject to effective scrutiny, as should those of any leader of any council. Devolution should combine strong, empowered local leaders with strong accountability, but also transparency. The Government will publish a new devolution accountability framework to ensure that all devolution deals lead to local leaders and institutions that are transparent and accountable.

Schedule 1 provides that a combined county authority will be required to have at least one overview and scrutiny committee, as we discussed earlier, which can review and scrutinise decisions made or actions taken by the combined county authority and the mayor. The schedule provides that the Secretary of State may make regulations about the overview and scrutiny committee, including membership, voting rights, payment of allowances, chair, appointments of scrutiny officers, circumstances in which matters may be referred to the committee, and the obligations on persons to attend and respond to reports that the committee issues. This will ensure a robust framework within which overview and scrutiny committees will operate.

We think that this gives sufficient scope for local scrutiny on decisions taken by the CCA or mayor, such as the appointment of a deputy mayor by the mayor from among the combined county authority’s membership, if that is considered appropriate. I make it clear that the statutory deputy mayor will have to come from the members of the CCA—from those local authorities. It is not the same as a deputy mayor for police and crime, who could come from somewhere else, because they would possibly be required to have different experience and background. I hope that makes sense. It is quite important that we have those two deputies separated.

On Amendment 116, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, we agree that information on funding should be available, and I can reassure the noble Baroness that that will be the case. Information on the funding available to a combined county authority and mayor will be in the public domain. The deal agreed between the Government and the area sets out both the funding arrangements and the powers to be conferred on the combined county authority and the mayor. The deal document is published and therefore publicly available. There must also be a public consultation locally on the area’s proposal to establish a combined county authority. We expect this to set out how the CCA will work and include the powers to be conferred on the CCA and the mayor and the funding available. The final proposal, which must be accompanied by a summary of the consultation, will constitute the formal submission to the Secretary of State seeking the establishment of the CCA.

In Amendment 117, the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, probes whether there should be an annual summit of the CCA mayors. The existing combined authority mayors have themselves established the M10 group to enable them to work together. The Government engage with this group on a regular basis. We expect the M10 and the new combined county authority mayors to consider how best to work together. We think a locally led arrangement is better than a centrally imposed approach, and I expect it will evolve as more areas agree devolution deals.

In tabling Amendment 118 to Schedule 3, the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Stevenage, is seeking to prevent a combined county authority taking on part of the police and crime commissioner role. Schedule 3 provides further detail, setting out the matters on which the Secretary of State either may or must make regulations to enable a transfer of police and crime commissioner functions to a combined county authority mayor. It provides the framework and arrangements for the mayor to exercise these PCC functions on a day-to-day basis.

The amendment would limit the ability of the Secretary of State to determine an appropriate limited scope to the conferral of PCC functions to combined county authority mayors. Combined county authority and combined authority mayors should have parity where possible to ensure that all areas of England have the same options. The schedule achieves this consistency by mirroring the scope of regulations that govern the conferral and exercise of police and crime commissioner functions by combined authority mayors, as set out in Schedule 5C to the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Act 2009. The amendment would create an inconsistency between the schedule governing the making of regulations related to combined county authority mayors’ exercise of PCC functions compared with its equivalent for combined authority mayors, leading to unnecessary inconsistency in the legislative framework for the PCC model.

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[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

These decisions, as with many, have to be taken locally because local people will understand better than anybody what is right for their area. I have given the Committee my personal views from when we were considering mayors—I just thought it would be confusing.

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

I approached it from the opposite direction: if indeed it should be a matter for local people to decide because they are best equipped to understand what terminology might be appropriate, why does the Minister feel that it is sensible or suitable to have a defined list from which they must choose, rather than doing exactly as she said by exercising their discretion in relation to their own area and locality?

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

It is not a defined list, as I said. There is a list which I assume probably came from consultation on the White Paper, and things that people have already said they might like to use. They can choose from that shortlist, but they can also have a different title that is not on the list. The choice is theirs.

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[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My Lords, we have tabled a number of consequential, minor and technical amendments for combined county authorities. The consequential amendments are to existing legislation, to ensure that it applies to combined county authorities where necessary. This will mean that the CCA model can work in practice as a local government institution. It will also mean that CCAs have parity with combined authorities where it is required to make the model a viable alternative to areas with two-tier local government.

The other minor and technical amendments are to amend the Bill to update references to legislation that gained Royal Assent in 2022, including the Elections Act and the Local Government (Disqualification) Act, which will affect the combined county authorities. Though they amend other Acts, these amendments do not extend provisions any further than the remit of the previous clauses. Given their importance to enabling the combined county authority model to work effectively in practice, I hope noble Lords will support these amendments.

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

I will speak very briefly; I will certainly not debate with the Minister all 35 amendments. I am taking on a brief inspection that these are indeed just minor and consequential. I want to use this as the opportunity to say that the Minister has written to us today, advising us of a whole range of further amendments that the Government will table. While most of them flow from the debates we have had so far, one particular amendment relating to the building safety regulator is completely off-piste, as far as I can see. In responding, can the Minister—perhaps being grateful for me not debating all 35 amendments—assure us that sufficient time will be given for us to think through some of the new amendments the Government have tabled today?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I am sure that the Minister will be pleased to know that I too will not debate all 35 amendments. They are largely consequential and drafting amendments. I noted that, earlier in today’s debate, the noble Earl, Lord Howe, referred to the consultation provisions contained in Amendments 151 and 152, so we will have a closer look at those, and we may write to the Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Bybrook, if we have any further concerns on that.

I have one tiny question—forgive me: I know that it is late—on Amendment 143. The proposed new paragraph 7ZB in Schedule A1 to the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 states:

“If the Secretary of State … thinks that a constituent planning authority are failing or omitting to do anything it is necessary for them to do in connection with the preparation, revision or adoption of a development plan document, and (b) invites the combined county authority to prepare or revise the document, the combined county authority may prepare or revise (as the case may be) the development plan document.”


I do not necessarily need an answer now, but I would be grateful if the Minister could write to me. Is it the Secretary of State or the constituent planning authority who invites the CCA to intervene in the preparation or revision of the document? That was not clear. The amendment also makes provision for the CCA to charge the non-constituent authority for work done on the development plan. Would those charges be agreed between both parties in advance, subject to a fee scale or limited fixed charges? I ask that question because it may be that the financial position of the constituent planning authority was the reason for the delay in the first place. It may be that, either in preparing the plan or if the recruitment of planning staff in the area is difficult, the authority is not in a position to increase salaries and so on, so if there were to be a massive charge to it from the CCA, that might be an issue. I am happy to take a written response to that question in due course.

Other than that, I have no questions or comments on the amendments.

Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Lord Stunell Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 13th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

My Lords, I apologise for not being present on the first group that the Committee discussed today, courtesy of Avanti trains. We now have three very important amendments, which go to the heart of whether levelling up can be achieved. It cannot be achieved unless there is a massive input of finances to local authorities and to CCAs in order to achieve it.

