Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill (Twenty Fifth sitting)

Tim Farron Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 18th October 2022 Public Bill Committees

[Mrs Emma Lewell-Buck (South Shields) (Lab)]

I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

The new clause is tabled in my name and that of hon. Friends and hon. Members right across the House. Time and again, we have heard from the many Ministers who have sat opposite us during our short time considering the Bill that the Government are committed and serious about levelling up, yet time and again, when the Opposition have suggested amendments to support and strengthen those aims, the Government have voted against them. I hope that the Minister will give serious consideration to new clause 8, as it will actually help the Government.

The Government have struggled to define what levelling up means and, consequently, how its success can be measured. In fact, in their own technical annex to the White Paper, when addressing how they will measure boosts in productivity, pay, jobs and living standards—especially in areas where they are lagging—the Government state that further work needs to be undertaken to refine the metric. I humbly suggest that new clause 8 does just that.

Legislating for a reporting mechanism that is linked to a revival in manufacturing will focus the efforts of this and any future Government into job and skills creation, as well as the promotion of the UK as a manufacturing powerhouse once again. For too long our economy has been reliant on the service sector, where jobs can often be low paid and insecure, especially in coastal communities such as mine—coastal communities, towns and cities that were once the manufacturing hubs of the UK.

In the last 12 years we have seen a marked increase in low rates of economic growth, leading to stagnation in productivity and living standards. That is felt most starkly in the north-east, where Hartlepool, Redcar, Cleveland, Darlington, Newcastle, South Tyneside and Sunderland have all seen significantly decreased manufacturing outputs compared with 2010. The consequence has been an over 50% decrease in apprenticeships in engineering and manufacturing technologies in every single north-east local authority since 2010. Manufacturing makes up only approximately 9% of UK output, compared with 17% in the early ’90s. In other countries, such as Germany, Japan, Switzerland and South Korea, it is nearly as high as 25%.

The UK brand is still powerful; we have the skills and talents to be making and doing so much more. I do not have all the answers, and I know it can be difficult to create the right environment for manufacturing to thrive, but there are plenty of people smarter than me out there who have thought it through and do have the answers. What we need is a Government who are willing to listen to them, and to be held accountable for any action they take. New clause 8 would do that.

I suspect that the Minister will try to explain why the Government do not support the new clause. I suspect that she will explain that there is already provision for measuring and monitoring the missions in the Bill. However, new clause 8 goes further than that: it cuts across nearly every one of the levelling up missions but, more than that, it targets them directly at the very areas that the Bill claims it wants to level up. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s views on the new clause.

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

It is an honour to serve under your guidance, Sir Mark. I am in full agreement with the hon. Member for South Shields, and I am pleased to be a signatory to the new clause, which gives the Government the opportunity to place real, measurable metrics at the heart of levelling up. It would ensure that we tackle some of the myths about growth, which is a word bandied around an awful lot in this place. Many of us think that so much of what the Government mean by “growth” is just consumer spending on the basis of credit and, therefore, does not really add anything long term to our economy.

The new clause gives the Government the opportunity to have measurables for this country to level up in a way that sees us restore manufacturing and skills to the heart of our economy, ensuring that we have growth that is not only real and sustainable, but distributed equally across the country. It would ensure that the Government can be held to account on whether they achieve that or not.

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This is the first time I have spoken in Committee since the new Ministers took their place, so I welcome them. I am grateful for the time they and their predecessors—and their predecessors, and their predecessors—have given to debate some of these issues with colleagues who have concerns. I will be so bold as to say that they saved the best until last. I hope that, as we head out of Committee, the Government will look towards Report and bring something back then. As I have said before in Committee, given the commitments made in the Conservative party leadership campaign over the summer, the Bill will, by definition, have to undergo some pretty mighty changes before it re-emerges on Report. We need to find a way of sending the signal to our farmers and to everyone in this country who needs the food that our farmers produce that food security is important, that we can lock it into the planning system and that we can ensure it is considered as a material concern whenever development comes forward on our agricultural land.

