Planning Bill

I refer the House to the Register of Members' Interests and to the fact that I am vice-president of the Town and Country Planning Association and an honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects. I hope that the Government will not mind if I deal with practicalities. There is no doubt that the Bill is in itself a declaration of failure; only two and a half years ago, we were told that the planning Bill coming before the House would solve most of the problems that this Bill is designed to solve. It is also true that even the Bill's most robust supporter would have to admit that the Government are better at the rhetoric than the delivery, and that joined-down government is not a quality that they have managed to discover in their 10 years so far. One thus has to look into these things in great detail in respect of their practicality, not least from this particular Department. In the not too distant past, it managed to tell Ipswich that it was going to be a unitary authority, but then told it, immediately after it had spent £1 million in preparing for it, that it was not going to be a unitary authority after all. The same Ministers took a totally different decision. That being the case, this Department needs to be looked at extremely carefully when it comes to the practical results of the particular legislation that it puts forward. Let me take the precise example of nuclear power. I have two nuclear power stations in my constituency: one is in the process of being closed down and decommissioned, and the other is perhaps the most successful in the United Kingdom. If there were to be a new nuclear power programme, I know that my constituency would be a prime target for it—and I happen myself to be a supporter of having a new nuclear power station at Sizewell. One can perfectly well take the generality of the decision in Parliament that we accept nuclear power. It is right that a particular part of the Bill should provide for that and the quality of life commission, which I chaired, was one of the earliest advocates of doing so. There is something in common here and I shall point out the several other things that the Government have taken from that earlier vision. They are very interesting, and perhaps more importantly they illustrate the bits that they have not taken from it. Having agreed the general principle, though, someone has to apply it to Sizewell. It is at that point that local support must be gathered. After all, what is the planning system other than a means of reconciling a whole range of different interests—the national interest, the local interest, the particular interest? Reconciling those is crucial. Very often, people want to do different things on the same site and the planning system enables society to make that decision. It is always a second best, of course, because although the law of property should be that one can do what one likes with one's own land, we decide that that is not acceptable because there are community interests that have to be reconciled with the particular interests—so we reconcile them. The trouble with the Bill is that, although it deals more sensibly with the idea of taking the general decisions, it makes much worse the problem of how we deal with the local community. When we had the Sizewell B inquiry, I was able to present the interests of my constituents in front of a judge. The judge was not there as an expert. Indeed, I dislike this concept of planning experts—people who are supposed to be experts in energy, experts in this, experts in that, experts in the other. That is not what my constituents want. My constituents want somebody whom they believe to be an expert in judgment who will listen to the points that they raise and decide whether, in addition to having a nuclear power station, which is decided here in Parliament, they must have a new road or whether, as in the last case, there has to be an insistence on 80 per cent. of the heavy goods coming in by sea. It makes a lot of difference to people if they do not have 10,000 lorries passing in front of their houses. Those are the issues that my constituents will want to present, but they will not want to present them to some Government placeman who happens to be an expert in this, that and the other. They want to feel that they can appear in front of a judge who can make the decision himself. That is also true in relation to planning inspectors. At least a planning inspectorate is a professional body of people. We want professionals, not placemen. That is the difference, and that is why we believe it necessary to have the first part of the proposals but then to accept that there should be a local inquiry on the particularities of the local impact of a national decision. Of course we would not have to discuss the issue of nuclear power again—in Suffolk as in Somerset, or in Bedfordshire as in Devon. That would be decided by the House from the planning guidance produced by the Government, but what happens locally is crucial to every local community. Those communities must feel that the process is proper. I submit to the House that a quango wandering around the country—no doubt chaired by Dame Deirdre Hutton, or another person of that kind who chairs everything around here—would be a set of placepeople, if I am to be politically correct. That is what they would be and that is what the public would see them as.