Planning Bill

It is somewhat surprising to range in a planning debate from Oliver Cromwell to Napoleon Bonaparte, but given the views of my right hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk, Coastal (Mr. Gummer), I think I had better come down on the side of Napoleon, which might well have been my preference in any case. When one represents the Pennine dales of North Yorkshire, it is easy to look with a certain detachment upon arguments about terminal 5 at Heathrow, for example. It is a long way from terminal 5 to the Long Preston bypass; most of my constituents would be much more concerned about the bypass, although they will be eager users of terminal 5. That brings us to one of the key points in the debate: planning is not like many other policies or areas of debate. The culture of our political system is to crystallise a difference in view and then to make a choice. Planning is perhaps unique in that it has a role for mediation. It is trying to set a framework in which opinions are collected and weighed and an attempt is made to draw a balance. There are conflicts of interest, and conflicts between individuals and between the community and the nation. The planning guidance and the regional and local plans are all designed to provide some sort of parameter around those conflicts. The result is, of course, a near universal discontent. Businesses complain about the slow process and the anti-development culture within local authorities. Individuals complain about their local concerns being ridden roughshod over and about the absence of an appeal against the granting of planning permission. If we are honest, most Members will agree that when constituents come to our surgeries to talk about planning, it is almost always to ask us to get something stopped rather than to get something done. We must therefore adopt a hard-headed realism in approaching this debate, because in planning terms the national interest is not the sum of local or individual interests, although the national interest does require the submission of a local or community interest. We need to provide prisons, asylum-processing centres, power plants, new runways and nuclear waste repositories, and we must decide as a nation how we provide them. International competitiveness, to which the Secretary of State referred as a key reason for the Bill, means that Governments have far less power now than in the past. The choices that they can make are much more restricted, because if we wish to survive as a nation in the global economy we must deliver the conditions that maintain our competitiveness. That means that we do not have the same degree of discretion that we had in the past. Another consequence is that the Government have less power over individuals than previously, because modern technology and the internet have empowered individuals in a way that was not possible even when I first entered the House, when my constituents were perhaps willing to say that I was in a position to make decisions that they were not able to make because I had access to information that they did not have access to. Such information is now accessible to all of them. On the provisions relating to major infrastructure projects, I am concerned that the Bill might be setting itself an impossible task. It is setting itself to speed up very sharply the process of decision making while simultaneously providing for a complex panoply of consultation, and also ultimately running through it are what I see as blurred lines of accountability. It will be difficult to bring those measures together in a working mechanism. The procedures are top-down because we will have the national strategy statements, but they are bottom-up because of the pre-application consultation procedures, and there is an intermediate bit in the middle, which is the stage of parliamentary scrutiny and the proposals for Select Committee scrutiny. I am unsure how reconcilable those objectives will turn out to be in practice. It is easy enough to agree on the national challenges that demand a more ruthless approach to planning—I use the word ““ruthless”” advisedly, and not necessarily pejoratively—including economic interests, which I have mentioned, and the need to respond to the challenges of climate change. They are very new challenges, which are linked. Although the procedures by which the Government intend to address them are clear in their architecture, however, they are much less so in their content; this is a building without any furniture in it—and I am also not quite sure where the directions flow within that building. How detailed will the national policy statements be? If a statement effectively determines the policy on nuclear power, will the commission have a discretion other than to decide where the plants will be built? Frankly, we all know where any future new nuclear power plants are likely to be built. That is not a closely guarded secret; there are not, as the French would say, trente-six solutions. There are a handful of places, all of which we know of, where they might be built.