Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [HL]

Perhaps I may make a couple of comments before the promoters of the amendments reply to what the Minister said. When she talks about community involvement in the regional strategy, our experience of the regional spatial strategy, as it is now, and of its predecessors is that there is very little community involvement. Community involvement is a myth. The north-west region has recently had its regional spatial strategy approved. The new regional strategy will be even bigger involving even more things, so there will be even less opportunity for people to take part, because there will be more competition from different interests. What takes place is involvement by a number of powerful and active interests. Some of them are commercial interests and some of them are pressure group interests, but to describe that as community involvement is an inaccurate use of words. The whole process would be a lot easier to understand and describe to people if the Government used accurate words. It is difficult enough to get widespread or large-scale community involvement with the adoption of the local plan, never mind the regional strategy or the local development framework, as it is now. A few people, the same people every time, put forward their views, but most people have no clue that it is going on. That is even more true at the regional level. My second point concerns the examination in public. In the old days, when there were county structure plans, district councils were pretty well guaranteed an audience at the examination in public. Again speaking from my experience in Lancashire, nearly everyone who put forward a coherent expression of views got a hearing at the examination in public; they went along and they had their say. That is no longer the case because the process simply cannot cope with the scale of the operation across a widespread region of some 100 miles from end to end and 8 million people, or whatever it is. But there is a huge amount of resentment among the planning authorities of district councils in the two-tier areas that they cannot get a hearing at the examination in public. They are the planning authorities responsible for producing the local development framework and the local plan once all the regional strategy is put together, and yet they are limited to submitting written representations; they are not able to discuss issues with the inspectors and the other people there. I do not know whether some of the smaller unitary authorities are in the same position and also do not get a hearing. This is not satisfactory. It is, in effect, saying to the authorities, ““Okay, you can put your representations in. We will pat you on the head””—our experience is that they do not pay a great deal of attention to them; or, if they do, they do not agree with them anyway—““but you are the planning authorities that will have to carry this out at local level; you have got to turn it into your local development framework””. To deny such authorities a hearing at the examination in public is utterly unsatisfactory. The system ought to be expanded sufficiently to at least allow local planning authorities representing people in the localities in the region to have a say.