PETERTIDE ordinations meant that the Bishop of Manchester, Dr David Walker, was the only real representative of the Lords Spiritual to contribute to the Second Reading of the Planning and Infrastructure Bill within the House of Lords on 25 June.
He clarified that there was “considerable interest within the Bill on our Benches”, despite the limited episcopal input. “This just also happens to be one among the busiest weeks of our yr. Several hundred latest priests and deacons might be ordained in our cathedrals across England this coming weekend,” he said.
“We desperately need a rapid expansion within the constructing of social homes, ideally at social rents. Enactment of the measures here included might be a part of the architecture — please excuse the pun — we want if we’re going to underpin the ambition for a mixed economy for housing, one which is able to live as much as the Archbishops’ Commission on Housing’s values of homes which can be secure and sustainable.”
With regard to “rural provisions”, he said that “the Bill provides a vital opportunity to guard chalk streams, that are each globally rare and ecologically very significant.”
Dr Walker had “long championed the needs of the Gypsy, Roma, and Traveller communities. They have been a part of the backbone of rural Britain for a lot of generations, but they’re increasingly pushed to the margins”. He was keen “to make sure that Gypsy and Traveller accommodation figures are included and explicitly referenced in the necessities of spatial-development strategies”. He said that “the definition of social housing could also helpfully be amended to incorporate local-authority Gypsy and Traveller sites”.
The Communities Minister, Lord Khan (Labour), introduced the Bill and referred to the “consensus on this House that the country could and ought to be higher served: higher served by more decent housing, with a greater, faster process for agreeing what infrastructure is required to support the communities we construct; higher, greener infrastructure to assist the country meet its climate targets; a greater deal for nature, which we all know the general public deeply cares about”.
He said that the Bill would “further support the Government’s clean power 2030 goal, enabling essential clean-energy projects to be built as quickly as possible”.
Lord Naseby (Conservative) was concerned that some adaptations, equivalent to solar energy and “heat pumps in every property” were “not feasible”.
“I worked in Hull, which had row after row of terraced housing. Those properties cannot have heat pumps,” he said.
Parliament TVThe Bishop of Manchester, Dr David Walker, addresses the House of Lords on 25 June
Others also voiced concerns. Lord Goldsmith (Conservative) said: “We have 85 per cent of the world’s chalk streams, but only 11 out of 220 are currently protected.”
Baroness Grender (LibDem) was concerned that “this Bill continues with the overcentralised, developer-led approach that has demonstrably did not deliver.”
For Baroness Bennett (Green), “the health of nature is the health of human beings — we human animals living on this fragile planet on this terribly nature-depleted country.”
Lord Fuller (Conservative) was keen to emphasize the “must optimise housing and economic growth throughout the context of optimising the burden of well-meaning regulations. We must get the public-private balance right.”
He said that “too often, officialdom, in its widest sense, is inflexible. It interprets the local plan grounded in data which is perhaps several years old and stuck previously, quite than addressing the needs of tomorrow.”
In summing up, Baroness Taylor (Labour), Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State on the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, said that she had been at “St Mary’s school in Walthamstow yesterday, where the kids are doing a project on homelessness, and I asked them what they’d say to the Prime Minister. They said, ‘Can you tell the Prime Minister to construct some more homes that individuals can afford?’”
She thanked Dr Walker for his mention of “the very excellent report of the Church Housing Commission and the Nationwide Foundation. I used to be very grateful for that piece of labor; it has been incredibly helpful in shaping pondering, particularly on social, reasonably priced and specialist housing.”
The Bill was committed to a Committee of the Whole House.
