Quality in the Built Environment

Tony Lloyd Excerpts

Wednesday 13th December 2017 Westminster Hall

[Tony Lloyd (Rochdale) (Lab)]

May I, too, congratulate the hon. Member for Bury St Edmunds (Jo Churchill)? She will have to go home blushing tonight, because she made an excellent speech and set out the terrain very well. Indeed, all the contributions had real merit in their different ways.

We know that we have a housing crisis in this country and that we have to build at levels not seen previously, but the hon. Member for Henley (John Howell) is absolutely right: this is not just about houses; it is about people’s homes. It is about people’s homes in communities that are both safe and sustainable, and that means things such as flood prevention. The hon. Member for Falkirk (John Mc Nally) talked about building that in and, as far as we can, future-proofing.

The right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) spoke about the need for facilities for people with disabilities. In fact, we should be building homes that can be retrofitted where appropriate, so that people can, if they choose to, spend their lives in those homes. The windy staircases of the past are simply not consistent with the future. The hon. Member for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson) also made very valid points on how we ought to move forward. I was attracted by the comments of the hon. Member for Henley about neighbourhood planning. Yes, we have to see design as a central part of the changes that we want to make.

One of the realities is that we have a serious infrastructure backlog that will prevent us from moving forward quickly. Building 300,000 new homes means an awful lot of construction workers. We have an ageing construction force in this country, and half the construction workers in the national capital are EU nationals. I know not where they will go post-Brexit, but there is a good chance that many will disappear. That will, if nothing else, create shortages in London and suck in construction workers from elsewhere. With those twin problems, we have to be serious about training the next generation of construction workers. They will not necessarily always be young people; they may be less than young people.

I say to the Minister that under this Government, we have seen the hollowing out of both planning and building control in our local authorities. That simply is not consistent with the demands that the hon. Member for Bury St Edmunds has rightly made. We have to see the public weal protected, and in the end it is our local authorities that can do that best, if we are to make it meaningful. I will not repeat everything that the hon. Lady said about the housing surveys. I will simply repeat the point that we know that many people—a disproportionately high number—are dissatisfied with the homes that they get.

There is a house in my constituency that was referred to in the report by the all-party parliamentary group for excellence in the built environment. It is owned by Elizabeth and Stephen Watkins. The house was built in 1998, and they have been involved in a dispute ever since. It has never been lived in. It is a disgrace that there is no process for reconciliation. We must have not a nice, cosy, industry-led ombudsman, but an ombudsman process that has real teeth and the capacity to make a material difference. I have to agree again with the hon. Member for Bury St Edmunds, because yes, that would be good for the private sector.

Grenfell Tower, we know, was retrofitted. We will probably have to do a serious retrofit to something like 27 million homes that already exist in Britain, but the work on Grenfell Tower was very recent. We have to ensure that there is an ombudsman capacity that has real teeth and can protect people, whether they are living in social housing, in owner-occupation or, very importantly, under private landlords. We know that private landlords will play a disproportionate part in the building of the future.

I will finish on a couple of issues. The hon. Member for Henley said that he does not want to see little boxes. We have to do something about the space standards. There is a consultation out, and I say to the Minister that we have to bring that to a conclusion. Secondly—this will be my concluding point—we know that we are not hitting our targets for moving to carbon neutrality by 2050. Probably 1 million homes in this country will be retrofitted to those carbon standards. The Committee on Climate Change said that it should be something like 4 million over the same period. I say to the Minister that the Government have now got to do an awful lot more.

Congratulations to the hon. Member for Bury St Edmunds. This has been a great debate and it is an important one for the future.