My Lords, I too, welcome the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, to his new role and welcome the new clauses in the Bill. I want to address the points just made by the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, and pick up the question of the exemption from the full requirements of the zero-carbon standard for small development, which is not yet fully defined.
First, it is extremely important that we encourage small and medium-sized enterprise to get back into business. They were very hard hit in the recession; they went out of business on a big scale when times were hard following 2008. We need to get them back into business if we are to achieve the 200,000 or 250,000 homes a year, or whatever it is, that we need to build. That almost goes without saying.
The big six housebuilders used to do 46% of all the housebuilding in the UK; they now do 70%. Seventy per cent of all new housebuilding is in the hands of that very small number of builders. We need to bring back those small and medium-sized builders. However, I doubt whether this measure is the way to do that. To think that exempting small sites means that small builders will come back into play is a leap of imagination. First, larger housebuilders of course sometimes develop small sites, particularly if they are profitable; or they develop larger sites but in phases. That means that if we choose a threshold of 10 homes, we will discover a whole series of schemes with nine homes being built over a period. Housebuilders like to do things in phases in any case. We may not address the SMEs when we address this. It is not about small builders; it is about small sites, and it may miss the point.
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Secondly, the small builders are not there not because they are incapable of achieving the building regulations standards that we set before them; in fact, they are rather good at getting the building aspect right. Their problems have been finance: the banks have not wanted to back them after the recession. They have not been able to get their hands on the bridging loans to build and develop, and have had problems getting their hands on the land because the big housebuilders surround towns with their own options and agreements. Some smaller builders would say, “We build to a better quality and a higher standard than the big national housebuilders. It is not that we want lower standards; that is not preventing us getting on with the job”. We may be missing the point with this approach.
My final point is that in rural areas, 10 homes is quite a big scheme. We will knock out all the developments in rural areas across the country if we set a threshold of, “We don’t need to worry so much about zero-carbon standards for 10 homes or fewer”. Yet those are areas in which people are keen on having high standards, but in which it is particularly important that insulation standards are high. One should recognise that rural areas may be more exposed to the elements than the middle of a town.
I am not at all sure whether this measure reducing the requirements for zero-carbon standards to be applied to smaller schemes does what it is intended to do, which is to get the SMEs back into business. Other factors would do that, and this might simply mean that an awful lot of housing was excluded in a way that we would all regret, particularly if the bigger housebuilders came into play by phasing their developments.