Communities and Local Government/Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

I apologise for the fact that I will not be able to hear the Front Benchers sum up the debate. I will read the report tomorrow. It is interesting to follow the ““split”” speech of the hon. Member for Lewisham, Deptford (Joan Ruddock). I shall focus on the first part—the environmental part. I agree with the hon. Lady that there are simple things that we can do. The look on the face of the man who came to read the meter when, several years ago, I rewired my property and installed low-cost lighting was second only to the delight on my own face when I received a dramatically reduced bill. It can be done, easily and inexpensively. You missed an interesting speech from the Secretary of State, Mr. Deputy Speaker. It was a trip around the rose garden in which the Secretary of State looked at all the rosebuds but ignored the greenfly and the thorns. I thought I might touch on one or two of the thorns, but let me first mention one of the buds. The Secretary of State and the Government are going to reduce the number of targets considerably; at least, that is how it looks on paper. Such action constitutes a dramatic about-turn for local government, which over the past few years has been loaded with targets and Bills such as the ““best value”” Bill—a misnomer if there ever was one—that restricted and handcuffed it. They were followed by the comparative performance assessment, by a myriad targets, and by books and books of prescriptive guidance. Of course, the Secretary of State’s Department, in its previous guise, was not alone. All the other Departments piled in to shackle local government, or nail it to the floor. There was also the problem of the way in which the grant was redistributed and re-thought out three times, mostly to move money to northern urban areas. We have heard before from Government that they will cut the number of targets and cut bureaucracy. What usually happens is that they take away some of the targets with one hand—we have heard talk of a reduction from 1,000 to 200—but put them back with the other. As I said in an intervention, although this Department—as part of an unjoined-up Government—is taking some of the load from local government, the others continue to pile it on. I hope that the Secretary of State will give some thought to the fact that even in her Department there are examples of increased bureaucracy that she ought to be tackling. The new local area agreements are hyped as a new way of streamlining funding and reporting, but as far as I can see they involve an excessively bureaucratic and time-consuming performance. There are hundreds of pages of prescriptive guidance on process, format and the local public service agreements that local authorities must follow. There is minute scrutiny by Government offices, under policy directions that come straight down from central Government. There are mandatory indicators—with continued emphasis on national priorities and indicators effectively removing the so-called local aspects—six-monthly review meetings, and so on. At the same time, local government must look over its shoulder at grossly expensive, non-elected, unwanted, interfering regional government. It is worse in London, which has a Mayor, and below him—if my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) will allow me to say so—a talking shop, the London Assembly. It has no power to do anything. It can watch the Mayor, it can talk about the Mayor, but it has little or no real power to have any effect on the Mayor. The Government say that the London Mayor is to have new powers to interfere in the running of London’s strong unitary authorities. Perhaps the worst will be his new wider planning powers. Local people in London boroughs vote for local councillors on local issues, of which planning is one of the main ones. Soon, unless the Secretary of State wakes up, the London Mayor will be able to ride roughshod over local planning decisions to an even greater degree than he does at the moment. The Mayor is supposed to interfere only in planning issues ““of strategic importance””, but he alone interprets what is of strategic importance. The whole process will take longer, as will the challenging of any decision. It will slow down even more planning programmes and planning development. There will be furious arguments between the two teams, yet there is no arbitration process. Even if the Mayor takes over a planning application, he will require the local borough to handle the application and, of course, to pay for it. This particular Mayor has a history of trying to get involved in major applications merely to squeeze section 106 money out of developers as a price for his agreement. That brings me to one aspect of the proposed planning Bill. The Select Committee on Office of the Deputy Prime Minister: Housing, Planning, Local Government and the Regions recently looked at the proposed planning gain supplement. It is a new name for an old tax on development. There have been four attempts by previous Governments to tax in that way: the 1947 development charge, the 1967 betterment levy, the 1973 development gains tax and the 1976 development land tax. They all failed. We have, as the Select Committee has pointed out consistently, an opportunity to look at the 106 agreement process that is already there. Many local authorities make that work very successfully. It is agreed locally, it is collected locally and it is utilised locally. It has some problems in some areas, but a renovation of the 106 agreement process would be a much more sensible way of proceeding. Instead, we will have a tax that is centrally collected, at a rate set centrally, and distributed centrally. Anyone in local government with any knowledge of how this Government have worked over the past few years will cynically point to the Government’s central collection of locally achieved capital receipts and their redistribution, and to the three engineered changes in revenue grant support. The planning gain supplement is a not so stealthy tax. Its aim is to increase public taxation on developers in excess of that already collected through 106 agreements. It is to apply to virtually every development, from major to minor, and it will not help to progress development. I have just touched quickly on a few items in the Queen's Speech, each of which, bar the one or two rosebuds, will ultimately further shackle local councils. Our local authorities may still be local but they are less and less government under this national Government.