Sustainable and Secure Buildings Bill

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Mr. Stunell: The Minister is being extremely helpful, but ''the summer'' has now become ''this year''. Perhaps he would elaborate a little more on that.

The unitary development plans produced by local authorities are deemed to be in force and can be used as operational documents, even at the draft stage. Can the Minister give an assurance that the material that will be published will also be operational in the relationship between his and other ODPM officials and local planning authorities, which still look over their shoulder and wonder whether they have to go through the same hassle that Merton did?

10.15 am

Phil Hope: I wanted to address that point. I understand that there was what the hon. Gentleman described as a period of hassle for Merton. As I said, his opinion of ODPM officials was a little harsh, but that is water under the bridge. Whatever lessons had to be learned have been learned. We want to ensure that responsibility lies with local planning authorities—not only the 24 but the other 380. Given the encouragement in PPS1 and PPS22, we hope that all authorities will share the enthusiasm of those 24.

When I talk about this year, I mean this summer. The consultation on the planning guidance closed on 30 January, and we had 600 responses. We want to publish the results in the summer, along with the companion guide, which will give good examples. I am not sure whether I could give many more positive and encouraging messages to indicate the direction in which the Government want to travel.

Brian White: There is one way in which the Minister could do that. The ODPM is a landowner, and some of its agencies are developers in English Partnerships. It could give a strong steer to the market through its actions as a landowner and through its agencies. Will the Minister give a commitment this morning that the ODPM, in its guise as landowner, and its agencies will live up to our expectations as regards renewable energy in new buildings?

Phil Hope: I regret that I cannot wing it completely this morning and give a commitment on behalf of English Partnerships, its landowners and property owners. Clearly, however, we must tell ourselves what we tell everyone else. My hon. Friend's general point is fair, and in dealing with local authorities and private house builders, we should remember that we have our own stock. We talked earlier about Crown property being covered by the Bill. We understand the need at least to put our own house in order if not to demonstrate the way forward, and the millennium villages and communities are examples of where the Government have put their money where our mouth is and sought to encourage excellent practice.

Brian White: But my understanding is that English Partnerships has just accepted a tender from a builder who, rather than proposing a programme that takes environmental issues into consideration, will build the largest number of houses at the lowest price. That goes

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against the grain of what the Minister says. Will he therefore take this morning's message back to his agencies?

Phil Hope: I will take it back. I cannot comment on the case that my hon. Friend raises, but the message has been well and truly put across this morning.

Mr. Hayes: This is an important part of the discussion. If the Government carried out a cost-benefit analysis of the effectiveness of different renewable technologies or of measures to improve ventilation facilities and the retention of heat, those affected by the additional overheads would be reassured. The worst thing that we could do would be to force people to do things that did not yield great benefits. That would not be necessary if we did a cost-benefit analysis.

Phil Hope: The hon. Gentleman makes a good point. Of course, any new building regulations undergo a consultation period and a regulatory impact assessment to ensure that they will have the desired outcome. That also ensures that there are no unintended consequences, and that people do not, for example, stop building houses for others to live in because the regulations are over-prescriptive, lacking in flexibility or unable to deal with different market circumstances. What matters is what works, what will encourage people to move in the right direction, and what are the levers for change that will affect central and local government and the private sector as they go about their building work.

We have had a good and long discussion, and the Government well understand the Committee's enthusiasm. In addressing hon. Members' points, I have explained why the clause is not needed and set out the specific new steps that we are taking to ensure that we move in the right direction. With that, I hope that the hon. Member for Hazel Grove and others will accept that the clause cannot stand part of the Bill.

Mr. Stunell: We have had a very good debate, and I thank all hon. Members who have contributed to it. I hope that the Minister will reflect on the discussion and that he felt the heat on this issue. That is not really fair on him, because he is speaking on behalf of the ODPM, and his ministerial responsibilities do not cover this area. I know that what he has had to do is at second or even third hand, which is all the more credit to him.

There is a grey area between what building regulations can reach and what planning controls and policy can address. My clause was an attempt to ensure that the Government face up to the need to deal with that crossover so that we avoid the situation, which has happened, in which someone comes up with one way of solving the problem but is told that it is a matter for building regulations, not planning, or the converse in which someone comes up with a solution but is told that it is a matter for planning, not for building regulations. Some of the basic questions, such as orientation of houses, slip through the gap.

Unless sustainability is a material and proper consideration and is built into planning, we will continue to make the same mistakes and build houses with large windows facing north. As the hon.