[Tim Farron]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Buckingham on bringing forward these important new clauses. I agree with an awful lot of what he said. Undoubtably, food security is something that our country has overlooked hugely in recent decades, to our great cost. By some metrics, we produce only about 55% of the food we eat. That is not just a dangerous position to be in given the global situation, but it is morally questionable. As a first-world nation, we will go out and find the food we need, and we will inflate prices on the commodities markets, which will end up increasing prices for the poorest people in the world. On that level, we have a moral requirement to make good use of the land we have to produce food to feed ourselves so that we are not literally starving other people around the world.

It is worth pointing out that 70% of England’s land and about 72% of the United Kingdom’s land is agricultural. If we are serious about tackling global carbon emissions and improving biodiversity, we have to start with those working in farming. Anyone who thinks we can improve our environment without keeping people farming to deliver those environmental policies is not living in the real world.

The other thing that makes the new clauses attractive to me is that they refer to the responsibilities not just of planning authorities, but of Ministers. When it comes to planning authorities, a requirement to look at the impact of any proposal on food production and farming may sometimes mean that we protect land and do not allow development. It may also sometimes mean that we permit development, in order to allow, for example, diversification. Some level of renewable energy on farm sites is something that farmers actively want, to help shore up their businesses. I agree that we do not want to see whole farms handed over to solar, but many farmers would like the option to use renewables for environmental reasons and to cross-subsidise and diversify their business. Also, sometimes we simply need labour in those communities, and we may need to build some houses to ensure that we have sustainable farming.

I wish that the provisions of these important new clauses were already in law, because they would stop the Government botching the transition from the common agricultural policy, which was far from perfect, to the new ELM scheme. That will see farmers lose 20% of their income by the end of this year, with very little to replace it. Fewer than 2% of the 1,000 farmers in my patch—13 of them—have signed up for the new sustainable farming incentive. The botching of the transition means that farmers will lose their income, and so far they have very little to compensate for it.

However, to botch the unbotching is almost inexcusable. In the last few weeks, the Government have signalled that they might be ready to rip up ELMS altogether, after farmers have spent two years preparing for it. We see foolishness upon foolishness, all of which puts our farmers in a desperate position. They have never been more angry with the Government of the day—and we do not have time to go into the damage being done to our farming community by trade deals. We desperately need to remember, at the heart of policy making, nationally and locally, the importance of farmers and farming to food production and the environment. If the hon. Member for Buckingham were to press the new clauses to a vote, he could count me on his side—I would vote with him.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (Lee Rowley)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Mark. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham for his introduction to the new clauses and for the work he is doing on this important policy area. We absolutely accept the challenge that he puts to us. He made strong points about the importance of balancing competing demands, all of which are important in isolation and need to be thought through and integrated as best as possible, while recognising that it is sometimes not possible to do everything. The point of Government, both local and national, is to try to ensure that that balance is struck in the best possible way.

I hesitate to go too much into an agricultural discussion, although the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale was keen to move into that space, but I acknowledge the points that have been made. It is critical that we continue to have food security in the United Kingdom, that consumers have access to good quality, healthy and sustainable food and that domestic producers have a viable business in the long run. Although I do not want to trade figures, the figures I have in front of me state that we produce about 60% of what we eat, and we produce roughly 70% to 75% of what we can produce in this country. Given the problem of dates, times and the like, I recognise that those things move around, although they seem to have been relatively static over the last 20 years. Therefore—to my hon. Friend’s point—the question is whether the planning system needs further content and signals so that it is clear that these things can be weighed up more clearly.

At the current time, things are going on elsewhere in Government, particularly around the Agriculture Act, which my hon. Friend referenced. The Act commits the Secretary of State to have regard to the need to encourage the production of food by producers in England and for that production to be done in an environmentally sustainable way. Also in the Agriculture Act is a legal obligation to produce an assessment of food security once every three years. I hope that goes some way towards reassuring my hon. Friend, although I acknowledge that he is also interested specifically in the planning element.

This might be one of the statements that I make regularly over the next few minutes or so, but I am happy to talk to my hon. Friend in more detail about the underlying intent and calls behind his new clause. However, at the current time, I ask him to withdraw it in lieu of further discussions and debate outside after our sitting.

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[Rachael Maskell]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Sir Mark. I add my support for these measures, because it is incredibly important that power be given back to people in communities. On many occasions, I have seen developers across York move into a space and determine the future of a community without engaging it, even if only in a consultative way. Occasionally, the community may be lucky enough to meet the partners cursorily, yet those developers will derive serious profit from the land. Also, what they place on the land will have huge implications for local housing prices and economic opportunities for the community, but the community is completely disregarded.

