Rishi Sunak refused three times to commit to maintaining the pensions triple lock beyond the next election, as Keir Starmer mocked him as “inaction man” over national security. Ministers are at risk of having their plans to promote more housebuilding overturned in a vote in the House of Lords later this evening. They have already lost three votes on the levelling up and regeneration bill (see 1.42pm and 3.44pm) and peers are now debating the proposal to relax legacy EU anti-pollution rules (known as nutrient neutrality). No 10 claims the construction of 100,000 homes will be blocked if Labour and its allies overturn the plans in the Lords. (See 3.44pm.) Lord Deben (John Gummer), the former Tory cabinet minister and former chair of the Climate Change Committee, has just delivered a blistering attack on the government’s proposal in the Lords within the last few minutes. He said he did not regard himself as a rebel on this issue, because he thought it was the government that was not being conservative. He went on: First of all, it is asking local authorities - and I can hardly believe it – to disregard the facts. This is the kind of attitude that you see in the Republican party in the United States; the people who don’t believe in climate change, that people who anti-vaxxers, don’t look at the facts. Deben said he did not believe government claims that getting rid of the EU rule would lead to more homes being built. “The housebuilders are not building the houses they’ve already got planning permissions for in areas which are not in any way affected by this,” he said. And he said he objected to the government proposal that housebuilders should not have to pay for the pollution they caused. He went on: I thought the Conservative party was in favour of the polluter pays. Now I just want to say to the minister, were she canvassing in the Mid Bedfordshire byelection at this moment, does she turn to an elector and say, ‘In future housebuilders building in the Wye Valley will not have to contribute for the cost and the damage they do, but you will through your taxes.’ So the Mid Bedfordshire voter in the byelection is now going to be asked to subsidise the housebuilders, because that is what these amendments are about. Deben also said the government’s handling of this showed that it misled parliament when it said the Office for Environmental Protection would provide sufficient environmental safeguards for the public as the UK left the EU, and European law no longer applied. That was not true, he said. He went on: We were assured that Glenys Stacey [chair of the OEP] and her department were going to be treated with all the respect which one would have expected. And we were told that she would have all the powers that were necessary for the government actually to take her seriously. And what have they done [about the nutrient neutrality plan]? Two pathetic letters, and no statement … It does mean that the British people are now less protected from government mistakes than any country in the rest of Europe. For procedural reasons, if it loses, the government cannot reinsert the plans into the bill when it returns to the Commons, and a defeat would be particularly embarrassing because Sunak claimed last month that his reforms were already in place. Old EU ‘nutrient neutrality’ laws prevent thousands of homes from being built here in the UK. Nutrients entering our rivers are a problem, but the contribution made by new homes is small - these laws only block families from building the homes they need. So I’ve reformed them.
But this could be another example (like small boats, and the Rwanda policy) where the Tories believe that, if they can’t do what they want to, at least they may be able to claim some electoral credit by blaming others for blocking them.