Healthy Homes Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2022-07-15
Topic: Housing
Edmund Crisp (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, this has been a very impressive debate, showing the deep experience of people from all sides of this House. There is an overall message in all this about learning from the past and thinking about the future I will just pick up a few of the themes that people have mentioned before replying to the Minister. I cannot possibly do justice to what has been said but I will start, if I may, with the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, and his deep experience. He made very practical points about how this covers more than one department and the difficulties that creates for effective policy and implementation, and the need to think about how we can get at least some of this adopted through existing powers. I will come back to that. I am grateful to him for his support and for the presumed support of his ancestor, Hilton Young, on this matter I am very grateful to everyone who has spoken and to the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, for talking about his personal experience. One theme I took from what he said was liberating people; houses are the foundation for liberating people to be all that they can be. The noble Lord, Lord Stunell, gave me one quotation that I will remember this debate for. He said, I think, that we are building homes that are deliberately substandard. I did not know that there is a policy to that effect, but that is obviously what he has found in his wide experience in this field. The noble Lord also stressed the importance of having safe and affordable houses, which is a theme that others have picked up as well My noble friend Lady Prashar talked about how thoughtlessly we sometimes make changes in housing, without considering the wider implications. This is one of the points about systems and systems-thinking that so many others have raised. I was grateful to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Ely for drawing attention to the tension between the rush to build houses, and quality and standards. Rushing to build poor houses leads to major problems in the longer term. The noble Lord, Lord Shipley, stressed the healthy homes principles and some of the outrageous results—only some—of permitted development rights and their implications throughout the country My noble friend Lord Best talked strongly about the welcome commission that he has chaired, and its wisdom. I think your Lordships’ House will be coming back to the links between health, housing and place, and the important issues that come together there. I was also struck by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, saying that we should not expect our homes to kill to us. That seems to me to be a pretty basic point. Another point that the noble Baroness made strongly was that we need to make the links between the healthy homes principles and other policies that are already in the Government’s agenda I very much welcomed the comments from the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, about system thinking and how we need to see this right the way through, understand the big picture and not just make marginal changes here that have knock-on effects elsewhere. I also welcomed her points about costs and benefits. While there are relatively low costs, in percentage terms, there are very substantial benefits in the longer term I was also very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, for her comments about what it means for disabled people and about making sure we future-proof our homes. Finally, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, who drew out the points about additional costs and brought us back to the north-south divide, the importance of levelling up and how this fits together. This Bill is fundamentally about bringing together a whole lot of issues around the foundation of people having a decent life in our society I turn to the Minister’s response. I simply do not agree that these issues are all covered by current government policy. I was not necessarily surprised and therefore not necessarily disappointed by her remarks, and she will not be surprised or disappointed by mine. Before I try to take this argument much further, one of the fundamental points here is that quite a lot of what the Government have been doing has been proffering guidance and not making it mandatory. I noticed that a number of noble Lords around the Chamber talked about the importance of having some mandatory standards. The noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, who I missed out in my run-around just then, made the point precisely that we need some mandatory things because, when they are in guidance, the good people do them and the bad people do not. We see the results of both the good—and there is some fantastic stuff happening in the country—and the bad I will take the advice of the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, and look for opportunities for this in current legislation. I will look to follow up a conversation I have been having with the noble Lord, Lord Greenhalgh, for whose time on this I am grateful, and look for opportunities to discuss the issues with the noble Baroness and the Government more generally. I will also look for opportunities for the levelling-up Bill to produce some of the aspects of this Bill. Indeed, it has been suggested to me that while this Bill has only four pages, the levelling-up Bill has 140, so perhaps we should have an amendment to include this as a schedule to that Bill.