That feeds into a wider agenda around people identifying with their place. Across society, we are wrestling with that issue, and with people having a franchise in place. People are feeling more and more disconnected from their locality. It is crucial that we find a way, across communities, to rebalance people’s right to steer through a mechanism. In debate on my earlier amendments, I talked about deliberative democracy. The community should absolutely be involved in processes before they get to a certain point. It is far better to prevent an incident than to try to recover once it has happened. It is important to find a way to give people franchise over their community, particularly when we contrast the harm that could be done with the profit that developing companies and landowners will reap. This huge extraction economy, as I have been calling it, is playing off the localism that people want in their vicinity, and causing a lot of stress and tension, because while it benefit others, it causes the community harm. A community right of appeal will start to tilt the balance back towards local people, which is absolutely essential.

[Tim Farron]

This important new clause gets to the heart of a historical imbalance, injustice and inequity in the planning system. Developers, who tend to have significantly more resources than those who question or oppose a development, have the right to appeal against the local authority or national park that turned down their planning permission, and they have the resources to see that through; but what happens if a community that has opposed a development loses? It may have opposed not development, but the nature of the development proposed. In my constituency, we are very often happy with the number of houses proposed, but outraged that none of the houses is affordable to local people.

The ability to challenge a developer and a decision seems to be at the heart of democracy. To really level up, we must not just level up geographically, but level out the imbalance of power between developers, many of which have substantial resources, and local communities, who, generally speaking, do not.

The new clause is a sensible move in the direction of winning people’s consent to the planning system, so that communities do not feel that things are being done to them. If levelling up is to mean anything, and if devolution is to mean anything, the Government should surely want to embrace proposals such as this.

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[Greg Smith]

There is clearly a game afoot, whereby many developers up and down the land acquire planning permission, but do not build out what they have received planning permission for. I stand to be corrected, but I believe that around a million homes that have planning permission are not being built out. New clause 18 would shut down some of the loopholes that are exploited; for example, if a trench is dug, or a single pipe is laid, or something very superficial to the development is started, that can satisfy the planning authorities that the development has started, even though not a single brick may follow, or certainly not in the timeframe the community expects.

Particularly pertinent is the ability under new clause 20 for a planning authority to revoke or modify planning permission where the development has not been built, or started. The community is expecting 10, 50, 1,000 houses or whatever, but the developer is simply playing a game, in order to increase the land value for resale later, or because they want to sit on the permission and distort property values in the a particular area, or for some other reason.

In our planning system, there should be an presumption that once a developer has been granted planning permission, they need to build the development. There will always be reasons why a development might not start immediately—force majeure or whatever—and we need to be conscious of that, but if a developer has been given planning permission, they should build or face a penalty. New clause 21 goes that little bit further: it would make council tax payable on sites that have been granted planning permission. That would give the developer a financial incentive, shall we say, to get on with the development, because if they are attracting council tax on each new home given planning permission, that will quickly rack up, certainly in many parts of the country, to many thousands of pounds per housing unit per year.

The new clauses are designed to get the planning system to work as it is meant to do. It is about ensuring that planning permission means something. When it is granted, communities that have consented to it should see the product—the homes and the commercial developments—that they want.

[Tim Farron]

These interesting new clauses highlight two issues about which I am particularly concerned—issues to which the hon. Gentleman alluded. They are very helpful new clauses, and I am grateful to him for tabling them. He is right that, over the past decade, roughly a million properties granted planning permission have not been built. That tells us something. When the Government consider growth and the need for new developments, they think they just need to loosen planning regulations. Well, the answer to that is that 1 million new homes have obtained planning permission but have not been built. Let us focus on making sure that those developments get delivered, rather than on reducing the regulations, because that tends to lead to the wrong sort of homes in the wrong sort of places.

Another issue affects tens of thousands—but not a million—houses. It is when developments begin but are not completed. That may be for a range of reasons, such as genuine business failure. It may also be due to a disreputable developer; we have seen plenty of those. I think of one in my constituency, a serial bankrupt, and it seems obvious to me that in their case, we are talking about a deliberate business tactic. Developments are either completely or partially abandoned. That is a waste of time and money, and it creates eyesores for communities, when the development could have provided nice, decent homes for people to live in.

