Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill (Fourth sitting)
Matthew Pennycook ExcerptsThursday 23rd June 2022
(1 year, 10 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023 View all Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Public Bill Committee Amendments as at 23 June 2022 - (23 Jun 2022)
The Chair
Thank you. The witnesses can expect questions from Ministers because the object of this Committee is to gather evidence to influence our detailed consideration of the Bill.
Matthew Pennycook (Greenwich and Woolwich) (Lab)
Q
Dr Benwell: It is definitely not a missed opportunity yet, because we are only at the start of the process. I would say it is a huge opportunity to tackle two important environmental problems associated with planning and levelling up.
The first of these is environmental inequality. We think of the levelling-up agenda as being about economic inequality, but we live in a country of really deep environmental inequality. We have probably all heard the statistic that there are 40,000 premature deaths a year from air pollution, but it can vary street by street, let alone town by town. It goes deeper than that, because there is environmental inequality in things like access to natural green space, which has been brought to the fore over the past couple of years when so many people have depended on it. Those inequalities are, again, really deep. People from the lowest socioeconomic backgrounds are nine times less likely to have access to high-quality natural green spaces, which is hugely important for our physical and mental health. People from ethnic minority backgrounds are twice as likely to live in places that are bereft of access to natural green space.
At a wider level, there are deeper environmental inequalities still. Think, for example, of folk living in areas where degraded uplands mean that water flows more quickly over surfaces, flooding homes and businesses. Think of the same in urban areas, where densification and the use of impermeable surfaces is increasing flood risk and other environmental risks. There are huge levelling-up aspects to environmental inequality, which this Bill is an opportunity to fix.
Secondly, the planning system can help us environmentally through its impact on nature. We know that more than 40% of species are in long-term decline, and 15% of species here in Great Britain are at risk of extinction. The last “State of Nature” report made it clear that planning and unsustainable development play a big role in that. The Bill is a chance to make sure that, in future, the planning system is not imbalanced as it so often has been in the past when it focused on things like housing numbers alone. We need to balance that with the need for spatial planning and careful development that contributes to nature’s recovery. At the moment though, those opportunities have not been realised. On the contrary, some provisions in the Bill will do quite the opposite and bring in new environmental risks.
I will quickly address how to grasp those opportunities. It would be excellent if, among the levelling-up missions set in clause 1, you included access to a healthy natural environment. I was really surprised to see that the levelling-up White Paper’s list of capitals included human capital, financial capital, intellectual capital and social capital but not natural capital. Not to list environmental capital as one of those fundamental assets reflects a 1980s philosophy, really. So we should have access to a good-quality natural environment as a levelling-up mission, and a duty on public bodies to help people achieve that with access to natural green space.
On improving the planning system, there are some obvious missed wins there, such as making sure that planning and development decisions are in line with section 1 of the Environment Act 2021 and section 1 of the Climate Change Act 2008, to meet our carbon budgets and halt nature’s decline by 2030. You could go further, with things like implementing the findings of the Glover review to improve the contribution of national parks to restoring nature here in the UK. So there are some really missed opportunities for positive planning.
On the negative side, I do not know whether we will touch on this later, but although the environmental outcome reports proposed in the Bill sound positive in principle for the natural environment, the way they are framed risks undermining some of our most important conservation laws. Those clauses and that part of the Bill need some attention to make sure they do what I think they are intended to do, which is to add a new layer of protection, not to weaken our long-standing, important environmental protections in this country.
Matthew Pennycook
Q
Carolyn McKenzie: The earlier speaker made some really good points; I back up all those points, but I will not reiterate them. At the local level, it is very much about integration across different policies. There is some really good stuff in the Bill, but integration across all the different policies will be key. This is not just about the big infrastructure, such as wind farms or EV charging; it is about making sure that environmental considerations are integrated across all projects in infrastructure and all levelling-up projects, because a pound spent on levelling up can deliver on your outcomes for net zero or biodiversity, and investment in net zero and biodiversity can deliver on your levelling-up ambitions as well.
In addition, although there is a real need for some of the big infrastructure projects, if I take a look at Surrey as a whole and our net zero emissions, the biggest proportion of those emissions, 41%, is down to private sector transport, and 31% to 33% is down to domestic housing. Those local actions—local public transport and active travel to get people out of their cars, and remote working, as well as tackling retrofit—have the potential to not only reduce emissions, but to drive jobs and growth and tackle inequalities, because inequality is hugely linked to the environment: a lot of our poorer communities have the poorest environments. The one thing I will repeat from Richard’s comments is that there is a lack of recognition that a healthy environment for all is really important when it comes to having a healthy economy and a healthy social area as well.
The last point I would like to make is about taking a place-based approach. Funding is often fragmented, competitive, and focused on specific things like EV cars or renewable energy. At the county level, we are very much looking at a place-based approach where we can link things together and look at a community as a whole. If we could link all that funding together and have a pot that delivers on an evidence-based approach that says what is needed in the area and links up all of our ambitions around health, economy, social and environment, that would be a lot easier, and we could make funding deliver more than the separate, individual pots could. Having place-based funding that is based on local evidence of need would be really helpful.
Paul Miner: I should say at the beginning that I am speaking today on behalf of CPRE, the countryside charity, and point out that CPRE is leading the Better Planning Coalition, which includes a wide variety of environmental, social and community organisations that have come together to put forward a shared view on how we can improve the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill and make it stronger for people and nature more generally. We are working in a number of key areas. Climate change is one of them.
In CPRE’s view, at the moment the planning system has an institutional weakness in dealing with climate change. There is a duty on local authorities in the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 for their development plan document—so local plans essentially—to contribute towards the mitigation of and adaptation to climate change. However, that duty is not strong enough. It does not consistently influence local authorities or planning inspectors examining plans or appeals. The Bill merely reiterates this existing and insufficient duty. We have seen, for example, recent planning stats reports for 24 recently adopted local plans that show only one mention of climate change for 24 of boosting housing supply. The priorities of the planning system have become massively skewed and unbalanced.
We want to see in the final version of the Bill some additional clauses that apply the climate change duty both more meaningfully, so that it clearly reiterates the national commitments made in the Climate Change Act 2008, but also applies the climate change duty to national planning policy as well as just local plans. It should also apply to decision making on specific planning applications, as well as just in the making of local plans. We also need to see more detail about what the duty means both in terms of mitigation, achieving Climate Change Act targets on budget and climate budgets, and in terms of adaptation, relating it to relevant statutory risk assessments and compliance. The coalition is coming forward with some further ideas on this, which we are very keen to discuss further with the Committee in due course.
Matthew Pennycook
Q
Dr Benwell: We cannot give a complete view, because so much is proposed to be done in regulations and that itself is a problem. The idea of taking a more outcome-based approach to environmental impact assessments is a good one and there are definitely areas where environmental impact assessment and strategic environmental assessment can be improved. So things like making sure that you get the thresholds right to include all potentially environmentally damaging plans; that could be improved. Things like making scoping decisions mandatory; that could be improved. The problem as we see it with the environmental outcomes proposed in the Bill is that the outcomes set can simply be spliced in in place of existing environmental requirements. We do not know that those will be robust enough.
For example, in the environmental impact assessment process, if anything proposed in a plan or a project is likely to cause significant harm to the environment, there is a duty to avoid, mitigate or compensate for that potential harm. In the new system, if an environmental outcome is set that, for example, talks about a general outcome of improving the abundance of species at the national level, any sort of project that claims to be doing that nationally could ignore local impacts. It could ignore the impacts on particularly important sites and species at the local level. That could be extremely damaging for things like sites of special scientific interest and UNESCO sites, which are afforded their main protection through the planning system and through the EIA and SEA.
I should point out that these clauses will affect not just the EIA and SEA; it is really important to note that the habitats regulations and the habitats regulations assessments are also affected. If you look at clause 127, you will find an extraordinary provision that says that anything done in an environmental outcomes report can be treated as satisfying any existing duties under the habitats regulations assessment process. That process, which is what protects our most internationally important wildlife sites from harm, is even stronger than the EIA and SEA, because under the habitats regulations process, before a site can be affected by a project that causes significant harm on site or by contiguous activities, the developer must prove that mitigation is in place to avoid that significant harm, or that there are imperative overriding public interest reasons to proceed and compensatory measures are in place.
That is a really high legal bar to protect our most important sites and species of international significance. Under the Bill, the Government could put in its place a more parochial and limited environmental outcome, such as saying that the best available technology has been used to reduce water pollution, or that overall national trends will be going in the right direction. That would weaken and undermine the extremely important protection provided by the habitats regulations. You do not often see a clause in a Bill that says that anything in regulations can be treated as satisfying existing legal duties, or indeed that anything in them can amend, replace or repeal any of the most fundamental parts of the habitats regulations that we have come to rely on for decades. The concept is quite good, but the way in which it is being applied brings serious risks of undermining long-standing environmental rules that would potentially create huge uncertainty in the planning system, because developers and conservationists alike have become used to operating under this system.
Paul Miner: I agree with Richard about the environmental dimension of the environmental outcomes reports. It is also worth the Committee considering that under the current system, local authorities have to do a sustainability appraisal, looking not only at environmental factors but at social and economic factors.
To pick up on what Richard and Carolyn pointed out, there is quite an important issue about the effect of the planning system on human health. It seems particularly strange that in a Bill about levelling up we are not using the outcomes reports as a means of embedding the Government’s levelling-up objectives in the planning system. For example, the levelling-up White Paper calls for measures on increasing healthy life expectancy and regenerating town centres, but those will not be assessed at all through the planning system under environmental outcomes reports, whereas they would have been under the current system of sustainability appraisals.
Carolyn McKenzie: I agree that taking an outcome-based approach allows us to be more flexible and achieve more, but it depends on how narrow the outcomes are, which is Richard’s point. It would be really good to ensure that the outcomes in the Bill match the performance targets and indicators that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is currently consulting on under the Environment Act 2021. They need to link up so that we have one set of environmental indicators that all sectors and all areas are delivering on.
To pick out one example, there is no mention of natural capital in the Bill, as Richard pointed out. How can we put in an outcome relating to natural capital, which could be really important for health, attracting businesses to areas or carbon sequestration? That is a key element of levelling up, so I urge caution in ensuring that any new outcomes link directly to the Environment Act and the 25-year environment plan.
Matthew Pennycook
Q
Dr Benwell: I should have brought my copy of the Bill. There are actually some very good bits in clause 117. The Government have done quite a good job of writing in the mitigation hierarchy, which is welcome to see. The problem is linked through to clause 127, which allows everything in preceding parts simply to replace existing environmental law. It would be much better if the Government came forward with fully worked-up proposals for how to strengthen the existing system of the EIA and SEA, rather than taking the approach of giving themselves the powers to take out layers of environmental law and put in something different.
You mentioned clause 120, the so-called non-regression clause. It is obviously a good thing to have a commitment not to weaken environmental protection, but I am afraid that the efficacy of such a clause is really in doubt, for a number of reasons. First, it is the Secretary of State in whose opinion environmental law has to be maintained at an equal level. That is a highly subjective opinion left in the hands of Ministers—and, just to emphasise, not a court in the land would challenge that on the basis of ultra vires without it being patently absurd. Courts are really deferential to decision makers, so if a Minister were to say, “Yes, this is equivalent,” that statement would have to be really, really daft for a court to challenge it. So we think that that kind of non-regression provision is unlikely to be robust.