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Member for South Holland and The Deepings said eloquently, we have been making mistakes in building construction for the past six or seven decades. We keep looking back and thinking that we would have a much more sustainable building stock if we knew then what we know now, or if we had taken intelligent decisions based on what we knew but did not act on.

I hope that the Minister understands what the Committee is trying to do and what my clause is trying to achieve. From the outset, I have had much support and help from members of the Town and Country Planning Association—the professional body of planners—who were clear that my description of the Merton process was nearer to reality than the Minister's. However, let us not go down that path.

The hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings made a very helpful contribution when he said that we should aim to set high standards. Standards tend to be diluted as the process goes on: if we do not start with high standards, we will not even finish with medium ones. I hope that the Minister will accept that we need to look at the long term.

The hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings also made the very important point that we need to consider micro-generation—the small contributions that can be made at individual building sites—as well as macro-generation. In the 1960s, we used to build power stations of 1,500 MW. In the future, we will build 15 KW power stations. We need to start thinking differently, and I hope that my new clause and the Minister's good intentions will make it easier to do that.

Last week, the hon. Gentleman suggested an index of beauty and introduced the new concept of monarchy diktats, apparently citing the Prince of Wales as an authority for just about everything. I believe, however, that we should be more rational and objective. Nevertheless, I thank him for his support for what the Liberal Democrats are trying to do.

The hon. Member for Nottingham, South spoke eloquently about his plans. I must tell him that Nottingham is not on the list of 24 authorities in the queue, but perhaps he will put that right soon.

Other Members made important points, especially about sustainability being an opportunity for jobs and employment. We must switch on the concept of sustainability. So many industries and producers are knocking on my door, never mind the Government's door, saying that they have a product that they could build, manufacture or market in this country to the benefit of the UK economy if they had a sufficiently large market. I hope that the Government—a Labour Government, for goodness' sake—are seized of the importance of that.

The BedZed project was mentioned, and is another example of hassle. I happen to know a little about that project. It is based in the London borough of Sutton, which is controlled by the Liberal Democrats. It had the most awful trouble getting permission from anybody in Whitehall to make a concessionary sale of land in order for that development to go ahead. That is another example of the institutional barriers that mean that there is only one BedZed in the

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country. That is because other local authorities think, ''We don't need the hassle which comes from locking horns with central Government on those issues.''

Mr. Kidney: One thing that I did not mention about BedZed is the name of the architect: Bill Dunster. The Minister should note his name and have a meeting with him, because he is keen to develop the BedZed concept across the country. He is in talks with local councils and Departments about future sites, but he could do with some helping hands to get some work done. For the benefit of my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent, North (Ms Walley)—he has even been to Stoke-on-Trent.

Mr. Stunell: I am sure that, on reflection, the hon. Gentleman would want to withdraw the word ''even.''

That was a helpful intervention. The same Bill Dunster has produced an estimate on the likely additional cost of having the requirement for sustainability built in—BedZed multiplied. He pointed out that with a 100-unit BedZed, which is a zero-energy construction, there would be on-costs of about 30 per cent., but if that number were increased to 5,000, the on-costs would be negligible. With a larger volume, the unit cost and other costs drop, and we move from having costs to having cost advantages, as we can consider using local—or at least UK-produced—materials.

I return to my point about Thameside, and I hope that the Minister will take that message back. He said that he was interested to hear that the draft was beefed up following consultation, and that the final version will be far stronger and far more positive. I am extremely pleased to hear that, and I am pleased that there will be a guide setting out some of the possibilities opened up by the note. I look forward to seeing both of them in the summer. I do not know if Hansard goes in for capital letters, but I should like the words ''in the summer'' to be capitalised. I should like to think that when we carefully consider the Minister's words in the cold light of Hansard, we can say that they permit local authorities to get weaving with their plans now, on the basis that the draft will allow them to go in the direction in which the whole Committee has said that it wants them to go.

I commended the clause at the beginning of today's proceedings and I have received some assurances. I know that the Minister is a man of integrity, and that his Department has all our best interests at heart, most of the time. I should like to think that the fact that this clause appeared in my Bill has been a major stimulus to the Department getting its skates on. I hope that Members' contributions to the debate have persuaded the Minister that, were he or the Deputy Prime Minister to think of backsliding, a significant number of Members would be on his back in a flash. On that basis, I shall not press the clause at this stage.

Question put and negatived.

Clause 7 disagreed to.

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Prepared 9 March 2004