We all know how the system works at the moment. When this place signs off on an Act of Parliament which places new duties and responsibilities on local authorities, government Ministers are always quick to say, “This will all be covered by the new burdens doctrine”. That means that the new cost will be assessed in Whitehall, by some process which is more or less invisible to the general public, and a number will be added to the amount of grant which is then allocated by Whitehall to local authorities. Putting it more accurately, the original amount will be subdivided so that the new burdens are one fraction of it and the reduced grant overall, because of the economic situation, is the other. In other words, there is no extra money at all because the envelope of money has been predetermined by the Treasury and is simply divided one way or another.

Perhaps the key point in what the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Stevenage, said was about the need for much more transparency on that funding relationship between central government and its decision-makers in Whitehall and the recipients of their decisions—the CCAs and local authorities. These three amendments are ways of establishing a process which would begin to deliver that. I very much hope that, in replying, the noble Earl will be able to give us some comfort that the message has been heard.

I say to the Government Front Bench that, if we could have some assurance that the new burdens doctrine was going to mean a genuine increase of funds for additional processes, we would have much more confidence that the levelling-up process could deliver, rather than simply reapportioning a few crumbs on the side of the plate from one place to another. It is about that process of funding the Government’s ambitions on levelling up; we really need to have some certainty that they have that process clearly in focus and in mind. We shall otherwise pass in due course, no doubt, a Bill that we all know will not provide a route for funding the initiatives which are absolutely essential if it is to succeed.

Turning quickly to the three amendments in front of us, I have characterised the first as a fair funding audit of local authorities which, it seems to me, would reveal at the local level some of the issues that I have just described. Increasingly large burdens are being placed on local authorities and combined authorities to achieve certain outcomes, but the Government are withholding money which would allow the authorities to deliver those.

Amendment 123 is asking about parliamentary oversight. I shall be very interested to hear how the Minister chooses to answer that. There is a great pressure—this was the topic we were talking about on the previous group—on auditing the performance of local authorities when they spend and allocate money, and when they undertake their risk assessments, but there is less investigation of how the Government are handling their side of that equation. Maybe there is indeed scope for enhanced visibility and transparency and parliamentary oversight of that process.

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I am sure that the noble Baroness will not be surprised to know that I fully support it; I have talked about bus services before, as she mentioned. Obviously, I am fully aware of how many bus services have been cut and how much funding local authorities will need if they are to take on these new responsibilities. The next group of amendments concerns transport; I have a number of amendments in it and will talk about this issue in further detail.

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

Has the noble Baroness given any consideration to one of the provisions here about the statement that the mayor must make on consent by the constituent councils? I think she said that it would be only if they gave their unanimous consent but, on page 51 of the Bill, subsection (4)(b) says that,

“if the mayor is unable to make that statement, the reasons why the mayor considers the order should be made even though not all of the constituent councils agree to it being made”.

So it is not even the case that all constituent councils are engaged; indeed, it does not even say that it should be a majority. It would appear that the mayor has absolute discretion to make a statement, regardless of constituent councils’ support.

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

Absolutely; the noble Lord is completely correct. I was trying to get across that there should be unanimous consent for anything as serious as that matter; I thank the noble Lord for drawing attention to it.

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[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I offer Green support for the direction of travel of this whole group of amendments. I was not able to be here for the previous group, but I offer support for Amendment 469 in the names of the noble Baronesses, Lady Pinnock and Lady Randerson, about allowing local authorities to run their own bus services.

I turn to the specific points in some of the amendments in this group. We have already heard the case set out. I agree with pretty well everything that has been said by the previous speakers about the parlous state of local transport in the UK, particularly in England, and the way in which we are so badly trailing other parts of the world. The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, talked about electric buses. I was just looking up the stats. The most recent ones I could find for the EU are from the end of 2021. There were 8,500 electric buses in the EU then, and I have no doubt that that figure has grown significantly. That is based on my own experience of arriving in a number of small European cities and finding that a line of little electric hopper buses, as we might call them, taking people from the bus station to the train station or around the city is just normal—yet for us that would be a rare and amazing pilot scheme.

I shall pick up some specific points. Amendment 93, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, would allow residents of the combined county authority to petition their authority and the Government for new transport infrastructure. Creating that democratic framework, explicitly putting it in the Bill, would be useful. We know how much hunger there is in local communities. Mostly they are trying to defend the bus services that they are about to lose, but in many places if people saw the potential for a route towards a new service that everyone knew was needed, the petition would provide a mechanism for that.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, said, Amendment 94 refers to the assessment of the sustainability of transport infrastructure. With 27% of our total emissions coming from transport, and 91% of those from road vehicles, heading towards public transport and indeed active transport—cycling and pedestrian routes—is crucial. To ask the CCAs to put down on paper where they are at and where they are aiming to go is also crucial.

Sustainability also means looking at the issue of resilience. We are in the age of shocks, climate and other, and as I was listening this to this debate I was thinking about the situation at Dawlish and the number of times that we have seen that crucial rail route cut off. That first really came to public attention in 2018, and we have got precisely nowhere on that issue since.

Amendment 97, which we have not yet heard formally introduced, would mean that CCAs could formally designate rail, bus and particularly cycle paths as key routes. If we are going to have the kind of modal shift that we need to see in transport then bus routes and cycle paths are crucial. We need to give CCAs the power to take control over those, see the way forward and make sure that they are secured and treated as important in the same way that we do, far too often, with the main road network.

This is all fine detail and not the kind of stuff that is ever likely to set the headlines ablaze, but it is crucial if this levelling-up Bill is going to go anywhere towards delivering what the Government say is its aim.

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

My Lords, this has been rather a depressing afternoon. We have had a long debate about where money was coming from, and the answer is, “There isn’t any”. Now we are on to a debate about another vital aspect of levelling up: you need the money, but you also need a transport policy that works. Reference has been made to the mission statement. I am becoming increasingly concerned that in every debate we essentially get the same message: the Bill is not about implementing the mission statement, delivering on the five pillars or any of the stuff that was in the White Paper, but about something completely different—and so far it has completely eluded me what the something completely different is. Here we have an opportunity to put a bit of substance in the Bill, which this set of amendments would certainly do.

I appeal to the Government just to join up some of the dots in their own levelling-up White Paper and their own set of mission statements, and to look at this piece of legislation as a way of delivering, or at least of outlining how they intend to deliver, these challenging targets. The mission statements have dates attached to them, yet we have already heard that the financial review is going to be quite a long way ahead—probably in the next Parliament, let us be honest. The transport amendments here would give the new CCAs some powers, chances and opportunities to begin to help the Government to deliver on their mission statement. I cannot say I am hoping, but I must surely have some expectation, that the Government are going to rise to that challenge.

I want to remind the Government that one of these aims is to have a similar level of public transport outside London as there now is in London, by an end date. I will leave aside whether that was a promise that could ever be fulfilled, but it would certainly be easier to achieve if you started now rather than starting in two years’ time or whenever the next big Bill or funding round comes.

In light of that government ambition, the Built Environment Committee, of which I was at that point a member, published a report called Public Transport in Towns and Cities outside London at the end of last year. We took a lot of evidence on what the impact of the pressures of single-pot funding are on transport authorities around the country, and some were much more successful than others. As somebody who lives in the area of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority and Transport for Greater Manchester, I rejoice in the fact that we usually do pretty well out of all this. But you have only to look across the Pennines to other transport authorities to see some that do not. We took evidence that they have essentially given up bidding because every bid that they have made, which costs money, has been unsuccessful, and they do not get the feedback that they need to improve or find a way through the system. It is single-pot funding which is not delivering levelling up in the way that it should do.

