Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Nigel Evans Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 13th December 2022 Commons Chamber

[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Order. Mike Amesbury will be the last speaker on a five-minute limit. I will indicate whether the new limit is to be four or three minutes as soon as he has finished.

[Mike Amesbury]

I rise to speak to my amendments 97 and 98, to my new clause 111 and to other amendments that I support.

After 12 years of pursuing policies that have wrecked and hollowed out communities and deepened inequalities, this Tory Government now say that they are the ones to repair the damage and that the so-called levelling-up agenda is the way to do it. The Bill exposes levelling up as the empty promise that it is. It will not ensure that our planning system delivers for us, it will not provide the genuinely affordable housing we need, and it will not put investment and power back into communities and people’s pockets. In fact, the current Government are doing exactly the opposite.

I support several Labour Front-Bench amendments, including amendments 78 and 84 and new clause 98. This Parliament declared a climate emergency in 2019, so it is somewhat bizarre that, years later, mitigation and adaptation are not hardwired into our planning system. New clause 98, which would do just that, is welcome. As it stands, the Bill will create a power grab by the centre and by the Secretary of State, undermining the local plans and neighbourhood plans that Members across the House have spoken for so strongly in this debate, so I strongly support amendment 78. If we are to build communities with the right houses in the right places that are genuinely affordable, with essential infrastructure and beautiful green spaces, they must be sufficiently funded. That is not the case now, has not been the case for 12 years and will not be the case under the Bill, which is why I am backing amendment 84.

I turn to the amendments that I have tabled. Amendment 97, which is supported by the Local Government Association, would provide local authorities with the certainty that they need about how to administer the levy in relation to retrospective planning applications; the Bill does not currently make provision for that. Amendment 98 would ensure that all forms of provision delivered through section 106 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, including affordable housing, are not lost but continue to be delivered by the levy. Otherwise, important schemes that do not come under the definition of infrastructure, but are currently delivered through section 106—including apprenticeships, skills development, supporting the local workforce and supporting young people into employment—may be omitted. New clause 111 would have the same effect as new clause 94: by removing the clauses of the Housing and Planning Act 2016 that relate to the sale of vacant higher-value local authority housing, it would hold the Government to a commitment that they made in the social housing Green Paper.

I also support amendment 2, which was tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy). Rightly, it would add childcare, either subsidised or free, to the definition of infrastructure. It is common sense, it is the right thing to do and I wholly support it.

My amendments and many others tabled by Members across the House seek to add some substance to a discredited and vacuous slogan: namely, “levelling up”. Over the past 12 years, communities such as mine have been hollowed out, with facilities from leisure centres to libraries closed down and our high streets boarded up. We need something radically different. In fact, what we need is a Labour Government who will empower our communities, genuinely power up our communities, and fill people’s pockets with the money and opportunities they deserve.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

There will be a four-minute time limit. I call Sir John Hayes.

[Sir John Hayes]

Alongside purpose, a sense of pride nourishes personal and communal togetherness; it builds social solidarity. Where we begin, live life and end it roots our days and shapes our dreams. Homes matter because having a place of one’s own to build a family’s future makes those dreams come true. Those who advocate housing targets clinically miss the point. Making homes of which people can feel proud is what public policy must make possible.

The Government’s decision to drop mandatory housing targets, under which local communities have been obliged to endure seemingly endless and unsustainable development, is therefore wise and welcome, if overdue. I have been pleased to play my part, alongside other sensible colleagues, in encouraging that sharp turn in thinking. I am delighted that local communities and the councils they elect will no longer have housing imposed upon them. They will be in sole charge of what is built and where. Never again will the imposition of top-down targets be a justification for developments that are out of scale or character with the prevailing built environment or the local landscape. We have bolted on to villages and towns throughout this kingdom unsuitable and unsustainable housing estates of catalogue-build, identikit houses that bear no relation to the local vernacular and are, frankly, a very poor legacy to pass on to generations to come.