Secondly, the other noteworthy part of the non-regression provision is that it talks about overall levels of protection. That is where we come back to the idea of talking about the environment in aggregate and those big broad trends of species-level data, which is really important—like Carolyn, I think that we should be linking back to the Environment Act targets—but it is not sufficient. We must keep in place the rules that protect the particular, the peculiar and the exciting at the local level that matter to important people, and those local populations of species and habitats that are so important. Otherwise, we get into a runaway offsetting mentality where the assurance that things will be better overall can be taken to obscure a lot of harm to the natural environment at the local level.
So there are some good things in clause 117 and some nice sentiments in clause 120, but overall they do not give the reassurance that would be provided by simply taking time to work up provisions in full and bring them forward in primary legislation rather than giving Ministers the power to swip and swap through regulations.
Paul Miner: I have nothing further to add on this question.
Carolyn McKenzie: I have nothing further to add other than to reiterate the local element. You do get lots of peculiarities in different areas, and they can be lost, so we must make sure that they are not.
Neil O’Brien
Q
Paul Miner: We think that a brownfield-first approach to new housing and commercial building development can have a number of benefits. We have seen constantly over the years that there is enough brownfield land available for over 1 million new homes in any given year, and this supply of brownfield is constantly replenishing as more sites come forward, and it is possible to build at higher densities.
We think there are a number of clauses in the Bill that could help with brownfield regeneration, such as those relating to changing compulsory purchase order powers, as you have mentioned, and the infrastructure levy. Getting local plans in place more quickly will also help to bring brownfield sites forward. So we see a lot of benefits to a brownfield-first approach.
However, the problem we have consistently had over the past 15 years, under both Conservative and Labour Governments, is that it has been easier for large housebuilders to bring forward speculative developments through the planning system, often not contained within local plans, than to be able to get these schemes through at appeal. We think there are a number of measures the Government need to look at.
Some of these may involve legislation but more involve changes to policy to give councils more power to set targets for the amount of housing needed in their area, to make sure that housing targets reflect what is likely to be built in the area, as opposed to what house builders say when they claim to be meeting housing targets that they then do not build, and to identify local needs for affordable homes. In many areas of the country they are crying out for affordable homes, but the kind of housing that is being built is not meeting those identified needs.
We recognise that there is a lot in the Bill that is helping to bring forward the benefits of a brownfield-first approach, in terms of, as you say, embodied carbon, saving precious agricultural land and regenerating communities in of need levelling up. At the same time, we think there is scope to do much more.
Matthew Pennycook
Q
Dr Ellis: There are two issues. One is about rights to be heard. We have decided now in the Bill to call several documents “development plan documents,” which has a specific legal meaning and a specific legal way. So the strategic plan, the supplementary plan and the local plan are now all development plan documents. If a development plan document is being prepared, it has legal weight in planning, and the quick answer is there therefore must be a right to be heard. On the strategic plans, the Bill currently says that it positively excludes the right to be heard at an examination. That seems to us wholly wrong and unnecessary. If people want to, we should give them the opportunity turn up at an inquiry and test the evidence.
To be clear, even if the criteria are set nationally, green belt allocations will probably be set in those strategic plans. In other words, the issues that people really care about have to be debated in an arena where there is a right to be heard. That would be an easy modification to make, and I so hope that Ministers will seriously give it consideration.
The other issue is centralisation. That worries us even more, because nationally described development management policy has a new legal status. There has been some debate about that, and we are absolutely convinced that it does have a new and special legal status as national policy described in law. The clauses elevate that policy so that where there is a dispute, it is resolved in favour of the national policy.
There are no limitations on what the Secretary of State can include in that national development management policy; nor is there a robust process of parliamentary scrutiny, which there is for national policy statements in major infrastructure. That has to change. If the Government are determined to have such a policy, parliamentary scrutiny and public participation in setting it are crucial.
Matthew Pennycook
Q
Dr Ellis: Simply, there will not be any. The duty to co-operate was a problematic measure—a stop-gap measure—inserted after the abolition of regional planning. You would expect me to say this, and it may not be popular, but regional planning in this country was critically important to our future. I understand and have to accept that there was insufficient public support for it. Again, it simply did not have the right kind of governance, but it was important.
Put simply, for the reasons you have heard, which I will not repeat, it is absolutely essential that we have bigger-than-local decision making. That enables communities to make decisions; it does not trump them. If you want to preserve the east coast from a sea level rise of 1.5 metres by the beginning of the next century, which is predicted by the Environment Agency, you cannot expect 33 district councils between the Humber and the Thames to do that on their own, so it is very important that we get that right.
Removing the duty to co-operate and replacing it with a policy imperative just makes a situation even worse. Devolution could help, but of course, that is an ad hoc process; we do not yet know who wants to do devolution. I am sat in Derbyshire, and I have no idea whether Derbyshire wants to be a combined authority or not. It is vital that we have that strategic tier.
Matthew Pennycook
Q
Dr Ellis: Development corporations are really welcome, but it is worth remembering that when you have effective planning, which links planning to delivery—that is what a development corporation does; you can really drive change—the most important thing is that their governance needs to be modernised so that they are genuinely accountable and participative. The purpose of a development corporation is to draw on what Oliver Letwin recognised in his review: the critical role of the public sector as master developer in de-risking development.
Much of the challenge in why we are not delivering the homes that we consent in the planning process is because the private sector has limited incentive to deliver beyond certain levels, based on absorption rates. Development corporations can do that. It is worth reflecting on the fact that, within 20 years of the war, we consented 33 new towns, which housed 2.8 million people and paid for themselves. That record is largely forgotten but still very powerful.
The answer is that the challenge in giving the powers solely to local authorities is that they work only when Government stand behind them. I think it is the Government’s role in housing that we need to draw out. They need to be more muscular in supporting local authorities. The experience from the locally led development corporation in north Essex illustrates that point.
Matthew Pennycook
Q
Dr Ellis: I think there is a huge opportunity to do that. It is essential that the Bill contains a purpose for planning if you want to recreate public trust by making it clear in statute what the system is for. It is interesting that there are currently four outcome duties in law on planning, but there is nothing in the Bill equivalent to what we see in Bills on social care or in national parks, where there is a clear sense of what planning is meant for.
If you want this new journey—we all do—to benefit the future of England, you need to need to set down that purpose around sustainable development. That is an inclusive goal; we are already internationally signed up to it, and for me, it is the only development goal that is credible for the future of this nation. Underneath that, I would quickly say that it is heartbreaking to see the potential that planning has to deal with climate change mitigation and adaptation and the dysfunction that we are currently presented with.
I have just seen an inspector remove a net zero policy from an area action plan for a new development in West Oxfordshire. That tells you that Government policy urgently needs to be reviewed. The whole sector has been calling for an urgent ministerial statement to clarify how net zero is delivered. We really cannot wait for the NPPF review at the end of 2024 for that; it must happen now. On adaptation, the issue is even more serious, in terms of having to begin to think about shifting population off the east coast, the challenges of surface water flooding, the endless flooding in Calder valley and how plans need to grasp the allocation of land for natural flood defence.
I know that I cannot go on, but all I can see is huge potential. We need to bind the planning and climate Bills together. The climate Bill must have specific requirements on the sixth carbon budget, and stronger requirements on adaptation, specifically around water and flooding.
The Chair
Thank you. We are going to take questions from members of the Committee, starting with the shadow Minister.
Matthew Pennycook
Q
Gavin Smart: The levy is certainly similar to CIL, but I believe it is managed in a way that CIL is not. I share some of your concerns about the impact of the levy on lower-value sites. One of our concerns is that we are currently struggling to deliver the housing that we need, particularly affordable housing and social rented housing. Whether a levy on a lower-value site will be able to deliver the resources needed to support the delivery of new homes for social rent is a significant concern.
The other issue that I would raise with respect to the levy is that we are very aware of the role that, historically, section 106 planning gain has played in the delivery of affordable housing and social rented housing. About half of affordable housing is delivered in that way. Although there are commitments from the Government that affordable housing delivery will be maintained, we are anxious to understand the detail of that, because section 106 has been such an important part of the delivery mechanism.
Kate Henderson: Thank you for the opportunity to speak to the Committee today. We really support the Government’s ambition to address regional inequalities in our towns and cities’ economies through levelling up. It is also very good to see housing and planning as part of the Bill, but we share have concerns around the impact of planning reforms on the ability to deliver much-needed affordable housing.
When it comes to the infrastructure levy, we are really looking at four areas where we would like to have a bit more detail and some assurances. The first is the issue of protections for the delivery of affordable housing. The second is around the importance of on-site delivery of affordable housing. The third is around the risk to viability, and the fourth is that we would like to see an exemption from the levy for sites that are 100% affordable.
The Chair
We are going to carry on, but we are having a slight problem with your sound and picture, Kate. If it breaks down, we might turn the video off and just have your audio, but we will see.
Matthew Pennycook
Q
“to ensure affordable housing levels will be maintained, with current levels as a minimum.”
Correct me if I am wrong, but I assume that you were referring to proposed new section 204G of the Planning Act 2008, which is discussed in schedule 11. I wanted to probe why you think the language in that clause, or anything else the Government have said in relation to the Bill, is anywhere near robust enough to guarantee the maintenance of current affordable housing levels. I read the language, which is
“must have regard…to the desirability of ensuring”
as quite weak in terms of ensuring that we see that affordable supply of housing come forward.
Kate Henderson: My starting point is that we really welcome the Government’s commitment to ensuring that as much affordable housing will be delivered. As Gavin Smart mentioned, at the moment section 106 planning obligations deliver around 50% of all affordable housing in England. It is vital that what replaces it delivers, ideally more, but at least as much. We are pleased that there is that reference in schedule 11, in proposed new section 204G, around having a mechanism to ensure that affordable housing levels will be maintained at current levels, but what we would like is a greater commitment and assurances from the Committee and ideally in the legislation about what we mean by current levels of affordable housing delivery.
There is a risk that in some areas minimum affordable housing requirements, which should be based on objectively assessed need, are actually being delivered by what is coming through the planning system now, and that is not enough in some areas and we do not want that under-delivery to be baked in. We would really like clarity from Ministers that, to protect affordable housing delivery, current levels will be based on current targets for affordable housing, which should be based on objectively assessed need.
Matthew Pennycook
Q
Kate Henderson: I think the Bill suggests that section 106 agreements will be retained for larger sites. I do not think we have necessarily determined the size of those sites yet and potentially that will come through in secondary legislation.
What we are learning from section 106 is that there are some really important considerations. We have been having positive conversations with the Government about this, particularly around the delivery of on-site affordable housing. The Government are bringing forward a new infrastructure levy. That levy has got to ensure that we get inclusive, mixed communities—that we get the integration of different housing types and different tenures, and that they are built to good, high standards. We know that mixed communities are far more successful than exclusively, for example, poor ones. We want to have the affordable housing integrated in.
That is one of the really important lessons from section 106—when it works well, you get an integration of your housing all on site and you get other good on-site infrastructure delivered at the right time as well. That helps with public acceptance of development, particularly at scale.
I think we would want to see in the design of the new levy that early engagement with housing associations is there absolutely at the outset and that on-site delivery is considered the default position when it comes to significant sites. We would really like to ensure that local authority use of contributions for purposes other than affordable housing would have to come after the agreed level of delivery of affordable housing on site.
Gavin Smart: I strongly agree with Kate, particularly around needing to be sure that we are not baking in low levels of performance on the delivery of affordable housing. We need to be sure that the expectation of the continuation of delivery of affordable housing is at a sensible level, supported by some sort of assessment of need. Like Kate and anybody involved in the delivery of affordable and social housing, we are acutely aware that the key benefit of section 106 has been the delivery of on-site in-kind provision that delivers the mixed communities that we all know work. It actually helps a scheme’s viability, because it means that developers know a proportion of the scheme they are developing will be sold immediately on completion to a landlord who will immediately fill it with tenants. That helps with speed of completion at the site.
