My Lords, we should be grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Best, for moving this amendment, which we wholeheartedly
support. If there were any doubt as to whether we were going to support it, praying in aid Nye Bevan just about did it for us. I welcome my noble friend Lady Wilkins back to the House and acknowledge her knowledgeable contribution on an issue on which she has campaigned over a long time. It is good that the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, and the noble Baroness, Lady Gardner, are on the same page as well.
We support the review of housing standards: a lot of good work has come out of it. However, one of the consequences, as we have heard, was that lifetime home standards and wheelchair-accessible standards have become optional extras. That is really the issue before us today. The noble Lord, Lord Best, has probed with a series of questions and I hope that the nature of those questions means that the Minister has ready and satisfactory replies to them all.
I draw the Minister’s attention to a couple of paragraphs of the housing review document. On page 6, paragraph 14, it says:
“Unlike other Building Regulations requirements the optional requirements described in the Approved Documents will not be mandatory. They will only be applicable where a local planning authority has put a plan policy in place specifically triggering the application of the optional requirement or nationally described space standard in particular circumstances. Neighbourhood Planning Bodies (and Neighbourhood Development Orders) will only be able to apply the space standard, and not optional requirements”.
Will the Minister tell us why that is the case? Perhaps more importantly, paragraph 21, which looks at applying optional requirements and nationally described standards, states:
“The first step is for a local planning authority to stipulate that an optional requirement or the nationally described space standard applies in that area. As stated already, this must be set in plan policies, which have been subject to normal Plan Examination processes. It would not be appropriate to apply optional requirements or the space standard through supplementary planning guidance, since this is not subject to a sufficient level of scrutiny”.
Have the Government moved on from that, or is that still applicable?
I have one small observation in relation to financial viability and cost. If the additional cost is £500 to £1,000, that is one or two weeks in a care home invested in a home on lifetime standards now. That obviously obviates that, going forward. I hope the Minister can satisfy us on those requirements, because it would be a great shame, given all the progress that has been made on lifetime home standards—particularly in London—if these developments were to push those backwards.