PARLIAMENTARY DEBATE
Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill - 17 October 2023 (Commons/Commons Chamber)

Consideration of Lords amendments

Let us look at the Opposition’s record. Just last month, the Leader of the Opposition claimed that Labour was the party of the builders, not the blockers, yet in the next breath he ordered his Labour Lords to stick to defective EU laws, blocking 100,000 homes and voting down Government plans to unblock nutrient neutrality and protect the environment, meaning that desperately needed affordable homes, care homes and brownfield regeneration projects in town centres still languish unbuilt—[Interruption.] From a sedentary position, the shadow Levelling Up Secretary, the right hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner), asks why we did not accept their amendments. She never put forward any proposals. She did not put forward any amendments. Labour Members voted ours down without a single plan of their own. No surprises there.

In tabling amendments in lieu of Lords amendment 44, the Government have made it clear that consultation in respect of the designation and review of an NDMP must take place in all but a limited set of circumstances. We welcome that subtle shift in the Government’s position. However, if the Government amendment in lieu were accepted, the form of consultation would remain, as in the original drafting of the Bill, whatever the Secretary of State “thinks appropriate”. In short, the Government’s amendment in lieu will replace a precise set of requirements, namely those set out in clauses 38ZB and 38ZC, with an ambiguous and loosely worded clause that will allow Ministers to determine the nature of the consultation to take place and give them the freedom not to consult in instances where they feel it is necessary, or expedient, to act urgently, however they choose to interpret that phrase. In our view, that is problematic. As such, while we welcome the willingness of Ministers to move on this issue, we do not feel they have gone anywhere near far enough. For that reason, we will support Lords amendment 44.
The need to do more to ensure that there is genuine coherence between the planning system and our country’s climate commitments has been a recurring theme throughout consideration of the Bill. It is abundantly clear from the evidence, including from recent detailed research undertaken by the Climate Change Committee, that the existing plethora of duties, requirements and powers that set out how the planning system should help to achieve net zero are not producing the required results. Not only are they insufficiently robust to produce consistency when it comes to the decisions taken by local planning authorities and the Planning Inspectorate, but the system regularly throws up decisions that are incompatible with the need to make rapid progress towards net zero emissions by mid-century or to deliver resilient and climate-proofed places.
The Government previously made vague commitments to revise the national planning policy framework to include a number of changes designed to respond to the climate crisis, but when they had the opportunity to act in the new version of the NPPF published last month, they failed to include any references to our net zero targets. As for the more far-reaching review of national policy that is promised, this will not take place until next year, if at all. It is simply not good enough.
We urgently need clear and unambiguous national policy guidance in relation to climate change, a purposeful statutory framework to align every aspect of the planning system with net zero, and an overarching duty on the Secretary of State, local planning authorities and those involved in neighbourhood plan making to achieve climate change mitigation and adaptation when preparing plans and policies or exercising their functions in planning decision making. The latter is what Lords amendment 45 would achieve, and we support it.
Lords amendment 239 quite reasonably proposes that, in addition to managing and shaping the overall childcare market in their area, local authorities should be allowed to deliver their own childcare provision, if they wish to do so. The amendment would expand on existing powers in the Childcare Act 2006 that allow local authorities to establish their own provision in circumstances where they identify a childcare need that cannot be met by any other means, or where they deem it more appropriate to provide that provision themselves.
The Government resisted this amendment in the other place on the basis that there was no appetite among local authorities to deliver childcare directly, that it would not make a material difference to childcare availability across the country and that it might risk an actual or perceived conflict of interest for local authorities as both market shapers and direct providers. Those arguments were utterly unconvincing. The huge gaps that exist in the affordability and availability of childcare across the country are denying children opportunities, limiting parental choice and holding back our local economies. Local authorities have a statutory responsibility to ensure that there are sufficient childcare places available to families within their local community. We believe that if they deem it necessary to directly deliver their own provision to meet that responsibility, they should have the freedom to do so.
We are therefore pleased that the Government have accepted our argument that local authorities should not simply be a childcare provider of last resort but should be allowed to deliver childcare directly if they believe it can help meet local need. We welcome the full concession made via an amendment in lieu of Lords amendment 239.