The most important point is that levies do many things, but what they do not do is give you actual physical buildings; they give you an amount of money. If you are struggling to find a site to deploy that money, they do not perform in the same way as section 106 reforms. So we have concerns about the levy and that is why we welcome the fact that, although what we mean by larger sites is not yet defined, the Government are signalling that they want to retain section 106 for larger sites. That is important. I think it will help delivery and help to build mixed communities.
Matthew Pennycook
Q
Gavin Smart: First of all, there is more flexibility in setting the levy than we previously expected. That is welcome because we want local authorities to be able to respond to the facts on the ground. However, like many public policy problems this is a matter of trade-offs. You do not want such complexity in the system that we are down to negotiating levies on individual sites, so it is about getting the balance right.
More important, something that I think is a bugbear of every attempt at planning reform is that, although we all believe that no planning system is perfect so it is always worth looking at how you can improve it, the other issue with planning policies is whether they are properly resourced enough to enable the local authorities that are operating them from London. Certainly, we have a concern that it might prove challenging for local authorities to be able to manage the complexity of negotiating a large number of different levies in different places. We know that elsewhere in the planning system local authorities can be outgunned by the development industry in terms of capacity. That remains a concern, because we think that overall capacity in local authority planning is stretched.
Kate Henderson: We think the test and learn approach is really to be welcomed. Alongside that, obviously we would want to see a transitional approach. Test and learn is particularly important when we are looking at viability and the delivery of much-needed affordable housing. It is really important, given that development and land values vary greatly from site to site and place to place, that we get the levy set at the right level to ensure viability, to ensure delivery, and to ensure we are creating great communities that include much-needed affordable housing. We have advocated a test and learn approach and it is really positive that the Government are looking at that. We would want to be a part of that approach to make sure we are able to get affordable housing, and that we have the good working relationships between local authorities, developers and housing associations on-site working with the community—
The Chair
We are having slight problems with the sound. We will just give it a second. Do you want to carry on?
Kate Henderson: I was just saying that we are very, very keen that, as test and learn is rolled out, housing associations, working with councils and developers, are part of that programme, so we ensure we set the levies at a level that enables the delivery of great places with high-quality affordable housing on site in mixed communities. Doing that in a phased way to make sure it is working, while retaining parts of the old system as this is transitioned out, sounds like a sensible, pragmatic way forward.
Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill (Second sitting)
Matthew Pennycook ExcerptsTuesday 21st June 2022
(1 year, 10 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023 View all Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Public Bill Committee Amendments as at 21 June 2022 - (21 Jun 2022)
Matthew Pennycook (Greenwich and Woolwich) (Lab)
Q
Eamonn Boylan: One thing in the Bill that we very much welcome the principle of is the notion that the infrastructure levy is effectively extracted once value has been created. That will make it much easier to calculate an appropriate levy, particularly on a complex, multifaceted scheme.
The issue for us would be, if the income from the levy is delayed until after development has been completed, what are the arrangements that enable me to fund the infrastructure up front? That is needed to enable the development to take place in the first instance. It would need to be linked to the availability of things like the brownfield land release fund or, potentially, borrowing powers to enable us to invest in the infrastructure on the basis of a levy replenishing the borrowing at a later date. The principle is a good one, and I am sure it will be welcomed in the development community, but we need to find a way of making certain that it does not work in a way that prevents us delivering infrastructure in a timely way to enable schemes to come forward.
Laura Shoaf: I reiterate that there is still a lot to unpack and still a lot to understand about what it will mean in practice. We keep coming back to certainty and simplicity being the two things that really help enable us to get big, new-generation projects off the ground. I reiterate Eamonn’s point: anything that can be leveraged into some sort of pump priming to help to give both certainty and consistency would be genuinely very welcome.
Joanne Roney: I would just add that generally, across the UK, we are supportive of the infrastructure levy being non-negotiable, which is a strong statement to make, and of it being determined at a local level, which will take in those regional differences that Eamonn and I mentioned earlier—the viability in different places. There is a lot to welcome in this, but the detail needs to be worked through.
Matthew Pennycook
Q
Eamonn Boylan: I will not pretend to you, sir, that I can have absolute confidence that we will avoid disputes over valuation. We have it at the start of projects now and we have had it at different stages. It will be essential to have established prior to the signing of formal agreement with the developer or developers that we have an agreement on the valuation methodology to be used at the point at which the levy is to be calculated—to try to remove some of that risk. That is certainly what we would hope.
Joanne Roney: I think the move to viability assessments increasingly being made public to planning committees helps to bring transparency and clarity to value early on in the discussions, as part of the planning process. We would want to build on that, so that we try to avoid those arguments. I am sure they will be there, but it is how they get resolved.
The Chair
As there are no further questions, I thank the witnesses for their evidence. We will move to the next panel: we have two witnesses virtually and two present in the room. If Members wish to remove their jackets, please feel free to do so.
Examination of Witnesses
Professor Graeme Atherton, Rich Bell, Sacha Bedding and Dr Parth Patel gave evidence.
Matthew Pennycook
Q
Rich Bell: I think we certainly agree with the comments that were made by many Members on Second Reading about the seeming primacy of the national management policy and the way in which the Bill seems to grant the Secretary of State the power effectively to overrule local communities. That does not seem to be in the spirit of the levelling-up agenda as we understand it.
Matthew Pennycook
Q
Sacha Bedding: Only to say that the consequence of that would be more disillusionment, and it needs rectifying. If people are really to have a sense of agency and ownership of their own place and feel that it has been levelled up, they need to feel that they have the power to stop that happening. That needs teasing out in a thoughtful way, so that those powers that we hope will pass down to communities are enshrined and do not depend on the largesse of other people in more significant positions of power.
Matthew Pennycook
To clarify, Chair, will we not be able to get the other witnesses in?
The Chair
It is looking iffy at the moment. If they do not appear, we can have a brief discussion about how to address it at the end of the sitting.
Matthew Pennycook
Q
Cllr Chapman-Allen: There are two parts to that question. One is that, across the whole of the country, regardless of which tier of government deals with planning, we have a shortage of planning officers. That, sadly, is the nature of the beast, with their desire to work in the private sector, where incomes will be greater.
For us in district councils, for those who have not got a rural locality basis—that ability for residents to interact with their council—through poor broadband provision, I think the proposals for digitalisation for planning is the real positive. As for how district councils will operate that, we are already in the vanguard of that AI—artificial intelligence—and how we interact with our residents on digitalisation.
The trial that has already taken place across the country has been really successful. Both we and the Department have learnt a great deal from it. As long as the outlay, with some capital support, is forthcoming in the Bill, to ensure that we are able to uplift our software and our hardware, I think it should be a seamless transition. However, we have to ensure that we build that into our capital programmes and into the activity of our staff, so that we can deliver it and, in turn, train up how our council officers operate and, more importantly, ensure that the public understand how they begin to interact and use that new digital service.
Matthew Pennycook
Q
Cllr Chapman-Allen: There will be legacy licences for some existing software. They will have a lag time to run out or, depending on the Government’s position on this, if there is a hard reset date, there will be a revenue cost to the authority. That needs to be picked up as it moves forward. However, I do not think that it will be a challenge, because the uniformity for residents on planning—in particularly for developers and individuals applying with planning applications—will allow the smooth understanding of how to interact with their local planning service.
Matthew Pennycook
Q
Cllr Chapman-Allen: I am not completely sighted on that clause, but in the wider sense of the LGA and DCN’s position on the proposed rules moving forward, this must be a bottom-up approach. As we have said time and again, in order for growth to take place, communities have to see the benefit realisation, whatever that is, whether for infrastructure, design or the specification of units we are building. As long as residents see the benefit to their communities, the policies that are forthcoming to date are in line with what we were expecting; with what we asked for back in the planning consultation in August 2020. That said, there will be nuances in every location across the country that will sit outside the NPPF, in which local planning policies from local plans must have that flexibility to support local needs and desires, and therefore those sorts of outputs.
Matthew Pennycook
Q
Cllr Chapman-Allen: I do not necessarily think this is a position around culture and morale. Being a planning officer is one of those specialist trades in a district council, no different from an environmental health officer or a health and safety officer. It takes years to get to the standard required to undertake that duty and that requirement.
The challenge we face is that framework and that position, and the fact that we are competing with the private sector. So, particularly for those districts that surround the M25, it is immensely easy for those planning officers to transit in between and to commute into London. For those districts that are in rural locations, some of those challenges on connectivity, and on access to health and education, make it a career choice sometimes for people as to whether they want to reside in those locations.
Of course, the new agile lifestyle post covid presents some further opportunities, but it once again comes down to pounds, shillings and pence. We are stuck between a rock and a hard place. We can always pay more for planning officers, but sadly we are not able to get 100% cost recovery on planning applications. So, in response to your question, we could go further to ensure that district councils and others that deal with planning matters could get 100% cost recovery and therefore pay a higher value for those planning officers to deliver that service.
Matthew Pennycook
Q
Cllr Chapman-Allen: Yes, there is, but I will put back on the health warning that with planning the clue is in the name—we need to make sure that we are planning for our communities for the next 10, 15, 20 or 30 years, and not being reactive. Also, this cannot be a top-down exercise for what we are trying to achieve. Every one of our locations, in our communities and in your constituencies, has its unique beauty, its unique opportunities and its unique challenges. Therefore, those local plans must be derived locally. As much as the national planning policy framework sits at a national level as the umbrella, I do not think it should necessarily dictate completely how we deliver planning locally for us.
Matthew Pennycook
Q
Cllr Jamieson: The key thing is that we are all immensely supportive of digitisation; it is the way to go. We do not want paper. In fact, one of the things that we saw during covid was that a number of local authorities moved to remote working and digitisation anyway, which made the process so much easier.
This is something that we are supportive of. I think Sam is right that we need clear guidelines, the relevant capital support and clear technical things, such as, “How will the system work?” and “What are the data protocols?”, because we want a very clear system that works for everyone. As ever, I think we are all slightly nervous about big IT projects, but this should work, with proper engagement with local government to ensure that we do it in the right way.
Matthew Pennycook
Q
Cllr Oliver: Yes, I agree with both James and Sam. Obviously, planning is largely in the remit of the district and borough councils. In an ideal world, I would hope to see some sort of spatial development strategy, or the ability to create that. The duty to co-operate has not worked particularly well, and, where we are creating CCAs and county deals, it would be very helpful for there to be some input, at least, from a county-wide perspective. In terms of the digitalisation, I would leave that to the other two and I agree with what they said.
Tim Farron
Q
If we take it as a given that, particularly in the rural communities that many district councils serve, there is a collapse of the private rented sector into the Airbnb sector and a massive growth in second home ownership at the expense of permanent occupied dwellings, do you think that this Bill gives you any additional powers that help you to push back against that? What additional powers would you like?
Cllr Chapman-Allen: The relaxation for local authorities to tax second homes for council tax purposes had a really positive impact. We are seeing that across those communities in which second home ownership is immensely high. For communities such as yours, Tim, that Airbnb community is a challenge. First, it removes those rental properties from the market for long-term tenants. Secondly, it creates a really fluid community, and sometimes there are risks of antisocial behaviour related to that. There could be more strengthening for those local authorities to place conditions on new builds and new properties to ensure that the type of mix and tenure, and/or usage around holiday homes and/or Airbnbs, could be strengthened.
That said, we have the existing legacy problems for coastal communities, market towns and cathedral cities already. I would not necessarily want to suggest that we change that through this Bill now. We need to ensure that we are working with those landlords positively, as with housing providers and housing legislators, to ensure that they understand the challenges they face, but more importantly, the challenges that the communities face.
