My Lords, it is a real pleasure to follow the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Carlisle. I agree with the comments he made about housing.
Last February’s White Paper promised initiatives to make a real dent in regional disparities. This Bill will create a statutory basis for new forms of devolution, make it a legal requirement for the Government to set medium-term targets on reducing inequality and provide several other powers around planning and high street regeneration. Disappointingly, it is not ambitious enough. These measures on their own are not enough to meet the Government’s 12 missions for reducing regional inequality by 2030, as stated in the White Paper. We need bold policies, not the cosmetic fixes contained in the Bill.
As we have already heard, the Bill contains several Henry VIII powers. As the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Stevenage, said, it is a complicated, mixed bag of measures that are hard to understand and will not make transparency, accountability and scrutiny easy.
In its current form, the Bill will leave us with a planning system that will be less democratic and will do nothing to build public trust. What we need is a democratic planning system that delivers sustainable communities and deals meaningfully with housing and the climate crisis. To achieve this, the purpose of planning must be set out in law. A statutory purpose for planning should be the foundation of levelling up, and it should focus the system on the holistic goal of sustainable communities.
My concern is about affordable social housing. As we have heard, housing is a fundamental human need, but our housing system is broken. There is a need for more social housing. To do this, we need to redefine the term “affordable housing” for the purposes of the infrastructure levy. As Shelter argues:
“The Levy must aim to deliver more social housing than the current system and this can be done by … redefining ‘affordable housing’ to mean social rent and … making social rent housing an onsite requirement of new housing developments.”
It is also vital that the Government tackle the issue of “hope value” as a barrier to building social and truly affordable housing. While there were encouraging comments by the Minister in the other place about hope value, I hope that the Government will consider removing the hope value payment requirement from designated housing schemes that deliver social rent housing.
The Government should also strengthen the provisions in this Bill to ensure that all homes promote health, safety and well-being, and help people to live well. A number of noble Lords have made the link between housing and equality.
I will not steal the thunder of the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, but last year he introduced the Healthy Homes Bill, which I supported. The purpose of the Bill was to create a duty to ensure that all relevant policies secured healthy homes; it provided a definition of a healthy home and the legally binding principles underpinning that. I hope that this is an opportunity to add some of the provisions of that Bill to this one.
Alongside healthy and affordable homes, the Bill must do more to ensure that there is appropriate investment into community infrastructure. Currently, we have a complicated legislative framework, which has not encouraged place-making infrastructure nearly enough. Austerity and cuts to local authority funding have compounded this problem. Today many left-behind communities face declining infrastructure alongside poor-quality housing stock.
The fourth aim of Clause 1 is to achieve levelling up by empowering local leaders and communities, especially those lacking local agency. Empowering communities is a vital step in achieving the levelling-up agenda. To achieve the levelling-up mission, the Government should increase investment, particularly in early years education and literacy. Investment in that area is essential for social mobility and levelling up. In real terms, schools saw an 8% decline in funding between 2010-11 and 2019-20. We need to do better. To boost literacy, schools that serve disadvantaged communities need to be given more support by increasing the pupil premium for pupils in long-term poverty. This funding, alongside a multi-sector, multi-partner approach, can deliver real dividends and support the 12 levelling-up missions.
A positive example of a place-based intervention helping communities with high levels of deprivation in the UK are the National Literacy Trust hubs, established in 2013. I declare an interest as the trust’s president. It works with local authorities, education providers and wider communities to improve literacy in areas with the highest levels of deprivation and literacy vulnerability. These sorts of initiatives need to be replicated and, of course, scaled up.
To conclude, holistic reform of planning laws is long overdue, and it is imperative that these reforms are included as part of the Bill. To achieve the levelling-up missions, the Bill must provide greater clarity on how the Government will provide healthy and affordable homes supported by community infrastructure. The Bill must support place-based interventions, particularly in education, through empowering local leaders and their communities.
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