Housing and Planning Bill

Lord Taylor of Goss Moor Excerpts

Monday 25th April 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, I have not spoken on this Bill before. However, I would like to add a practical point from the part of the West Country where I live, where there is both very large building going on—5,000-plus houses, some on a flood plain—together with very small building on small sites. What we are being told locally is that the various builders, particularly those on the larger sites, are now going back to the council to ask not to have to provide as much affordable housing as they were originally asked to do. It really is a very serious matter down in our part of the West Country. As everyone knows, affordable housing is so important that every step that can be taken to support it, I would hope that this House would support.

[Lord Taylor of Goss Moor (LD)]

My Lords, first, I draw attention to my interests on the register; in particular, I am president of the National Association of Local Councils. Although not in the register of interests, I chair a neighbourhood plan in a rural village.

I spoke on this in Committee to support the noble Lord, Lord Best—I was a member of the rural housing review that he conducted. I speak today in support of the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Royall. However, primarily, I want to urge the Minister to address the very real issue that is being raised here. I will not repeat all of the comments that I made before about the importance in small, rural communities of making sure that there are homes that the people who work in the shop, the pub, on the farm and with the children in the local school can afford to live in. I believe that that is something that unites the House. I simply say that in a world in which we want to protect many rural villages and communities from overdevelopment, one solution to affordable housing—simply to build enough houses so that prices come down—is not available. That means that if we are to provide homes for the people who do the work of the countryside, we have to do it in the form of affordable housing, whether it is to rent or through part ownership. As the noble Lord, Lord Best, said, the rural housing review made it clear—I believe that the Government know this—that the majority of such homes are provided on small sites as a result of affordable housing requirements. These are not sites which are unviable for development. There may be small urban sites where the costs of development are such that providing affordable housing is genuinely difficult to do viably, but in these cases, typically, the land has enormous value when given permission for market housing. While landowners in some cases may seek to maximise their returns, I think that it is legitimate, right and indeed part of neighbourhood planning that we say that the returns they make should be shared with the community by providing some affordable homes. Some landowners will do so voluntarily, but too often that will not be the case.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Taylor of Goss Moor]

My Lords, I will speak briefly on this issue, which I feel very strongly about. We are in a terrible place: because people believe there is insufficient land in our island to build, we cram homes on to the smallest possible areas. Through not releasing enough land, its value is bid up and it goes to those who will squeeze the smallest possible boxes into the tiniest possible area with the least possible facilities. We should have more generous minimum space standards. After the war, we built council homes with very generous room sizes and with gardens with space to grow food. We could learn from this.

We need to understand that only some 9% of our country is built on; half of that is parks and gardens. To build the homes we need adds a fraction of 1% to the built area. Even the south-east would still be 87% green fields, even if we built all the homes we need on such land, in that area, which we do not need to do. The argument that we cannot afford decent sized homes does not add up. It comes out of making too little land available. I will give three facts to the House. First, we build the smallest homes anywhere in the European Union outside Romania and Italy. That is because they build almost entirely apartments. They have a tradition of apartment living which we do not have here. An Englishman’s garden used to be important, but people rarely get that now. Around 40% of all homes built are flats, yet only 2% of the population say they want to live in them. We have got something immensely wrong there.

Secondly, we actually build smaller houses than we did in the 1920s, even including the workmen’s cottages which were very small even by today’s standards. Thirdly, we build homes half the size of those the Danes build, on average. It is a myth that we cannot afford the space to give an Englishman a decent home and garden, and it is high time that we changed that view.

[Baroness Andrews]

My name is on this amendment and I support what my noble friend has said. The contribution we have just heard from the noble Lord, Lord Taylor of Goss Moor, gives us very important context in our understanding of the possibilities. We all need space as much as we need light. That was what Parker Morris recognised when the first space standards were set down, and so many people have benefited from those. We now face the opposite situation. Government policy decrees that it is optional for local authorities to adopt national standards. There will be many good ones that will want to do that because they recognise the health benefits of having proper space and light, but many more will be inhibited by the requirements that are attached, which are going to add more burdens and complications.

It is interesting how often this Government generate more bureaucracy while constantly railing against it on every occasion. There will, therefore, be another dimension to the postcode lottery: local authorities which recognise that space is essential to good health and family and social harmony and provide for it, knowing that the converse means greater family and social stress; and local authorities which will not do that. It will mean less room for children to do homework; for teenagers to have necessary privacy; for parents to have room to move. All those things make for well-being.

Nowhere is this more crucial than in areas where there are no planning standards at all. I raised this issue in last week’s debate on the conversion of offices into dwelling spaces. It was very late in the evening and I did not want to test the patience of the House, but the other issues we have discussed, such as the impact on the viability of town centres and the general viability of enterprise, make it timely to raise it again. In 2013, when the Government amended permitted development rights without planning permission, this was at first for only three years. In October last year it was made permanent. This has given rise to grave concerns, in addition to the very serious ones raised last week by noble Lords such as the noble Lord, Lord True. There is a great deal more to be said about this aspect of policy and its impact in evidence from local authorities as diverse as Bath and Camden. For example, the London Borough of Barnet told our Select Committee that because there are no planning standards for converting offices to domestic dwellings, local authorities have no control over important details such as space standards, dwelling mix and tenure. The London Borough of Barnet told us that:

“There are no planning standards, so you could theoretically build rabbit hutches, as people sometimes refer to them, if you wanted to, whereas planning standards that define a good-quality size of units are almost set in stone”.

I refer noble Lords to a recent report by RIBA, which pointed out that, of the 170,000 homes built last year, 20,000 were converted offices. As such, under the regulations, there are no planning standards which give safeguards for the new home owners. The conversions need not meet space standards or any other planning-based quality standards such as energy efficiency. Some of these apartments are no more than 14 square metres, which is about one-third of the national average. If noble Lords are sceptical, I invite them to look at the RIBA report: it is on the web.

Overall, this is serious. It weakens the ability of local authorities to secure good quality housing, and it will lead to a new generation of home owners who will be expected to manage in conditions which are neither ethical nor healthy. Given the number of homes that may well be coming forth through these conversions, I hope the Minister appreciates that these are inadequate and, frankly, unsafe conditions and that she will undertake to review the need for full planning conditions to apply to them.