My Lords, I feel compelled to say, “Hear, hear”, every time a noble Lord gets up to speak on this. As a chartered surveyor, I am, in effect, a witness of evidence to the fact here, having spent a very large part of my career looking at and advising on older buildings, defective modern buildings and everything in between. I support all the amendments in this group, which are at the heart of what we know needs to be delivered by way of appropriate housing standards. I commend the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, for his untiring efforts on the healthy homes standard; he deserves all of our appreciation for that.
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The noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, referred to one of the typical government answers: that it is covered by current practices and regulation, to paraphrase what he said. I wish. I share what I believe is his scepticism about this. The intentions are not reflected in the delivery of the product—its design and durability are not delivered. There are some very good and conscientious designs, where the whole thing has been very well overseen and really useful and good neighbourhoods have been created. However, there are other developments whose quality, frankly, is like Tinseltown. When you talk to some of the residents, they say, “This building is never going to last”—that seems a terrible indictment, for the reasons that the noble Lords, Lord Best and Lord Ravensdale, made clear. It is one thing to reduce the components for energy conservation to a respectable minimum, but it is another thing to shorten the life by one-third, two-thirds or maybe more. When you think of the mass-produced
Victorian buildings that are still in use today, you wonder whether some of these modern buildings will last anywhere near as long. There is a disconnect here.
The healthy homes principles fundamentally pivot on the provision of security, satisfaction and comfort to occupiers in dwellings that do not challenge or undermine their work/life balance—the right reverend Prelate made that point, and I say hurrah to that. The daily existence of occupiers must at least be secure and unfettered by external concerns—they have enough trouble with bringing up their children, their daily work and that sort of thing without being challenged and destabilised by what is concerning them in their home and its construction, and in their immediate environment. We need neighbourhoods and layouts that work and we need homes that are cherished; if they are cherished, they are looked after and then they last longer. If they are not, it almost does not matter how well they are constructed; deterioration and dereliction will set in, which is an attrition of the built environment. Maybe there is a disconnect between planning control on the one hand and the design and construction of the delivery systems on the other. These amendments seem designed to close that gap, which is fundamental.
I will concentrate on a few of the problems; I stress that they are not universal but they are frequent enough to warrant concern in my view. I am thinking of condensation, noise and spatial conflicts such as bin storage interfering with parking space and so on—such things that could be designed out. One needs to consider badly designed artificial lighting, and perhaps poor daylighting, and areas in developments that are in some way conducive to criminal activity of one sort or another, as was mentioned. I point out also components in installations that seem to fail prematurely, and finishes on the outside of buildings that seem to have quite a short life expectancy—I am not talking about timber weatherboard or something like that, which will deteriorate over time; I am talking about cementitious products that you would expect to have a 25-year or 30-year life, but which are not meeting anywhere near that standard.
To that, we can add things such as bad conveyancing, where there are built-in conflicts in the very legal title and the entitlement somebody feels they have. These are the sorts of things that create totally unnecessary disputes between neighbours.
While I am talking about that, I will address the problem of rent charges on common-realm areas that have to be managed. Very often, these occur because the process of the common realm now, in some of these developments, is such that local authorities do not want to adopt common realms as part of their remit, so something else has to be set up. But because they are complicated—they may involve surface water attenuation and other things like that—they are inevitably likely to create cost centres. The rent-charge management companies are then passed on to companies that specialise in this area, and that is where we can get the increases in cost that then affect people’s ability to sell and to get mortgages, because the cost is more than the proportion of the value of the building that lenders will accept. This is not just a bad conceptual design but a bad legal
conceptual design. I believe that local government has a role and some control here, so we need to deal with these things to create robust standards.
To close the circle, I will say that I live in a house that was built in 1678. When I first went to live there, many would have regarded it as a rather large heat sieve. I have gone around plugging most of the bigger rat holes that have occurred in the interim, post construction. But this is not just about energy use, although that is a very important thing. Energy use is probably the major net present value of energy component; that tends to be the situation. I see my noble friend Lord Ravensdale nodding at that. But, if we can make sure that the buildings we build today will last at least as long as some of those Victorian buildings—so they are built in a robust style with things that do not fall apart, so people feel that they are not then threatened by continual recurring costs of making good and patching up—we will tick boxes in terms of energy, on the one hand, and human satisfaction and commitment for the long term, on the other. That must make a lot of sense.