The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, mentioned Northern Powerhouse Rail and Transport for the North. Plenty of work is going on pointing out to the Government what they could and should do, and how it could be delivered to achieve outside London that London level of public transport. Yet these opportunities are being missed again and again, so I say to the Government that these amendments are a way of getting that process started.

In Greater Manchester, the mayor—not of my political persuasion but certainly with a strong mandate—has been pushing ahead to get public transport to operate in a co-ordinated and fully functioning way across that city. Successive Conservative Transport Ministers have been deeply sceptical of what Greater Manchester has been trying to achieve, and I have challenged the Government on two or three occasions about whether they were or were not actively supporting the model of Greater Manchester and encouraging others to do so. The evidence that was given by the then Transport Minister to the committee was that the Government are completely neutral about all these funding models, and that it is entirely up to anyone to do what they want—except that the Government prefer that they do not do it the Greater Manchester way. Sometimes the Government seem incapable of learning from the practical experience of what works, and allowing or indeed encouraging others to take advantage of the experience that has been developed on the ground. Obviously we see this in Committee, and will see this all the way through it—“If it is not invented here, it cannot be any good.”

From that point of view, I dare say that the amendments of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, are doomed to fail today, but I ask the Minister to take a look and go back to the Department for Transport, and whoever else needs to be talked to, picking up the point the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, made. Please can the Government, and not just the department, put some guts into the Bill and make it deliver on the missions and objectives that they have set out, that they are so proud to boast about, and which these amendments could facilitate the delivery for?

Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Lord Stunell Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 22nd February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Valentine (CB)]

My Lords, my Amendment 57 is about the distribution of levelling-up funding. The premise of it is, first, that levelling-up challenges are by their nature long-term and difficult and, secondly, that any attempt to address them must be locally sensitive and not hampered by different government departments approaching the issue from different perspectives.

My contention is that short-term funding which fails on the above counts is counterproductive, causing local people to be pulled in different directions, chasing money which does not properly address their local needs. A report by the Business in the Community’s place task force, Partnerships in Place, on intervention in forgotten places, says:

“Levelling up funding needs to be flexible, long-term, localised and aligned with the levelling up missions to maximise”


the chances of “transformative change”. It praises, for instance, the Welsh Government’s Communities First programme, which operated for 16 years from 2001 to 2017 and helped 52 of the most deprived places in Wales. The report also makes the point that capital funding should have significant revenue streams aligned with it to ensure that the relevant agencies have the capacity to deliver well.

I will give some examples of good and bad practice related to funds for levelling up, to illustrate my argument. In some ways, literacy improvement is one of the more straightforward missions. It is measurable, and after 18 years of appropriate education, most children could expect to be literate. Let me give some colour to how the funding works in Blackpool and Bradford. Both were opportunity areas and under that banner were addressing literacy. These are sensible, multi-year interventions on social mobility and education, grounded in understanding of local needs. However, the programme finished in September 2022. The 12 areas across the country became “priority education investment areas”, with less money.

Blackpool’s aim is to provide targeted literacy intervention, but it still awaits its current year allocation. What the Government think is happening with those children during this academic year, I cannot imagine. If you delve further into the funding, there are some larger pots available. There is something called a safety valve bid of about £6 million for school buildings for children with special educational needs, and another safety valve bid of £3.8 million, reflecting the support needed for the huge proportion of high-needs young people in the community, but right now, Blackpool does not know whether it is getting any of this money.

In Bradford, again, the opportunity area had been focusing on literacy. At Business in the Community, we now have a newly created group to focus specifically on literacy in Keighley. This involves working with the Bradford Literature Festival, the Asian Women’s and Children’s Centre, the local mosques, local business and the Keighley Schools Together group, among others. We hope to devise a long-term approach to make a measurable difference, which can be a legacy of Bradford being City of Culture 2025. The government opportunity area funding, however, has ceased.

The recent community renewal fund epitomised several aspects of bad practice. Locality said that the short-term timescales—where bids had to be submitted by mid-June and money spent by the following March—coupled with the competitive bidding process, have seriously hampered the CRF’s ability to make an impact. In Norwich, a colleague of mine ran workshops funded by the CRF in the most deprived part of the city, based on local needs such as financial skills. However, given that they had only three months to deliver, there was not time to build the necessary trust and rapport with some of the individual members of the community who most needed the training, let alone provide ongoing support. My sense of CRF was that the policy was broadly fine, but that when it came to implementation, there were unrealistic and un-joined-up requests for outcomes from multiple government departments, which, combined with short timescales, made it dysfunctional.

However, let me congratulate the Government on a few levelling-up interventions which have worked well. First, the town deal programme, providing substantial capital funding to forgotten places, seems to me to be heading in the right direction. It satisfies a few criteria: it supports local ambitions led by a local partnership; the partnership is business-led, with a cross-section of stakeholders providing a degree of market reality and financial and business nous; it is multiyear; and it addresses issues across government departments. What I notice is that where these town deals are governed by a genuine partnership with a credible, non-vested business lead, they are largely effective. Unfortunately, with the desire to get the money out the door, it is possible that the majority do not quite pass this test. The town deals are playing into a tough economic environment. These weaker town deals will struggle and even the strong ones are likely to cost more, but the Government need to stick with them.

Secondly, the department is now undertaking some deep dives into a few places to see whether a strategic alignment between a place and national government can help to shift the dial. This approach is working well in Blackpool and, in particular, is sorting out some of the cross-Whitehall barriers, which include moving the courts off a £300 million regeneration site and focusing different departments on a Civil Service hub. There are further cross-departmental challenges to come. For instance, the DWP pays housing benefit to people living in illegally squalid housing, or there is the money granted to supported housing providers, who anecdotally dissuade youngsters from taking employment opportunities because they then lose the funding.

I finish by saying that I completely understand the difficulty for the Government in addressing all these levelling-up issues. My plea is that the Government do not make them worse with bad approaches and poor implementation from their ivory tower, nor, for that matter, unsubstantiated ministerial or politically motivated preference versus localised distribution decisions. One lesson is that a stop/start approach to funding will never help.

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

My Lords, I rise primarily to speak to Amendment 57, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Valentine, which was very eloquently supported in detail by what she just had to say. I also want to speak in support of the other amendments in this group. They are all on essentially the same matter, which is: how have the Government transferred, and how do they plan to transfer, resources from the centre to local government, so that they can deliver the levelling-up agenda that both the Government and local government want to see delivered in those areas?

Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Lord Stunell Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 22nd February 2023 Lords Chamber

I conclude with the obvious statement that healthy life expectancy is surely a key measurement of our effectiveness in tackling health inequalities.

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 20 in this group, calling for the provision of safe and affordable homes for all. It references a definition of affordable homes that appears in Amendment 242, to which we will come in due course.

Mission 10 in the White Paper—although they are not actually numbered as such, but it is the 10th mission —sets a target that is only seven years away, focusing on creating a secure path to home ownership. According to the technical annexe to the White Paper, it aims to ensure that everyone has access to good-quality housing, with a particular focus on improving areas where quality is low—I underline that. That is a very big ambition and a very worthy one, and seven years is an awfully short time to deliver it.

