Disabled Persons (Independent Living) Bill [HL]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Ashley, on persisting with this excellent Bill and on giving us a chance to debate the key disability issues of today. I pay tribute to the three noble Baronesses who have spoken before me for their wonderful campaigning work on these issues over the years. I should like to address issues in Part 4 of the Bill relating to accessible housing. I declare my interest as chair of the Hanover Housing Association, which provides housing and care for 19,000 older people and has 16 local care-and-repair home improvement agencies under its wing. The issues of inaccessibility divide into two parts: accessibility for existing properties that need adapting to make them suitable for people with disability and mobility problems, and the building of new homes. If homes are inaccessible because of steps up to the front door, an upstairs loo or bathrooms that cannot cope with a wheelchair, people can become impoverished inside their homes, can be forced to move to expensive residential care or can languish in hospital unnecessarily when they want to be at home, while the hospitals need the beds. The adaptation of existing properties to make them accessible and the building of new homes from the outset need to be treated separately. In relation to adaptations, I congratulate the Government on abolishing the pernicious means test for the disabled facilities grant and, just a few days ago, increasing the resources available for this grant by some 20 per cent. I hope that the ceiling on the cost of any adaptations, currently £25,000, which no longer covers major changes to a property, may be raised soon. Will the Government assist local authorities in overcoming the long delays currently experienced by those waiting for occupational therapists to assess their needs and for the bureaucratic machine to pay these mandatory grants for adaptations? Home improvement agencies and care-and-repair and staying-put schemes are doing great work in organising adaptations to existing homes. I hope that the Minister will be able to report soon on increased backing for these excellent local organisations. New homes being built can be designed in ways that mean expensive adaptations later will not be necessary. In the final years of the 1990s, the then Minister for construction, Nick Raynsford, wisely and helpfully introduced new building regulations in response to the efforts of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and its partners which devised the lifetime homes standards for new housing. These revisions to Part M of the building regulations represented a huge step forward in making all new accommodation more accessible to those with disabilities, to young mothers with buggies, to teenagers with broken legs, to visiting grandparents with mobility problems and to the human race in all its many forms. It is far cheaper, and infinitely more satisfactory, to build homes that, with level thresholds, wider front doors, downstairs loos and the rest, are accessible from the day that they are built. We think that 3 million more homes will be built between now and 2020, and we need to ensure that they are all fully accessible. In the years since 1999, when the building regulations were revised, two issues have needed to be addressed. First, these new controls did not go the whole way to introducing the full lifetime home standards and further work was needed to implement the remaining elements. Secondly, knowing the problems in the construction industry, it was necessary to ensure that these new regulations were complied with by every house builder. In terms of extending the regulations to encompass all 16 elements of the lifetime home standards, some progress has been made on several fronts over the past eight years. The Greater London Authority, the Welsh Assembly, the Northern Ireland Executive and a number of enlightened individual local authorities have incorporated into their planning policies the requirement to meet lifetime homes standards. The Government now hope, through guidance in their code for sustainable homes, to see these higher standards of accessibility adopted for all house building in the future. I hope that the Minister will update us on progress to that end. Using the planning system to require certain standards before planning permission is granted is not as stringent an approach as using the building regulations, which involve building control inspectors visiting sites to make sure that these measures have been fully complied with. The Government’s Building Regulations Advisory Committee—BRAC—has now completed its work in creating a British standard for accessibility, incorporating an updated, polished version of the lifetime homes standards. I understand that this is now ready to go. I should be grateful if the Minister could tell the House whether this further improvement to Part M of the building regulations is now to be taken forward. This leads me to my final point on new homes—the success of enforcement of the existing 1999 building regulations in relation to accessibility; and therefore later, I hope, the enforcement of enhanced regulations. In 2003 the Joseph Rowntree Foundation published research from Professor Imbrie, which concluded that, "““many developers and building control officers do not adequately understand the objectives of Part M of the Building Regulations relating to the accessibility of new housing. Indeed, the regulation is commonly regarded as ‘half-hearted’, and it is often poorly interpreted and variably enforced, leading to an unsatisfactory outcome for the design of new housing stock””." After the report was published, I asked the Minister then responsible, the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, when Her Majesty’s Government intended to undertake a review of Part M of the building regulations, as revised in 1999. He replied: "““My Lords, the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister has recently commissioned research to evaluate the impact of the changes to Part M of the building regulations, which concerns the accessibility of all new homes and was introduced in 1999. The work is expected to begin before Christmas and to report in about two years’ time””.—[Official Report, 15/10/03; col. 934 .]" It is now four years since that statement. I hope the Government do not think that we have all forgotten the Minister’s very positive announcement in 2003. When will this review, now more than two years late, report so that we can then see what action may be needed to bring recalcitrant builders into line and ensure that these invaluable improvements in accessibility, secured by the Government, appear on the ground for the benefit of disabled people and for society at large. I heartily commend the Bill and look forward to the Minister’s response.