Debate on the Address

My Lords, as has been said, we have had a fantastically fascinating day with excellent speeches. Not surprisingly, I suppose, many noble Lords have concentrated in some way on climate change, but, then, as the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, said, the way in which the topics for debate have been grouped is much better than usual. Climate change of course runs through all the areas about which we have been talking, so it is not surprising that these matters were touched on. The other matters were not quite so firmly embraced, but we have had good discussions on local government, with some contributions on agriculture and transport and a few on tourism. I start by congratulating from my Benches those who have made their maiden speeches today. I appreciate—and remember well—that it is fairly awe-inspiring and a great relief to get it out of the way, because that means that you really can start to take part in the proceedings instead of sitting on your hands wishing that you could get up and say something. All the contributions indicate that there will be no more sitting on hands and that there will be great participation by all four noble Lords who have made their speeches today. I welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Ford. As chairman of English Partnerships, she brings an immense knowledge about regeneration, development, planning and local government. That will be enormously important as we discuss the local government and planning Bills. She referred quite rightly to the use of brownfield sites and the importance of design quality in construction. She has a wealth of knowledge on which we can build as we take forward the debates. I particularly liked the contribution of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, as she drew attention to local government staff. Too often we forget about them, but they are the people who make local government work—they provide the services to, and support and nurture, our local communities. I was really glad that she mentioned them, because too often we do not mention them. She also talked about decent homes. We had a long discussion on that when we considered the Housing Act. The only trouble about decent homes policies is that the money will run out long before we get the decent homes built, but I am sure that something will be done about that. My noble friend Lord Bruce-Lockhart swells the number of Peers on both sides of the House with a local government background. With the Conservative Party becoming the largest party in local government, he has achieved the unique position of being chairman of the Local Government Association. He has been involved in the discussions on the Local Government Bill, which we will be taking on in this House in due course, and on which he aired his views today. He has also demonstrated a much wider breadth of interest, through his farming and agricultural experience and his experience of the economy. So we welcome him very much to our Benches and congratulate him on his maiden speech. I also congratulate my noble friend Lord Sheikh, who joins us on the Conservative Benches. He made an important contribution today because he widened our view of climate change. He put the issue very clearly and demonstrated very visually the fact that what is going on elsewhere in the world impacts on us and that what we do here impacts there. His discussion on the insurance and financial aspects of all this were well received and we look forward to hearing more from him. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Soley, for drawing attention to the fact that my noble friend Lord Sheikh is chairman of the Conservative Muslim Forum. Like the noble Lord, I believe that the more democracy we can get into this debate, the better, and my noble friend is clearly in the right position to do that. The subjects in the gracious Speech touched on today are, as I said, pretty wide. My noble friend Lord Dixon-Smith, in his excellent opening speech, addressed climate change. We have had many speeches on that this afternoon and I do not think that I shall take the House any further on it, except to say that I have noticed that it will have an impact on all the areas that we have discussed today—local government, agriculture and tourism will all be affected by climate change. How the Bill proceeds—the clauses and policies that we end up with—will be extremely important to our future, both in the impact on us all personally, as we will have to withdraw from some of the ways in which we have lived our lives, and in wider aspects. There have been notable contributions from my noble friends Lord Inglewood and Lady Byford and the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, on the areas beyond the urban. We tend to concentrate on the urban, but in their contributions on rural aspects, agriculture and the important effects in rural areas of housing, farming and everything else that we need to embrace, each of them put their finger on a specific point. In declaring my interest as an elected member of a London borough, I should like, perhaps not surprisingly, to dwell a little on local government matters. The first of those is the Local Government Bill—as has already been mentioned, the Bill has been heralded by the White Paper, which we have already discussed briefly in this House. The second is the Greater London Authority Bill on the powers of the Mayor of London, and the third is the planning Bill, which, surprisingly, does not appear on the list of Bills due to come before the House but, as I have now checked—it was not just my ears going funny during the gracious Speech yesterday—was mentioned in the Speech. I hope that it will be given some authority on the list, so that we know that it will be part and parcel of our lives in future. The big question over the Local Government Bill is when it will be introduced and whether that will be before or after Sir Michael Lyons has reported on the financing of local government. It is inexplicable that we should discuss local government in any depth knowing at the back of our minds that there is yet another major issue to come forward: local government finance. I hope that the Minister will be able to reassure us that there will be a tying-up of those two aspects when we have those debates. It would be ludicrous for Sir Michael Lyons to have done all the work that he has and for that to be separated