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Localism Bill

My Lords, I have listened with interest to the Minister’s reply, and I am sure we would all like to go along with whatever she says because she has clearly thought about it seriously. However, I do not think that it in any way answers the problems that people have. The noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, talked about unnecessary inconvenience, but that is not the big issue. Every bit of building work is always an extreme inconvenience for everyone else around it. In the street where my house is in London I have gone through eight years of all the office blocks being demolished and replaced with giant blocks of flats. It meant that the whole street was congested and you could not move. It was extremely inconvenient, but I do not expect compensation for that. We have to encourage development and any necessary construction. I am not so concerned about compensation for disturbance, but I am concerned about people who find themselves left with a hole in the ground beside them when the people who have dug it have gone bankrupt. It should be simple to set up some sort of insurance, and I would like to speak to the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, whose views I greatly respect, because he said there might be complications with this. I thought that insurance was a pretty common feature in building. Most builders have insurance. We should discuss that at some further time. I cannot promise not to bring this matter back at Third Reading until we have had the meeting and I hear the other possibilities. I appreciate the complexity of the Party Wall etc. Act and I can see that the points made by the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, are again very good. He and others mentioned foreign builders, which really are a major issue in central London. You do not get it outside London so much. In rural areas you get very helpful local builders who seem to do what they say they will do. People near me have found that even when they have told builders that they are working outside the official hours, those builders just ignore that totally. It has been mentioned how poor the enforcement is on these issues, which is another issue. I do not know whether a code of practice would deal with that as there is already a code of practice and special hours for people to be building—from 8 am to 6 pm, or from 8 am to 4 pm on certain days of the week. That is just ignored. I thought the point made by the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, about the safety of the workers was, again, very important. Again, foreign workers seem very often to just ignore normal safety precautions. I have taken in everything that has been said, but I cannot promise not to proceed again at Third Reading. I will need to consult the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, and the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, before that. Meanwhile, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment 206 withdrawn. Amendment 206A Moved by