My Lords, this continues a similar theme. I tabled an amendment in Committee to try to get more rigour into ensuring that the building regulations that we have are met and complied with. There is very little point in our legislating if those standards are not met in practice. I quoted the Government’s own adviser, the Committee on Climate Change, which stated that there seemed to be a big gap between what should be happening with the thermal efficiency of homes and what was actually happening. I was not completely reassured by that, but I accept that that is mainly a role of local government.
I am trying move on to address the fact that it often takes—and certainly has over recent years—a long time for a planning permission to become a built-out and lived-in development. We have the situation—I look on it as an anomaly or rather a loophole—whereby the building regulations to which builders must build relate to the date of the planning permission rather than when the development is constructed and completed. If that is only within a couple of years, it makes no difference whatever. We have, however, a number of developments—at certain times more than others—when that stretches over a considerable period. I realise that planning permissions themselves have a shelf life. After three years, if they have not been used, they go into abeyance. However, I remind noble Lords that under that system, as long as you do a certain amount of work—you do not have to complete it—that planning
permission remains live. That is something that is done very regularly to make sure that planning permissions are not lost.
I was very impressed by the Minister’s figure of £200 that would potentially be saved per annum by the moving up of building regulations by the Government. Of course, that illustrates very well the extra cost to residents of houses that do not meet those standards—either because they have been exempted under the small development regime that we talked about in the previous amendment or because houses are being built under building regulations that are several years old.
It seems to me that this is something that needs to be fixed—for consumers and certainly for the government strategy on fuel poverty and zero-carbon homes. So I am putting forward an extremely modest proposal that is a longstop: if developments have not been completed within six years of gaining planning permission, at that point they must comply with the building regulations of that time rather than those when the planning permission took place. I have tried to make this amendment as clear as possible. I hope it says that. I very much hope that it is in line with government policy and that this is something of a loophole that we would like to close—particularly when we have periods when building and construction developments take a particularly long time.
Indeed, I would ask whether there is a temptation sometimes to get planning permissions early. Where we have land banks, it perhaps means that construction is delayed but it almost gives a benefit to developers to hang on to undeveloped land. I would like to see this very sensible measure used as an incentive for building, particularly of dwellings when we have such a national housing shortage, to be started and completed within a reasonable period. I beg to move.