My Lords, I shall speak also to the other amendments in this group. If I can make a slightly irrelevant comment, if the EU working time directive were to apply to Ministers in this House, the two Ministers who are dealing with this Bill might be better treated than they are now. That is a dig at the Chief Whip.
There cannot be many occasions when an amendment commands the support of all parties in this House and of most Members of Parliament, would command widespread support from many parts of London and possibly other parts of the country where people are affected and which, were the Minister to agree to the amendment or something like it, would mean that she would be serenaded in the headlines of the Evening Standard. That is a pretty good win-win, and there cannot be many of those around, so later on I will give the Minister a chance to say that she accepts this amendment.
If I were a Minister, I would not understand why officials were advising me not to accept the amendment because there is nothing wrong with it. It is absolutely right in terms of local democracy for local people to have a say and right in terms of good governance in the benefits to London and other parts of the country. It is a total win-win for the Government. I should have kept this amendment until there was a Labour Government, and they could have benefited from it, but I have generously given it to the Minister today.
Given the widespread support, outside people have got on to me. I pay particular tribute to the Ladbroke Association and its chair Sophia Lambert who has been extremely helpful and has given me and other people a lot of advice. The amendments in this group
are actually a complete Bill. If the Minister were to adopt them, or much of them, her officials would have been saved a great of work in drafting something. Not only has there been widespread support, but there have been many previous instances in this House when Members have put forward legislation with similar proposals. I am thinking of the noble Baroness, Lady Gardner of Parkes, Lord Jenkin of Roding, the noble Lord, Lord Selsdon and the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, who have all tabled amendments to Bills. The noble Lord, Lord Selsdon, has also tabled an excellent Bill himself with the help of surveyors from the Pyramus and Thisbe Club. In the Commons, several MPs have put this forward as well, including Karen Buck, MP for Westminster North. Essentially, this proposal goes across parties; I hope that the Government will feel able to support it.
11.45 am
The public are very much concerned. One has only to indicate that one is interested in this issue to be given an avalanche of comments of experiences, certainly in many parts of London. People have told me that they have suffered years of noise and distress; people working at night cannot sleep in the day if a basement is being excavated; there is dust and vibration, and people who work from home say that they cannot carry on and have to find somewhere else to work. We are talking not just about Kensington, Chelsea and Westminster but about Wandsworth, Southwark, Camden and Richmond. If these basements have not come to the local area where any of your Lordships live, they are coming. I guarantee it, so noble Lords should not just say, “This is not for me; this is for those people in Kensington”—not at all.
I have learned a great deal about planning law in recent weeks, because I have a Private Member’s Bill on a similar topic, which is sitting somewhere waiting to be debated. I am conscious that I have a lot to learn, and there are in this House many real experts. I will make some brief introductory comments. There are two sorts of developments in basements. Where they extend beyond the footprint of the house, planning permission is required; if the basement is within the footprint of the house, it is classed as permitted development and planning permission is not necessary. By complete coincidence as I was coming in, I bumped into the leader of Camden Council and asked her what her council thought. She said that it would welcome a change in the law because it cannot do what it wants to do, as it is not permitted by the present legislative framework.
Under the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, all development needs planning permission. However, Section 59 of the Act allows the Secretary of State to make an order exempting certain categories of development from the requirement of planning permission. The Secretary of State at the time duly made an order called the general permitted development order. One of the categories of development covered by the order at present is certain types of extensions to residential properties. Although we think that it was never intended, the definition of “extension” in the order has been interpreted as including basement developments under the footprint of the house. There
are legal doubts about this interpretation and I have talked to one resident of an inner London borough— a QC, so not a person to be trifled with—who is contemplating testing this point through judicial review, something that has not been done before. On previous occasions, inspectors have been asked to comment, but he has said to me that he was thinking of taking this to judicial review because there were serious doubts as to whether the interpretation was correct.
The right course, and the easiest one, would be for the Minister to amend the GPDO to exclude all basements. It could be done at the stroke of a ministerial pen. It would save the cost of the alternative that the Minister keeps suggesting, which is to use something called the Article 4 procedure. That procedure is cumbersome, slow and costly and would have to be done local authority by local authority. It requires 12 months’ notice, meaning that people can then appeal and claim damages if they are caught with a development in train before the Article 4 procedure had its 12 months to come into effect. Amending the GPDO, however, would be simple. It would save bureaucracy, time and money and achieve part of the end. If the Minister were to take the GPDO route, there would still be a need for this Bill, because, as things stand, local authorities are reluctant to refuse planning permission because of the cost to them of appeals. Time and time again, we hear of local authorities saying, “Well, we’re not challenging this because we can’t afford the cost of the appeal”, and I understand that. This is one reason why local authorities are still granting planning permission, where logic would suggest otherwise. One has only to read the Evening Standard or Metro to see, week after week, examples of horrific large developments. They are fine for the owner but horrific for anyone who lives not too far away. I believe that my amendments would give local authorities the powers that they need.