We have a long way to go. Over the last 12 months, there has been a lot of change for landlords. Sadly some of those have now vacated the market because of the changes in regulations, and policies required of them. We must ensure that we have a suitable housing mix across the country, and those who want to and do rent have an important part to play. Therefore, landlords have an important part to play in that process. I would not necessarily want to over-regulate so that landlords no longer want to operate in that market. However, there is a challenge around Airbnb and there is further work we can do to support the Government in implementing some legislation on that.
Private Rented Sector
Matthew Pennycook Excerpts(1 year, 11 months ago)
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Matthew Pennycook (Greenwich and Woolwich) (Lab)
I thank the Minister for advance sight of his statement, although it is deeply regrettable that the Government only published the White Paper that is its subject a little over half an hour ago. If it had been shared earlier, Members might be better placed to question the Minister on precisely what the Government are proposing.
Labour strongly supports reform of the private rented sector and has called for it for many years. Regardless of whether they are a homeowner, leaseholder or tenant, everyone has a basic right to a decent, safe, secure and affordable home. Yet millions of those renting privately live with the knowledge that they could be uprooted at a moment’s notice and with minimal justification. Given the size of the private rented sector and its ongoing—indeed accelerating—expansion, this basic lack of stability and certainty is blighting the lives of growing numbers of families. The cost of living crisis is exacerbating this already harmful situation. In many parts of the country, rents in the private rented sector are surging, and with the Government having decided to once again freeze local housing allowance, millions of hard-pressed tenants are at risk of arrears and eviction.
We welcome the proposals in the White Paper and congratulate all the individuals and organisations that have made the case for change over many years. But why has it taken the Government so long to get here? The commitment to reform the private rental market and ban so called no-fault section 21 evictions was made over three years ago by the Government led by the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May). In the time since, over 200,000 private renters—not just the young but growing numbers of older people and families on low incomes forced to rent privately because successive Conservative Governments have overseen the erosion of our social housing stock—will have been turfed out of their homes as a result of the Government’s failure to act with the urgency required.
Three years on, that urgency is still lacking, and instead of the publication of legislation that we can fast-track through this House, the best the Government can do is to bring forward a White Paper. Renters across the country need emergency legislation, not further consultation. We know that it is not a guarantee, given that renters reform was promised in the 2021 Queen’s Speech and not delivered, but we do have a commitment to that legislation in this Session, so can the Minister give the House an indication of when it is likely to be published?
Let me turn to some of the specific proposals in the White Paper. We obviously welcome the proposed ban on no-fault evictions, but we will want assurances that the proposals for strengthened mandatory grounds for possession cannot be abused to unfairly evict tenants and will be tight enough to minimise fraudulent use of the kind we have seen in Scotland. Can the Minister provide any such assurances? We support the introduction of minimum standards in the private rented sector through the extension of the decent homes standard, but we have real concerns about how this might be enforced in practice given that it is not an enforceable standard in the social rented sector, where it already exists. What steps do the Government intend to take to ensure that the standard can be properly enforced and that private renters do not end up bearing the cost of seeking redress?
Lastly, in none of the coverage this morning or in the White Paper itself is there any sign of meaningful proposals to address the problem of unreasonable rent rises. A one-year rent increase limit, the removal of rent review clauses and vague assurances about giving tenants the confidence to challenge unjustified increases at tribunal are simply not good enough. According to Rightmove, private rents are rising at record rates, with average asking rents outside London rising last year by over 10% for the first time. With the scrapping of section 21, the risk of economic evictions via rent hikes is going to increase markedly. Can the Minister tell us why the Government are unwilling to act to properly protect private tenants from extortionate rent hikes?
We will study the White Paper carefully now it is published and we will engage constructively with its proposals, but we will also do whatever we can to ensure they are not watered down come the legislation. We are going to continue to urge the Government to bring that legislation forward as a matter of urgency, because renters have waited long enough for the protections that they deserve and rightly expect.
Eddie Hughes
I guess I should begin with an apology, saying I am sorry that the document was available at such short notice, although there is going to be considerable opportunity over the next couple of months for me and Members right across the House to discuss its content. I look forward to doing that either in formal settings or in the Tea Room with Members from all parties, right across the House.
But I am not going to let the hon. Gentleman rain on my parade on a sunny day like this. He is looking very serious, but I know that, deep down, Opposition Members welcome this legislation. They may be disappointed that it has taken a while to get to this point, but they may remember—it feels like a distant memory now—that we have had two years of a global pandemic in the meantime. The Government have done everything they could to support renters during that period. We have given furlough payments that have allowed renters to continue to occupy their properties and keep arrears as a result of the pandemic to a limit. We have also invested heavily in things such as discretionary housing payments to help people where arrears have been built up. So we have been doing an awful lot of work in the past two years and I think he should acknowledge that.
As I say, this is a White Paper; it is not the legislation. We have the opportunity now to discuss, as Members of Parliament and with stakeholders, what they think about the legislation and perhaps see if there is an opportunity to improve and enhance it, provided they are reasonable with their suggestions, before we get to the legislation.
On when that might happen, hon. Members will appreciate that our Department has an intense legislative programme. We have the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill and the Social Housing (Regulation) Bill. As you will be aware, Madam Deputy Speaker, the Social Housing (Regulation) Bill has already life in the other place, so progress is being made with our legislation. However, clauses have been sent for drafting and work is already under way. People are beavering away on the construction of that document, so I hope we will see it in quick time. Once it gets to Parliament, I am expecting its passage through Parliament to be pretty smooth and fast because I think it is going to be welcomed by Opposition Members.
On the point about the abuse of mandatory grounds that we are strengthening for landlords, I understand completely the reservations of the hon. Gentleman. I commit to work closely with him to make sure that that legislation is tough and there is not the opportunity for rogue landlords to thwart it in some way, given our best intentions.
On how we might enforce the powers, I fully appreciate that councils are under intense pressure, so we are going to work with councils on a number of pilot schemes so we can test what the best way is for them to enforce good-quality housing within the private rented sector, and then we can develop best practice and I hope share that across the country.
On rent rises, one of the things we should appreciate with regard to the cost of living is that, if somebody is forced to move tenancy, perhaps because of a no-fault section 21 eviction, on average, that costs approximately £1,400. So if we can limit the number of times people move, we are going to make sure that they do not experience those unfortunate and unnecessary costs. However, as a Government, we are clearly not committed to the idea of rent control. We have seen that experiment carried out recently in some places in Europe and all it does is stop investment in properties. That is the last thing we want to do.
This White Paper commits to a fairer private rented sector for both tenants and landlords, and I look forward to working with Opposition Members to deliver it.
Grenfell Tower: Fifth Anniversary
Matthew Pennycook Excerpts(1 year, 11 months ago)
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Matthew Pennycook (Greenwich and Woolwich) (Lab)
It is a privilege to respond for the Opposition in this important and timely debate. I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds East (Richard Burgon) for securing it and the Backbench Business Committee for granting it. In so doing, they have given the House not only the opportunity to appropriately mark the fifth anniversary of the Grenfell Tower fire, but a chance for us to properly reflect on its aftermath and what could be, but is not yet its legacy.
It has been an excellent debate, and I thank all those Members who have taken part. We have had a series of incredibly well-informed and powerful contributions. On behalf of those on the Opposition Benches, I put on record once again the admiration we feel for the survivors and the bereaved, and for the wider Grenfell community. In the face of unimaginable loss, their pursuit of justice for their families and neighbours and their dedication to securing wider change command enormous respect.
The events of 14 June 2017 were, as many have said today, horrific. The fear that the residents of Grenfell Tower must have felt on that night is inconceivable. The loss of 72 innocent men, women and children is something we must never forget. The fire is frequently referred to as a tragedy. I personally have never been convinced that is quite the right word to describe the horror of Grenfell, because labelling it as such implies that it happened not only unexpectedly, but entirely by chance, yet we know that what happened could have been avoided. It could have been avoided if shortcuts were not taken when it came to safety, if the countless reckless and unforgivable decisions made by some of those within the product manufacturing and construction industry were not taken, and if repeated warnings, including those expressed, as so many Members have said, by the residents of Grenfell Tower themselves, had not gone unheeded. But they were, and it is the survivors, the bereaved and the community who must forever live with the consequences.
Doing so is made all the more difficult by the knowledge that those guilty of wrongdoing have not yet been punished. Many Members have rightly raised that point in the debate. While we can never fully appreciate the grief that those who were directly affected have experienced, I can understand the fury that they must feel as they watch the Grenfell Tower inquiry continue day after day to relentlessly expose a catalogue of malpractice and negligence. While we recognise the need to await the conclusion of the inquiry before it is determined precisely what steps must be taken, I can understand the frustration that they evidently feel—it was palpable on the silent walk on Tuesday—that the prospect of justice feels more distant than ever.
When it comes to the question of justice, it is our responsibility as Members of this House to recognise that the fire at Grenfell Tower was not simply the result of pernicious industry practice; it was also the product of state failure—the failure of successive Governments in presiding over a deficient regulatory regime and ignoring repeated warnings about the potentially lethal implication of that fact. The Government have a duty to ensure that everyone lives in a safe home. Sadly, while there has undeniably been progress toward that end over the past five years—and a quicker pace of progress over the past nine months, for which I give the Minister and his colleagues due credit—this debate has highlighted the serious concerns that remain.
Time does not permit me to respond to all the pertinent issues that have been raised during this debate, from the failure of the Government to implement all the recommendations from phase 1 of the inquiry, to the ongoing impact of the building safety crisis on blameless leaseholders in privately owned buildings and on social landlords. I therefore want to use the time I have left to pick up two particular issues raised in the debate that are incredibly important for how we go forward: the functioning of the new building safety regime, which was raised in considerable detail by the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin); and the extent to which the wider post-Grenfell building safety crisis has been comprehensively resolved.
When it comes to the new building safety arrangements, the Building Safety Act comes into force in 12 days’ time, but the practical implementation of the new arrangements is just as important as what the legislation itself provides for, and in that respect, we have real concerns about whether the new regime will be able to function effectively. In particular, we remain unconvinced that the new Building Safety Regulator, which the Act makes responsible for all aspects of the new framework, has what it needs to perform all the complex tasks assigned to it.
Take the issue of indemnity insurance for approved inspectors. The Minister will be aware that as a consequence of a late Government amendment to the Bill, the current Government-approved scheme comes to an end next month, yet there is no sign of an appropriate alternative arrangement being put in place to protect the public and the public interest. Indemnity insurance may seem like an incredibly technical matter, but it is nevertheless integral to the proper functioning of the new regime, and on this and a number of other pressing issues it simply is not good enough for the Government to pass the buck to the new regulator without providing it with the necessary support, as is clearly the case.
The Government will have to do more in the months ahead to ensure that the regulator can carry out its functions effectively, not least because the second phase of the Grenfell inquiry will almost certainly produce recommendations that place additional pressures on it. When he responds, can the Minister update the House on what more his Department is prepared to do to assist the regulator to discharge the duties the 2022 Act places on it?
Sir Bernard Jenkin
I would go further than the hon. Member. The concept behind the architecture in the Building Safety Act is still not adequate. There are conflicts of interest for building control surveyors, and there is the complete lacuna of independent incident investigation. Would he undertake to allow Nick Raynsford, Keith Conradi and me to come and brief the Opposition Front-Bench team on this matter, so that they understand our submission to the Grenfell inquiry fully?
