I want to write to Baroness Pinnock
Baroness Pinnock: ...overflows; the health problems that follow can be very serious, but I will start with some history. Nearly 170 years ago, sewage was discharged into the rivers that served our great cities. In London, it was the Thames, and one hot summer in 1858 the smell that resulted from the raw effluent was dubbed the Great Stink. It affected Parliament to such an extent that the curtains were soaked...
Baroness Pinnock: ...the importance of improvements in building regulations in improving fire safety. As many noble Lords will know, the Grenfell Tower fire was started by a fault in a fridge. Nearly one fire a day in London is caused by faulty white goods. Improving the safety of electrical goods in the home will lead to a reduction in domestic fires. My noble friend Lord Tope has long been an advocate of...
Baroness Pinnock: ...the seventh richest country in the world, so I am really pleased that my noble friend drew attention to that. My noble friends Lady Burt and Lady Barker and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London all raised the issue of the Bill to ban conversion therapy: where is it? I will leave it at that because it is very important for a section of our society, and for some of us who have a...
Baroness Pinnock: My Lords, having just last week travelled by high-speed rail from London to Switzerland, it is shameful to me that the country does not seem able to be part of the great European high-speed rail transit system, especially for those of us who live in the north of the country—although that now includes the south-west and the Midlands. That brings me to the great cities of the north of...
Baroness Pinnock: ...: that local fees are set according to the area in which they are made and the area a council represents. I suspect that there must be varying costs to planning applications—for instance, in London boroughs compared to some other parts of the country where costs are not as high. My second major concern is the failure of these proposals to enable full cost recovery. The Government’s own...
Baroness Pinnock: ..., I wanted it to be specifically drawn to the attention of the House, because it was wrong to exclude them on the grounds that the risk is less. Fire services across the country, not just the London fire service, say that the risk is unacceptable. These flats are covered with flammable cladding that was put there knowingly by materials manufacturers that knew it was flammable and that a...
Baroness Pinnock: ...a completely new topic. It is so out of scope that, to debate it, the Long Title of the Bill has also to be amended. The noble Lord, Lord Moylan, has chosen to discuss, via the theme of ULEZ, the London devolution deal. How much better if he had done so during the very long section of debate on the Bill devoted to devolution. The amendments that he has proposed have only a tenuous link...
Baroness Pinnock: ...he played in bringing this amendment to the Floor of the House. This is a really good move, which is welcomed across the House, adopting the extension of the blue plaque scheme to areas outside London and to those of us who live outside London. I did not realise that they did not happen outside London because of the local schemes that have been in place. My understanding is that those...
Baroness Pinnock: ...64 is a general plea to make business improvement districts more responsive to the views of the residents that they affect. The noble Lord, Lord Northbrook, has used as an example an area of London of which I know little, so I will not be able to respond or comment in any way on the specifics of that. However, on the generalities of business improvement districts and the amendment in the...
Baroness Pinnock: ...to go to a council meeting. Think of how many people that will exclude: those who cannot drive would not be able to get there, as there are no buses and no trains, or very few. This is not like London. In the winter North Yorkshire has snow, which makes it even more difficult to get physically to meetings, which is when a virtual option makes really good sense. There is also the example of...
Baroness Pinnock: ...planning process that considers what must be thought about. Since I came here from faraway Yorkshire, I have wondered whether a lot of our proposals in legislation are based on experience in London. I do not think that street votes are going to go down right well in parts of Yorkshire, to be honest. People will turn to their local councillors and ask us to solve it, which many times we...
Baroness Pinnock: ...of that amendment—and to define affordability in a local context. Where I live in West Yorkshire, you can still buy a house for £150,000. You probably could not buy a garden shed for that in London. There is a wide range of house pricing and housing rents, and local authorities ought to be able, as part of their understanding of their local area, to define that. Lastly, I reference...
Baroness Pinnock: .... This is a very interesting and important debate because it is about creating part of the hierarchy of a plan-led process. At the moment, we have quite a mixed pattern across England. Obviously, London has the ability to make a spatial strategy policy and plan; so do just some of the metro combined authorities, as they are known. In 2018, there was a statutory instrument which enabled...
Baroness Pinnock: ...defects, there was a cascade of responsible entities. At the bottom of the cascade were leaseholders, who may be required to pay a capped contribution, which was limited to £10,000 outside London and £15,000 in London. These alone are significant sums—for first-time buyers, for instance. There are still questions to be asked about whether the Government’s attempt to ensure that...
Baroness Pinnock: My Lords, I want briefly to point to what I regard as the principle behind all the discussion that we have had tonight; that is, the difference between the powers of the London mayor and the way they were established, as opposed to those of combined authority or metropolitan district council mayors being established by the Bill. There are lessons to be learned. All through the debate on the...
Baroness Pinnock: .... The other way of doing it is by percentage difference in value. The Government’s own land value estimates for 2019 reveal that while the average price of a hectare of land for housing in London was £35.5 million, in the north-east it was just £1.1 million. There is a huge percentage difference and cash difference in land values across the country. What this is attempting to do is to...
Baroness Pinnock: ...Committee how these are already in use in different parts of the country. We will start with the additional member system. It is used for elections of the Scottish Parliament, the Senedd and the London Assembly. This is a mixed system—some are elected by first past the post and others from a list system—but the outcome is more proportional to the votes as expressed by the electorate....
Baroness Pinnock: ...on economic growth is the poor skill levels in some parts of the country. Another of the metrics set out in the annexe to the White Paper is the numbers who travel to work by public transport. In London that is over 50%, according to the data in the annexe—I was not quite sure that I believed it, but that is what it says—and in most other places in the country the figure is around 10%....
Baroness Pinnock: ...area of west Yorkshire—you cannot get a bus after 5 pm. Come on! If we are serious about narrowing these gaps, we have to be serious about public transport. Many of those of us who live outside London will applaud that measure, because once it is part of a regular public reporting process, it will force change both in funding and in governance models. I will not go through all 12...
Baroness Pinnock: ...to invest in areas that have, for too long, felt left behind ... A vision for the future that will see public spending on R&D increased in every part of the country; transport connectivity reaching London-like levels within and between all our towns and cities; faster broadband in every community; life expectancies rising; violent crime falling; schools improving; and private sector...