All that we build should make us proud. Our inheritance is what our forefathers built for us, and our responsibility is just as great as theirs. Development should, wherever possible, be regenerative, and it should be incremental. Every hamlet could take a few extra houses; every village could take more; towns many more than that; and cities, of course, many thousands. When we understand that development can be incremental, people will cease to object to it in the way they do currently.

There are those who dismiss beauty—they are crass to do so, because people deserve the chance to live in lovely places, including less well-off people. Unfortunately, that is too often not the case. I welcome the Government’s decision to put beauty at the heart of the housing agenda by raising design standards and making sure that developers and local planners adhere to those standards. It is also important that communities have their say. When they are faced with a choice between the ubiquitous kind of bland, identikit housing that peppers too much of our country or well-designed homes, they will usually choose the latter.

There is, however, concern about the industrialisation of the countryside resulting from the Government’s relaxation of the moratorium on onshore wind. It is critical that topography, visual impact, the connection to sites of special historical interest, areas of outstanding natural beauty and sites of special scientific interest, and the connection of turbines to the grid, are all taken into account. Not only is this a dangerous energy policy—I do not have time to explore that—but it also risks spoiling much of the English landscape and ruining vistas that are cherished by local people. If we really believe in local consent for housing, we must follow through and believe in local consent for that kind of infrastructure development, too.

As I have said, all that we build should add to what is there. We will be judged as a Parliament, and indeed as a generation, by what we pass on to generations to come.

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[Greg Smith]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend and agree entirely that those regulations make it clear. It is a shame that the shadow Secretary of State, the hon. Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy), is not in her place, because she was a councillor with me in 2006 in Hammersmith and Fulham, where I, then charged with the community safety brief, used section 106 money in part to fund additional police officers in the town centres of that borough. There is precedent out there that we can use funds such as the predecessor to the infrastructure levy, to fund some level of revenue services. That is why I urge the Minister, when she sums up, to acknowledge that we can do that and be true localists, so that communities that determine that childcare provision is important are enabled to make those deals as part of their infrastructure levies.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Margaret Greenwood is the last Member with four minutes, and then we will move to a three-minute limit.

[Margaret Greenwood (Wirral West) (Lab)]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. This Bill introduces national development management policies, or NDMPs, which will have primacy over local development plans, meaning that those plans could be easily and rapidly rendered out of date by changes to national policies. My constituents who are campaigning to protect the green belt will be concerned about that, and I pay tribute to them and support their campaign.

The Bill states:

“If to any extent the development plan conflicts with a national development management policy, the conflict must be resolved in favour of the national development management policy”,

so local democratic processes for determining planning decisions could be seriously undermined. New clause 73 in my name would ensure that the Government cannot use NDMPs to allow housing to be built on green-belt land. It is remarkable that, despite the Bill introducing NDMPs, the Government have not set out what will be in their scope. Surely the Government would want to be clear about that before legislating for their introduction.

It is clear that, under the Conservatives, there has not been sufficient protection for the green belt. According to the Campaign to Protect Rural England, more than 42% of planning applications submitted for green-belt land in the 10 years to 2020 were granted, and importantly, the report also points out that there is sufficient brownfield land for more than 1 million homes.

Part 5 of the Bill replaces the current system of environmental impact assessments and strategic environmental assessments with a new environmental outcomes report regime. New clause 72 would require EOR regulations made under part 5 to be subject to the super-affirmative procedure to ensure a high level of scrutiny. EIAs and SEAs have been vital to the protection of sites of local, national and international environmental importance for decades. They set out and assess the impacts that developments may have on the environment, and help local authorities to decide on planning applications. It is a matter of extreme concern that a huge amount of detail—including information on which plans and projects EORs will apply to—is deferred to secondary legislation. In effect, the Bill gives a blank cheque to Ministers to change environmental protections in the planning system. The super-affirmative procedure should be used to provide much-needed greater parliamentary oversight.

