Planning Bill

I entirely take the point and I shall certainly want to study what the noble Lord said. However, whatever the Bill may say, there is a deep-seated culture and a danger that officials will need to say that they wish to protect their Ministers against any suggestion of a referral to the courts. There is another problem. In its representations—I am sure that other noble Lords have received the paper—the CBI produced an extremely interesting chart, at the end of which is a procedural graph on the Government’s proposal in the Bill. At the bottom of the chart are the words ““IPC Decision””—that is, the Infrastructure Planning Commission’s decision. Below that are the words ““Approve”” and ““Reject””, and in the middle the words ““Judicial review?””. As the law stands at present, I do not think that we will be able to escape the inevitability of a resort to judicial review in contentious matters. In a book about the British constitution that I read recently, there was a very interesting passage about how this had grown over the past 20 or 25 years from being a small, last-resort application to the court where a decision had been taken which no reasonable person could possibly have taken to becoming open house for the courts to substitute their judgments for those of a public body such as the commission or, indeed, of Ministers. The noble Lord, who knows far more about these things than I do, shakes his head and no doubt he will be able to correct me but that is the impression that is being given, and it was remarked on in the constitutional book that I read recently. The one body which is not subject to judicial review is, of course, Parliament. We are at a very early stage in this process and if it is felt, as the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, very interestingly said, that it is not acceptable that the commission, as an appointed body, should take these important decisions, is it not possible that the right body to which the recommendations from the commission should go is Parliament? The argument would then be how could Parliament possibly cope? I take some comfort from the estimate given in the White Paper, referred to at Second Reading by the noble Baroness, I think, about how much work the commission would have to deal with. Paragraph 5.57 states that,"““it is hard to be specific because of the likelihood of fluctuations in the frequency with which major infrastructure projects are brought forward, and there might potentially be peaks of anywhere up to 25 major projects in some years. Depending on the volume … we expect that the commission might require between 20 and 30 commissioners””." We shall come to the number in later amendments. I ask the Minister whether that estimate still stands. Is that the Government’s best guess of the number of major infrastructure decisions that will fall to the commission? Is it so impossible that Parliament could be the recipient of the commission's recommendations? A committee or perhaps a Joint Committee of both Houses could then say, ““Yea”” or ““Nay””. It could refer the decision back or it could take it, and then perfectly clearly Parliament would be responsible. Another point, made very forcefully by the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, at Second Reading—I have had a very happy weekend re-reading the Second Reading debate, which was a long time ago—is that there is moral value in the decisions being taken by Parliament. I think he meant by that—I would interpret it in this way—that if one challenges the decision of Parliament, one challenges the whole basis of the constitution. I can speak with some personal knowledge on that as I faced 36 recalcitrant local authorities which were determined to subvert the whole of the rate support grant system then in force, demanding that I should repeal the rate settlement that had been made and demanding that I should get rid of all the constrictions of capping and so on. My answer to them was, ““I cannot do that: these have all been approved by Parliament””. To my mind and to theirs, that was the end of the argument. We had this great summit in the Department of the Environment with 36 council leaders, led by Mr Blunkett, and it is now well documented that their ambition was to overthrow the Government. When I said to them, ““I cannot repeal these: they have been passed by Parliament””, they had no further arguments. My legislation went through, the support grant was effective and they all made their rates in the ordinary way. To my mind, the real authority in this country, which cannot be challenged through judicial review, is Parliament. I suggest to my noble friend that if one shares his view that an appointed, unelected, independent commission should not make these decisions, the right answer is to refer them to Parliament. After all, Parliament will have already considered the national policy statements in great detail. That is all in the Bill and we shall come to that later. Why should not the same committee or committees say, ““Here is a particular project, here is the recommendation of the IPC, are we prepared to accept it, yea or nay?””. That seems to me to be the right way to proceed.