Clause 32

Part of Infrastructure Bill [Lords] – in a Public Bill Committee at 12:15 pm on 8 January 2015.

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Photo of Alan Whitehead Alan Whitehead Labour, Southampton, Test 12:15, 8 January 2015

I rise briefly to support both of those amendments. I do not want to add to what has been clearly and succinctly put forward by my colleagues also supporting them, but to underline what is a proposal that might well not work. It could potentially produce a quagmire of competing attempts to get round the exemption level and, possibly, a lawyer’s paradise on the basis of who is dealing with what site, what number of houses are being put up on what site, who is the guiding hand behind each site and whether they are the same company or not. That appears not to have been addressed or thought out at all in introducing this exemption.

Secondly, it is a rather breathtaking move to introduce legislation, which we are discussing this morning and that will presumably—if the amendments are overthrown—become full legislation shortly, at the same time as a consultation is under way to decide whether there should be legislation and if so, what kind. The consultation that my hon. Friend the Member for City of Durham says has just finished actually finished on 7 January 2015—that is, yesterday. It has a number of options for what might be done as far as exemptions for small sites are concerned, but even that consultation makes an interesting point that is at the heart of some of the arguments about whether a small site exemption is necessary at all. It says:

“Costs of delivering zero carbon homes are expected to come down, and the impact of this would need to be analysed. The expectations on the reduced cost of delivering a zero carbon home may help bolster the case for a time limited exemption.”

But of course there is not a time-limited exemption. We are perhaps about to decide that we will go full tilt for an exemption on the basis of a housing number of 10, and, as the consultation states, in terms of the most recent figures for sites of this size, exempt 21% of the new homes being built. That is not an insignificant number, but a substantial number of homes produced over the period.

Such homes will not only be at a slightly lower level of code development, but effectively exempt from that code development, and therefore for a considerable period of time exempted from that code. At a future date those homes could be substantially retrofitted according to any future policy to uprate our housing standards.

So it seems to me that this proposal is fundamentally misconceived at this stage in the proceedings. That is not to say that, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich and Woolwich emphasised, there should be  no such things as allowable solutions. That is not to say that protocols to enable allowable solutions to be worked out should not be undertaken. However, to do it on the basis of 10 homes with virtually no other factors being considered, while other factors are considered in consultation with the public, is not a way forward that any member of the Committee ought to support. The proposal should not be rushed through when people believe that they should have the opportunity to consult and decide on what should be the way forward. Indeed, as my hon. Friends have mentioned, if such a consultation were to be taken seriously, it would reveal that there is virtually no support for the proposal among those who might conceivably be consulted. It would reveal substantial support for different forms of allowable solutions that move us forward as far as the energy efficiency of homes is concerned. We should not downgrade the whole process, which appears to be part and parcel of what is happening to the zero-carbon homes policy at the moment.