The Bill currently states that, before making any EOR regulations that contain provision for what the specified environmental outcomes are to be, the Secretary of State must have regard to the current environmental improvement plan. This omits crucial considerations such as the preservation of the green belt, the protection of heritage and climate obligations, which should be central to any environmental assessment process. Amendment 63 addresses that omission. It is vital for the Secretary of State, as well as having regard to considerations such as protecting the green belt and meeting our climate obligations, to have regard to the protection of heritage when setting EOR regulations, because heritage and the historical character of the places where we live are immensely important.

The green belt is not safe in the hands of the Conservatives, and the Bill should be strengthened to provide much greater protections for it. People will not forgive politicians who concrete over the rural landscapes that they value so much. Nor can we trust this Government to protect the environment and address the climate emergency: that was made abundantly clear last week by the Secretary of State’s decision to grant permission for a new coal mine in Cumbria, a shocking decision which has attracted the attention, and the concern, of John Kerry, the United States climate envoy.

In 2019, the UK Parliament declared a climate and environment emergency. I call on the Government to accept new clauses 72 and 73 and amendment 63, which I believe would strengthen the Bill.

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But there is much more to do, and some councils are trying to thwart the aims of Parliament, either by counting every application as a self-build when it is not or by seeking to manipulate downwards the numbers on the registers by insisting on a local connection test, by charging a substantial fee or even by removing people’s names when they have not yet met their obligations to those registered individuals. My proposals would make it much more difficult for councils to behave in that way, and would substantially increase the likelihood that more supply will come forward, which is what we need if we are to create a world in which more people on ordinary incomes have the chance to bring forward their own schemes and have a dwelling of their own.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Happy wedding anniversary, Nickie Aiken!

[Nickie Aiken (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con)]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker.

I want to speak in favour of Government new clause 119, to which I am delighted to add my name. The campaign for a register for short-term Airbnb-style properties has been long in the making. Before I came to this place, when I was a member of Philippa Roe’s cabinet on Westminster Council, we successfully lobbied the Government of the time—the coalition Government—to secure a 90-day limit for lettings in London under the Deregulation Act 2015. Mr Deputy Speaker, I hope you will allow me to pay tribute to Philippa Roe, Baroness Couttie, who lost her battle against cancer yesterday. I pay tribute to the brilliant work she did as a councillor.

It should therefore come as no surprise that I welcome the substance of the Government’s new clause 119, which would require the Secretary of State to make provision for a registration scheme for short-term rental properties. Legislating for such a scheme, let alone understanding the scale of the problem across the country, has been hampered over the past decade by a distinct lack of evidence and data. With this in mind, I would like to stress the importance of subsection 3 of new clause 119, which will mean that the Secretary of State

“must consult the public before making the first regulations under this section.”

This is absolutely the right approach, in my opinion. Consultation will be fundamental, and we need time to review the data and make sure that we are doing this right.

I have a certain amount of sympathy with the hon. Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell). There are strong commonalities between the Government’s new clause 119 and new clause 107, and I know, having run a local authority, that we must allow councils the freedom to do what is best for their own area. Believe me, a one-size-fits-all approach will not work. To avoid over-legislating, it will be essential that we get this right before applying the standardised registration scheme to the to-do list of local authorities, primarily because not all local authorities need a registration scheme; for those where a scheme is necessary, it must differ according to regional trends in short-term letting. Westminster will be different from York, and requirements in York will be different from those in Cumbria and coastal communities.

I take this opportunity to thank the Minister, my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for South East Cambridgeshire (Lucy Frazer), who has really listened and got this argument. I do ask, though, that we look at announcing a timescale for the first regulations to be brought forward, to allow local authorities to start planning now for the registration if it is coming later this year. I am delighted that the Department has accepted our arguments and has brought in new clause 119.