Let me start by agreeing with the Minister of State’s opening remarks. He said that the Bill is about the Government’s priorities and I agree with him: it is about obfuscation, smoke and mirrors, waffle and self-delusion. It seeks to give the impression of activity when the Government are doing next to nothing to stimulate growth in the economy and to ensure there is the infrastructure investment we need. It might be entitled the Growth and Infrastructure Bill, but I would be astonished if five years down the line anyone could identify a significant economic consequence for either growth or infrastructure investment.
The Bill essentially reflects Government prejudice rather than evidence. That is the biggest single charge against the Government: rather than evidence-based policy making, we have been fed a diet of prejudices about the supposed failure of the planning system, the discredited Beecroft agenda, how regulation and workers rights are somehow impeding growth and the fear of revaluation—I shall come back to that, because it is a curious question that reflects something in the Government’s psyche that they would do well to begin to think about.
Let us turn to planning first. Everyone who gave evidence to the Public Bill Committee said quite clearly—Ministers know this—that we are not getting development, housing and economic growth not because of the planning system but because of the lack of confidence and lack of lending, as well as because of the fact that people are very nervous about investing because they are uncertain about the future of the economy. That is the fundamental problem and the Government ignore it at their peril.
As everyone has heard, planning is a useful whipping boy blamed by the Government for any problems. As we listened to Ministers, we heard them changing their tune as the debate went on. They started by saying that all the planning problems were holding back growth, but by the end they were saying that only a small number of councils were not acting as well as they should. They said that the intention was to incentivise those councils and that it would not impact heavily on or affect many of them, as not many were failing. The fascinating thing about that is that when they were challenged they could not name a single such authority. The Secretary of State, who sadly is no longer in the Chamber, had a go on Second Reading, but got it spectacularly wrong, naming an authority that was not in any way failing. That is the measure of the Government; they really do not know what they are talking about. It is prejudice rather than evidence.
When we come to Beecroft, the situation is exactly the same. I have to say this to the Liberal Democrats: what a disgrace that they have gone along with the Beecroft prejudice about employee rights when their Business Secretary said that he had stopped the implementation of the Beecroft agenda. Would that he had, but he has not, and the rephrased employee ownership option—changed to shareholder ownership because the Government realised that calling it employee ownership would probably contravene the Trade Descriptions Acts—is universally condemned by people who really care about employee ownership. All the organisations who gave evidence to us—the people who have worked for years to build up employee ownership—said, “Don’t do this.” They told us that it would discredit the whole process of
getting employees more involved in the running of their businesses and the measure was a fraudulent product that would do harm, not good.
That was the second prejudice. I have already referred to the third one—the extraordinary postponement of the business rate revaluation. Why is there somewhere in the psyche of the Conservative party a fear of revaluation? The Conservatives think it is somehow going to cause them harm. I suppose it is because the revaluation is due to take effect in 2015, and they probably think it might be bad news and that if they can halt it they might be able to turn it around. Once again, they have acted on the basis of bogus figures that no one believes. When the rating experts gave evidence—Gerald Eve, the British Property Federation and the British Council of Shopping Centres—they all said that they did not believe the figures from the Valuation Office Agency. Ministers have trotted the figures out again today—800,000 potential gainers, compared to 300,000 losers. No one believes it. When we proposed the simple amendment that the Government should publish serious estimates and consult the interested parties before taking a decision, they would not accept it. They wanted to proceed on the basis of their prejudice rather than on evidence.
In between the bookends of prejudice that characterise the Bill, there are one or two worthwhile and sensible provisions, and I welcome them. The Penfold agenda for the rationalisation of conflicting planning and consent regimes is a sensible move forward, and there are some good things in that area, but it is hard to find them with those awful, unjustified, un-evidence-based prejudices on either side of them.
It is to the Government’s credit—this is a seasonal comment as we approach Christmas—that Ministers have realised that there are some turkeys in the Bill that had to be changed. I thank the planning Minister, the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, the hon. Member for Grantham and Stamford (Nick Boles), for agreeing to reconsider the rural exceptions policy; the Government were going to make a serious mistake, but they have backed away and I am grateful to them for that. But those are small mercies in a Bill that is fundamentally flawed and will do nothing about the two subjects that it is supposed to stimulate—growth and infrastructure—and will actually perpetuate a series of myths that do nothing for good government or development in this country.
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