Matthew Pennycook
I am more than happy to meet the hon. Member and the other individuals he cites. I agree that there are gaps and deficiencies in the new regime, and I agree in particular that there is a conflict of interest with the Health and Safety Executive being the body that investigates major incidents. If those incidents were in in-scope buildings, it would be investigating the regulator that sits inside it, but there are also conflicts in building control, as he rightly raises.
When it comes to the wider building safety crisis, alongside its impact on blameless leaseholders, the overall pace of remediation is arguably the most pressing concern we face. It is agonisingly slow. In the debate that took place last week on social housing and building safety, the Secretary of State openly admitted what has been patently obvious for some time to any Member dealing with cladding casework, namely that the building safety fund
“has not been discharging funds at the rate, at the pace and in the way that it should”.—[Official Report, 9 June 2022; Vol. 715, c. 974.]
Despite Members from across the House having repeatedly expressed concerns about that fact with Ministers over a considerable time, little has seemingly been done to expedite the processing of applications.
The result is that of the 3,462 non-ACM-clad privately owned buildings over 18 metres that have made applications to the fund, remediation works have begun on only 259 and have been completed on just 30. Can the Minister tell us what is being done to expedite decisions on those applications not yet determined? As one would expect, given that it was established earlier and its scope is far more limited, better progress has been made in remediating ACM-clad buildings via the building safety programme, with 78% having been completed, but five years on from the Grenfell fire, how can it be the case that 55 residential buildings still have deadly Grenfell-style ACM cladding on them, and 16 of those have not even begun to remove or replace it?
Of course, in both those cases, the figures I have cited relate only to high-rise buildings over 18 meters. By its own estimate and published figures, the Department believes that there are likely to be between 6,220 and 8,890 mid-rise residential buildings that require full or partial remediation or mitigation to alleviate life safety fire risks. I suspect that the real numbers are far higher.
The bottom line is that if the Government do not accelerate markedly the pace of remediation across the board, we are likely to find ourselves marking the 10th or even 15th anniversary of the Grenfell fire while still bemoaning the fact that some unsafe buildings require fixing. It is essential that the Government continue to be urged to address those failures and the others that have been raised in the debate, because honouring the lives of the 72 involves not just commemoration, but the building of a fitting legacy, as other hon. Members have said.
As Grenfell United made clear in the statement it released on Tuesday to mark the fifth anniversary, the survivors, the bereaved and the community want those who were lost to be remembered not for what happened, but for what changed. Not enough has changed over the last five years and it is beholden on the Government to go faster and, in many cases, further so that everyone has a secure, decent, affordable and safe home in which to live.
Social Housing and Building Safety
Matthew Pennycook Excerpts(1 year, 11 months ago)
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Matthew Pennycook (Greenwich and Woolwich) (Lab)
It is a privilege to be able to wind up this important debate on behalf of the Opposition, and I commend the Government for their willingness to facilitate it. I also commend the tone that Members have adopted throughout; I agree that it has been a good debate. Before I respond to some of the issues that have been raised, I want to echo what others have said in welcoming those in the Gallery and in putting on record once again our admiration for the survivors and the bereaved of the Grenfell Tower fire and for the wider Grenfell community.
As I have said before from this Dispatch Box, the horror of that dreadful June night nearly five years ago was the product not only of pernicious industry practice but of state failure: the failure of successive Governments in presiding over a regulatory regime that was deficient and in ignoring repeated warnings about the potential legal implications of that fact. Having suffered the awful consequences and having to live with the trauma forever, the fact that those who survived, those who were bereaved and those residents of the wider community continue not only to seek justice for their families and neighbours but to campaign for wider change commands enormous respect. I know that that sentiment will be shared across the House.
Week in, week out, the Grenfell Tower inquiry continues to expose a catalogue of malpractice and negligence in relation to building safety regulations, but, as others have said, it has also shone a light on attitudes to social housing more generally, and on how tenants with a social landlord are treated. My hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh)—who is currently not in her place, having had to leave the debate for personal reasons—made it clear in her incredibly powerful contribution that far too many people still live in cold, damp, leaky and fundamentally unsafe homes, that they wait months, if not years, for repairs to take place, if they do at all, and that their concerns are routinely ignored or dismissed by their landlords. Those landlords frequently write them off, as Simon Lawrence, the individual who led the work on Grenfell Tower for the contractor Rydon, did, as “rebel residents” who want to make unfounded complaints at the drop of a hat. I pay tribute to the many individuals and organisations who have sought to draw attention to the plight of social tenants across the country over many years, and I would like to highlight the contribution of the campaigners Kwajo Tweneboa and ITV’s Daniel Hewitt, who have done so much to that end recently.
As this debate has highlighted, there are genuine points of disagreement between those of us on the Opposition Benches and the Government when it comes to social homes. As several of my hon. Friends have pointed out, we believe that successive Conservative-led Governments have not only singularly failed to build the social homes we need over the past 12 years but have overseen their loss on an unprecedented scale. A staggering 134,483 social homes for rent were either sold or demolished without direct replacement between 2010 and 2021. That is an average net loss of over 12,000 desperately needed, genuinely affordable homes a year. That is a trend that the measures announced this morning on extending the right to buy would almost certainly exacerbate, in the unlikely case that they are ever implemented, because we know that only 5% of all social homes that have been sold under the right to buy have been replaced. We also know that, while there are many social landlords who routinely fall well short when it comes to repairs and maintenance and could do better, social landlords do not operate in a vacuum. Years of swingeing funding cuts to local authority budgets, as well as the four years during which a Conservative Government imposed a 1% social rent cut on them, have inevitably taken their toll, and covid has hit housing revenue accounts hard too.
However, the debate has highlighted that we are in broad agreement on the objective of driving up standards in what social housing stock remains, and on ensuring that tenants’ concerns are heard and acted upon. That is why we welcome the Social Housing (Regulation) Bill, which I understand has been published while this debate has been taking place. It is good to see that Ministers are on their toes in responding to these concerns in such short order. However, we regret that what is essentially a narrow and largely uncontroversial piece of legislation took so long to materialise. We will support the measures in the Bill, but given the scale of the problem that we know exists, we will press the Government to go further in key respects, so that standards in social housing markedly and rapidly improve and tenants are able to seek redress effectively in practice.
For example, it is almost certainly the case that the social housing regulator will be unable to act on the volume of individual tenant complaints it will receive, and that it will be inadequately resourced to perform its new inspections role. So why not allow it to retain the proceeds of any fines levied to help fund its work? Why not look to give it more teeth than presently proposed, for example by giving it the power to order compensation to tenants? Why not do more to enable tenants to enforce repairs themselves, so that the regulator is not the sole effective means of redress? And why not allow the resident panel, the establishment of which the Government have finally conceded, to be put on a firmer footing, with its agenda and its terms worked up with a direct input from tenants, rather than just by Ministers? We will be pressing the Government to answer those and other vital questions over the coming months as the Bill makes its way through the House, because tenants deserve the most robust piece of legislation that this House can possibility deliver.
I turn now to the other subject under consideration today, namely building safety. The House will know that the Opposition welcomed the Secretary of State’s decision in January 2022 to abandon the failed approach of his predecessors and to ensure that industry pays its fair share to resolve the crisis. Hon. Members will also know that while we tried our utmost to amend it to ensure that all leaseholders were fully protected from the costs of remediation, irrespective of circumstance, we supported the passage of the Building Safety Act. Yet despite the change of approach and the fact that the legislation comes into force imminently, as others have said the nightmare that so many affected leaseholders have endured over recent years appears far from over.
It is true that significant numbers of large developers have now pledged to remediate “life critical fire safety works” in buildings over 11 metres that they played a role in developing or refurbishing. Yet I have to tell Ministers that there are a growing number of examples of developers seeking to reassess affected buildings as less dangerous than previously reported, or to evade the commitment they made altogether to avoid paying.
That is not the only outstanding problem. The hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) both made the point about leaseholders living in buildings where there is no developer or freeholder who can pay, and the fact that leaseholders in those buildings still have really no idea how their non-cladding remediation works will be funded. The Act presumes that litigation will play a role but redress by that means, even if it comes, would entail significant costs and take many years.
Similarly, those leaseholders who own the freehold of their building still have no idea what, if any, support they will receive from Government. They have no protections whatsoever under the Act, as Ministers acknowledged during its passage; and the promised consultation on enfranchised buildings clearly will not now occur before it comes into force, so they have been left in an extremely difficult position.
Then, as the hon. Member for Kensington (Felicity Buchan) and my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts), the Chair of the Select Committee, said, there is the issue of the overall pace of remediation, which is still agonisingly slow. There remain serious problems in relation to the time it is taking to process building safety fund applications; and the Department’s own data, released in April, makes it clear that there still exist, nearly five years on from the Grenfell tragedy, 58 residential buildings with Grenfell-style ACM cladding on them, 16 of which have not even begun to remove or replace it. Leaseholders across the country are still receiving invoices to fix historic cladding and non-cladding defects and they are still being hit with exorbitant secondary costs.
To take just one example, which has featured prominently in the debate: soaring buildings insurance premiums continue to push countless blameless leaseholders toward financial ruin. Hon. Members from across the House have pleaded ad nauseum with Ministers, over many years, to address this issue and still nothing has been done. We are told repeatedly by Ministers that they are talking to both insurers and mortgage lenders with a view to finding a solution, but it feels as far away as ever. In short, when it comes to many of these issues, there is what feels like a shocking lack of urgency, and these are issues that must be addressed at pace because they are blighting the lives of those caught up in this scandal.
Finally, there remain a range of wider fire safety issues that are entirely unresolved. And far from making progress toward doing so, the Government appear content to leave them as such. My hon. Friend the Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Ruth Cadbury) mentioned the Government’s shameful decision to reject the Grenfell inquiry phase 1 recommendation that it be a requirement to produce personal emergency evacuation plans for disabled people in high-rise buildings. I think that is shameful.
The fire at Grenfell Tower was an unspeakable horror and one that rightly exposed systemic failings in our country’s building safety regime and how we treat social housing tenants. The Government have a duty to comprehensively address those failings and it is right that we continue to debate progress towards that goal. All of us acknowledge the need for deep-seated change, but despite the steps that have been taken we still have a very long way to go, and we need to get there much, much faster.
Neighbourhood Plans
Matthew Pennycook Excerpts(1 year, 11 months ago)
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Matthew Pennycook (Greenwich and Woolwich) (Lab)
As always, Ms Ghani, it is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair. As others have said, this is not only an important debate but a timely one, given the recent introduction of the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill and its Second Reading tomorrow. I start by congratulating the hon. Member for Bosworth (Dr Evans) on securing the debate, and I commend him on his considered opening remarks. I also thank the hon. Members for North Wiltshire (James Gray), for Totnes (Anthony Mangnall) and for Strangford (Jim Shannon) for their contributions.
In opening the debate, the hon. Member for Bosworth made a strong case for the importance of neighbourhood plans to his constituents in Leicestershire, the need for greater clarity around neighbourhood plans and the need for such plans to be accorded more weight in national planning policy. Opposition Members are very much in agreement with the thrust of his argument, although I take issue slightly with his wider remarks about unregulated development and development without the necessary infrastructure, which he spoke of as if they were materialising from the void, as if by magic, rather than as a consequence of successive Conservative Governments being determined to liberalise the planning system in a way that is causing extremely damaging development across large parts of the country. That issue aside, we have heard from all the speakers today about the benefits of neighbourhood planning.
Introduced in 2011 under the Localism Act as a formal part of the development framework, neighbourhood planning gives communities a greater say in where future development takes place, how it is designed and what infrastructure is provided with it. To the extent that it enables communities to better shape development in any given area, neighbourhood planning can—as we have heard, this is by no means always the case—increase public engagement, reduce the number of objections to planning applications and boost housing supply over and above local authority targets.
