Housing and Regeneration Bill

I have to remind the Committee formally of the interests I declared at Second Reading. They remain on the record. Having got that out of the way, I hope the Committee will not mind if I explain the rather devious technical device that we are using to have this debate. It is a measure of the importance that all sides of the Committee place on this issue that this procedure was agreed. The manuscript amendment that we are formally discussing, Amendment No. 1A, was agreed by all sides because the noble Lord and the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, were likely to have a clash of dates with the second day in Committee next week and it was arguable whether we would get to the rest of the group of these amendments today in time for them to be properly discussed. It was in order to avoid that embarrassment that we are having this debate. I am quite sure that the noble Baroness gave her agreement as speedily as I did. It is a measure of the significance of this subject. I am grateful to my noble friends Lord Brooke and Lord Lucas for reminding the Committee that design is a matter of taste. Not only are there the complexities of Ministers coming and going, but tastes, fashions and, heaven help us, planning committees come and go, and one needs to have some comment to make on the planning system. One can have the most wonderful architects but in the end planning committees say what will and will not be built. We have all heard criticisms of inappropriate designs for houses and estates. Fortunately, we are long past the words of a song that was around in my youth about little boxes made of ticky-tacky that all looked just the same. I am sure some Members of the Committee will remember that song. However, the other side of this debate is that we need to remember that for many people any house is better than no house. We have already had some reiteration of the housing numbers. When I started in local government, we were building 360,000 houses a year with all the services that were required. It was a remarkable achievement. It was post war, and there was war damage to recover from and all the rest of it. But, if there was bad design, it was because of the urgent requirement to produce more houses. We have been through that phase and many of those houses have now gone, but some of them remain. I should probably declare another interest—or confess, perhaps, to an aspect of my life which is a little odd. I have never lived in a house less than 350 years old. Two houses I have lived in have had parts which go back 500 years. That is an immense tribute to the quality of the design of those days. One of those houses depended entirely on prefabrication; it could be built in only one way from one specific post. It is not that they were grand houses; they were timber-framed farmhouses. Plenty of cottages built in a similar period remain in the countryside. The buildings are a tribute to the durability of the materials and the skill of the people who put them up. Whether we achieve that again today remains to be seen; realistically, I think probably not. However, I would like to think that there will be buildings we put up today which will still be here in 500 years time. That is what this debate, among other things, is all about. We should remember that the quality of architecture now has a great deal to do with the word ““utility””. As has been said by others, we need our buildings to be energy and space efficient. They need to be adaptable for a number of purposes; for example, to enable a young married couple to move in, to bring up their children—I was going to say to kick their children out, but they will leave of their own accord—and then to grow old gracefully in. That needs a great deal of thinking about. I come back to the point that I mentioned when I began. We need to recognise the planning responsibility as well as the architectural and design responsibilities. We have heard about inappropriately designed estates on the edge of old communities that look like sore thumbs. Planning committees will have approved such estates. They did not have to approve them. I once had to lecture to a degree course in planning; I was not asked back again. That was mainly because they were teaching planning as a precise science—which it might be—but I reminded them that the serious planning decisions were all taken by democratically-elected members and that, however precise their science was, they would have to learn to put up with a bit of democracy in their planning. In what we are doing with the Bill—we will come back to this later—there is a need to remind members in local government that they are there to do a job, that they are expected to do it and that they do not deserve to remain in local government if they do not do it. Most people in local government do the job, but very often they take the easy option, particularly in planning matters. You then come to the difficulty, and a different pressure on local authorities, of a lot of planning authorities taking a hard line and demanding very good design, which slows up the development process. I can see the Minister with a grin on her face and saying, ““Yes, we shall have to be very critical of them for that””. Not for what they are doing on the principle of design but because they will not achieve the necessary volume. We have to remind ourselves all the time that we need volume. That is all I want to say. I have drifted very much away from the significant question of design because that has been very thoroughly covered in the excellent debate we are having now. We need to remember that there are others in the process—we have not mentioned builders, developers and so on—and we have to get them all positively involved.