It is very important because it is also going to be the gateway to tackling a whole set of other missions, which the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, set out in her speech on Amendment 7—which of course we support very much. Health and well-being are essentially connected to the housing quality of the people who are being measured, and that includes their overall capacity to participate properly in education. Is there somewhere for children to spread out their homework? Is there a bedroom that they can sleep in properly? There is no argument that this is a good idea, and indeed the Government have, within planning policies, an intention at least to make sure that affordable housing is provided.

However, what those non-governmental organisations, the homeless organisations and many local councils’ housing departments fret over is that affordability as defined in the planning regulations is actually unaffordability in real life. If we do not shift that definition of affordability and take a more realistic view about what it is, it is absolutely clear that, however much effort is put into housing and affordable housing, it will fail to deliver what the Government want to achieve by 2030. Homes will be simply too expensive for lower-income purchasers, while renters will remain trapped in overpriced and undermaintained property well beyond that seven-year target.

This amendment is designed to come to the rescue. It sets out clearly a route for the Government’s missions to deliver genuinely affordable and safe housing for everyone, creating enough space in the housing market for people with limited means to afford a roof over their head through either renting or buying or through shared ownership schemes. The amendment also requires homes to be safe. I have to say to noble Lords that 10 years ago it would not have been seen as necessary to include that point in a Bill, but the devastating revelations following the horrific Grenfell Tower fire have undermined that complacent view. Again, we know from Shelter and others working in the field that too many people are living in unsafe as well as unaffordable homes.

However, the substantive part of this amendment and the part I want to explore a little more is “an affordable home for all”. It is a great slogan, and of course it is at the heart of the housing debate currently running in our town halls and planning departments, and of course throughout the Government and particularly among their Back-Benchers, among many others. Every local planning authority has an affordable housing policy—and so do the Government. As I am sure the Minister will tell us, they are spending a lot of money on it. Why, then, does it turn out that so many affordable built under these carefully crafted policies are in fact unaffordable to those who need them most? The fact that undermined so many good intentions is that affordability in planning policy is being calculated by the Government by reference to house prices and not by reference to buyers’ income or spending capacity. Obviously, a home which is going on the market at 80% when the 100% figure is £1 million is a very different animal from one that is going at a time when the housing price is £500,000 or £250,000.

This amendment addresses the slippery word “affordable” head on and proposes a definition of affordable that is based on the income of those seeking a home and not, as at present, a notional discount on current market prices. That definition is set out in detail in Amendment 242, which obviously we shall come to in a different group in due course, which is referenced as “Meaning of ‘affordable home’” in Amendment 20. Briefly, we define affordable in terms of local housing allowance for units provided for renters and as a percentage of income in relation to the mortgage costs for buyers. It provides a fundamental reshaping of the term “affordable” so that there is an objective framework within which policies and funding can be deployed, with the knowledge that the homes delivered via that policy will be affordable to those in pressing need of them.

If we continue to misuse the term “affordable homes” in our public discourse and policy-making, we will continue to miss the targets and the Government will fail in their missions. Much worse than that, families across the country will continue to be left out and left behind, and the circle of deprivation will continue with it. I will add that many of the other missions which also have deadlines of 2030 will be compromised or fail completely. This amendment opens the door to a solution by reframing “affordable” in terms of the income of the family rather than the capital price of the home, and I beg to move.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, my Amendment 21 joins a queue to add, amend or clarify missions. This queue can feel a little like a fanciful—farcical, even—wish list, but the Government only have themselves to blame for the fact that some of us are just trying to pin down these missions rather than rely on guesswork.

My guess is that, as much as the Bill relates to planning, it is not unreasonable to assume that there will be a housing mission. Indeed, in the missions published in February 2022 we are told so. However, I was shocked when I read its content: increase home ownership and housing standards, tick; more first-time buyers in all geographical areas, tick; and a 50% reduction in non-decent rented homes, tick. But, extraordinarily, there is no mention of increasing the supply of houses or of targets to build more homes at a time when we need that to happen with missionary zeal if we are to stand a chance of making levelling up more than a slogan.

If the Government are serious about increasing home ownership, having more first-time buyers and ensuring that the rented sector expands and improves, we need more houses or the policy will run into the housing affordability road block. We heard a lot about affordability from the previous speaker, the noble Lord, Lord Stunell. At present, the average home costs over eight times average annual earnings, as against the historic norm of three to four times. Put bluntly, house prices and rents have risen beyond what any reasonable person would think it acceptable to spend on one of the most basic human needs. Those high prices and rents are responsible for many of the social ills that the Bill is allegedly designed to address—from worsening living conditions, falling home ownership, rising homelessness and the spiralling costs of housing benefit.

Half of all first-time buyers—rising to two-thirds in the south-east—rely on the so-called “bank of mum and dad”, which is fine if you have parents who can do that for you, although, with more and more mums and dads suffering the brunt of the cost of living crisis, that might be on the wane, anyway. Those who cannot turn to their parents are not only left behind but, ironically, end up paying a lot more in rent each month than their peers with a mortgage. Meanwhile, renters in London spend 40% of their income on rent, which is simply unaffordable, and rental prices are being pushed up by supply not meeting demand. We therefore need to build more houses to bring prices into line with earnings, whether we are buying or renting.

The hugely impressive housing campaign group Priced Out, staffed by young people who are passionate about housing, explains this well. It says:

“The affordability of housing is a significant concern for millions of people. If we don’t fix the root cause of this problem, we will continue to ruin lives and futures”.


Priced Out has hopes that the Bill will tackle that root cause. So do I, and that is what my amendment is about.

Of course, there is more to this than a demand for paper targets. Just because something is written down, I do not necessarily trust it. Over the years, we have all heard endless pledges from Governments of all stripes included in all political parties’ election manifestos, yet we still have a supply problem. The UK remains one of the slowest and least prolific homebuilding countries among all 28 members of the OECD. Too often, under previous Administrations’ versions of housing missions, we have seen distractions from the core issue of increasing the supply side.

This Government in particular have tended to fall back on headline-grabbing demand-side quick fixes, such as help-to-buy schemes. However, this arguably makes things worse. Demand skyrockets by giving young, aspiring homeowners a state loan. But that means that prices go up, especially if we plod along with a fixed, stagnating supply of homes.

Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Lord Stunell Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 20th February 2023 Lords Chamber

It is important that we consult where necessary, so that we know exactly how things are moving forward, what communities are feeling and how they are responding to the different levelling-up guidance and funding. If we are to move forward and genuinely make a difference, as the Government say they want to, we need to ensure that we have proper scrutiny and reporting, and that we understand exactly what the outcomes are. I beg to move.

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

My Lords, I agree with a great deal of what the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, has said about the need for monitoring and evaluating any government process, but particularly one as deep-seated and far-ranging as this is obviously intended to be.

I will speak to Amendments 24, 26, 32 and 49, all of which appear in this group. They are tabled to explore how the outputs from the mechanism that Clause 1 sets up are to be monitored and, even more importantly, evaluated. Noble Lords will know that Governments are notoriously slack at carrying out timely and effective evaluation of their policies. They are very often launched in a blaze of glory, or, on this occasion, in a White Paper, and what follows is often a serious disappointment. My noble friend Lady Pinnock has shaped that argument very well in the debate on the first group. Avoiding monitoring and evaluation is deep-seated in the government machine, which actively avoids formal monitoring as far as it can and definitely seeks to avoid any public evaluation of what that monitoring reveals. That is not specific to this Government: I would be stretching my memory to think of a Government who have eagerly embraced independent evaluation and monitoring of any of their policies.