A detailed University of Reading report from May 2020 concluded that the contribution of neighbourhood plans to housing supply—as a result, essentially, of spatial planning by allocation—could be significant, that such plans have helped in many cases to improve design policy and refine local priorities, and that they have had an influential role in planning decisions in many parts of the country. There is also evidence that they have provided a means for particular communities to mitigate the impact of acute housing pressures in their localities. To take just one example—an issue that we have debated more than once in recent months—neighbourhood plans have proven to be a means of assisting coastal and rural communities to better control excessive rates of second-home ownership and the marked growth of holiday lets, although the Government still need to do much more to properly bear down on the problems arising from those trends.
In praising the concept of neighbourhood planning, I do not intend to imply that it is problem free. Opposition Members have genuine concerns about the take-up of neighbourhood plans, in the sense that all the evidence suggests that the vast majority of the 1,061 neighbourhood plans made to date emanate from more affluent parts of the country, where people have the time and resources to prepare and implement them, rather than from less affluent areas and more complex urban environments. We also have concerns about the fact that their policy content, in terms of addressing critical issues such as climate change, has been highly variable. Those concerns aside, we continue to support the principle of neighbourhood planning.
The more fundamental issue with neighbourhood plans—somewhat ironically, given the title of today’s debate on the Order Paper—is that, as things stand, it is not entirely clear what role they play in national planning policy.
Anthony Mangnall
Does the hon. Gentleman recognise that clause 88 of the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill makes the point that neighbourhood plans will take into consideration climate change and environmental aspects?
Matthew Pennycook
I do recognise that and I will come to the Bill specifically later in my remarks. It does provide some useful clarity about neighbourhood plans, although there are far more serious defects when it comes to them, but I will come to that shortly.
As I was saying, I do not think it is clear, as things stand, what role neighbourhood plans play in national planning policy. They are explicitly addressed in the national planning policy framework, but only in terms of process and—as people will see if they read the relevant sections—in such a convoluted manner that I would not be surprised if even professional planners struggle with what the guidance means in practice. On one hand, the stated rationale of neighbourhood plans is that they give communities the power to develop a shared vision for their area, and because they are legally part of development plans, they do provide for a statutory say in what goes where. On the other hand, they must conform to local plan housing allocations and have regard to national planning policy and they can be overturned when they are in conflict with either. The resulting tension, the root of which is ultimately the question of who decides—communities or Ministers—remains largely unresolved.
What I would argue is lacking but is sorely needed is greater clarity about the precise remit of neighbourhood plans. More fundamentally, we need a better sense of the function of neighbourhood planning within the wider planning system. Ultimately, we will have to move toward a planning system based on a clear and easily understood settlement—one that ensures that communities that wish to proactively shape development in their area cannot stymie the meeting of local housing need, while also preventing central Government from unduly stipulating how that need is met on the ground in any given area. That balance is critical, and it is balance that is required, but we believe that that balance has still not properly been struck. That is largely because the default reaction of successive Conservative Governments when confronting the tension that exists between local planning and national planning has been to seek to disempower communities and further horde control at the centre.
Several hon. Members spoke about the great play that earlier Conservative-led Governments made of neighbourhood planning, and it is absolutely true that the coalition Government made great play of it and of localism more generally in their early years. However, since that Administration, successive Conservative Administrations have spent much of the past 10 years ineptly tinkering with the planning system in ways that have systematically undermined the scope for effective local and neighbourhood planning. Far from seeking to remedy that error or to take forward a localism agenda—as the hon. Member for Bosworth, who introduced the debate, argued—the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill doubles down on it.
The hon. Gentleman did not explicitly mention this, although the hon. Member for Totnes did, but the new national development managing policies that the Bill provides for will take precedence over both local and neighbourhood plans where there is a conflict between them “to any extent”—the Bill is very clear about that. In addition, the requirements to consult on any new NDMP are entirely at the discretion of the Secretary of State and, unlike with national policy statements, there is no parliamentary approval process.
I just ask Members to consider for a moment what that would mean in practice if the Bill goes through unamended. Those powers would allow a Minister of whatever political allegiance to develop an NDMP encompassing literally any policy designated by them as relating to development or use of land in England, to determine not to consult on that policy and then to use it to overrule any local development plan in conflict with it at the stroke of a pen. Is it any wonder that organisations such as the Campaign to Protect Rural England are warning that if this power is enacted it will stifle local innovation on issues such as affordable housing, energy efficiency and nature conservation, undercut local democratic engagement in and scrutiny of the planning process, and lead to significant delays where conflict between local plans and national policies is contested?
The hon. Member for Totnes was absolutely right when he spoke about the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill as an opportunity. We have an opportunity to reform planning policy in England in a way that empowers local communities. Instead, my fear is that the Bill as drafted is likely only to further erode the legitimacy of the planning system in the public’s eyes by downgrading the status and the scope of local planning. The Government must amend the Bill to ensure that communities are still able to participate effectively in every aspect of development plan formulation, and to make it crystal clear—I think this is the point that the hon. Gentleman was making earlier—that NDMPs can only be used to overrule local and neighbourhood plans in relation to nationally significant issues.
When the Minister responds, I hope we hear from him that he appreciates the concerns that have been expressed about the ways in which the Bill undermines localism in the planning system, and that he is willing to think again about those clauses in the Bill that would undermine local and neighbourhood plans specifically. More widely, I look forward to hearing his thoughts about how the Government might provide greater clarity about the future remit and function of neighbourhood plans and in particular—this point was well made earlier—about what can be done to encourage their uptake by communities, particularly those facing the greatest social, economic or environmental challenges?
Oral Answers to Questions
Matthew Pennycook Excerpts(1 year, 12 months ago)
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Michael Gove
Steps taken in the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill and changes to the national planning policy framework should absolutely address the problems my hon. Friend identifies. Of course, the biggest problem he identifies is the fact that, sadly, South Cambridgeshire has a Liberal Democrat-controlled local planning authority that does not care about community but pursues a narrow political agenda, to the detriment of all.
Matthew Pennycook (Greenwich and Woolwich) (Lab)
With rent levels surging in the private sector and with the local housing allowance frozen once again, millions of hard-pressed tenants across the country are at risk of arrears and eviction. We know that rent tribunals are not an effective safeguard against punitive rent rises, and that the risk of such rises is likely only to increase when section 21 no-fault evictions are finally scrapped. Will the Secretary of State therefore tell the House why his planned renters reform Bill appears to be completely silent on protections for tenants against unaffordable rent rises?
Michael Gove
Our renters reform Bill will specifically ensure that people in the private rented sector are protected, and I look forward to working with the hon. Gentleman to ensure that the Bill satisfies the need of the hour.
Affordable Housing (Devon and Cornwall)
Matthew Pennycook Excerpts(2 years ago)
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Matthew Pennycook (Greenwich and Woolwich) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Mr Hosie. I congratulate the hon. Member for North Devon (Selaine Saxby) on securing this debate, on the thoughtful way in which she opened it, and on her tenacity in returning to this issue time and again. I know that she has been highlighting it since she was elected. I also thank all Members who have participated this afternoon. We have had a series of excellent contributions, as well as a range of practical suggestions and questions, which I hope the Minister will respond to.
As many of the hon. Members present will be aware, having taken part in them, this is not the first debate this year to grapple with the issues of access and affordability relating to housing in rural and coastal communities. Indeed, there have been several Westminster Hall debates over recent months in which Members from across the House have raised serious concerns, particularly about the impact of second homes and short-term and holiday lets on the availability and affordability of homes for local people to buy and rent. That, in itself, speaks to the importance of this matter to a great many people across the country, as well as the pressing need for more to be done to address the problem so that we get the balance right between the benefits that second homes and short-term lets undoubtedly bring to local economies and their impact on local people.
It is clear from the strength of feeling expressed in this debate, and in those other recent debates, that there remains a clear view among a sizeable number of hon. Members, on both sides of the House, that as things stand the Government have not done enough, and have not got that balance right. That lack of action on the part of the Government has real consequences. I do not think it is hyperbole to use the word “crisis”, as many hon. Members have done. I think that this is a crisis, particularly as it applies to Devon and Cornwall—but also to other parts of England, as we have heard.
What does that crisis look like? As we have heard, as well as entailing the loss of a significant proportion of the permanent population—and the impact that loss has on local services, amenities and the sustainability and cohesion of communities—excessive and growing rates of second home ownership are, in a great many rural and coastal areas, directly impacting the affordability, and therefore the availability, of local homes, particularly for local first-time buyers. The staggering growth in short-term and holiday lets in many rural and coastal constituencies is having the same detrimental impact, albeit on not only the number of affordable homes for local people to buy, but access to private rentals—as we heard—for those who cannot buy and also cannot secure social housing.
Incidentally, when it comes to the shrinking private rental markets in many rural and coastal communities, the issue is not only of access but of security. Many renters in these parts of the country—particularly key workers—are finding that their landlord wishes to begin using their property exclusively as a short-term or holiday let, and they are evicted as a result. That is yet another reason for the Government—who I must say have failed to bring forward a renters’ reform Bill in this Session, despite promising to do so in the Queen’s Speech—to get on with it and finally introduce the legislation necessary to ban no-fault evictions, rather than delaying matters for another year or year and a half with a White Paper.
What, then, needs to happen to ensure that we make available more affordable housing in Devon, Cornwall and other rural and coastal communities across the country? First, as I have said on previous occasions, there is clearly more that could be done to mitigate the negative impact of excessive numbers of second homes and holiday lets.
When it comes to non-planning levers—primarily taxation—we accept that the Government have taken action over recent years by reforming stamp duty, allowing local authorities to increase council tax to 100% for second homes, and proposing that properties be required to have been let for 70 days in any given financial year to be liable for business rates, rather than council tax. However, there is a strong case for going further. We believe the Government should explore providing local authorities with powers to, for example, introduce licensing regimes for second homes and short-term lets, and giving them even greater discretion over their council tax regimes, perhaps, as my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard) just mentioned, allowing local authorities, as Labour has done in government in Wales, to levy a premium or surcharge on second homes and long-term empty properties if they believe that is what is required in their locality.
I believe there remains a strong case for reviewing whether the current 3% rate of stamp duty surcharge on second homes and the 5% rate levied on non-UK buyers are set at the appropriate level in light of the boom that we have witnessed over the course of the pandemic. When it comes to planning levers, the system does now enable residents to put in place local neighbourhood plans that can go some way to managing second-home ownership rates, but again it is clear that further measures are required. We believe that the Government should explore further changes to planning restrictions and enforcement that might enable local authorities to bear down on excessive numbers of second homes and holiday lets in a way that, if designed well, would not exacerbate the problems of affordability and availability that have been touched on in today’s debate.
Secondly, as well as doing more to mitigate the negative impact of, in particular, second homes and holiday lets, Ministers really do need to start grappling with what reforms are required to deliver the right quantity of new housing in the right places, at prices that local people can actually afford. They need to do so because at present the Government are failing to deliver on this front, both in terms of sufficient numbers of new affordable homes to rent—where Ministers are presiding over a system that sees a net loss of thousands of genuinely affordable social rented homes each and every year—and new affordable homes to buy.
The hon. Member for South West Devon (Sir Gary Streeter) mentioned shared ownership and the first homes scheme. I could spend a long time speaking about the deficiencies of shared ownership as an intermediate model. I gently suggest to the Minister that, like its starter homes forerunner, the Government’s flagship first homes scheme, as a policy, looks to all intents and purposes like it is already an abject failure. Not only is it leading to a significant reduction in the number of social and affordable homes to rent by top-slicing funding secured through section 106 agreements, but since it was first introduced, rising house prices, coupled with a rising new build premium, have already eroded the value of the first homes discount, by my calculations, in almost three quarters of local authority areas.
