Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [HL]

I am grateful to my noble friend Lady Hamwee and the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, for speaking to their amendments in this group, and to my noble friend Lady Maddock for putting her finger on a major problem: in places such as Northumberland, the Government have abolished local democracy. Sooner or later, someone will have to come along to reinvent it. It may well be after our time, but the memory of it should not be allowed to die. Those of us who remember local democracy should continue to talk about it in the hope that in future people will pick it up again. I was very grateful for what the Minister said. She did not answer my question about what processes of consultation there will be in drawing up the implementation plan, but I think that I can give her the answer that she would give me if I pressed her on it, so I do not need to. That would be that of course these are reasonable people and they will consult where it is necessary and sensible to do so, because everybody in the world is reasonable: that is the basis on which the legislation is proposed. She said that the implementation plan will set out who will implement the strategy and that it will involve local government and other processes, the planning system, investment, the private sector and, no doubt, others that I did not have time to write down. That would be a huge document. It will clearly not be a huge document, because there will not be the resources to produce a huge document. Therefore, it can do one of two things. It can either be a summary document, which would be a complete waste of time for everybody, or it can concentrate on major projects with major lines of investment—reopening railway lines, perhaps, or building new motorways, although I hope not that, or whatever it happens to be—in the public sector and developments such as port developments, major industrial estates, and so on. Such things could be in it, and that would be sensible. However, when the Minister started to talk about aligning investment with priorities and having one document at regional level, I thought, ““One document to rule us all, one document to bring us all and in the darkness bind us””. That is not an entirely frivolous point. The amount of dirigisme that there is nowadays in government thinking on planning and bringing the planning and economic systems together means that the system we have now is quite different from the system that this country had for many years. We used to strongly criticise France, for example, for having a very dirigiste economic and planning system which was thought not to be the sort of system that we wanted here. I genuinely worry that the Government are trying to control too much from above in too much detail and in too many plans. That is at the heart of a lot of the concern that some of us have had with recent planning Bills, including this one. If everything in the regional strategy is material to the planning system, the planning system is going to be different. We discussed that in our debate on a previous group so I will not go into it in further detail, but I believe that the combination of the Planning Act 2008 and some of what is set out here will result in a new wave of direct action against planning decisions and development. People will feel that the planning system as they see it, which is when applications are put in at local level, has no flexibility and cannot do anything for them. They will simply be told that it is there in the regional strategy and the national policy statement, that it was all agreed previously and if they did not take part in the public consultation—the community involvement—that is their own fault. That is what people will be told and I think that it will be a very serious situation. The Minister referred to the possibility of people wanting to invest. I accept that there have to be priorities, partnerships and clearly determined priorities on big projects. However, most people who invest at a lesser level—building a factory, a supermarket, a housing estate or whatever—do not think like this. In many cases, people will want to invest in the way they want when they want and, if the system cannot cope with that—if it is too inflexible with too much top-down stuff—the investment simply will not take place. It is no good saying that that investment has to be in Liverpool but these people want it in Burnley or vice versa; in many cases, you simply have to go with the flow. We live in a free society. We do not live in a top-down, old-fashioned, eastern European society, which this system seems to be getting more and more like. Finally, the Minister said that this arrangement was for the long term. I wish that it was. I just wish that the Government would allow people to make long-term plans and let them evolve without constantly ripping them up and starting again. In the north-west, we have just had a regional spatial strategy which was to last until 2021, yet we have completely started again producing a regional strategy. That is nonsense. You have to make some decisions and then let those decisions carry on and flow. You have to let people carry out their investment and then come back in 10 or 15 years’ time with some evolution having occurred in the mean time. There is absolutely no point in always tearing everything up and doing it all again from scratch. I am getting frustrated now, so I shall sit down and beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment 180F withdrawn. Amendments 180G and 181 not moved. Amendment 181A had been withdrawn from the Marshalled List. Clause 75 agreed. Clauses 76 and 77 agreed.