Interestingly, the Government’s White Paper is very strong on “accountability” and “transparency”, which it describes as key attributes that will be built into the levelling-up programme. Unfortunately, the Bill completely omits to mention these two essential characteristics of levelling up, and for that matter, it also omits any mention of specific missions. These amendments are designed to tackle that gap. No doubt my amendments and those of the noble Baroness could be strengthened, and I hope we will see how best we can do that. I regard these as quite modest, de minimis amendments to establish the principle of what is needed.

The first of the amendments I have tabled with my noble friend Lady Pinnock, Amendment 24, simply inserts another prerequisite for any mission statement coming into force: that there must first be an affirmative resolution by each House of Parliament, not merely having them laid before us. In fact, that is a really basic requirement for any such far-reaching policy package: it should have proper parliamentary scrutiny. Without this amendment or something very like it, not one of the mission statements will have ever received any direct democratic endorsement.

The Minister may say that this was in the Conservative manifesto of 2019. The slogan was certainly in the manifesto, but were the missions? No, they were not. Were the metrics of any of the missions in the manifesto? No, they were not. Importantly, bearing in mind that this is a political process, did the Government even have a settled view on what levelling up was during the passage of three Prime Ministers through Downing Street and four changes of Secretary of State last year? No, they did not have a settled view. In fact, except for an unusually hostile reception of a Budget last autumn, levelling up would now be taking off in a completely different direction, with a completely different Administration and objectives. A 2019 election slogan cannot absolve the mission statements from parliamentary scrutiny. Indeed, the Government’s own White Paper makes it clear that such accountability and transparency in the process itself is important.

On transparency, I admit that my claim that it is all in the White Paper overlooks the fact that that was indeed three Prime Ministers ago, and maybe that has been scrubbed in the nine months since. Perhaps the Minister can confirm whether it is still an important principle in the Government’s thinking about levelling up. I therefore hope that I will get a positive answer from the Minister on Amendment 24, and that she will be very quick and willing to accept it.

Amendment 26 points to a critical weakness in Clause 1: the complete absence of accountability of Ministers of the Crown. Clause 1(8) rushes from dealing with the first iteration of statements of mission—those that are in front of us now via the White Paper—to publishing the second iteration, without ever passing “Go”. There is no mention in Clause 1(8) of independently examined evidence and evaluation of what has happened so far and no accompanying analysis, but simply a straight jump to laying it before Parliament, which will be, as far as I understand it, on a take-it-or-leave-it unamendable basis. Again, the Minister may be able to reassure me that these will be open, debatable and amendable by Parliament. I should be very pleased, and totally astonished, if she were to say that.

Amendment 26 requires that independent evaluations be published to accompany the new draft mission statements when they come before Parliament, and that the draft revised missions themselves are constructed by the process set out in Amendment 29, which we will come to later this evening. That requires that such missions shall, prior to their adoption, have been endorsed by the devolved Administrations and by local government within England in respect of their specific areas.

A central part of levelling up has to be a built-in independent evaluation system providing analysis alongside each round of mission statements. Otherwise, we all know what will happen—it happens all the time: targets will be fudged and stretched and outcomes will not be monitored properly, yet the process will still go blithely on, repeating the same errors and omissions time and again until, in due course, it lapses into history and is replaced by the latest sparkly new slogan. Levelling up will become just another in a long string of non-performing slogans.

That brings me to Amendment 32 in my name and those of my noble friend Lady Pinnock and the noble Baroness, Lady Valentine. I appreciate their support. As it stands, Clause 2(2)(a) only requires that the formal periodic report on levelling up includes the Minister’s own assessment of how well things are going. Our amendment would require that, alongside that ministerial assessment, there should be

“an independent evaluation of the effectiveness of the progress that has been made”.

That is not very challenging, is it? The effectiveness of the progress that has been made should be supported by an independent evaluation.

That is surely the true test of accountability—for the evaluation to be based on objective evidence, not a subjective assessment, least of all a subjective assessment made by the person being held to account. We would not accept in most areas of responsibility that the accountability, assessment and evaluation is done by the person being held to account. I very much hope that the Minister agrees and will accept Amendment 32 in due course.

Finally, Amendment 49, to which my noble friend Lady Pinnock has added her name, which I appreciate, takes these essential reforms forward to apply to all future iterations of statements of mission. This is not just about getting it right now; it is about embedding a process that will continue indefinitely as levelling up rolls out iteration after iteration.

Taken together, these four amendments plug the huge gap between the good intentions and smooth words in the White Paper and the stark, Whitehall-controlled process being set out in the Bill. I look forward to hearing that they find favour with your Lordships and the Minister.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

If I may, I wish to speak to Amendment 25 in my name. I begin by drawing attention to my registered interest as chair of the Cambridgeshire Development Forum, which will become more relevant in relation to the later housing, planning and development-related issues than to this first part relating to missions.

In the earlier group, there was a reference to this Bill being more than one Bill. It is in truth three Bills all in one place. When we started out in this, I was reminded of that story about the elephant: “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.” Let us take it just one bite at a time and try not to eat it all in one go.

I did want to make a point about missions, and I will add to it a little. Amendment 25, to which I speak, was really about trying to explore, with my noble friends on the Front Bench, the Government’s overall attitude to the process of parliamentary scrutiny of their policy priorities. For example, a number of noble Lords will have participated in our recent scrutiny of the Procurement Bill. In the that Bill, now in the other place, the Government included a provision relating to parliamentary scrutiny of the national procurement policy statement, an important statement of the Government’s priorities. The Government are resisting being told what those priorities should be, but none the less consented in the Bill, in the other place, that it was Parliament’s job, if it did not approve of their priorities, to say so by means of a Motion.

Amendment 25, which is subtly different from Amendment 24 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Stunell, and others, which says that Parliament must approve the statements, is in precisely the same form as the Procurement Bill regarding the scrutiny of the national procurement policy statement, in that the statement will be proceeded with unless either House resolves not to approve it within 40 days. It uses exactly the same terminology; I have simply lifted it from the Procurement Bill.

I want to know, what is the difference? Why, in this respect, do the Government not think it appropriate for Parliament to approve—or, indeed, if it objects, not to approve—of the Government’s executive decisions? They are undoubtedly important. The priorities in the Procurement Bill are terribly important. The missions are terribly important. I cannot understand why one should have this form of scrutiny and the other should not. My first question to my noble friend is: why can we not have the same degree of scrutiny in relation to this statement as the Government are giving us in relation to the national procurement policy statement?

--- Later in debate ---

[The Lord Bishop of Gloucester]

My Lords, I too will speak in support of Amendment 4. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, for tabling this amendment. I am very aware that my right reverend friend the Bishop of Durham is a co-signatory and is unable to be here today to speak.