As the Minister will know, we took strong exception to the provisions in the Bill, as first published, that would have had the effect of disregarding the full repeal of the Vagrancy Act 1824 that the House approved via amendments to the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022. Having resisted our urgings in Committee to voluntarily withdraw the relevant placeholder clause, the Government were forced to do so in this place on Report.
However, nearly a year on from that concession, and 20 months after the then Policing Minister, the right hon. Member for North West Hampshire (Kit Malthouse), made a commitment from the Dispatch Box that it would be repealed in full within a maximum of 18 months, it remains the case that the 1824 Act—an embarrassing remnant of Georgian England’s approach to the poor and destitute—remains on the statute book. We welcome the concession the Government have made in essentially accepting, albeit with a slight variation in respect of timing, Lords amendment 240. In so doing, the Government will at least be required to produce a statement detailing the impact of enforcing the most pernicious sections of the Vagrancy Act that criminalise sleeping rough and begging. But the Government really do now need to honour their word on this matter, bring forward the necessary replacement legislation and repeal the Vagrancy Act in full, as the House has clearly insisted that they do.
Lords amendment 241 relates to public buildings that are in a state of disrepair—an issue that has gained prominence in light of the revelations in recent months about the risks posed by RAAC. The amendment would simply require the Government to keep a register of schools and hospitals that are in serious disrepair. The Government maintain that extensive data on the condition of both schools and hospitals is already publicly available and that a requirement to maintain such a register, and update it regularly, would place an unnecessary burden on schools and NHS trusts in a way that would detract from their ability to address the most serious building safety issues. We note and appreciate those concerns. However, there is clearly a need for greater transparency and more accessible reporting on public buildings that are in a state of disrepair.
I stand to be corrected, but it is my understanding that there is no statutory requirement to release all the data in question. To the extent that data has made its way into the public sphere, it has emerged in an ad hoc and unplanned manner, and it is often presented in formats that are virtually inaccessible. Given the strong case for measures to increase transparency and improve reporting in relation to this important issue, it is disappointing that the Government have not felt it necessary to provide any concessions. We urge them to give further thought to whether some kind of compromise might be reached.
Lords amendment 242 seeks to remedy a glaring defect within the Building Safety Act 2022: that qualifying leaseholders who have been required to extend or vary their lease subsequent to the Act’s coming into force in June last year have found themselves ineligible for the leaseholder protections it provides, because a lease extension is technically a new lease, not an extension of the same lease. The fact that this defect was allowed to arise is a source of serious concern, particularly given that the Leasehold Reform (Ground Rent) Act 2022, passed only a few months before the Building Safety Act, included provisions designed to ensure that the same problem could not arise under it. This is a salutary warning of the problems that arise when a Government choose to legislate in haste on an issue and do not provide the House with adequate time to scrutinise a Bill.
The Government, to their credit, have accepted that this problem needs to be remedied. The amendment in lieu that they have tabled to Lords amendment 242 achieves that end, and does so with retrospective effect. Although many more issues relating to the building safety crisis require the Government to think again—not least the plight of non-qualifying leaseholders the Government chose to exclude from protections under the Building Safety Act—we welcome the concession that has been made, albeit with one proviso: Ministers must take steps to ensure that leaseholders who paid service charges over the past 15 months in the belief that they were not eligible for the leaseholder protections under the Act, because of the Government’s mistake, are reimbursed. Those individuals should not suffer financially as a result of a drafting error that should not have been allowed to occur in the first place. If the Minister—I hope she is listening to this point—can provide us with some reassurance on that point, we will happily accept the Government’s amendment in lieu.
The issue of onshore wind has arisen at several points during consideration of the Bill. In response to demands from a sizeable group of Conservative Back Benchers, the Government committed on Report in this House to make changes to the NPPF to facilitate more onshore wind deployment, subject to local approval. Although it was made clear that the precise method by which community consent would be determined would emerge from consultation, a clear deadline of April this year was given for changes to be made. That deadline came and went without the NPPF being amended. As a result, a group of disgruntled Conservative Members threatened to amend the Energy Bill to ensure that the harmful effective moratorium imposed on onshore wind since 2015 was finally ended. To stave off a rebellion, the Government agreed to update footnote 54 of the NPPF. However, the revised wording of that footnote still leaves onshore wind projects subject to a uniquely restrictive consenting regime. It therefore remains easier to build an incinerator or a landfill site than an onshore wind farm in England. As RenewableUK stated in responding to the changes:
Lords amendment 244 seeks to remedy this anomaly once and for all and to ensure that onshore wind projects are treated in the same way as any other form of infrastructure. It would reinstate onshore wind projects of more than 50 MW as nationally significant infrastructure projects, just like all other onshore forms of electricity generation; remove the obligation for pre-application consultation that currently exists only for onshore wind projects of two or more turbines; and require associated planning guidance to be brought back in line with that for other forms of generation. We strongly support it and urge the House to finally resolve this matter by doing the same.
