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Planning and Energy Bill

I think that my hon. Friend will find that that organisation simply deals with the question of insulation as a whole, and as I said to my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea (Martin Linton), a useful by-product of insulating a building properly for heat and, therefore, energy consumption, is a better effect in dealing with noise. Of course, the only effect produced by lagging pipes will be that they will not bang so loud if there is an airlock, but insulation between floors and in roofs, cavity walls and so forth can have a significant effect if someone is being disturbed by their neighbour's stereo. Both my hon. Friends made significant points in that regard. In November 2006, the new planning policy statement 3 on housing was published, which dealt with the particular problems of climate change. It said that"““Developers and planning bodies will have to take account of the need to cut carbon emissions as well as the wider environmental and sustainability considerations when siting or designing new homes.””" That goes to the heart of my new clause. As I said in my opening remarks, we have to try to cut carbon emissions in the first place, which is done not just through the way in which the energy is produced—be it windmills, solar power or whatever—but by using less energy. The PPS3 guidance is important in that respect. It is important that the planning guidance is integrated with the building regulations. That is what I am trying to put across in new clause 1. Effectively, the local authority has powers under the planning laws; it does not have the power to mess around directly with the building regulations, but it can do so indirectly through the planning laws. That is why integration through the PPS supplement to the building regulations is the right way to go. The PPS supplement makes it clear that planning and climate change necessitate clear and challenging roles for regional and local spatial strategies, which are expected to help to shape the framework for energy supply in their local authority area. At the local level, development plan documents—the things that we are looking at to set out the basic planning framework—will set policies on the provision of low-carbon and renewable sources of energy to provide the platform necessary for securing and complementing the increasingly high levels of energy efficiency required by building regulations. Again, we see the symmetry between the need for policies on low-carbon and renewable sources of energy and the need for energy efficiency required by the building regulations. We have a statement that makes it clear that both sides of the equation have to be addressed. Paragraph 30 of the PPS supplement draft document makes it clear that planning authorities should"““be concerned with the environmental performance of new development and with the impact of individual buildings on, and their resilience to, climate change.””" It advocates that they engage"““constructively and imaginatively with developers to encourage the delivery of sustainable buildings””" and to support innovation. At the same time it says that they should not be setting their own standards for environmental performance, as national standards are already set out through the building regulations, and for new homes, in the code for sustainable homes. I think that that last part is wrong. Local authorities should be in the forefront of such work. The document states"““Planning authorities should assess their area's potential for accommodating renewable and low-carbon technologies, including…micro-renewables””—" for which clause 1 provides—"““in new residential, commercial or industrial development.””" It is also important, however, that they have regard, as the planning guidance document says, to other matters, some of which I shall pick up on later if we get to the second group of new clauses. The document emphasises, in a shopping list of about a dozen issues in paragraph 23, the contribution that can be made to meeting the energy performance requirements for new buildings through the building regulations, and by extension, through new clause 1—moving beyond those into local requirements.