My Lords, sometimes the socially and economically desirable clash head on with the environmentally undesirable. Today’s debate links business and the environment, explicitly and implicitly, whose activities are intertwined with and crystallised by the effects of housebuilding or, for that matter, road and rail building. This is because such construction activity is, by definition, indelible; it is pretty irreversible in most cases. By comparison, some changes in the natural world as opposed to the built world are reversible—happily, as we now see, for example, in the population explosion of the otter, once thought 50 years ago in the United Kingdom to be heading straight for extinction. Once built, however, changes to urban and rural land are permanent. I can think of very few examples in which the clock has been turned back to some silvan or rural idyll, outside of the airfields of East Anglia where the nissen huts have vanished and the concrete airstrips have reverted to the ploughland of pre-World War II times.
One of the ways that more housing, more building, will be made more acceptable—this is a great political challenge for the age—and less prone to protest and thus delay, is if those concerned with the social need for more roofs over heads and the economic need for more growth contributed to by the building industry pause to reflect that these rightful ends make indelible marks on the landscape of our country—“No turning back”, to borrow a phrase. It is critical, therefore, that the irreversible is well designed, well landscaped and well lit in the interests of those who are to live there and of those who live nearby and perhaps have a new housing estate in their view. It should also, for example, inform the mind of a passing motorist, whose rapid glance produces a “Dearie me, look at those brick boxes—that blot on the landscape over there” reaction.
The reverse should be the case in order to promote a new consensus that new housing is needed just as much on some greenfield sites as on some brownfield sites. Good design is not a matter for limp-wristed aesthetes but a matter for political concern. It is practical politics, as we are going to find in the run-up to the next election. It is a vacuous cop-out by those who—like me, I have to admit—wish to see brownfield built on first, and greenfield sites only when necessary, to say that everything will be solved if only all new housing is on brownfield sites. We see this most tellingly when we look at the new building that surrounds us in the
capital, which is going so slowly, in an area where brownfield or renewal and rebuilding are the only options. That is the case for London itself, but certainly not for the rest of the country.
Land is owned by central government—noble Lords will know the old refrain—and by the NHS and local government that is at least brownish-tinged and could be built on. There is a mass of sites that must be called brownfield in other forms of ownership. However, I have absolutely no idea, as there is an information blackout, of exactly how much brownfield land there is in this country. The debate on “brownfield building” would be so much better informed and so much more realistic if we had, à la William the Conqueror, a Domesday Book of brownfield land. I do not know whether that exists in some ministerial cupboard or other, but if the Minister responding to the debate—my noble friend Lord Freud—has any idea of the amount of such land, and whether there is a definitive map of it, might he kindly let your Lordships know? It would better inform our debates and, unless we have it, nimbyish arguments about there being no need to build on greenfield sites because there is so much brownfield land will continue to dominate the debate. That said, because of such arguments and the need to build more houses—which I of course recognise—I strongly support proposals in the new Infrastructure Bill contained in the gracious Speech to end the unfortunate delays caused by local authorities blocking progress on projects already granted planning permission.
However, the argument about building seems to be a competitive bidding war now between the major political parties. My own has made a pledge to have so many more houses built as soon as possible. The noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, in her feisty speech, gave a clear commitment to see that 200,000 houses a year will be built by 2020 if there were a Liberal Government—