I am going to make quite a critical speech of the Bill and even perhaps agree with some of the remarks of the right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn), although I have to say that it is rather tough to take lectures on local democratic accountability from Labour Front Benchers who were the authors of the regional spatial strategies that, in the south-west alone, generated 35,000 objections, volcanic local opposition and legal challenges. They wasted tens of millions of pounds and, in the south-west, the strategy was never even finished.
Mind you, the right hon. Gentleman, and the hon. Member for Bury St Edmunds (Mr Ruffley) and the right hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) on the Conservative Benches, were right to worry that we may accidently recreate some of the same tensions at local level, through over-reliance on the same national statistics that the regional spatial strategies used, and on the Planning Inspectorate. I hope that Ministers emphasise to local planners and officers in planning authorities and to the Planning Inspectorate that they should take the NPPF more seriously and, in particular, emphasise its provisions for local authorities to balance growth with social and environmental considerations. They should pay attention to, and proactively use, the new local green space designation in the NPPF and clearly distinguish between housing need and housing demand. The confusion of the two different things threatens valuable and treasured green spaces in areas of high demand such as my constituency.
I have been an enthusiastic supporter of the Government’s localist agenda, partly as a reaction against Labour's regional spatial strategies and partly because, as a Liberal Democrat, I plead entirely guilty to being a doctrinaire localist and environmentalist. I was proud to support the Localism Act and the final draft of the NPPF. I was very proud to support the natural environment White Paper, which is a significant improvement on the previous Government’s policies, particularly in its emphasis on valuing natural capital, but in many respects this rather hasty looking Bill seems to take the Government in the opposite direction. As a Government, we were supposed to balance the dominant pursuit of economic growth with other factors such as the quality of life. This might be a timely moment for that rhetoric to be put into practice and for us to rethink some of the clauses.
Clause 1 threatens local authorities with loss of local power to determine planning applications. The criteria on which that will be done remain unspecified. That, in effect, leaves the Secretary of State with a rather vague and arbitrary power to define those criteria himself. That looks to me profoundly anti-localist and contradicts the Secretary of State's very good record as a doughty champion of localism—so much so that I suspect that it was not his idea. Whoever thought of it, it is a disappointing measure to put in a Bill from this coalition Government.
Clauses 9 and 10 have the worrying new power to stop up and divert local footpaths and bridleways. There is a rationale for that to do with the timing of planning applications. Nevertheless, in the context of other measures in the Bill, I find it rather concerning.
Clause 12 threatens the power to create village greens. On this I do not agree entirely with some of the criticism of the clause. The existing provision has become a tactical device to protect local green spaces from particular developers’ planning applications. That has been pretty unreliable, so it is good that we aim to replace that hotch-potch and accidental approach with the specific designation of local green spaces, which are to be determined at the time of plan making, rather than in response to planning applications. That is an improvement. Of course I would support that because I was responsible for putting it into Liberal Democrat policy, from where it went into our manifesto, into the coalition agreement and then into the NPPF.
However, it is proving pretty difficult to use that in practice at a local level. I have not even managed to persuade or completely convince planners and officers in my constituency proactively to look for and identify areas that could qualify as local green space designation areas. There are good candidates at Starvehall farm, Weavers field and, above all, in the green fields at Leckhampton in my constituency, yet even we do not seem to be developing and using that power properly, so in that respect I suspect that clause 12 may at the very least be premature.
Clause 21 seems designed to use a system designed for national strategic infrastructure, for planning applications for commercial and business use which are not national, not necessarily strategic and may not even be infrastructure. In its current form it looks to me as though it is undermining localism, too.
Then we come to the extraordinary clause 23. I proposed a policy on employee ownership and workplace democracy to this year’s Liberal Democrat conference. I would strongly commend the contents of that and its many recommendations to Government, including the option to bid for employee ownership at the time of transfer of an undertaking, which we believe could result in a step change in employee ownership. However, we strangely overlooked the need to link that to the trashing of people’s employment rights. Why should we remove the right to request training, when we are supposed to support training? Why should we allow more unfair dismissal, when we support fairness? Why should we remove the right just to request flexible working, when we are supposed to support flexible working? I have worked in business, and I have employed many people, and I have never found it very motivating to threaten my team’s employment rights. These rights have never deterred me from employing anybody. This looks like a nasty, vindictive little clause and Ministers should chop it out completely.
Lord Heseltine’s report makes many useful recommendations that would support sustainable economic growth. He talks about promoting unitary authorities, better marketing of the UK as a destination for inward investment, the promotion of investment in new technologies, and better promotion of British interests within the European Union. He also talks about having a definitive and unambiguous energy policy and about better links between further education and local enterprise
partnerships, and between industry and higher education. These are all sensible proposals. As a Liberal Democrat, I find it surprising that I am endorsing the work of Michael Heseltine, but this is a very good report, and it was very good of the Government to commission it. A Bill based on Lord Heseltine’s ideas could generate cross-party support.
The Bill in its current form seems guaranteed to generate cross-party opposition, however. Some of its planning ideas look half-baked and undemocratic. It unnecessarily threatens people’s employment rights. None of it was in the Liberal Democrat manifesto or the Conservative manifesto, and none of it was in the coalition agreement. It is unworthy of this Government, and it is very uncharacteristic of this Secretary of State. We should pause it and rewind, and rewrite it along the lines of the Heseltine report. Until we do that, I cannot support the Bill.
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