Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)

My Lords, I rise with pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, who both signed the amendment in the name of my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, who is currently on medical leave, and did an able, if unexpected, job of introducing this group of amendments. Before I get on to this, I feel that, after our last discussion, I should declare my position as a vice-president of the Local Government Association, since the debate went in that direction. I will also declare that I have a personal qualification to speak in this area of a Bill that I was not otherwise engaged in, since I can also, like the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, and others, dust off my experience as a veteran of the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill back in the day. To speak to the specific details of this amendment, it is about the density of housing development and the effective use of land. My noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb has personal experience of this as a London Assembly member. What happened in London was that the Mayor was given the power to ensure greater density of housing in particular, and that had demonstrable positive impacts in London. To go back to 1961, the very famous theorist Jane Jacobs, in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, said that one of the key things that helps cities thrive is a sufficiently dense concentration of people, particularly a sufficiently dense concentration of housing. We have gradually seen this being pushed forward, and of course we are, as we saw in London, going back to something we knew before. Georgian squares in London actually have a greater density of housing than many modern developments, and they are great places for people to live. What we are talking about is the fact that quality and density together have excellent outcomes, and this amendment, in this really important part of the Bill, as the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, just said, brings that forward, so I am hoping against hope that we might hear something positive from the Minister at this stage. I am just going to say one sentence on Amendment 224 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson, on VAT costs and buildings. I would have signed it had I noticed it, and I am just going to cross-reference my earlier amendment about embodied carbon. Because of our tax and VAT rules, we are emitting so much carbon, in embodied carbon, in the destruction of buildings.