from the rest of local government. Perhaps the Minister will tell us what is going to happen about that report. I am sure that the Minister will recognise that, after the debacle of the system being introduced in Northern Ireland of council tax based on a percentage of the value of the property, there is now considerable alarm about what will be proposed by Sir Michael. The Minister has already stated categorically in this House that percentage of value is not a measure to be implemented in this country for council tax, but an expansion of the number of bands, for example, could bring almost the same increases for some high-value properties as have been demonstrated in Northern Ireland on the percentage basis. The percentage-based system in Northern Ireland has caused great panic and the increases in bands here will cause the same panic. It will therefore be important, as I have said, that we discuss this altogether and can see everything that is proposed. The White Paper is something of a curate’s egg—there are some good parts and some bad—but we welcome any reduction in the regime of targets, performance indicators and inspections, and we welcome the promises to devolve central powers and responsibilities and to strengthen local leadership, albeit with caveats. Our support will be tempered by the absence of a complete rethink on regionalism. We believe that local councils are, and should be, at the heart of decision-making and providing the services on which local people rely, and that regionalism has no part to play in that. Regionalism is not localism, and unelected regional assemblies are an obstacle to it. The White Paper is strong on the value that local government brings when it works in partnership with other organisations to stimulate community interest and participation, and we support that. As the paper says, many local authorities are already doing this; indeed, many were the leaders on community partnership, and it is interesting that the White Paper and presumably the Bill are now catching up on that. As the noble Lord, Lord Bruce-Lockhart, said, the Bill is still very short on the devolution of powers. We remain sceptical of the value of elected mayors, but we support the view that a leader’s term of office should be for four years. The challenge of electing someone every year is not necessary and does not lead to continuity. However, we also agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, that one of the problems with a mayor is that his power is individual and that checks and balances on that form of leadership are very hard to provide. That is one reason why, with our view of the Mayor of London before us, we have remained very nervous about the role of mayors in local government. It has also been said that councils will now be able to speak out again. It was a disgrace to introduce a measure that prevented councillors from speaking on planning and licensing issues, and it is very good to see the Government beginning to ease up on that. This has come about through the members’ code of conduct and the Standards Board. I hope that the Government did not believe that the measure would be implemented in the way it was, but I cannot say that we did not warn them that this was precisely what would happen. It is absolutely unforgivable that someone should be elected democratically and then be told that they cannot speak about things that affect their local communities. We will support the lifting of that measure, but we will want to ensure that it is lifted properly. We believe that the role of parish councils can be strengthened, but we see no room for them in London. We have concerns about the ambiguity of having city regions and regional regions at the same time, and about the rather artificial proposals in the White Paper for councils in shire areas to bid for unitary status. We will end up with so many tiers of local government that we will have no idea who is doing what. By the time the Bill becomes an Act, I hope that it will fulfil the hopes that we have for it. We will play our part in ensuring that it does. The GLA Bill will give both housing and planning powers to the mayor. These are strongly local matters. This is particularly true of planning; it is essential that communities have their voice heard not only on strategic planning matters but on matters that affect them locally and individually. The mayor has already said that his powers will be limited by him to only a very few major applications, but he will decide which ones. We already know of his enthusiasm for tower blocks, even where they have been rejected by local committees, and of his imposition of a 50 per cent affordable housing requirement on each development, irrespective of the views of individual local authorities. We also already know that he is prepared to dictate rather than to consult on matters or, if he consults, to pay no regard to the outcome, as with the extension of the congestion charge—believe me. His record does not augur well for a benign use of additional powers. There is little or no detail on the planning Bill, which I hope will appear, but we can assume that it will implement some of the recommendations in Kate Barker’s report, one of the most controversial being the introduction of the new development land tax to replace the current Section 106 provisions. Both relate to the amount of money that a developer can be required to provide for community gain; they relate to what it can be spent on and who has control over it. Earlier proposals for a planning tariff were not well received and we wait with interest to see how the development land tax is put forward, if the planning Bill is to be about that. We know, too, that under the householder development consents review consideration has been given to taking decisions on small-scale planning applications out of the hands of local elected members. That would involve ““approved agents”” certifying the lawfulness of proposals after only limited consultation with affected parties. Whether the Government intend to move in this direction in the Bill we cannot know until we see it, but I hope that the Minister will be wise enough to leave that alone and to leave planning development control in the hands of elected councillors. There is a lot to come and we look forward to the discussions that will take place. Again, I congratulate noble Lords who have made their maiden speeches. We look forward to the future.