Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Peter Bottomley Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments
Tuesday 17th October 2023 Commons Chamber

[Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)]

I congratulate the Minister on the way she presented the Government’s approach to these over 100 amendments— on heaven knows how many pages, if one tries to read through them. I also congratulate the Opposition spokesperson, the hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Matthew Pennycook), on martialling the points and presenting them in a way that the House can understand. In particular, I join him in saying to the Government that Lord Crisp’s proposals have much that should be incorporated.

Amendment 327, which would be inserted before schedule 7, talks about houses designed

“to provide year-round thermal comfort for inhabitants”;

to have reduced opportunities for the “risk of crime”; to be free, as far as possible,

“from adverse and intrusive noise and light pollution”;

and to ensure that

“living areas and bedrooms…have access to natural light”.

The amendment addresses a whole series of issues that did not get as much attention as they should have done. When developers are able to convert office blocks into homes, some of those homes are, frankly, substandard.

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

I very much agree with the point that the Father of the House has just made. Does he agree that healthy homes should incorporate the idea of green space and more equitable access to good-quality green space within reach of those homes, as set out in the Lords amendment? We know about the improvements to physical and mental health that can come as a result of access to green space.

[Sir Peter Bottomley]

The hon. Lady reminds me that I meant to say that when Dr Christopher Addison became the first Minister for Health in 1919, the first action he took was to help build social housing on a scale that would allow people’s health to be improved by living in far better environments, inside and outside their homes.

Yesterday, in levelling-up questions, the Secretary of State very kindly spoke clearly about the approach to the development at Lansdowne Nursery, on the A259 in my constituency, and the threat to Chatsmore Farm, in what is known locally as the Goring gap.

It is important that the words that the Secretary of State spoke yesterday should be passed on to planning inspectors, including the one in Arundel today, who is considering the appeal against the properly justified refusal of planning permission to put homes on the Lansdowne Nursery site.

I invite Ministers from the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities to come to my constituency—and to the constituents of my hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Andrew Griffith) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Nick Gibb)—to see how every bit of grass is under threat from opportunist developers.

Those developers have rightly been turned down by local authorities—boroughs and districts. They should be supported by planning inspectors, not at risk of what I would call “a rogue decision” by someone from Bristol.

Turning to amendment 22, after clause 70, the Government are wrong to ban parish councils from meeting remotely if they want to. Some parish councils cover a large area and many elderly people kindly serve on them. If they want to have a valid meeting, why can they not tune in, if they are ill, remote or for some other reason? It seems to me to be totally unnecessary for central Government to say to local councils, especially parish councils, “You cannot do that.” I hope that the Government will think again, if not in this Bill then in another one. Let people have autonomy and a degree of sovereignty. If their powers are limited, then how they use them should be up to them, in my view.

In amendments 242 and 243, Lord Young of Cookham has helped qualifying and non-qualifying residential leaseholders. I accept that the Government proposals are limited to residential leaseholders and do not cover commercial leaseholders.

What the House should not accept, and where the Government should think again, is why there has to be a distinction between qualifying and non-qualifying leaseholders. Many non-qualifying leaseholders have homes on which they cannot get a mortgage or sell, and on which they cannot avoid paying high annual costs, as well as remediation costs.

I repeat the question put by the Opposition spokesperson, the hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich, about what happens to people who have paid but who will now not qualify. Will the Minister give clear advice when she winds up, or in a later statement, on what happens to leaseholders facing claims for payment that they think they should not have to pay? Can people get out of this dilemma, which is caused by too many people in Government not understanding the legal status of residential leaseholders?

I do not believe that Dame Judith Hackitt understood it when she put forward her fire safety proposals, and I do not think the Government understood in the early days. Now that they do understand, will they please remove the distinction? The idea that if people live in homes below 11 metres they are not facing an un-mortgageable and unsellable home is wrong. Many people who have leasehold homes under that level are frankly in a dilemma that Government ought to be able to resolve.

I could go on for longer, but many other Members wish to speak. I congratulate those who have helped to improve the Bill. There are many elements that I support—the Government can take that for granted—but on issues where they are allowing injustice or ineffective approaches to continue, let us change that.

Let us be on the side of the 5 million to 6 million residential leaseholders whom we have ignored for too long, whose situation has been understood poorly. Now that it is understood better, we ought to allow them to have better, healthier, happier and more financially secure lives.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

I call the SNP spokesperson.

--- Later in debate ---

[Rachel Maclean]

It is a pleasure to be able to respond to the points made by colleagues across the House. This is a complex and important Bill, and it has been a thoughtful and well set out debate; everyone has contributed.