Levelling up, as the Government’s White Paper initially outlined, is about equally spreading opportunity across our country. It is about challenging unfairness and allowing people to live more fulfilling lives—I thank the noble Lord, Lord Bird, for his inspiring speech. These are aims that surely all of us welcome, but I cannot see how this will ever be achieved unless the Bill includes reducing child poverty.

This is about the present and the long-term future. As has already been said, the latest statistics are that there are 3.9 million children living in poverty in this country; that is more than one in four. With more and more families turning to food banks and the experience of persistent poverty tripling a child’s likelihood of having mental health problems, this cannot continue.

What does it mean for years to come, when these children and young people are adults? Even if you are lukewarm regarding care and flourishment, none of this makes long-term financial sense, and it certainly will not lead to long-term levelling up. Child poverty has been calculated to be costing the Government £38 billion per year. That does not fully take into account the financial impact of needs and services which can then become necessary in later life, whether that be health costs, various support services or criminal justice services. We know that children who are not invested in to give them the best start in life are more at risk of failing to flourish as young people and adults.

Poverty limits a child’s future opportunities and employment prospects, largely due to the impact it has on education. If levelling up is about equally spreading opportunity across the country, it is essential to ensure that children are receiving quality education. Yet how can we expect them to receive quality education when so many are facing the realities of poverty? The noble Baroness, Lady Lister, has already spoken about the Child of the North APPG report. One youth ambassador expressed how poverty was impacting their life:

“The main impacts are education. No matter where you are, school is difficult … It isn’t just hunger. The worry is still there. That feeling of worry never leaves. How your sister’s trip to the zoo is going to be paid. How you’ve not seen your mam eat. All going through your head in a chemistry lesson.”


The impact of poverty on a child’s life and future should not be underestimated. It impacts education, physical and mental health, relationships and access to opportunities. It is therefore impossible to achieve levelling up without putting the mission of reducing child poverty at its heart.

Furthermore, as has been said, child poverty is an inequality that people face throughout the country. I know that if my right reverend friend the Bishop of Durham was here, he would highlight the stark inequality in the north-east of England. Absolute child poverty may have fallen marginally across the UK since 2015, but it has risen in every local authority area of the north-east since 2017. This makes the gap between the north-east and the UK average poverty rate the greatest it has ever been.

Ending geographical inequality, which this Bill strives to accomplish, means ending the inequality of child poverty equally across the UK. Prioritising a strategy around reducing child poverty will improve not only the well-being of millions of children throughout the country, allowing them to flourish, but employment prospects and earnings, increasing economic growth and benefitting the country overall.

Childhood may not be permanent, but the experiences we have in our childhood shape the rest of our lives. Reducing child poverty in every local authority, and across the country, must be a priority now, because without doing so levelling up will be nothing more than a distant fantasy.

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak to the amendments in my name, but I could not begin without commenting on the three very powerful speeches which have just been made. I hope very much that the Minister is listening and will be able to give something better than a formulaic response to the pleas that have been made.

In the amendments standing in my name and the name of my noble friend Lady Parminter, there are references to two other missing links in the metrics which are in front of us via these 12 missions—missing in both the Bill, where there are no links at all, and in the White Paper that preceded it. There are 12 missions set out in the White Paper and none of them references the need for future investment to achieve net-zero emissions as the fundamental basis of levelling up. I find that, frankly, astonishing. It is all the more surprising because the White Paper itself takes space in section 1.4.1 to explain that the risks and opportunities that the transition to net zero raises are greatest in exactly those parts of the country that most seriously need levelling up.

The White Paper points out that to achieve a just transition, the most challenging area is in those places where levelling up is most needed:

“Parts of the UK that need to undergo the largest transition”


to net zero

“lie outside the South East, often in some of the least well-performing areas of the UK.”

The White Paper recognises that there is a correlation between the intensity of the impact of the intended transition to net zero and areas that need levelling up. In other words, you need more of it in the places where levelling up is needed the most. It clearly identifies that but then proposes no action to respond to that impact.

Our amendment does not propose an additional mission to remedy this oversight, because, quite apart from the spurious precision of a particular number of missions in the first place, the transition to net zero needs to be at the heart of all of the missions in the White Paper. There is a powerful read-across to living standards, transport, skills, health and well-being—to mention the scope of just five of the missions on the Minister’s list. Amendment 18 is framed in terms of requiring pervasive action within all 12 missions to enhance their success in delivering meaningful and enduring levelling up, and seeks to avoid the temptation of short-term, quick fixes that build in carbon emissions and make matters worse or undermine the UK target of net zero by 2050.

Those risks are real. For instance, for a Minister anxious to achieve a particular mission target by 2030—on, say, living standards, which is mission 1 in the White Paper—it might be very tempting to prioritise investment in an oven-ready, carbon-intensive employment prospect, rather than in a longer-term plan that would aid transition and boost jobs far more, but not until after 2030, when the Minister’s accounting period had ended.

However, an even bigger risk is emerging, which is that new green jobs are not preferentially going to those areas that need levelling up. In fact, they are not even being sprinkled equally across every part of the country. The new green jobs and investment are following the money and not the need, with London and the south-east picking up those jobs much more quickly than the north-east or north-west of England.

--- Later in debate ---

The levelling-up White Paper has set out our commitment to the green revolution and the transition to net zero through the £26 billion of capital investment. Low-carbon businesses have already created 400,000 jobs and an estimated turnover of more than £41 billion in 2020, which has helped to create a basis for multiple missions. The net-zero review, published by Chris Skidmore, contains several proposals that will help the Government meet their net-zero target by 2050, in addition to driving economic growth and increasing living standards. The noble Lord, Lord Stunell, was correct that we must ensure that the green revolution and its economic benefits move across the whole country and not just certain areas. We are seeing that.

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

I appreciate what the Minister is saying, and it is not part of my case that investing in green jobs has been a failure. My point was that investing in green jobs has been very successful, but it has been more successful in the more prosperous regions. Consequently, the disparity between the rich region and the poor region is widening. Clearly a major redirection of thinking is needed to ensure that the green investment and the green jobs are channelled in the right way. The noble Lord, Lord Lansley, said that he did not want to see Cambridge levelled down. I do not want to see London levelled down. I want to see the north-east levelled up, up, up. The metrics will have to be adjusted to accommodate that.

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

That is exactly what I said. We need to look at where these jobs are. An example of that is the £1 billion funding to support new investment in carbon capture, utilisation and storage in four industrial clusters or super-places across the UK. The net-zero strategy announced the first two clusters, one in the north-west and north Wales and the other in Teesside and Humberside. We are working to take that investment across the country and to places that need it.

This Government are committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions across the country to reach net zero by 2050. There is a statutory duty within the Climate Change Act 2008 on the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy to set a carbon budget for successive periods of five years and to ensure that the net UK carbon account for the budgetary period does not exceed the carbon budget that has been set. Section 16 of the Climate Change Act 2008 also requires the Government to publish an annual statement of UK emissions, already in statute.

In addition to all this, the Treasury has mandated the consideration of climate and environmental impacts in spending decisions. Through its updated green book, policies must now be developed and assessed against how well they deliver on the Government’s long-term policy aims, such as net zero.

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

I apologise to the Minister for intervening again, but can I press her? Of course, that is all worth while, but will that analysis be on a regional basis or simply on a whole-country basis? We need to know, or the Minister needs to know, whether year by year that gap is widening or narrowing because of that extra green investment.