Lords amendment 273 concerns mayoral control of police and crime commissioner functions. The Government have sought to ensure that metro Mayors are given the power to unilaterally take on those functions themselves without the consent of the constituent authorities of the relevant combined authority, and to do so from the point at which this Bill is given Royal Assent.

Despite promising to put power back in the hands of local people, the amendments show that the Bill in its entirety is nothing but a thinly veiled attempt by Westminster to roll back on the devolution settlement. The Bill adopts a top-down approach that cuts out the democratically elected Scottish Parliament and its Ministers, in favour of decisions made in Whitehall. In the last Budget, the Chancellor announced several direct funding programmes in Scotland through the Government’s levelling-up fund—projects that totalled £172 million in spending. Those projects violated the devolution settlement, spending in areas that are explicitly devolved and undermining money that should have come to Scotland in the form of Barnett consequentials. It is not enough for the UK Government to seek support from the Scottish Government in the implementation of projects selected by Whitehall; the Scottish Government must be consulted at all stages, as was the case with EU funding. If the UK Government are serious about levelling up, they must respect devolution.

Finally, I would not be a Liberal Democrat if I did not mention the importance of local government. We desperately need more powers to be devolved to local government. However, I have deep concerns about the way in which that is sometimes done. Devolution should be implemented with an understanding of what the local area needs; just because it works well in one place in a certain way does not mean it will work in the same way across rural Somerset. I strongly urge the Government to give more powers to Somerset, but in consultation with the people of Somerset, so that we are given greater decision-making powers in our local area rather than just implementing what Westminster thinks we need.
I look forward to being a hard-working Member of this House and a great representative for Somerton and Frome. To all the people of Somerset: Sumorste ealle.

Given that national development management policies are about how land is used in England and are a cornerstone of the planning reforms in the Bill, it is really important that we look at them carefully. I, like many others in this place, have long been concerned that NDMPs run contrary to localism. They reduce transparency and, importantly, local participation in plan making. I fear that they will take priority over local plans, with no guarantees of public consultation. For me, that is what really matters.
In a constituency such as mine, Aldridge-Brownhills, on the edge of Birmingham, local people need and expect to have their voices heard, particularly through parliamentary scrutiny. We saw that only last year with the “Black Country Plan”. I see that there is another Member from the Black Country in the Chamber, my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley South (Mike Wood), and he will know exactly where I am coming from. That plan was designed to pull all the local authorities together to look at housing need across the west midlands. Areas such as mine were at serious risk of having swathes of houses built on our precious green belt. Thankfully, thanks to scrutiny, transparency and the voice of local people and locally elected councillors and parliamentarians, the plan was dropped, and our local council is now able to continue working on the local plan.
On Lords amendment 44, I am pleased that the Government have listened and tabled an amendment that will place consultation on a legislative footing, but I would like to press the Minister on this. Government amendment (b) to Lords amendment 44 states:
I would like to understand exactly what we mean by that. It is vital that we get this right. We have one opportunity to get it right and, if we do not, I fear that areas such as mine and the edges of the communities that I represent will continue to be under threat.
Our much loved green belt and our green spaces mean so much to us. We are not anti-housing, but we want houses in the right places, and we want a mix of housing. As the Minister will be aware, we have lots of brownfield across the west midlands. She spoke about the brownfield-first approach. I think it was the West Midlands Mayor, Andy Street, who championed brownfield first. I, among others, have spoken many times in the Chamber in favour of that.
Finally, I want to touch on the duty to co-operate, which is often at the heart of the problems that constituencies such as mine face. I seek clarity from the Minister today, or in writing from the Secretary of State after the debate, as to what we mean when we refer to the alignment policy. I sincerely hope that this is not simply a relabelling of the duty to co-operate.

