My Lords, I support the amendments and thank noble Lords for what they have said because, although I thought this was a serious issue, I was unable to take part in debates on the then Housing and Planning Bill. It is clearly very important. Permitted development is a useful tool when used proportionately. It has been able to free extra capacity to build housing, in many cases, very appropriately. When the National Policy for the Built Environment Select Committee was doing its Building Better Places report, this came up as a formidable problem. The noble Lord, Lord Tope, has described it. It is to do with the scale and the concentration in particular areas. I will be very grateful if the Minister has any figures that show how much conversion of office space to residential there has been and a geographical breakdown that shows some notion of the scale. We are getting housing development outside the normal planning provisions. Once that happens, essentially none of the planning rules applies. One of the things that exercised the committee was that the casual conversion of office space to residential space was compromised because of the absence of space standards and, I think, normal building regulations. I would be grateful if the Minister will state the official position on the lack of acceptable agreed building standards in buildings that are being converted.
There are two social impacts of casual conversion. One is on the nature of the living accommodation that is being created in this era of desperate demand for housing. What sorts of lives are people living? The other impact is that with 28% more housing instead of office space, the demand on services is quite different. Therefore paragraphs (a) to (c) of the proposed new clause are extremely important. Does the department have any assessment of this? Has it done any work on the impacts that can be measured? What is the Minister’s judgment about that? We need more information and to know more about what the department and local authorities know about the way this is working.
Amendment 44 raises an important principle. The point about planning changes is that single changes are manageable and have a useful, and often positive, effect, but cumulative change can be very different.
Cumulative change is what the noble Lord, Lord Porter, raises in his amendment. The noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege, represented him very well and spoke about development rights and the impact on sustainability overall. The only analogy I can make—and I hope it would be contained in Amendment 44—is with conservation areas. In conservation areas, you have permitted development rights. You may be able to advise individual householders to put in wooden windows rather than plastic windows or not to put a porch over the front door, but after a while control and discipline slip and the character of the conservation area can be completely compromised. One has to be extremely careful about the nature of the slope when one embarks on permitted development rights. The notion of cumulative impact is very important.
I do not know whether there is anywhere in planning law the concept of a cumulative impact which could inform the way this amendment could be very usefully attached. If there is, there is something to be gained from thinking intelligently about how Amendment 44 might be pursued. It is obvious that local authorities ought to have more control over what happens in the exercise of permitted development rights, and this is very timely because we have now had five or six years of accelerated deregulation, of which permitted development rights are probably the most conspicuous aspect. It is time that we step back and look at the impact of that in relation to local authority competence.