The simple fact is that the policy does not address the underlying reasons why young people and key workers cannot get on to the housing ladder, particularly in areas with overheated housing markets, such as Devon and Cornwall. Labour is committed to giving first-time buyers first dibs on new homes in their local area, and to establishing a new definition of affordable, set at a rate of 30% of local incomes, rather than the present definition, which is linked to those overheated market rates that we have discussed.
I conclude by saying that this has been a worthwhile debate, and I have no doubt that we will return to this subject once again in the next Session unless the Government decide to heed the demands of hon. Members, including many on their own side, and act quickly on this issue. I very much look forward to hearing from the Minister, both that the Government are minded to do so and precisely what that action will entail.
Building Safety Bill
Matthew Pennycook ExcerptsWednesday 20th April 2022
(2 years ago)
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Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)
I call shadow Minister Matthew Pennycook.
Matthew Pennycook (Greenwich and Woolwich) (Lab)
This Bill has been a long time in gestation. First published in July 2020, it was subject to extensive pre-legislative scrutiny and was examined in exhaustive detail over five long weeks in Committee in the autumn of last year. Then, in January this year, the Government accepted that the approach they had taken to the building safety crisis over a period of more than four years following the Grenfell fire had not worked, and they announced that it would change. We raised a series of questions and concerns about what that change of approach would mean in practice, but we welcomed the fact that it had finally happened. It is of course right that we seek to ensure that those who profited from the sale of unsafe buildings and construction products pay their fair share when it comes to putting things right, that every developer and freeholder who can shoulders the financial burden of fixing their own buildings, that we restore common sense and proportionality to the assessment of building safety in general, and that leaseholders are properly protected from the costs of remediating all historical cladding and non-cladding defects. Labour has urged the Government to act on all these fronts, and more, for years, and we are pleased that we are now finally making progress toward some semblance of a comprehensive solution to the building safety crisis.
However, the manner and the pace at which this already complex and technical Bill has been overhauled to reflect the Government’s belated change of heart has been deeply problematic. Large sections of the Bill have been completely rewritten on the basis of hundreds of Government amendments tabled in the other place that the noble Lords had relatively little time to consider carefully or properly scrutinise. We welcome many of those amendments, particularly the removal of the building safety charge and the abolition of building safety managers, and we also welcome the important concessions the Government made in the other place in response to Labour amendments—for example, to exempt social housing providers from the levy. But that does not detract from the fact that this is no way to make good law, and I want to put on record the Opposition’s serious misgivings about the way the Government have gone about revising the Bill. As a result of the way it has been modified, it is now, by all accounts, something of a mess, and the five pages of complex Government amendments tabled yesterday afternoon, which again provided hon. and right hon. Members in all parts of the House with little time to properly consider them, do little to remedy that fact.
Nevertheless, the Opposition have always maintained that we want to see a version of the Bill on the statute book as soon as possible. As such, our focus is now on ensuring that its most glaring remaining defects are addressed so that it can be passed in what remains of this Session. To that end, there are five specific issues to be considered today: the duties placed on the Building Safety Regulator with regard to reviewing safety and standards, protection for leaseholders in buildings below 11 metres in height, protection for leaseholders in enfranchised buildings, the issue of buildings held in trust, and the proposed leaseholder cap.
The first can be dealt with very quickly. As well as having the resource and capacity to perform all the complex tasks assigned to it, it is critically important that the new Building Safety Regulator within the Health and Safety Executive be clearly tasked in the early years of its operation with assessing the benefits and costs of a range of measures in relation to safety and standards. Lords amendment 6 specified four—fire suppression systems, the safety of stairways and ramps, the certification of electrical equipment, and provision for people with disabilities—and we supported it. Having maintained in the other place that the amendment was entirely unnecessary, the Government yesterday tabled an amendment in lieu of Lords amendment 6 that almost entirely mirrors its provisions. On that basis, we will support that Government amendment.
The second issue is protection for leaseholders in buildings below 11 metres in height. As I argued on Report on 19 January, 18 metres was always a crude and arbitrary threshold that not only failed to adequately reflect the complexity of fire risk but was an entirely unsound basis for determining which blameless leaseholders were and were not protected by the state from the costs of remediation. The same argument applies to the 11-metre threshold. The blameless leaseholders who are trapped living in unsafe smaller buildings deserve the same protection as those in mid and high-rise unsafe buildings. As the Earl of Lytton argued in the other place:
“There seems no good reason for height exclusion on any moral, economic, safety or practical ground.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 29 March 2022; Vol. 820, c. 1508.]
The Government maintain—the Minister said as much again in his remarks—that there are no systemic building safety issues with buildings under 11 metres, yet we know from the devastating incident at Richmond House in Worcester Park in 2019 just how dangerous to life defective buildings under this height threshold can be. The Government further maintain that buildings under 11 metres in height that are dangerous are few in number. I suspect that is almost certainly the case, but all the more reason, then, to provide financial support to those blameless leaseholders who find themselves living in them rather than leaving them without protection. I noted what the Minister said when he gave a commitment that the Government would review such buildings on a case-by-case basis, but it begs the question: why will the Government not act by amending the Bill to cater for the exceptional circumstances that he spoke about?
Rushanara Ali
On that point, does my hon. Friend agree that if the Government do not act to safeguard such blocks, the people who live in those kinds of accommodation will find it very difficult to be insured and to get mortgages? This is a short-sighted response, when the Government could address these issues in the round.
Matthew Pennycook
My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and it has been a consistent position of ours that we ensure that all leaseholders affected by the building safety crisis are protected irrespective of circumstance, including what height their building happens to be. For that reason, we will oppose Government amendment (a), tabled yesterday to Lords amendment 94, and seek to ensure that the Lords amendment remains unmodified.
I turn to the third issue we are considering this afternoon: enfranchised buildings. Under the Bill, enfranchised leaseholders will, in effect, be treated as freeholders when it comes to the costs of remediation. That cannot be right. Buildings that have exercised a right to collective enfranchisement, or those on commonhold land, may be few in number, but it has been the policy of successive Governments to encourage leaseholders to enfranchise and to promote the right to manage. Indeed, the Government have promised legislation in the next Session to make it easier and cheaper for leaseholders to buy the freehold of their building, yet the Government have put forward no solution whatever to the issue of enfranchised buildings in the Bill as it stands, and they are seemingly content, at least until this afternoon, to see such leaseholders completely excluded from the protections enjoyed by those in buildings that remain unenfranchised. We vehemently disagree with that position. It is imperative that such leaseholders are afforded the same protection as those who do not collectively own or manage their buildings. As Lord Young put it in the other place,
“it would be perverse if the legislation before us today put enfranchised leaseholders in a worse position than leaseholders who are not enfranchised”.—[Official Report, House of Lords, 29 March 2022; Vol. 820. c. 1509.]
It is essential that the service charge protections set out in schedule 8 to the Bill apply clearly to enfranchised buildings and buildings where the right to manage has been exercised, which is another reason why we cannot support Government amendment (a), tabled yesterday to Lords amendment 94, and why we will seek to divide the House on it. The Minister is right to say that pressing the amendment to a vote is not enough, and that at some point the Government will have to go further than simply accepting Lords amendment 94 or a version of it, because the Bill in its current form would not prevent resident-owned companies from making unlimited demands on leaseholders in their capacity as shareholders, to cover the costs that they would be unable to pass on via service charges if the Lords amendment, or a version of it, were to remain part of the Bill. So the Government will have to act.
I noted what the Minister said about a consultation, but I have to say that I agree entirely with my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield). It is too late in the day to consult on this matter. Four and a half years after Grenfell, the Bill needs to be amended to reflect and deal with this issue.
I turn to the fourth issue we are considering this afternoon, which is buildings held in trust. As it stands, buildings held in trust on behalf of a third-party investor, where the landlord is a professional depository or custodian regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, or buildings owned on trust by what I can only describe as ground rent grazers—almost invariably based offshore—do not meet any of the association tests or the net wealth test in the Bill. Unless the Bill is revised to capture such trustee arrangements, they will escape the so-called waterfall system as set out in schedule 8, and the leaseholders will find themselves picking up a proportion of the costs of non-cladding remediation. The Minister is right to say that, in the other place, the Government accepted that the Bill needed to be so modified, and yesterday they tabled an amendment to Lords amendment 98 as a result.
Let me be clear that the inclusion of Lords amendment 98, as amended in the way the Government propose, would make for a better Bill than one that has no provision addressing the trustee loophole whatever. However, the Government amendment tabled yesterday afternoon has serious deficiencies, which are almost certainly the result—I make no charge against the officials involved—of the hurried timescale in which it has been drafted and tabled. Let me take the two most obvious problems with it. First, the Government amendment covers only partnerships or bodies corporate that are a beneficiary of a trust; private individuals are entirely excluded. That cannot be right, and they must be brought within the scope of these arrangements.
Secondly, the Government amendment makes no distinction whatever between types of trusts. A local authority pension fund, for example, will be liable under the waterfall system in precisely the same way as an offshore ground rent grazer. We believe that that is wrong and that the Government should think further about how they might better protect trusts where there is a clear public interest in doing so. We will not oppose Government amendments (a), (b) and (c) to Lords amendment 98, but I urge the Minister and his officials to go away and consider whether the flaws in the Government amendment as currently drafted can be rectified as the Bill progresses.
General Practice: Large Housing Developments
Matthew Pennycook Excerpts(2 years, 1 month ago)
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Matthew Pennycook (Greenwich and Woolwich) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Mr Dowd.
I genuinely think that this has been a valuable debate about an important issue. I congratulate the hon. Member for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous) on securing it and on the typically clear and powerful remarks he made in opening it. He has been raising concerns about this issue for a considerable period, and the fact that he felt compelled to secure this debate today only serves, I am afraid to say, to highlight the startling lack of progress on the part of the Government in addressing those concerns.
The concerns are not the hon. Gentleman’s alone; indeed, this issue is not confined to his corner of Bedfordshire. His concerns are widely shared across the House. As the attendance for today’s debate makes clear, they are keenly felt among Government Members in particular. I thank all the Members who have contributed this morning.
Having heard today’s contributions, we can only hope that the Minister will at least be convinced of the need to go away and revisit the fundamental aspects of a planning system that routinely fails to produce the necessary social infrastructure for new communities to thrive. We have heard lots of complaints and points of contention today, but it is within the Government’s gift to take action on many of the issues that have been raised. I hope that the Minister will go away with renewed vigour to address them.
The focus of this morning’s debate has been on the provision of primary care services for large-scale housing developments. I add my praise to the general expressions of support that have been conveyed today to GPs and GP practice staff. That we face significant challenges as a country when it comes to primary care capacity is not in dispute. The reasons for that shortage are complex, and when it comes to problems such as the recruitment and retention of enough GPs to accommodate rising patient demand or how local health services plan for population growth in service provision, those are obviously the responsibility of the Department of Health and Social Care. However, there is no question in my mind but that the planning system is exacerbating the crisis in primary care, particularly in areas experiencing significant development, by failing to deliver new facilities in places where the needs of large-scale new communities cannot be met simply by the expansion of existing sites.
The particular concern of the hon. Member for South West Bedfordshire and others who have spoken this morning is general practice capacity, but the national failure to ensure that all new large-scale housing developments have adequate primary care provision is mirrored in other forms of infrastructure, whether that be school places or transport, as the hon. Members for Wantage (David Johnston), for North East Bedfordshire (Richard Fuller), for Aylesbury (Rob Butler) and others have remarked upon. Having that infrastructure is absolutely key to gaining local consent, which is an essential part of the planning process.