I thank colleagues across the House for their remarks. I can assure everyone that the Government have listened extremely carefully to those. Because I have limited time, I may not be able to give as full an exposition on every single point, but I hope colleagues will not be disappointed and my door is always open to colleagues —as are the doors of all my ministerial colleagues in the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities—to listen to any specific problems that people will have. Therefore, I want to thank the Father of the House, my hon. Friend the Member for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley) and my right hon. Friend the Member for North Somerset (Dr Fox) for their comments.

I thank the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Sarah Dyke) for her maiden speech and congratulate her on how she delivered it and its content. I listened to it with great interest and particularly noted her advocacy for and championing of the cider industry in her constituency, as well as her standing up for farmers. I am sure that is something that every single Member of the House can strongly agree with. I wish her all the best for her parliamentary career.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for St Ives (Derek Thomas), my right hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Wendy Morton), the hon. Member for North Shropshire (Helen Morgan), my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (John Redwood), my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (Greg Smith), my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis) and my hon. Friends the Members for Mansfield (Ben Bradley) and for Waveney (Peter Aldous) for their comments. I also thank colleagues from the Opposition Front Benches for their constructive comments. We have definitely reached agreement on some points, although not all, which is not surprising given the range of issues we have been looking at.

I want to touch on a few themes that colleagues have raised. I hope that we can go some way to addressing the specific questions put to me by them. Colleagues have raised concerns about how national development management policies will operate in practice; people have said they are thinking ahead to how those could operate in practice. I want to be clear that, where a decision is made in accordance with the development plan, national development management policies and a specific local policy, and NDMPs are relevant considerations but not in conflict, as part of a planning judgment, it will still be for the decision maker to decide how much weight is afforded to those different policies based on their relevance to the proposed development. The precedence clause sets out only what should be done in the event of a conflict between policies and where they contradict one another. We do expect such conflicts to be limited in future because of the more distinct roles that national and local policy will have. In response to questions asked by many hon. and right hon. Members, I can assure the House that we will be consulting further on how that will operate. My right hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills asked: what does the provision mean when it says the Secretary of State can act urgently? I reassure her that that refers to very limited circumstances such as the unprecedented situations that we saw during the pandemic. It is envisaged that that provision would be used only in those sorts of urgent and emergency situations.

There has been much debate about the role of district councils in the future combined county authorities. I have definitely heard the points that colleagues have made. We do value the amazing work that is done by district councils. I wish to thank my own district council—Redditch Borough Council—for the incredible work that it does. I know that Members have thanked their own local authorities. I listened very carefully to the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Mansfield. It is right that we want devolution to work and the voices of those district councils are really important. The Under-Secretary of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Redcar (Jacob Young), has been very clear in his discussions that we are encouraging potential areas to consider how best to involve district councils—they make a unique contribution—in recognition of the role that they play, without holding up those important devolution arrangements.

I have been struck by the number of colleagues who have talked about remote meetings and challenged the Government’s position on that. It is the Government’s view that face-to-face democracy should remain in place and that physical attendance at meetings is important, not just to build strong working relationships, but to deliver good governance and democratic accountability. It is clearly right that councillors are regularly and routinely meeting other councillors in person and that members of the public can ask questions in person. Some of these measures were brought in during the pandemic. Now that the pandemic has passed, it is right to consider reversing those and getting back to that face-to-face democracy. However, we are looking at a call for evidence on this matter and we will publish the results of that as soon as possible.

[Sir Peter Bottomley]

It seems to me that it would be a good idea to consult parish councils in particular and to have a debate in the House of Commons when the Government have had their responses. For the Government to say what their view is, is one thing. For Parliament, which gives powers to authorities, to decide we do not want to tell them how to discuss using those powers is another. Those authorities are limited by the powers. In my view, they should not be limited in how they discuss them.

[Rachel Maclean]

I thank the Father of the House for those comments. I can assure him that the Government are carefully considering his points, and those made by other colleagues.

I turn to rural-proofing and the vital role of rural areas—a point made by a number of colleagues, particularly my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham. He asked how we will make sure that we abide by our commitments to rural-proofing in the Bill. I wish to be clear that we are fully behind the objectives to make sure that rural areas benefit from our levelling-up agendas. We want to make sure that the needs of people and businesses in rural areas are at the heart of policymaking, including through rural-proofing. The report that we published early last year demonstrates that we are making real progress on all sorts of issues, including digital connectivity and action to tackle rural crime.

My hon. Friend also asked about the use of agricultural land for food production—again, an issue close to the hearts of many of us who represent rural areas. The Government agree that we must seek to protect our food production and rural environments, and we will publish the consultation response on that issue very shortly.