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

I spoke earlier about data and the processes and policies that we are putting in place for data capture and analysis. These are the things that will come out of that. I expect that to be one of the outcomes that we will see in the reviews of the missions.

I am very sorry that my noble friend Lord Holmes of Richmond was not here, but I know what he would say because he is a huge voice for disabled people in this country. I thank him for that and for his Amendment 14. If the House agrees, I will respond to it. The objective of improving the lives of disabled people has been considered throughout the levelling-up White Paper. People with disabilities are less likely to be employed, and face additional challenges in workplace progression. The White Paper highlights the in-work progression offered to support better employment opportunities. We need to continue this. The disability employment gap is widest for those who have no qualifications, hence why we will continue to work closely with local authorities to improve their special educational needs and disability services where they are underperforming.

The Government are delivering for disabled people. We have seen 1.3 million more disabled people in work than there were in 2017, delivering a government commitment five years early. We have supported the passage of two landmark pieces of legislation—the British Sign Language Act and the Down Syndrome Act. We have also delivered an additional £1 billion in 2022-23 for the education of children and young people with more complex needs.

Amendment 16 tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, would require this Government and future Governments to include a mission to increase cultural infrastructure across the UK within mission statements. I agree with her that people’s lives are shaped by the social and physical fabric of their communities. The local mix of social and physical capital, from universities to good-quality green spaces and from libraries to local football clubs, gives areas their unique character and vibrancy and makes residents proud to live in that place. Recognising that in the levelling-up White Paper, the Government set a “pride in place” mission. The Government’s ambition is that, by 2030, people’s satisfaction in their town centre and engagement in local culture and community will have risen in every area in the United Kingdom, with the gap between top-performing and other areas closing. Increasing cultural infrastructure will be key to achieving this mission.

The Government have taken practical steps to support, protect and expand cultural infrastructure. The £1.5 billion cultural recovery fund rescue packages helped thousands of cultural organisations across a range of sectors to stay afloat during the Covid-19 pandemic, while the community renewal fund, the community ownership fund, the levelling-up fund and the UK prosperity fund have provided opportunities to enhance cultural arts, heritage and sporting infrastructure in places across the country. The mutual importance of cultural and place identity is recognised in the Government’s work with places, such as through the devolution deal and the pilot destination management organisation initiative in the north-east of England.

I hope that the extent of the Government’s action on these priorities, set out elsewhere in the policy, and the approach that has been set out—a clear, uncluttered and long-lasting framework for levelling-up missions—provides Peers with sufficient assurance not to press their amendments.

Levelling Up Fund

Lord Stunell Excerpts

Tuesday 24th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My Lords, I am very sorry, but I cannot explain the techniques. All I am aware of—we have made it very clear—is that there will be a third round. It is best to note that 45% of all the awards so far have gone to opposition councils.

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

My Lords, on 21 December last year, the Minister told me in a Written Answer that the bid on behalf of Marple community hub was being “assessed”. Well, it failed to make the grade. Will she undertake to publish the assessments of both the failed and the successful schemes so that, as she said, a fair and transparent process can be seen by all?

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My Lords, no, I cannot agree to do that because I think we would need to talk to those local authorities before we put anything like that out in the public domain. It is transparent. You can see on GOV.UK exactly how decisions are made and the processes for giving those grants.

Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Lord Stunell Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 17th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

My Lords, first, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent, on her excellent and feisty maiden speech. We look forward to hearing more from her, and more about Stoke-on-Trent, in the future.

The Bill comes clanking into sight three months late and after a couple of rather drastic rebuilds from where it started. It follows last year’s White Paper, which itself hugely overpromised, with 12 missions, six capitals and five pillars. Now, three Prime Ministers later, we are left with at best a framework Bill. It contains no money, no messages and no actual missions—it is a skeleton Bill where the bones do not join up. It may be best described as an “empty box of dreams” Bill.

Even if we accept that the Bill is about only the mechanics of administering levelling up and not the policies that might deliver it or the money that might pay for it, it is, nevertheless, still a failure. When it comes to those mechanics, the common thread—or perhaps the missing link—is any evidence of sound governance based on the principles of democratic accountability, with powers devolved to and exercised by the bodies nearest to the communities they serve.

First, the Bill hands to the Secretary of State powers that should rightly be exercised by local government, combined authorities and the newly formed combined county authorities. Secondly, the Bill insulates CCAs from effective democratic scrutiny and challenge. Thirdly, the Bill leaves the marginalisation of town and parish councils unchallenged, while failing to recognise that the solution to the central problem of putting more homes in more places is staring it in the face in the form of neighbourhood plans.

I will spend a minute on the centralising of executive powers by the Secretary of State in the Bill. I asked the House of Lords Library for a list of all the Secretary of State’s new powers as set out in the Bill. The Library replied very helpfully by referring me to the Government’s own delegated powers memorandum and warning me that it is 375 pages long. It is stuffed with Henry VIII powers. The Library drew my attention to what it described as a “non-exhaustive” list of 25 of them, highlighting a dozen or so in particular.

At Second Reading, I simply say to the Minister and to noble Lords that it cannot be called genuine devolution if the Secretary of State can at any time override any local plan anywhere with the trump card of “nationally significant” development, and it cannot be genuine devolution of powers if the Secretary of State can parachute in a national development management policy on any topic, at any time, on any area of the country, with no appeal and no escape. Added to that, such a power reduces the certainty of a stable local planning environment that is essential if local growth and well-being are to follow from it.

That failure in sensible governance at the top is compounded by the lack of democratic accountability in the new CCAs. We will have a mayor—that is one thing—but who on earth will be the “associate members”? The Government’s Explanatory Notes say they might be “local business leaders”. In practice, they will be selected by the majority group on the CCA to join them round the table and then be given a vote, and seem to be a resurrection of the somewhat corrupt institution of alderman. Surely they should have no place on a CCA, which is already shorn of any effective scrutiny.

What does the Bill propose should happen below that, at the all-important community level of government? There is no hint of double devolution in the Bill—of a cascade of powers and money to town and parish councils or neighbourhood forums. In fact, it is somewhat the opposite. In the later stages of this Bill, I and my colleagues will want to test thoroughly all these deficiencies and omissions and try to rescue some trace of the democratic accountability and local community decision-making that must be at the heart of any effective levelling-up mechanism, in this Bill or elsewhere.

Housing (Built Environment Committee Report)

Lord Stunell Excerpts

Tuesday 8th November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

My Lords, I start by declaring my interests as an honorary president of the National Home Improvement Council and an honorary fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers. For the purposes of this debate, I also declare that I am a mortgage-free owner-occupier, and that my wife and I have a leasehold flat in London. I am part of the housing-privileged, as are nearly all the opinion-formers in this building. We would do well to remember, when we talk about the housing crisis and housing issues, that our own perspectives may perhaps be limiting our understanding of just how traumatic and difficult it is for many people. In that light, I believe that this report is a very clear-headed and well-evidenced document that, as a committee member, I am very ready to endorse.

