My Lords, I have a few reasons for seeking to have a short debate on Clause 33. First, let us be clear: this clause was not in the draft Bill that the Joint Committee scrutinised. That is a statement of fact. I am not complaining about that, because there are other things in the Bill that were not in the draft Bill and which I totally support. Indeed, I have signed one of the later government amendments. However, the fact is that it was not in the draft Bill. It was not even discussed or scrutinised in the House of Commons. I often wonder what happens down there. I spent 27 years there. We used to go through the minutiae in great detail. Half the Bills that come up here now have not even been debated. I question that. This clause was not in the draft Bill and was not discussed or scrutinised in the House of Commons; therefore we in this House ought to ask a few questions about it.
This is about lowering building standards. I do not want to be unfair to the Minister, because it is not his Bill—it is Oliver Letwin’s Bill. We were told that in the Joint Committee; Ken Clarke said to Oliver, when they came in as witnesses, “It is your Bill”. Is the Minister aware that he will be the first Minister in the coalition to speak in support of lowering housing standards? When the Environmental Audit Committee in the other place looked at this, a civil servant was sent to give evidence, not a Minister. He is out on a limb today. Is this what he went into politics and into the coalition for, to advocate the lowering of housing standards, from a Liberal Democrat perspective? That is what this is about.
I do not know all the background to this, obviously. There is a limit to my time. I looked at the clauses which were not in the Bill that we scrutinised in the Joint Committee that I had the honour of chairing. This one popped up one day on the system and my attention was drawn to it. I can see the Home Builders Federation’s fingerprints all over the clause; there is no question about that. I cannot see the fingerprints of the Construction Products Association, though—the people who actually make the products that make our houses energy efficient and more sustainable. Of course, they are small firms; there is probably not much by way of political donations from that part of the economy. So the message to the building products companies from this clause is, “Do not bother to invest in sustainable products”. What a message to send to a vital part of our manufacturing industry.
In the previous debate I raised the question of the local plan, and I fully accept that the Minister has to come back on that. However, in respect of this clause, my understanding is that the required local plan changes will effectively mean that nothing will happen. There will be a real problem here if local authorities have to change the plans at massive cost due to Clause 33. I say to the Minister that it will put a blight on housebuilding—the very opposite to what we need. We need 4,000 new homes every week. Local authorities which want to build sustainable housing or have a sustainable housing requirement will have to change their local plan when this clause becomes a reality and the code is no longer in use, and I will come to the details of the code in a minute. They will be forced to go to public inquiries at massive cost and that will take time. As my noble friend said, it will take two or three years. In other words, they will be advised not to bother, and we will end up getting housing of a lower standard.
My questions to the Minister are more specifically about this clause than the previous one, to which I was not paying full attention, although I listened to what the noble Lord, Lord Best, said. It struck me that the question about the local plans was quite legitimate. To say that you are giving local authorities choice is fine if the choice is theirs to make and they can get on with it, but if the consequence of the change is that they have to change the local plan and they may be opposed in doing that, it could take years and money, so they will not do it. Therefore, their choice is actually removed. The clause is giving them a freedom but constraining the way they use it in such a way that they cannot use it. It is a bit like saying that this is a Deregulation Bill but it is shot through with more regulation. There is a real difficulty here. I should like the Minister to be more specific about the effect of local plans because that will be important when we come to Report.
What is going to be lost in this? What will be lost are rules relating to materials and life cycle, pollution, site waste, internal recycling, energy efficiency, water efficiency, surface water flood risk, drying space in homes, white goods facilities in homes, daylight and sound. These are all issues relating to the environment and energy, and they will be lost because the code will not apply. That is what it is all about. There is no doubt that there will be a drop in housing standards exactly at the time when we do not need that.
The Environmental Audit Committee of the other place looked at this. It said that unlike building regulations, the code for sustainable housing,
“incentivises developers and designers to think about sustainability from the outset and throughout the development process”.
The coalition agreement stated that the Government would,
“require continuous improvements to the energy efficiency of new housing”.
