My Lords, there appears to be a clear consensus across your Lordships’ House that we need to improve the mental and physical health and overall well-being of citizens, and that we can do that, in part, by improving the area around where people live and the homes in which they live.
Amendment 241, to which I have added my name, and which was powerfully introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, deals with the issue of the area around people’s homes and how it could be improved. A very good example of that is access to nature, and it is worth remembering that the Environment Secretary, Thérèse Coffey, very recently said:
“Nature is vital for our survival, crucial to our food security, clean air, and clean water as well as health and well-being”.
So access to nature is important for health and well-being purposes, as well as the other things that she mentioned.
When I was a Minister in what was then the Department for Communities and Local Government, I had a responsibility, for a while, for green spaces, and I had an opportunity to see some tremendous work being done by some planners. However, I was very acutely aware of the enormous pressures that they were under to achieve further access to green spaces. They faced huge conflicts, where many other issues often took priority over access to green spaces, and therefore priority over citizens’ health.
As part of the Government’s recently announced plans for nature recovery—which, in part, we were discussing in relation to earlier amendments—the House will know that the Government have set a target to ensure that everyone will live within 15 minutes of a green space or water, but, unfortunately, there is very little detail expressing how that will be achieved. So one of the benefits of Amendment 241, it seems to me, is that it will help the Government achieve that particular objective. However, as others have said, in particular the noble Lord, Lord Stevens, and the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, this is about more than just access to green spaces: it is about access to amenities and being able to get to them easily by walking, wheeling or cycling, which are all forms of exercise that improve health.
It is worth noting that in 2021 Sustrans carried out a survey that found that walking, wheeling and cycling together prevented almost 130,000 serious long-term health conditions every year. Yet we are still building developments that are far from existing settlements, and where you cannot even buy a pint—perhaps I should say a litre these days—of milk, or at least you will not be able to until a later phase of development. So people have to resort to using their cars or, where it is available, public transport, thereby again reducing exercise opportunities.
Planning departments can play a role in enabling people to exercise as part of their everyday lives, but they need help. We know from the Sustrans survey that 64% of planners who responded called for “robust … guidance or regulation” to help them prioritise health and well-being. I believe that this amendment—which is based, as we have heard, on the 20-minute neighbourhood approach—would help achieve that, while also providing the flexibility that planners need because they know their area best.
As we have heard, subsequent amendments in the group look at ways in which we can improve the housing in which people live in order to improve their overall well-being. Like others, I pay enormous tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, for the work he has done leading so many of us in the direction he has taken us with his string of amendments, which I very much hope will be incorporated, in some form, in the final version of the Bill.
I will pick up on one aspect that is not covered by his amendments, but is covered by Amendment 504GF, which was very well introduced by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, and to which I have added my name. It does not deal with new homes being built but looks at existing properties and how they could be improved to help the health and well-being of their residents and to achieve our net-zero target.
One of the reasons I am particularly attracted to this amendment—there are many others—is that it introduces into legislation targets for improving the energy efficiency of existing properties. As the Minister knows, this is an issue that I have raised on very many occasions in your Lordships’ House. I am always pointing out that there are 17 million homes that are currently below the acceptable energy efficiency level. In one of my many attempts to do this, I referred three years ago to the report by the Climate Change Committee, UK Housing: Fit for the Future?, which assessed the preparedness of our housing stock for the challenge of climate change. It concluded that the measures to reduce
“emissions … from the UK’s 29 million homes”—
responsible for 17% of all carbon emissions—had
“stalled, while energy use in homes”
had increased, and adaptations of housing stock to meet the impact of climate change were
“lagging far behind what is needed to keep us safe and comfortable”.
Three years on, the CCC’s most recent report shows that the situation is still dire. The decline in work to retrofit existing properties has hardly been halted. It says:
“Installation rates for building insulation have plummeted over the last decade, and are far below the level they need to be”
to deliver on UK climate targets.
Of course, as I have said in your Lordships’ House on previous occasions, I welcome a number of recent initiatives by this Government—ECO+, for example, and the announcement only three days ago of £1.4 billion to improve energy efficiency in social housing, although it is from a pot that was previously announced—and I look forward to hearing plans from the newly established Energy Efficiency Taskforce.
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However, whatever that task force does, it will come up against a significant problem, because the latest research by the New Economics Foundation has shown that anyone hoping to cut their energy bills by adding insulation, solar panels, double-glazing or heat pumps face years-long waits to upgrade because there is now a shortfall of 200,000 installation workers. There are simply no longer the people out there to do the work: however much we all want them to do it, they simply will not be there. That is the problem I raised several years ago, when I warned your Lordships’ House that we had to take action and listen to what the industry wanted. At that time, I quoted the chairman of the British Energy Efficiency Federation, who said:
“On far too many occasions the energy efficiency industry has been made promises by Governments, only to see them withdrawn. This has resulted in the laying off of staff, the loss of investment and the closure of factories.”
As the Climate Change Committee has argued, there needed to have been greater policy certainty, since the absence of such certainty has led to skill gaps and lack of investment in the construction, design and development of new technologies for the urgently needed major refit programme. What the industry said it wanted several years ago and has consistently said year in, year out, is that if it is going to invest in skills, training and the equipment and the technology, it needs to have the certainty that the work is going to be there for it to do. It says the way it will get that certainty is by having the targets the Government keep repeating placed into legislation.
Placing targets in legislation is something the Government have said time and again they believe in. They have done it for a whole range of things, including for the Climate Change Act itself, yet they refuse to do it for the energy-efficiency target. The amendment that the noble Baroness introduced places those targets into legislation and offers an opportunity to get together to find and work on a way forward to help the industry rapidly build up the number of staff to do the work. I hope that, on this occasion, the Government will listen.