The biggest example of devolved government is the devolved Government of Scotland. It is now a good time to review how well that has been working, because we were told that devolution would boost the Scottish growth rate and improve Scottish public services relative to public services elsewhere. So far this century—the period in which we have experienced devolved government with considerable powers—Scotland has always had considerably more money per head for public services than England, yet the Scottish growth rate has been lower than the English growth rate.
Scotland comes into the House today to demand bigger levelling-up moneys, because clearly more than two decades of Scottish independent government in many areas has not levelled Scotland up yet. We need to ask why that has failed. What was wrong with the conduct of the SNP Government and, before that, were there defects in the Labour-led Government in Scotland? How could future Governments in Scotland use those powers and the considerable sums of money granted to better effect?
What matters is which parts of the country attract most of the private investment. For all the public investment that Governments have put in, it will always be greatly exceeded by the total amount of private sector investment, because in our more free enterprise society, our private sector economy is still larger than the public sector economy, unlike in true socialist or communist states. That private investment is often the driver of many of the better-paid jobs and levelling-up opportunities that can then be created.
I am keen that we get a better balance in where new housing is built not so much because of the impact that I see of too much housing being put up in a hurry in my area, but because I think that more of that investment should go to places that want levelling-up moneys and that need a better balance of development. Those places could do with a lot of the private investment that all too often comes to parts of the country that do not qualify for levelling-up money.
Every time I get a new housing estate in Wokingham, I have to go to a Minister and say, “We need a new primary school.” After we have had half a dozen new housing estates, as we regularly do, I have to go and say, “We need a new secondary school.” Those are big ticket items, and that is big public sector investment that has to go to a part of the country that does not need to be levelled up. More difficult is trying to get money for roads, because we have this strange idea that we can put as many housing estates as we like into a place like Wokingham and magically our existing road network will take it when people buy those houses and practically all of them have cars; well, it cannot. We then need bypasses, extra road capacity or extra train capacity. We need the utilities to put in more water and electricity capacity, otherwise we have the embarrassment that we have lovely new houses, but it is difficult to hitch them up to a grid that works. There are great pressures and huge amounts of consequential investment from the new housing that comes into a congested area of the country that does not qualify for levelling up.
I urge all parties to do a little more thinking about how we level up areas and to ask why it is that so many people wish to visit huge amounts of private sector housing investment in places that are levelled up, while starving the rest of the country of it, when it is often the motor of the levelling up that they seek.

I associate myself with the comments made by my right hon. Friend the Member for North Somerset (Dr Fox), although he has left his place, about the Planning Inspectorate. I urge the Minister to consider his comments on that carefully.
Lastly, I turn to Lords amendment 80, on flooding. Across Buckinghamshire and my Buckingham constituency, there have been countless examples of houses in particular built in the floodplain. These are houses that the local authority turned down but the Planning Inspectorate granted. Then—surprise, surprise—when flooding issues have come along, the developer has raised the level of the houses, in some cases by in excess of a metre, so that, when the land does flood, it floods not the new homes that it has sold for in excess of £1 million but the existing houses that surround it.
I think of one example in the village of Ickford in my constituency where that very thing happened—I even stood in my wellies in the flood waters before the foundations were dug on the development. The houses were then built with whopping great slopes in the back gardens leading to the existing homes, and when the new owners move in and try to dig their gardens to plant flower beds, doing all the things people love to do in their gardens—surprise, surprise—they find that they quickly hit layers of rubble and stone where the developers have raised the land by that height. I urge my hon. Friend the Minister to consider how we can look at Lords amendment 80 much more carefully and properly stop the perversity of house builders being allowed to build in these floodplains, often hiding behind expert evidence they paid for and controlled, which it is difficult for others to give proper scrutiny to and disprove, even though everyone in the neighbourhood—that village, town or wherever it might be—will tell them straight down the lens, “That land floods, and if you build houses on it, those houses will flood too.”
The Bill is materially better than when we started with it last year. I repeat my thanks to my hon. Friend the Minister for the engagement she has given and urge her to push that little bit further in order to iron out those final gremlins and get it to being a Bill that communities can be really confident will protect them.