I will not review the speeches made by the 13 contributors so far, particularly as nine of us have been on the committee and we have probably spoken quite enough to each other about this already. I will go straight to the Government’s response to the report, which I have described elsewhere as being half-hearted—although I have to say that there have been three different Governments to choose from, and goodness knows exactly how the industry is supposed to plan when housing targets are yo-yoing all over the place. This year started off with 300,000 as the Government’s target, which was subsequently dismissed by the next Government as being Stalinist. As I understand it, the target was reinstated by the following Government to be 300,000 again—and we are of course waiting to see what happens on 17 November. In fact, with current policies, never mind the current economic situation, 300,000 is not so much Stalinist as fantasist.

We have had four Housing Ministers this year since our report was published. Is it any wonder that housing completions are falling, house price inflation is outrunning actual inflation, as it has been for over a decade, and, as the report makes clear, the balance between supply and demand for both social homes and homes in the private rented sector is totally out of kilter? At the very bottom end of the market, homelessness and sofa surfing are rapidly rising trends.

What are the solutions and how close are the new ministerial team to applying them? Noble Lords in their contributions so far have made it clear what some of those questions and some of those answers are. I will take just a quick look at local planning and ask the Government to say what they believe the locus of decision-making should be. Should it be decided in Whitehall, in the town hall, or in the local community? The committee, four Ministers ago, got a very clear answer that that Government and that Housing Minister believed that the decision should be based in the local community, who gave a great uptick to the idea of neighbourhood plans, which have been succeeding in many parts of the country. Will the Minister tell noble Lords what the current policy is on where planning should be and what it should be delivering?

I want to draw attention to one statistic which has not come into the debate today, which is that there are over 600,000 unused planning permissions for homes already in existence. The reality is that housebuilders build houses to sell. Most years they can sell 100,000 to 150,000 homes. If the Government want more homes built, they have to bribe or pay for those homes to be built. The report in front of noble Lords found that Help to Buy certainly provided the bribe okay, but there was very little evidence that, as a result, more homes were built using that money. Instead, housebuilders still sold 150,000 homes, but they cost a lot more.

Perhaps noble Lords will indulge in a thought experiment. Just imagine that there were suddenly no planning restrictions. How many homes would house- builders build each year? The answer is: not more than 150,000, although they would, to some extent, be in different places. Incidentally, it would probably be less than that, as the asset value of their jealously hoarded land banks would collapse and so, probably, would their business.

Ministers have to decide, if they want homes that are beyond the capacity of the private market to absorb, how much they want to pay to get those extra homes. They will certainly get the most homes for their bucks if they put the money into local council housebuilding. I am making the economic argument—a financial, Treasury argument—that if you want those homes, social housing is the way to get them at the lowest cost per house. They will also get those homes with fewer delays and fewer broken bones if they let local communities take control of their planning and stop imposing Whitehall master plans.

However, market failure is not the only barrier to more and better homes built more quickly. There is a major capacity and skills deficit in the industry. I was delighted to hear what the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham had to say about what is happening in Sunderland to try to address part of that. That problem is an accelerating and deepening one, made worse by some of the actions of the biggest housebuilders.

The Halifax produced its running total on house prices, and the average house price in Britain last month was £292,000. That appeared in the newspapers as bad news, because it was a fall from the rise in the previous month, but what they did not report was that it was an 8.6% rise compared with 12 months before. The average house price has risen by £28,000 in 12 months. In London, where the average house price, according to the Halifax, is £551,000, the price has risen by more than £40,000.

According to a publication called Money Matters, the top eight housebuilders made £7 billion profit in the past two years. That includes Barratt, Taylor Wimpey, Redrow, Persimmon, Berkeley and others. They are all in the Home Builders Federation, their trade association. I am not sure whether it is an oligopoly, as the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, said or whether it is a 1960s trade union, but the outcome is pretty much the same: very low standards of work, with many faults and rampant poor workmanship—the situation is so bad that purchasers prefer to buy a 30 year-old house than a new one. If you were selling 30 year-old cars from the forecourt, you would expect them to go for a lower price than the brand new ones, but that is not what we have.

Yet, the HBF, in its report to noble Lords which has already been referenced in this debate, Building Homes in a Changing Business Environment, has a self-serving list of 12 areas of additional costs, for which it pleads that it needs recompense or, better still, delay or abolition of those 12 imposts. If it does not get that, it is quite clear: it will not build as many affordable homes. It threatens to offset the extra costs it alleges will arise against its Section 106 contribution—which, in 2019-20, delivered 51% of affordable homes. It still found space to complain about the loss of Help to Buy, which was fattening its members’ wallets, obviously, despite the committee’s evidence that it was a waste of money as far as getting extra homes was concerned.

So, what were those 12 things? Electric vehicle charging points were one. Upgrading homes to produce better energy performance and biodiversity net gain—matters that the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, referred to—was another. Even the levy to put right Grenfell’s cladding failures was on the developers’ list of unbearable costs that meant that they could build fewer affordable homes.

Housebuilders have inflated margins not just on their sales, with their multi-billion pound profits, but on their cost estimates for the 12 imposts that they are complaining about. I cannot go into those as we do not have the time but nowhere in the HBF’s report to noble Lords is there any hint that not only will purchasers of a new home nowadays expect to have an electric vehicle charging point but that having zero heating bills is a rather good sales pitch just now.

Of course, not a moment’s thought is given to the idea that maybe, just maybe, housebuilders should invest more in producing decent homes and take a dip in their profits. If they did, of course, that would be one important step towards letting SMEs back into the market. They develop smaller sites, develop more quickly, develop to higher standards and are usually more locally accountable.

These are my questions for the Government. First, are the Government committed to building 300,000 homes a year? Secondly, are they willing to accept the logic of the lowest-cost delivery of the homes that the market cannot provide, and to use what money there is after 17 November to invest in social housing? Thirdly, will they resist the HBF’s blackmail and insist on it raising money to pay for Grenfell cladding replacements, higher environmental standards in and around homes, and zero-carbon standards? Fourthly, are the Government ready to work with the whole construction industry to boost skills and capacity, debug the supply chain and support new entrants on to the housebuilding scene? If so, this report will have done its job.

High-rise Buildings: Evacuation of Disabled Residents

Lord Stunell Excerpts

Wednesday 25th May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My noble friend is right that the concern is ultimately for those buildings where simultaneous evacuation is in place. We are making progress in ACM buildings and high-rises with other forms of flammable cladding. Most importantly, we now have a situation where we are getting the polluters to pay and the funding in place to get remediation done as quickly as is practical.

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

My Lords, the Prime Minister gave an undertaking that every recommendation of the Grenfell inquiry would be implemented in full. PEEPs were a clear recommendation of that inquiry. That commitment was underlined by the Secretary of State for what was then the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. The Minister himself made similar comments during the passage of the Building Safety Act. Can he not understand the anger, fear and frustration of disabled people living in high-rise blocks about what, from an earlier question, appears to be what we might understand to be a delay but might be a U-turn on the Government’s commitment to implement PEEPs?

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

I genuinely understand the concerns and frustrations, but we have come forward with what we believe to be a sensible proposal. This is a genuine consultation with a call for evidence for examples of practical, proportionate and safe PEEPs and other fire safety initiatives. It also includes a working group with responsible persons, residents and disability groups to examine the role that neighbours and friends can play in supporting the evacuation of vulnerable residents. We are listening and it is important that we get a policy position that works.