Natural Environment and Rural Communities Bill

I shall make a brief intervention of a rather paradoxical nature. The noble Lord, Lord Cameron, and I both spoke in the debate on the rural economy on Thursday last week. Although I have rural connections, I was for many years an inner city London MP. I remember vividly the Committee stage in the House of Commons on the Greater London Authority Bill. I say that because we were dealing with the problems of London as a microcosm of great cities throughout the country on the issue of a strategic authority. The Committee consisted of 29 Members of Parliament. The Minister’s PPS was a Member for Aberdeen, and the Tory Whip had been the chairman of a West Midlands regional authority. The other 27 Members were all London Members, and they therefore spoke with considerable authority both for the centre of the city and the suburbs. What struck me about that Committee stage with that degree of expert opinion was the number of issues—despite the fact that London had had a strategic authority from 1889 to 1986 and therefore was not unfamiliar with the issues—that individual members brought up where circumstances overlapped, in rather the way that the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, was describing. On each occasion the Minister, Mr Raynsford, assisted by Miss Glenda Jackson, would quietly turn down the issues that we brought up out of our own experience where the various tectonic plates met. Then in the later stage in the House of Commons, and certainly much more in the House of Lords, the Government accepted a whole series of amendments that we had moved in the Commons. Civil servants from different departments, having been sent away to investigate whether there was anything in what we had said, clearly reported to Ministers that there was. Therefore, I am highly sympathetic to the view of the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, that you must have some means by which government departments across Whitehall are asked to look at rural issues in a unique way.