That £1.5 billion for two counties the size of ours over such a short period—it is a five-year settlement—is a huge amount of money and presents a huge opportunity by bringing into scope many of the road and rail projects for which our area has been waiting a very long time. As a result of all the local nuances, such as low land values, we have never managed to get those projects to the top of the Treasury’s Green Book list—we have never managed to make them into national priorities—but they are local priorities, and for the first time they will be deliverable at a local level, which is very exciting. My constituents will take heart from the fact that, for instance, the Robin Hood and Maid Marian lines, which we have been talking about for a decade, will now be in our gift, subject to the passage of the Bill.
I entirely agree with the Government’s stance in rejecting Lords amendments 13 and 14. I am directly involved in the negotiations on the delivery of the structure and voting rights of district councils in our proposed East Midlands combined county authority, and we have had a very constructive relationship. They have lobbied me to vote in favour of Lords amendment 13, and, because of the importance and value of that relationship, I want to explain my reasoning very clearly.
I think the Government are doing the right thing in rejecting the amendment because of the premise of creating combined county authorities. In previous iterations, we have not been able to secure the unanimity across 18 districts and boroughs that would allow us to deliver devolution. If they had all agreed to be full members of the combined authority we could have done that eight years ago, at the time when the West Midlands and Greater Manchester did it, but because we have not been able to find the necessary consensus we have missed out on more than £6 billion during that period, relative to Greater Manchester. For the last eight years we have looked enviously over the border at the west midlands—and at the Teesside constituency of the Under-Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, my hon. Friend the Member for Redcar (Jacob Young)—at all the investment and support that they have had and that we could have had. The combined county authority principle gives us the opportunity to deliver that, in a slightly different way with a slightly more flexible approach.
Preventing the inclusion of Lords amendment 13 does not mean excluding the voices of districts and boroughs. In our combined authority, they will have voting rights on issues that affect their powers and their remit. It will be impossible not to include them in the decision-making process when they are the planning authority, and, indeed, the combined authority will be unable to deliver a great deal without their consent. It is important to emphasise that saying that they cannot be full constituent members does not mean they will not have a say, and those rights and those powers. In fact, if they could all agree to be full constituent members, even now, we could still deliver a consensual version under the current statute without the need for the Bill.
As for Lords amendment 14, which concerns associate members, we had already decided and agreed locally that there was not enough legitimacy in voting rights for non-elected members of the combined authority who would not be ultimately accountable to the public through elections. I am pleased that the Government agree with that principle.
Let me finally say something about locally led urban development corporations. We in the east midlands have had one of those, in an interim form, for some years. Covid delayed its powers, but it has done some fantastic master-planning in significant parts of our region, seeking to secure the maximum public good from private sector investment in, for example, our freeport and sites such as Ratcliffe-on-Soar and Toton. The urban development corporation provides a great opportunity—particularly when working in conjunction with the combined authority—to take a long-term, strategic approach to planning and delivery, whether that means business and commercial investment or housing, and to do so in a more long-term and joined-up way. The planning powers in the corporation mean that that can also be delivered more swiftly and easily. This is another exciting prospect, so I am pleased that after being an interim vehicle for a number of years, the east midlands development corporation will finally acquire its full range of powers and opportunities.
I really welcome the Bill returning. I am excited about the opportunities that it brings to Mansfield and to Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire in the new county combined authority through significant new investment in our transport network, in our economic development and in major flagship projects. I have used the example of STEP Fusion in Bassetlaw on a regular basis to describe the impact that this can have on our region. We have a £20 billion investment in clean energy and exciting new jobs in the nuclear industry in north Nottinghamshire, and a new combined authority that can wrap around that, working with providers of skills and training to ensure that my constituents can access those jobs. We can also wrap the transport infrastructure around that, whether that involves bus, road or rail, to ensure that they can get in and out to those jobs.
We have never had the opportunity to deliver this at local level before, and those changes will be really meaningful in the long term. Children growing up on estates in Mansfield now will have job opportunities in 10, 15 or 20 years’ time that they could never previously have dreamed of, so this is a huge opportunity. My one ask of the Government—in addition to what I have said in my short speech—is that this must be delivered in the next fortnight in order for us to have our regional election next year. This must be delivered before Prorogation; otherwise, we will run out of time and my constituents will have to wait for months or even a year for access to these powers and funds, so I urge the Minister to ensure that we get this delivered in time.

