Planning Bill

I begin by mentioning my entry on the Register of Members' Interests as a member of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors. If I may, Mr. Deputy Speaker, I would also like to offer my apologies to you and indeed the House for being absent for 90 minutes; it was due to my making a contribution in a Committee upstairs. I am particularly sorry to have missed the contribution of my right hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk, Coastal (Mr. Gummer). He mentioned Swampy in a question, but I gather that his later contribution to the debate was a little more historical; I believe he gave us a gentle canter through history with reference to Oliver Cromwell, so I look forward to reading the record tomorrow. As we have heard in a number of contributions, planning is one of those peculiar subjects that excites little interest in the abstract—indeed, we can see that on the Government Benches—but real passion and debate in practice. To be fair, I thought that the contribution of the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) was exemplary. He was a doughty fighter, who showed what he can do in standing up for his constituents, and I applaud him for that. The reason for the contradiction between the abstract and the practical is that planning shapes the world in which we both live and work. It determines what is built in our communities, and indeed where it is built. As we all know to our cost, bad planning decisions leave a permanent scare with which, frankly, many of have to live with on a permanent and daily basis. That is why it is so important that we get the balance between efficiency and accountability right. Over the past 10 years, the current Government have been in a muddle about how to manage the planning and development system. Instead of focusing on making development control function better, Ministers have commissioned an endless tide of studies and reviews. They have held consultations and briefings, but in the end have often ignored the findings of the whole process. They have wasted millions of pounds. Somewhere, there are acres of files of all those studies and reviews; in all that time, they have achieved almost nothing towards their proposed purpose. Meanwhile, the Government have restructured the responsible Department no fewer than five times since 1997. That has cost a fortune, demoralised the staff and undermined effective policy development and implementation. As we have learned from recent biographies and so on, much of that upheaval, as Tony Blair has suggested, has simply been to accommodate the ego of his former deputy, the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull, East (Mr. Prescott).