Localism Bill

My Lords, my noble friend Lady Gardner should discount any figures that she heard at that meeting this morning. The number of people who are dead is of the order of 100 billion, and I think that we are some way short of that in terms of the living. My noble friend Lord Deben harked back to the days when the urban were a minority in this House. I thought that he made a rather thin case for those days and the retention of the hereditary peerage. He made a much better case for the retention of Secretaries of State in this House, and I hope that we will be able to defeat the Government’s intention to remove them over the course of this Parliament. I entirely agree with what he said and he put it much more nicely than I am going to do. I am greatly saddened that the National Trust should have chosen story over truth. I do not think that it will do it and its reputation good over the long term. I do not accuse my noble friend Lord Marlesford of any such thing. He and I just have an honest disagreement. However, I shall start with something on which I think we probably do agree: given 1,000 or 2,000 acres of rural Hampshire, neither of us would recreate Basingstoke in it. I very much share the feeling of my noble friend Lord Deben that the countryside is a living place and that villages and other human habitations grace it. I agree that the way that the Bill sets about making possible the revival of the countryside, breathing into it not a vast mushroom growth but a steady rate of change and development to suit the requirements of the local population, providing a natural means of life and change, is something that we should welcome. Countryside with well designed, well placed houses and other buildings in it is a more beautiful thing than thousands of acres run by barley barons on a rotation, where the most delightful thing you are likely to see is rape every 10 years and where, if you visit it as a botanist, which I do, you see a few gross weeds such as nettles and docks, a few coarse grasses, and a few scrawny annuals and crops. In botanical and any natural terms, farmers have created a desert, much of it in countryside which has no great beauty—nothing on which to rest one’s eye. It would be vastly improved by a few well placed villages and other buildings, and I do not think that we should romanticise about all our countryside being of the quality of the greatest. Therefore, my concern is that we should not be blown off course by the misleading adventures of the National Trust and others but should concentrate on the purpose of the Bill, which is to give discretion to local communities regarding how they develop. I trust them, as does my noble friend Lord Deben. Because no speech from me would be complete if I were entirely in favour of the Government, I say that I share the concerns of my noble friend Lord Deben about the interregnum. What happens when there is no local plan? I do not think that it is desirable that that should be a space for a free-for-all.