Disabled Persons (Independent Living) Bill [HL]

My Lords, like every noble Lord who has spoken, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Ashley, on his tenacity in bringing forward this excellent Bill. I shall address one or two comments to Part 4, on housing and planning. I welcome all the measures proposed in that part, such as allocation of social housing, a disability housing service to match the needs of people with disabilities to the accommodation that may be available for them and proper assessment of the housing needs of disabled people. I shall concentrate on Clauses 33, 34 and 35, which are all about ensuring accessible and adaptable homes. That is an absolute fundamental, since people with disabilities spend a good deal of time in their homes, and the ability to move around freely within them is essential. I declare an interest as chairman of the Hanover Housing Group, which provides many thousands of homes for older people in particular, and also runs 15 care-and-repair local schemes that take advantage of the disabled facilities grants and adapt existing properties for better accessibility for those people with disabilities who live there. In the 1990s, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and its housing trust experimented with the provision of more accessible homes. I was then the chief executive of that organisation, and we worked with a number of the leading disability organisations to hone and perfect standards that would ensure better accessibility and adaptability for the future and would make life easier not just for people with disabilities and mobility problems but for everyone. That includes young families for whom the buggy needs to come in through the front door without going up two horrible steps, and older people, for whom those same two steps can provide a dreadful barrier to getting in and out of a property, especially on an icy day. All those changes to standards of accommodation can make life so much better for everyone, if only the building industry would adopt them. Rowntree got to the point of an agreement across the piece with many disability organisations that a set of 16 lifetime homes standards would achieve that higher level of accessibility that would make such a difference. I was delighted when the then Minister for construction, Nick Raynsford, introduced changes to the building regulations, which were enshrined in the Building Regulations 2000, to ensure that every new home accorded with these better standards of space and accessibility within the home. Since that time, two results can be detected. One is a certain amount of cheating, we suspect, on the part of some house builders in the implementation of those building regulations. I greatly welcome in the Bill the concept of a really thorough-going review to ensure that building inspectors and builders are doing their jobs in actually meeting the standards that now are enshrined in building regulations. The other more positive change is that the Government have turned their minds—I commend the work of the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, in taking hold of this—to taking the next step to a universal design standard that embraces all of those lifetime homes standards beyond those already accepted in the Building Regulations 2000. This really would be a helpful move. Yesterday, we heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, confirmation that the timetable is for all the housing association homes to meet these higher standards by 2011—which is not so very far away—and for the private sector house builders to follow in 2013. Those extra additions to the standards do not add anything significant to the cost, as long as they are part of the design at the outset. That is the key. If only builders would move away from their old pattern books and adopt the newer standards which incorporate accessibility and adaptability, it would not cost more than pennies at the outset. Achieving that change will be a dramatic improvement, but I detect in the air a move on the part of many house builders to take a step back rather than a step forward, on the grounds that the construction industry is in difficulty and that now is not the time to go for higher standards. I feel in the air a move to deregulate rather than have requirements for greater regulation of the standards of new homes. I ask the Minister and all other members of the Government involved in these matters to be resolute in not listening to the blandishments of those who think that a little bit of cost-cutting might now be permitted by the Government. We have to take the opportunity—now that land values have fallen so reducing the cost of production, and now that building costs have fallen—to improve on building standards, in particular standards of accessibility, not just to improve the lives of people with disabilities but to improve the lives of all citizens in a universal form. I leave that thought with the Minister.