Thirdly, some local councils, such as Suffolk County Council and the Broads Authority, which straddles Suffolk and Norfolk, cover large geographical areas, and one has to ask whether it is appropriate to require councillors to drive up to an hour and a half for a meeting. I am thinking, for example, of a journey from Bungay in north Suffolk, in my constituency, to Ipswich, which is a three-hour round trip. We are seeking to encourage less use of our cars, as we strive towards net zero. Attending these meetings on that basis is expensive, time-consuming and inappropriate when we should be looking to lessen our carbon footprint.

That brings me to a question that I think I have been asked by every single Member of the House who has spoken, which is about the national planning policy framework response. People are anxious to see the detail of that, and I understand why. We had a huge number of responses to this vital planning consultation, which represents a significant change to planning policy and something that the industry is clearly calling for. We have seen problems with our planning system, and we do need to make sure that it is fit for the modern day and can deliver the homes that people need in communities, built to the highest standards. That is our objective and we need to get it right.
I am pleased that we have been able to work with many colleagues across the House, in particular my right hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet (Theresa Villiers) and my hon. Friends the Members for Buckingham and for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely), on the specific concerns they have raised. We will publish the response as soon as possible, or in any case shortly, and our position remains as set out in the Secretary of State’s letter of December 2022.
Turning to the vital issue of onshore wind, I recognise the contributions from my right hon. Friends the Members for Reading West (Sir Alok Sharma) and for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland (Sir Simon Clarke). We will respond shortly to the consultation on local partnerships for onshore wind, including on improvements to the system of community benefits. I recognise the challenge to the Government by my right hon. Friend the Member for Reading West to set out more clearly what the benefits will look like. I hope he can see that the Minister for Energy Security and Net Zero is on the Front Bench and has been doing considerable work on this matter. There are very successful schemes across the country already that deliver discounts on energy bills of up to £300 a year, and we see great potential to go a lot further. We hope that colleagues continue to support us in that vital work.
I will touch on climate change, which has been raised by several right hon. and hon. Members. I want to be clear that the Government take meeting the challenges of responding to climate change through the planning policy system seriously. That is why there is already a climate change requirement in the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004. That is restated in schedule 8 to the Bill, which amends the 2004 Act by adding proposed new section 15C(9), which sets out that local planning authorities must design their local plans
As part of our programme of changes to the planning system, we intend to complete a fuller review of the national planning policy framework to ensure that it contributes to climate change mitigation and adaptation as fully as possible.

Amendment (a) made to Lords amendment 231.
Lords amendment 231, as amended, agreed to, with Commons financial privileges waived.
Government amendments (a) and (b) made to Lords amendment 237.
Lords amendment 237, as amended, agreed to.
Government amendments (a), (c), (b) and (d) made to Lords amendment 369.
Lords amendment 369, as amended, agreed to.
Motion made, and Question put, That this House disagrees with Lords amendment 1.—(Rachel Maclean.)
Lords amendment 1 disagreed to.
Proceedings interrupted (Programme Order, this day).
The Deputy Speaker put forthwith the Questions necessary for the disposal of the business to be concluded at that time (Standing Order No. 83F).
Motion made, and Question put, That this House disagrees with Lords amendment 2.—(Rachel Maclean.)
Lords amendment 2 disagreed to.
Motion made, and Question put, That this House disagrees with Lords amendment 4.—(Rachel Maclean.)
Lords amendment 4 disagreed to.
Government amendments (a) and (b) made in lieu of Lords amendments 2 and 4.
Motion made, and Question put, That this House disagrees with Lords amendment 3.—(Rachel Maclean.)
Lords amendment 3 disagreed to.
Lords amendment 6 disagreed to.
Government amendments (a) to (d) made in lieu of Lords amendment 6.
Motion made, and Question put, That this House disagrees with Lords amendment 10.—(Rachel Maclean.)
Lords amendment 10 disagreed to.
Government amendments (a) and (b) made in lieu of Lords amendment 10.
Motion made, and Question put, That this House disagrees with Lords amendment 13.—(Rachel Maclean.)
Lords amendment 13 disagreed to.
Lords amendment 14 disagreed to.
Government amendments (a) to (p) made in lieu of Lords amendment 14.
Lords amendment 18 disagreed to.
Government amendments (a) and (b) made in lieu of Lords amendment 18.
Motion made, and Question put, That this House disagrees with Lords amendment 22.—(Rachel Maclean.)
Lords amendment 22 disagreed to.
Lords amendments 30 and 31 disagreed to.
