My Lords, I was pleased to add my name to Amendment 241 tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham. I support the various amendments that the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, has tabled on healthy homes, and other amendments in this group.
I start by taking my cue from the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, who said, rightly, that we need to be open and explicit in what we are asking for. That is quite a straightforward challenge. I suspect that most people in this country want to live in congenial and liveable neighbourhoods where kids can walk to school, where there is somewhere to play outdoors in the holidays, where older folks can pop along to a local shop, perhaps bumping into a neighbour along the way; neighbourhoods in which we design out pollution, obesity and crime. All of that is the art of the possible. Not doing so, even though in the short term it may appear that it will be more costly to get it right, has hidden long-term costs for the taxpayer, which a number of noble Lords have mentioned—whether that is obesity, pollution or crime. The fact is that these decisions, when they are made in the built environment, have consequences which last for a generation. Bad decisions have consequences which spill over for many years to come.
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I suspect that the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, is going to speak shortly. I hope he will not regard it as unpatriotic of me to say that, perhaps in the mid-20th century, our shared fair city of Birmingham might be an example that still lives on of how to get it wrong. Herbert Manzoni was the city surveyor and engineer for nearly three decades. He was the man who got rid of trams, gave us three ring roads and ensured that, by the early 1970s, nearly two-thirds of the tower blocks—the new estates—were built on the outer ring road or beyond it. That is a sort of worked example down the generations of what we do not want.
On the other hand, we have the example set by Nye Bevan, who, as noble Lords will recall, was a Minister not only of health but of housing. He insisted that the designs for new homes would include space standards, heating and indoor toilets at a time when nearly two-thirds of the houses in the Rhondda valley had no indoor toilet. The noble Lord, Lord Crisp, has promised to share with us a photo album of disastrous developments that are occurring in the here and now. So this is not
merely of historic interest; it is quite obvious that, right now, the planning system is not giving us the neighbourhoods and homes that we require.
I am not naive enough to think that the amendments in this group are, by themselves, such that if we do not have them we will have disaster and if we do have them we will have triumph. However, were these amendments to see their way through into legislation, they would put our fingers on the scale and increase the probability that we will get better planning decisions in the future. Certainly, in the recent past, the NHS has tried to engage in this agenda through the so-called Healthy New Towns initiative—with only limited success because, frankly, the planning framework was weighted against incorporating these kinds of decisions into what is required.
As this Bill has gone through Committee, we have come back time and time again to the question as to whether it is more than just a recitation of missions. We have had a debate about metrics, but I would argue that we are missing a third M, which is “mechanisms”: mechanisms by which things will actually improve in the real world. I suggest that, rather than regarding this group of amendments as exploratory or testing amendments, the Government might regard them as substantive propositions that, hopefully, the House will return to on Report, because they provide one such mechanism for bringing about real-world improvements in health and the congeniality of living across our country.