My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have spoken on this group and to the Minister for, as ever, her thoughtful response to the discussions.
I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, who rightly focused on the balance between large developers and SMEs in constructing homes, something that we all need to put our minds to. She commented on sites that blight areas. It is absolutely correct that, very often, the small sites that are the subject of her amendment are the sites that we turn our eyes away from when we walk around our local neighbourhoods.
I have taken a great interest in developing such sites in my own area, including a brownfield site that was an old factory and is now a good housing development, with a mix of social and private housing. The noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, has the smallest area in Hertfordshire, while mine is the second smallest. We had a great focus on this in our roles on our councils, using small sites to expand our council housing stock, and a regenerated shopping centre and pubs which had closed. A doctor’s surgery had outgrown its site, so a land swap gave it a new surgery and us a good housing site, and a low-demand garage site provided bespoke accommodation for those who were street homeless. I totally support her points about using SME builders for this work; when you work regularly with a group of SME builders, they get to understand what your area needs, the things that you are looking for, and the standard and sustainability that you need.
I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, for her comments on the vital role of small businesses in our community, particularly retail businesses. It will help us all enormously if we can eventually get that enshrined in law, so that we can do that. It would be a great help to our communities. Having those key businesses in communities makes them more sustainable. I love the idea of a repair shop—a repair club has just started in my borough, which I was delighted to hear about.
I am grateful for the support of the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley. It was lovely to hear about Polruan when we are sitting here in London—I am very fond of Cornwall—and his support for the rogue landlord database. That is a very important thing that we could introduce into the Bill, although I note the Minister’s comments on it.
The noble Lord, Lord Best, knows that I completely agree with his points about the definition of affordable housing. It also speaks to comments made by the Minister about affordable housing being delivered as an in-kind benefit of the infrastructure levy. Unfortunately, the definition of affordable housing can mean, for example, that in renting terms it is 80% of market rents. When I look at the average salary of people in my area, I see that 80% of market rent is way outside the pocket of many of the people who live there. We have to focus very much on this definition, between affordable housing which is—let us face it—not affordable to a lot of people, and social housing, which in many places is the only tenure of housing that many residents can afford. But I was pleased to hear the Minister’s comments, and look forward to discussing all those aspects further when we get to the infrastructure levy discussions.
I hear the Minister’s comments that if a local plan has strong evidence, it is for local leaders to stick to that. I hope that can be passed on to the Planning Inspectorate. We are charged democratically to make
decisions on behalf of our communities, and too often they come up against this barrier of the inspectorate, and we are asked, at the best of times, to look at them again, and at the worst of times are told that they are not acceptable and we have to go back on them.
I was also pleased to note that there is a target of 10% of housing on small sites. I agree that the provision that local planning authorities can be encouraged to split larger sites is helpful, but I just come back again to this issue around the NPPF, which we do not have and will not have before the Bill has gone through its stages. I am sorry to go on about this, but to deal with any of the issues we have discussed this afternoon, we need to know where they are going to sit between the NPPF and the Bill. If they are not going to be in the NPPF, we certainly want them in the Bill. We need to think more about that.
On the amendment of my noble friend Lady Hayman of Ullock on rogue landlords, I ask the Minister: when are we going to get the renters’ reform Bill? We have heard it mentioned many times in this House now, at Question Time and in other debates. Is it going to come in this Session, or can she confirm whether it will be in the forthcoming King’s Speech? We have heard very good assurances, both from the Secretary of State and from Ministers in your Lordships’ House, on this commitment to reform, but to have it moved sort of indefinitely into the future is very worrying. This sector is in crisis now; we have people now who are struggling, who have to pay thousands of pounds in finder’s fees and so on just to rent properties. This is urgent, and I hope we can have some clarity about when that Bill might come forward. That said, I will withdraw the amendment for the time being.