Would the Government consider going further than the new clauses suggest and applying existing legislation, namely empty dwelling management orders? They allow local authorities to commandeer empty properties after a period. It should be noted, however, that the period is seven years, which is far too long, but we should be able to commandeer developments that were begun but not completed for public use and public good. I can think of one house in the Kendal Parks area of Kendal that has been uncompleted for 20 years. It is an eyesore, and damaging to the local community. It could be a decent home for someone. I can also think of a whole development in Burton-in-Kendal that has been poorly managed and has fallen out of the hands of one set of owners into those of another. The ability of local authorities to commandeer properties for the public good would be of huge benefit, not just to my community but to every Committee member’s community.

[Lee Rowley]

I am grateful to the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale for his comments, and to my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham for tabling the new clauses.

I accept that this is another area of policy that is difficult and challenging and that a balance needs to be struck. I completely understand the concerns that have been raised. In order not to detain the Committee, and without offering any guarantees, I would be keen to continue the conversation outside the realms of the Committee to consider and reflect on the points made by those who have spoken. I am happy to discuss that in advance of further stages of the Bill, should my hon. Friend be content to do that.

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[Tim Farron]

The two new clauses are about trusting local communities. We are not saying that every meeting must be held virtually, but that local authorities—in this case, planning authorities—should have the power to do so, and for good reason. My preference is for in-person meetings, but for the reasons that have been set out, especially by the hon. Member for Buckingham, local authorities should have that power.

Every part of my patch is parish. There are 67 parishes, and some of them are bigger than most Members’ constituencies and have not very many people living in them. To get from one end of the Lakes parish to the other, people have to pass three or four lakes. We should consider the age profile of some of the members of the parish councils and the distances involved. I said earlier that it rarely rains in the lakes, but occasionally it might. It certainly gets dark at certain times of the year. On a wet November night, holding a meeting on screen rather than physically is probably safer and better for everybody. Let us trust communities to make those choices on the go, and not impose.

The pandemic has been a traumatic and formative experience for us as a culture, as a society and as representatives of the people. We have learned many lessons, and some of them we should carry on with. I was disheartened and disappointed that some members of the Government seemed to be almost determined, as a point of principle, to close down any virtual operation of democracy during the pandemic—never mind at the end of it. It is encouraging to hear a cross-party outbreak of common sense today. It would be great if the Government listened.

[Dehenna Davison]

As a millennial Minister who is used to swiping and not to turning pages, Members might expect me to say that I prefer virtual meetings, but actually I do not. In-person meetings and the social element are important, yet we saw the value of virtual meetings during the pandemic, at the time when we needed them most. Hon. Members will remember the powers granted through the Coronavirus Act 2020, which allowed local authorities flexibility on remote and hybrid meetings, in certain circumstances. They will also know that those regulations expired back in May 2021. Since that date, all council meetings have had to be in person. The new clauses lean into the terms of those previous provisions and seek to replicate them on a permanent basis, but only for planning committees. I heard the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Mansfield.

Looking beyond the circumstances of the pandemic, the Government considered that there may be benefits to permanent provisions for remote meetings, and that local councils may be keen to have the flexibility to use that provision as they see fit. I have been lobbied by a lot of my local parish councillors on the benefits that remote meetings can bring.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Mansfield highlighted, the Government conducted call for evidence last year to test the views of those who had participated in and experienced councils’ remote meetings to inform our decision on this matter. I thank the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich, and the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale for their points on trust in local governance and local planning, which we all agree is paramount. Increasing participation is only ever a good thing.

The Department has considered the responses to the call for evidence and we have been weighing the benefits, which hon. Members have highlighted, against views that physical attendance remains important to deliver good governance and democratic accountability. I take on board the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Mansfield about the investment in the technology that a lot of local authorities had made, which must also be taken into account.

I genuinely thank my hon. Friends for tabling the new clause, but we need to first consider the call for evidence. We will issue our response, which will set out the Government’s intentions. I ask for a tiny bit more patience and for the new clause to be withdrawn.