I do not think that this issue is primarily one of housing supply. There is a housing crisis and we need to address it, but the crux of this issue is the need for up-front infrastructure investment before or at the point that a large-scale residential development completes and new residents move in. However, the planning system as it currently operates—and I think Conservative Members will accept this—is simply not geared up to facilitate that infrastructure-first approach on all major sites; all too often, no one has overall responsibility for place-making.
The importance of master developers was clearly identified in the Letwin review: they strategically assemble land, secure the necessary permissions, co-ordinate the delivery of the infrastructure and de-risk the development process as a matter of course. Without those developers, the system incentivises volume house builders to build often poor-quality housing in inappropriate and often entirely car-dependent locations, in a way that frequently leads to intractable disputes about how core infrastructure and services will be delivered and who will pay for them. Ultimately, the fact that the planning system lacks many of the features necessary to support effective large-scale housing growth stems from the failure of central Government to take a clear strategic role in the delivery of new large-scale communities.
The hon. Member for South West Bedfordshire and others drew attention to the inadequacies of the housing infrastructure fund, and they were right to do so. The fund can and does support the delivery of infrastructure on sites where viability is an issue and address the need for up-front infrastructure and the problem of risk on a limited number of sites. However, because it distributes funding on a competitive, ad hoc basis, it is not a general solution for the infrastructure needs of all large-scale housing developments.
Homes England could play a far larger role in providing local authorities with support and assisting local partners directly with delivery, land acquisition and the master developer role. It has extensive legal powers that allow it to take on that role and obtain land by means of compulsory purchase. It could be the instrument the Government use to support large-scale growth with the necessary social and transport infrastructure. However, that would depend on the Government having a strategy; at present, I am afraid, they do not. Although there are exceptions, in general terms it is simply a fact that central Government in England do not play a clear strategic role in site identification or the delivery of new large-scale communities.
The national infrastructure strategy sets out a range of investment priorities, but it does not provide a framework that makes clear which areas are preferred for long-term priority housing growth and their relationship to infrastructure investment. National planning policy on delivering sustainable, large-scale housing developments is incredibly vague and provides little in the way of encouragement or guidance to local authorities contemplating meeting local housing need in key strategic locations.
The Conservative Administration of the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) changed the law in 2018 to encourage locally led development corporations to act as master developers. However, to the best of my knowledge—the Minister may correct me—none has yet been designated.
In many ways, the root cause of the infrastructure challenges on sites such as those that have been mentioned today is the issue of land value capture. Aside from direct Government grant, development of those sites is reliant on developer contributions in the form of section 106 or the community infrastructure levy to meet essential infrastructure needs. However, those contributions are often not sufficient to provide all the infrastructure needed on those sites. I am surprised that this has not been mentioned today, but that is at least partly a direct consequence of the impact of viability rules set out in the 2012 national planning policy framework, which allow developers to game the system and drive down section 106 contributions. Although in some cases local authorities could be more robust with developers, the national planning policy framework ties their hands behind their backs in terms of what they can extract as public gains under section 106.
The Minister will no doubt point to the Government’s proposals, mentioned most recently in the levelling-up White Paper, to introduce a new infrastructure levy. However, at present, we have no idea how it would apply to large-scale development or deal with areas of low demand, how much it would yield or the date by which we can expect it to be implemented. There is an immediate deficit, as the hon. Member for South West Bedfordshire said in his opening remarks.
Given how heavily the Government appear to be leaning on the new levy as a means to secure affordable housing and the infrastructure communities need, perhaps the Minister might give us a sense of what the new levy will look like, what form it will take and when it will be brought before the House for consideration. Indeed, he might even go so far as to give Members a straight answer to the more fundamental question of whether the Government still intend to legislate for a reform of the planning system in this Parliament.
To conclude, this debate has highlighted a problem that is not confined to a handful of sites or to particular parts of England, but is the inevitable outcome of the current planning system, which does not provide the necessary social and transport infrastructure on major sites as a matter of course. Addressing that problem requires a fundamental change of approach on the part of the Government, not just tinkering around the edges with individual infrastructure funding streams.
Real benefits can be gained if the Department is willing to grapple seriously with the problem, not only in delivering a marked increase in housing supply but in terms of the quality and sustainability of the new communities that could be created. The alternative is that we continue to see more poor-quality housing in inappropriate locations without the necessary infrastructure that residents need to flourish. Members across the House do not want to see that outcome, and I suspect the Minister does not want to see it either, but do the Government have the political will to re-examine the flawed system that they are currently presiding over?
Stuart Andrew
I thank my right hon. Friend for asking such a specific question. I do not have those figures to hand, but I will ensure that I get them to him. He makes a very valid point, and I will come on to some of the things that we are looking at to address exactly his points.
I was talking about local plans, which provide certainty for communities, businesses and developers. An effective and up-to-date plan is essential not only to meet an area’s housing requirements, but to create well-designed and attractive places to live, with the services that people need on their doorstep. We are already helping councils to put in place such robust and up-to-date plans. That includes encouraging visits from the Planning Inspectorate and specialist advice from the Planning Advisory Service to provide a range of specialist planning advice to councils throughout England.
Plans should be shaped by early, proportionate and effective engagement between plan makers and communities, local organisations, businesses, infrastructure providers and operators, and statutory consultees. They should seek to meet the development needs of their area, and that includes facilities that will be needed across health, schools and other areas. We recognise, however, that more work is needed. We want all infrastructure providers, including healthcare providers, to be much more engaged in the plan making right from the outset, because that is clearly not happening enough, as we have heard in the evidence of colleagues today. We will come forward on how we will do that as part of our reforms in due course.
Local plans are not the only means of improving services and building that vital infrastructure. There are clear regulatory frameworks for local authorities and developers to follow. The national planning policy framework, for example, states that local plans should aim for sustainable development, which means that new schools, hospitals and local services such as GP practices should be factored in from the outset. Proposed development should be shaped by effective engagement with the local community, so that planners and developers know what is really needed. In some areas, it might be new roads, bridges or bus depots, but in others it will be new nurseries or GP surgeries. That engagement should extend to relevant health bodies too, such as NHS trusts and the clinical commissioning groups, to ensure that any development helps rather than hinders local strategies to improve health and wellbeing.
Local healthwatch organisations have a role to play. They have a firm grasp on the concerns of people who use health and social care services. My Department strongly encourages planning authorities to consult them when new homes are being built, so that they can raise those all-important questions on the number of GPs needed. Equally, to some extent local plans should head some of that off before houses are actually built. I have, however, listened to what colleagues have said—I hear it loud and clear. Put simply, if a GP surgery is right in the centre of town and a new development is on the outskirts, it is obviously better to ensure that a new surgery is built closer to the homes it will serve.
We have touched on some of the funding. Hon. Members are aware that councils obtain contributions through a community infrastructure levy on new development and by negotiating section 106 planning obligations with a developer. That helps to create funding not just for housing, but to address local infrastructure needs. In the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for South West Bedfordshire, about £5.5m has been allocated to healthcare provision through such funding, and that should be spent on helping to provide GP practices.
I recognise, however, that there is an issue here about which we need to do more. We hope that part of the effective planning reforms that we are to introduce will answer some of that. Our ambition has always been to simplify the system and to ensure that development becomes synonymous with improved services, and healthier and happier neighbourhoods. That is why we are exploring the introduction of a new infrastructure levy to replace the existing system of developer contributions.
At the moment, we plan for that new levy to be payable on completion of development. That will replace the negotiation and renegotiation that we keep seeing happen. The new levy will not be negotiable and will maximise land value, so we get more for local communities. It will also bring much greater certainty on costs, on factoring expenditure into the price paid for land and, in turn, on delivering more vital infrastructure. Under our proposals, local authorities would be allowed to borrow against infrastructure levy revenues so that they could bring forward vital improvements to services, including expanding GP capacity, before the first spade of a new development even hits the ground.
That said, I recognise that we need to test the policy. Many issues have been raised. I cannot at this moment commit my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister to a meeting, but I will raise with him the suggestions and comments made today, and I will meet my colleagues in the Department of Health and Social Care to raise the points made, to ensure that we are prioritising, gearing up and keeping focus, so that we can see what more can be done, and so that we do not miss the opportunity provided by the new fund to get the necessary infrastructure.
Matthew Pennycook
The Minister may not be able to answer, but may I tempt him to name the legislative vehicle by which the new infrastructure levy will be introduced?
Stuart Andrew
The hon. Member will not have to wait too long before hearing which vehicle will be used; I hope it will be in a couple of weeks.
I want to touch on the issue of transparency. We have introduced infrastructure funding statements, which give people the opportunity to see what councils have done, but we can and must do more to give confidence to residents. That brings me on to community engagement.
As hon. Members will know, changes to the levy system are by no means the only improvement we want to bring to our planning system. One of the reasons why new development has not always been matched with tangible improvements to schools, nurseries or GP practices is that it has not always been easy for local residents to scrutinise applications or to make their voices heard. We need a faster, more responsive planning system, fit for the modern age. That means embracing digital technology and encouraging more residents to voice their views on what is being built in their community, and where.
I know that some of our previous proposals generated significant debate, to say the least, and it is therefore right that we paused for thought and took stock of different voices from across the planning sector and beyond, but on this ambition we are determined to make headway because we believe that it will result in more real-world improvements to services, which hon. Members all want to see.
My ministerial colleagues and I hope to announce a way forward soon so that the planning system supports our wider mission to level up communities in Bedfordshire and right across the country. The key point is that, at its heart, communities must be involved. Communities and neighbourhoods should be shaping the places in which they live, so that we have beautiful places with the necessary infrastructure and a democratic system that also considers environmental improvements. Neighbourhoods should have a big say in all of it.
Colleagues raised a number of other points. My right hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet (Theresa Villiers) never misses an opportunity to raise housing targets with me. She knows from our conversations and meetings that I understand the issue. If she will allow me, I will come back to her in due course. My hon. Friend the Member for Wantage (David Johnston) has also been quick off the mark to come to see me to discuss the issues in his constituency. Again, I understand them.
My hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough talked, quite rightly, about wanting to support new housing but that we should be building places where people want to live, not just huge dormitory estates. There has to be a sense of community. My hon. Friend the Member for North East Bedfordshire (Richard Fuller) asked me to double up with the Secretary of State after his report—I will make sure that I do that for him.
I will see my hon. Friend the Member for Truro and Falmouth (Cherilyn Mackrory) later today to discuss the issue of second homes and its impact on those working in the public sector. I hope we will have a constructive meeting. My hon. Friend the Member for Keighley (Robbie Moore) talked about towns I know well. My mother-in-law lives in Addingham, so I will get an earful from her if I do not get this right.
My hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury (Rob Butler) talked rightly about the stark increase—from 16,000 to 26,000—in the number of patients at his surgery. That is absolutely an area we need to look at carefully. He also talked about all of the different funds that are available. I think that that is one of the most confusing issues, and it is something that I would like to address as we go forward.
The Opposition spokesman, the hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich talked about the new levy. We are currently working with local authorities, providers and industry to ensure that the levy works for everybody.
In closing, I reiterate that I have heard loud and clear the concerns of hon. Members. The frustration of our constituents when large-scale new developments are green lit and local services become increasingly congested is palpable for us all. I hope I have clearly set out what we have already done to address that, through local plans, NPPF and section 106 agreements. I have also reiterated that we intend to go much further, by creating a more streamlined, smoother planning system, which levels up infrastructure and local services in every part of the country. I say to my hon. Friends that I am committed to working with all of them to ensure that we can make that vision a reality.