My Lords, I thank the Minister for his response to my amendment. I think we recognise that putting material in the Bill reduces flexibility. The point is well made that these things will need to be dealt with in secondary legislation. The purpose of an amendment such as this is to get some debate and discussion going, as the Minister is well aware. He suggested that Amendment 101A, with its recognition of sites of fewer than 10 properties, was an acceptance of the policy. That was certainly not its intent. The key part of that amendment was that there should not be any exemption after 2018.
The consultation that I was probing was the one that was dealt with in the Minister’s letter of 3 November, which was the consultation on the exemption for small sites. If I made reference to allowable solutions it was not my intention. That was the consultation—knowing when it will happen and, more importantly, what is in it.
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The noble Lord, Lord Teverson, recognised that the Government still have ambitions in this direction to deliver on zero carbon for homes, but it is a question
of how we define that. That is the issue. Part of the debate we had from the noble Baroness, Lady Maddock, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans has been about why we have moved back from the starting position. The right reverend Prelate made the important point that the standard was agreed basically in 2010 and technology has moved on since then. We are now, in 2014, talking about standards to be set in 2016. Also, the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, as well as the right reverend Prelate, made the point about the impact of all this on fuel poverty, particularly on smaller sites, which are likely to be more prevalent in rural areas than urban areas, and the huge importance of all this given the IPCC report, which the right reverend Prelate just referred to.
The noble Lord, Lord Teverson, talked about institutionalising fuel poverty if we do not get this right. He also made a point about how we view small builders and that somehow they have to be let off all sorts of standards in order to flourish. The point was made extremely well that small builders can be very skilled and are able to deliver high-quality homes to the standards that we should be looking for. The point I tried to make in moving the amendment was to identify other ways that we could help small builders in terms of access to finance and parcelling land so that they have the opportunity to get in on developments that they might otherwise be excluded from. That is a better way of approaching small builders’ needs than relaxing some of the zero-carbon homes restrictions, which we should be looking to build on and support rather than row back from.
Having said all that, I am sure that this debate will rumble on and we will come back to it on a number of occasions. We hope that we will see that consultation document on small-site exemption very soon. I know that it is not wholly within the Minister’s remit, but it would be helpful if we saw that because it would help our debates and our concerns. As the noble Baroness, Lady Maddock, said, because the Government have moved back from their starting position, the concern is about how committed they are to this. The more the Government and the Minister can do to allay our concerns on that the better. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.