Government amendments (a) to (d) made in lieu of Lords amendments 30 and 31.
Motion made, and Question put, That this House disagrees with Lords amendment 44—(Rachel Maclean.)
Lords amendment 44 disagreed to.
Government amendments (a) and (b) made in lieu of Lords amendment 44.
Motion made, and Question put, That this House disagrees with Lords amendment 45.—(Rachel Maclean.)
Lords amendment 45 disagreed to.
Lords amendment 46 disagreed to.
Lords amendment 80 disagreed to.
Motion made, and Question put, That this House disagrees with Lords amendment 81.—(Rachel Maclean.)
Lords amendment 81 disagreed to.
Government amendments (a) to (c) made in lieu of Lords amendment 81.
Motion made, and Question put, That this House disagrees with Lords amendment 82.—(Rachel Maclean.)
Lords amendment 82 disagreed to.
Power to specify environmental outcomes
Lords amendment 90 disagreed to.
Government amendment (a) made in lieu of Lords amendment 90.
Lords amendment 102 disagreed to.
Lords amendment 103 disagreed to.
Government amendments (a) to (d) made in lieu of Lords amendments 102 and 103.
Lords amendment 133 disagreed to.
Lords amendment 134 disagreed to.
Lords amendment 137 disagreed to.
Lords amendment 139 disagreed to.
Lords amendment 142 disagreed to.
Lords amendment 156 disagreed to.
Lords amendment 157 disagreed to.
Lords amendment 172 disagreed to.
Lords amendment 180 disagreed to.
Motion made, and Question put, That this House disagrees with Lords amendment 199.—(Rachel Maclean.)
Lords amendment 199 disagreed to.
Lords amendment 239 disagreed to.
Government amendments (a) to (c) made in lieu of Lords amendment 239.
Lords amendment 240 disagreed to.
Government amendments (a) to (c) made in lieu of Lords amendment 240.
Motion made, and Question put, That this House disagrees with Lords amendment 241.—(Rachel Maclean.)
Lords amendment 241 disagreed to.
Lords amendments 242, 243 and 288 disagreed to.
Government amendments (a) to (d) made in lieu of Lords amendments 242, 243 and 288.
Motion made, and Question put, That this House disagrees with Lords amendment 244—(Rachel Maclean.)
Lords amendment 244 disagreed to.
Lords amendment 249 disagreed to.
Motion made, and Question put, That this House disagrees with Lords amendment 273.—(Rachel Maclean.)
Lords amendment 273 disagreed to.
Government amendment (a) made to Lords amendment 273.
Lords amendment 280 disagreed to.
Lords amendment 285 disagreed to.
Government amendment (a) made to Lords amendment 285.
Lords amendment 327 disagreed to.
Motion made, and Question put, That this House disagrees with Lords amendment 329.—(Rachel Maclean.)
Lords amendment 329 disagreed to.
Government amendments (a) and (b) made in lieu of Lords amendment 329.
Lords amendments 5, 7 to 9, 11, 12, 15 to 17, 19 to 21, 23 to 29, 32 to 43, 47 to 79, 83 to 89, 91 to 101, 104 to 116, 118 to 132, 135, 136, 138, 140, 141, 143 to 155, 158 to 171, 173 to 179, 181 to 198, 200 to 230, 232 to 236, 238, 245 to 248, 250 to 272, 274 to 279, 281 to 284, 286, 287, 289 to 326, 328, 330 to 368 and 370 to 418 agreed to, with Commons financial privileges waived in respect of Lords amendments 73 to 75, 78, 301 to 326 and 349 to 367.
Motion made, and Question put forthwith (Standing Order No. 83H(2)), That a Committee be appointed to draw up Reasons to be assigned to the Lords for disagreeing with their amendments 1, 3, 13, 22, 45, 46, 80, 82, 133, 134, 137, 139, 142, 156, 157, 172, 180, 199, 241, 244, 249, 280 and 327;
That Rachel Maclean, Mr Gagan Mohindra, Paul Holmes, Sara Britcliffe, Matthew Pennycook, Mary Glindon and Ms Anum Qaisar be members of the Committee;
That Rachel Maclean be the Chair of the Committee;
That three be the quorum of the Committee.
That the Committee do withdraw immediately.—(Robert Largan.)
Question agreed to.
Committee to withdraw immediately; reasons to be reported and communicated to the Lords.