Planning and Compulsory Purchase Bill

Part of the debate – in the House of Lords at 6:58 pm on 6 January 2004.

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Photo of Lord Lucas Lord Lucas Conservative 6:58, 6 January 2004

My Lords, I have always had a downer on architects, because one of my forebears was the first president of the RIBA and built himself a monstrosity that was unliveable in and was the beginning of the end of the family's finances. None the less, it has been a great pleasure to listen to the noble Lord, Lord Rogers of Riverside. I have had the pleasure of listening to him several times. I agree absolutely with him about what needs to be done. However, I also agree that what it takes is not in the Bill. There is no emphasis on design.

The difficulty with building houses on brownfield sites is that one is building one of the most immovable forms of land occupation that there is. One must achieve absolute dereliction in housing before one gets a chance to change it.

It is essential to the continued health of a city that there are places where it can develop whatever else it needs in 50 years' time, which we cannot now anticipate. There must be places where those things can go. If we are to fill many of those places with housing, it must be extremely well designed and must constitute communities, not housing estates. Much more energy and imagination must be used to create the city than we have heretofore allowed. I am not clear that anyone is being given the powers necessary to ensure that that happens. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Rogers, will give us some of his time in Committee and possibly table an amendment or two in order that we might make some progress on that. I can see that I shall be an active participant in Committee.

There is a lot in the Bill that I hope will work. I will be trying to make sure that we get right the details of outline planning permission and the three-year time limit so that they will work in practice.

I shall also urge strongly that we allow local authorities to treat their planning control departments as real profit centres. We have all seen what has happened as a result of the freeing-up of local authorities' parking fees. The whole business of road management and maintenance has become enormously effective. In areas such as Kensington and Chelsea, if the streets are not paved with gold now, they soon will be, because the council has nothing else on which to spend its profits.

Planning departments should acquire a new status. Local authorities should value running them well because they could be a real source of revenue and strength. At the moment, the fees are ridiculously low. They are tiny when compared with the value of the developments. The whole system could stand fees that are four or five times their current level. That would allow high-quality planning professionals to be employed and provide the lubrication that the system needs to run well.

My goodness, we need some improvements. Kate Barker's interim review is a real wake-up call. We laugh when the Albanians become involved in enormous pyramid schemes; we shrug our shoulders at women empowering women. But we find ourselves in one of the most extraordinary schemes ever; namely, the British housing market. There is no wealth creation in the ever-increasing spiral of house prices. It merely passes money from one set of people to another, with a general level of parasitic losses as it goes on. We are impoverishing the younger generation to enrich the old. All kinds of economic distortions are being introduced by the endless progression of house prices. We are beginning to see that the problems associated with affordable housing all occur because the general level of house prices has risen so much.

Ridiculously—though we have come to accept it as normal—housing is considered an investment. Housing is for living in. We get out of houses the pleasure of living in them. During the past 20 years, the average household income has risen in real terms by 20 per cent. There has been an increase in individual incomes, but a decreasing size of household. During that same period, the average size of house occupied by the average householder has decreased by 20 per cent. We think that we are becoming a more prosperous nation, but we are living in smaller and smaller boxes. That is ridiculous. We should enshrine in policy an ambition that people live in better and nicer houses 20 years from now, with more space and more objects about them that give them delight. Our ambition should not be that they live in a more expensive, but smaller, house. I hope that that will not be the case, because the economic dislocation that has resulted from the current state of the housing market will be even worse.

As Kate Barker points out, the root of the problem is the planning system. We have allowed it to become sclerotic; we have made it permissible that the supply is restricted to the point that the only way in which prices can go is up.

As a nation, we should take up another suggestion in Kate Barker's report and set ourselves an objective that house prices should not go up in real terms. The general cost of an individual unit of housing should be stable in real terms. If the Government set that as an objective and hand down that objective to planning authorities in one way or another, the consequence will be a great calming in the housing market. People will not pay immensely increasing prices if they think that they will face a drop. We should say, "No, we have gone far enough. This is the level of prices we will accept. Any increase beyond this and we will be aiming to reduce it". If people believed that the Government were doing that, there would be a calming of the situation. To that extent, the Bill is a lost opportunity. Perhaps the Kate Barker review will give us the opportunity for another one; but, as has been said, we see such Bills very infrequently.

I hope that there are measures that we can take in the Bill to allow us to start to tackle the situation—one would be to make planning departments real profit centres for local authorities. We must do more. We must see an end to the house-price spiral; it does nobody good. It is not really what we should want. We should want to invest our money in productive opportunities, not in this ridiculous housing spiral, which profits only those selling land into the system and those living off it.