Since 2007, the code for sustainable housing has delivered continuous improvements in the energy efficiency of new housing and other aspects of sustainable construction. On the Government’s decision to wind down the code, the Environmental Audit Committee of the other places stated, as part of its consultation, that the:
“DCLG may have overstated the case in dismissing”,
the code,
“as ‘unnecessary bureaucracy’. Retaining and evolving the CSH may offer a better way of driving incremental increases in sustainable home building than the proposed options set out in the … consultation”.
The LGA has said that it is going back almost to square 1 in terms of decent standards.
Manufacturers of building products have highlighted that long-term investment in sustainable building products might be affected by the new regime. The Construction Products Association pointed out that,
“sustainability represents an important business opportunity for UK manufacturers and represents market growth and export potential. Regulation and Standards are required to drive this forward”.
The BRE, which I will come to in more detail in a minute, said that the consultation proposals would restrict the ability of local planning authorities to adopt proactive strategies and would run counter to the Government’s stated aim to allow greater local choice.
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From my point of view, we have a real problem here with the clause. It looks so innocuous, does it not? Page 28 looks like a technical adjustment, as Ministers sometimes say—as I have said myself several times—but there is far more to it than that. You have to look at the section of the Planning and Energy Act that the clause amends. It states:
“A local planning authority in England may in their development plan documents”—
note that, in their development plan documents—
“and a local planning authority in Wales may in their local development plan, include policies imposing reasonable requirements for … (c) development in their area to comply with energy efficiency standards that exceed the energy requirements of building regulations”.
It is paragraph (c) that the clause removes. That is what it is about. You have to read the section that it amends to see how damaging this part of the Bill is.
The removal of the code, which gives local authorities flexibility, and the introduction of a national standard as part of building regulations goes against the coalition agreement, which I have already quoted from, which said that the Government would return decision-making powers on housing and planning to local councils. The quality of housing stock may decline when the standards are removed. Home owners will be faced with high energy bills and poorer quality environments. Twenty seven per cent of the UK’s carbon emissions come from domestic property. That was something we drove home when the then Climate Change Bill went through this House before it went to the other place. We did far more work on it than the House of Commons. Domestic properties are creating a massive amount of the carbon emissions of the UK. We need to do more to tackle that, not less. The UK low-carbon environmental goods and services market is now worth an estimated £122 billion to UK plc.
Why on earth is this in the Bill? Why is the Minister today proposing to scrap the code? He must tell us about the impact of that. How will environmentally sustainable housebuilding be promoted? If the code
goes and local authorities say that they want to maintain those standards, they will have to change their local plans. That will take years and it will be opposed by developers—I know that developers build the houses; I am not slagging them off. They like flat greenfield sites—I think that they should have more of them in the green belt, by the way; I have no problem about that. If the Minister wants to talk about delivering up steps, try delivering in Stroud in Gloucestershire. That is the place to go delivering to find out about access and steps up.
Building to lower standards will store up problems for future generations. That is the reality. To conclude, I ask the Minister to make a commitment before we get to Report that he personally—because he is operating as the postbox for the other Ministers, for Mr Letwin and Co., the gang who want to burn all the regulations and hang the consequences because it looks good—will visit the BRE. It is only 10 miles up the M1, near Watford. He should see the reality of what it does to give advice. It is now privately funded; it was government-funded at one time. The late Ian Gow permitted me to go there when I was shadow Housing Minister in about 1984. The fact is that it is a leader in this. People, both in this country and abroad, listen to the BRE on sustainability in housing.
We have housing stock of 23 million or so. We are not doing much to upgrade that. The only chance we have to improve is in the small numbers of new stock that come along—although we all want those numbers to be vastly increased. Will the Minister go and look on site and listen to the BRE’s views about the damaging effects of this clause on our future housing standards? I do not want him to be in the position of the lap-dog for the Tories and of being told, “Go and do this. It is lowering housing standards, but you are the patsy Lib Dem”. He does not want that reputation. One way to deal with it is to get a few facts, listen to people who know about this and who have certainly advised the Government in the past, though I do not know whether they did on this clause. The BRE has certainly drawn the attention of others to the clause. I saw it on e-mail and that made me look at why this clause was not in the Bill to start with. It was part of another consultation around the same time. It is a tragedy that this was never raised in the House of Commons, because there has been no warning about building to lower housing standards. That cannot be a good thing. That is why we should have a brief debate on Clause 33.