If the Minister were to hint to me now that she is prepared to accept the principle of my amendments, I will not bore or take up the time of the Committee by going through them in detail. If she were to say that she agrees in principle and that something will be brought forward on Report, I shall sit down. I know that I have bounced her into this but it seems the sensible thing to do. There is no reason on earth why the Minister should not accept a change in the planning laws, and she would be very popular if she did. However, this is not about popularity; it is about good local government. Residents in many parts of London are entitled to peace and quiet and to not suffer disturbance. I shall go on but if at some point the Minister gets a note saying “Accept this”, I shall of course sit down.
The first amendment sets out a code of practice for subterranean development works. It would introduce some enforceable rules so that local authorities could ensure that developers digging basements did so in a way least likely to cause damage and annoyance to neighbours—that annoyance can be pretty awful. In the past, the Minister has claimed that local authorities already have adequate powers. She said that in an earlier debate and she said it to me in a letter. She said that they could, for instance, impose planning conditions to control construction noise. I differ from that view following advice that I have had. Planning conditions are normally used only to deal with matters that
cannot be dealt with under other legislation. Because noise is normally dealt with under control of pollution legislation, many authorities fear that such a condition would be struck down. So it is not easy to enforce noise standards through existing legislation that requires local authorities to prosecute alleged offenders. A code of practice would be much simpler, and what is required is something that developers would automatically be bound by.
My next amendment says that there should be a presumption against subterranean development. Very few basements built in London bring any benefits to the local community. They may be fine for the owners, who will have pool rooms, swimming pools, banqueting halls and all that sort of stuff, but they do not provide any housing benefit. They provide recreational facilities for the occupants—we have heard of gyms, temperature-controlled wine cellars and so on—and they bring enormous disbenefits to the local community, especially during the construction period, which can be up to three years, but often for much longer.
We need to argue that the disadvantages are noise, disturbance, disposing of spoil, and damage to neighbouring houses when a basement is built under a terraced property—something that can take years to manifest, long after the party wall Act has ceased to provide any remedy. Sometimes there is a need for pumps to pump water from basements; there is increased energy consumption from having air-conditioned basements; and there is the possibility that 10 or 20 years down the line the underground structures will be degraded to such an extent that they will need to be rebuilt, which I understand is extremely difficult to do. Those are the arguments.
Then there is a need to give notice to adjoining owners. The party wall Act is not really designed to deal with this phenomenon; it deals only with neighbouring properties that are a short distance away, whereas there can be damage to properties that are further away. The Act deals only with properties within six metres of the excavation and I think that the distance should be greater.
I am covering these points very briefly. I do not want to go through all the details or the Committee will be fed up with me.
There is also a need to deal with expenses and losses. Developers can go bankrupt, which can leave neighbouring owners out of pocket. They can sometimes be difficult to pursue through the courts, and sometimes in the case of subterranean developments the developer is a shadowy company based in the Cayman Islands or wherever. It is essential to ensure that funds for paying for loss and damage, which in the worst case can amount to many hundreds of thousands of pounds, are secured in advance. The party wall Act provides some security but only for the expense of completing work on a building, not for repaying damage to neighbours’ premises or compensating them for the loss.
Then there are the problems that affect people who are living in a property close to a basement that is being excavated. These days many people work from home. People have written to me to say that they have had to leave their homes because they could not go on working while the work was happening; we are talking
about a period of two years. People involved in music have found that the noise that affects their ability. Some people have had to rent offices elsewhere simply because they could not go on working at home.
At the moment surveyors are unwilling to award such costs because basement developments are sometimes or frequently combined with other works on the site, outside the scope of the party wall Act. People may be building extensions, and these are not the subject of my amendments. It is then very difficult to determine how much disturbance is caused by other works and how much by basement works. The result is that neighbours end up with no compensation at all, although they have been deprived of a working environment. There are also medical issues for vulnerable people.
Finally, Amendment 101BH contains a new schedule that has provisions for a local authority code of practice for subterranean development. In the interests of time I have left out a lot of the points that I was ready to make, but I repeat that the Minister’s suggestion on Article 4 is just not good enough. It does not deal with the need, and there are other and better ways of doing this. If the Minister is happy to say that she accepts the principle here, I will withdraw the amendment. We have time on Report to do something positive, so I urge the Minister to accept the principle of the amendment. I beg to move.