My Lords, I declare my interests as the chairman of a company that tries to help in terms of sustainable development, as an officeholder in the Town and Country Planning Association and as an honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects. Above all, I was my noble friend’s successor as Secretary of State. I fear that I have to say to him that I disagree deeply with his assessment of the Bill.
I am sorry that we cannot have an automatic discussion about its Title because I am always suspicious of Titles which are difficult to vote against. It seems that more time has been spent on getting the Title of this Bill right than on any of the clauses because the difficulty we have here is that of a half-baked Bill. At no point do we have the information needed to make any of the clauses meaningful. I do not think that it is easy even to table amendments to this clause without understanding what the criteria will be. If it is possible to put criteria into the consultation, it seems to me that there ought to be a mechanism for then translating such criteria as survive the consultation into the Bill, so that we know where we are. I fear that we really do not know where we are.
I want to challenge that fundamental argument—a historic argument that has come from the Treasury since time immemorial—that the planning system is the only thing that you have to deal with if you want
to get growth. I remind the House that the planning system is there precisely to make places better for the people who live there. There is a price to pay for that. If you have a planning system it will cost money in the sense that if you did not have one, developers would not have to pay the costs of putting forward a planning application. It seems to me that those figures are pretty much nonsense, because all they are is an adding up of what it costs to have a system in which the public have some say in the conditions and the places where they live. That is a fundamental part of the life of any community. My concern is that it is difficult enough now for communities to plan their future, and that this is going to make that significantly worse.
This comes at a time when we have just discussed and debated the Localism Act. I feel like putting down an amendment that asks for the repeal of the Localism Act, because that seems to be what this first clause actually says. It does not seem to sit with all the rest of what the Government have been putting forward—which is something that I have been going up and down the country defending and believing in. I know that it is difficult to be local and that people at the top know best, or think they know best, but in the end I want the people of Suffolk to have some say in the Suffolk of tomorrow, and not to be told by somebody outside that they have to have this because it is good for them or good, in a curious general way, for growth.
I remind the House that two things are important. First, there is no discernible distinction between good and bad planning authorities on party political grounds. I go round the country and I know that you cannot say that Labour authorities are better or worse than Conservative authorities. There are very good Conservative authorities and very much less good ones, and very good Labour authorities and very much less good ones. The Liberal Democrats of course find themselves, as usual, in every possible place. I cannot resist a lifetime of teasing.
The words of my noble—and real—friend seem to give away the reality of the matter, which is that it is always about people’s vocal belief that this is so. People are vocal and always have been. All the time I was Secretary of State—and I am the longest-serving Secretary of State—they were vocal about it. Everybody always is, in particular if they do not win. I am afraid that we have to put up with that vocality, if there is such a word. There are many things wrong with the planning system. I believe that large infrastructure projects should always be done centrally and that it is nonsense to have another debate about the safety of nuclear power every time you go round the country. That is barmy. It is barmy to accept that if you want to build a railway or something of a serious nature, you have to deal with every single bit, because it is not the bits that count, it is the whole. There are very obvious examples of that, which I support and am enthusiastic about.
My problem—which is why I support these amendments—is that this particular clause seems to be inapplicable, in the proper sense of that word. First, if we are not going to deal with more than a handful of authorities and a handful of applications, then it does not meet the vocality. It does not meet what people are
complaining about, so they will go on complaining. No doubt, as the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, said at Second Reading, we will have another Bill—because we always do—and there will be another way of not achieving what those who are vocal want. The reason is that it is not achievable. What they really want is something that distinguishes between planning applications not on the grounds of merit but on the grounds of speed. That does not seem a very sensible basis on which to do it. Of course, bigger planning applications take longer. Anyone can decide about a car port in a short period. A complex decision on mixed development in an area of outstanding natural beauty, with difficulties of infrastructure, takes time. If it happens to be in a small district council, it takes longer, because the district council is unlikely to have spare capacity to deal with it.
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We could of course say that we should not have so many small district councils. There is an argument for that and I think that we have all been through it—with most of us bruised from trying to deal with it—but that is what we have got. The issue is how this Bill will improve it. I suggest that it cannot do it by being applied to a sufficient number of occasions and cases to meet the needs of the complainants. Will it do it by being an exemplar, forcing people to do what they would otherwise not have done because it is there as the great atomic weapon? Is that what it is about? I find that very dubious democratically, because, after all, the local authority makes its decisions with some sort of reference to the people who elect it. That is its job. Is a local councillor now going to say, “I’m not going to listen as closely to the people who have elected me because there is this thing over here which may come and destroy what I have to say”? We already know the dangers that arise when local authorities fear to say no lest they lose on appeal and have a large bill. Will we have further problems on this issue? I fear that we will.
If this provision is going to be of any use at all—I have my doubts, but we could try to improve it, which is what this House is for—we should at least make sure that people know what the community as a whole, as represented by the elected Government, wants them to do. The problem with this Bill is that I have no more idea having read it than I did before, because it is not in it. Would it not therefore be sensible to say that we will find out about it through the workings of the Bill? That means giving proper notice to the local authority and saying, “We do not think that you are doing very well. Here are the reasons why we don’t think you’re doing well and you’d better get yourself better over the next 18 months or we will actually take the powers to ourselves”. I do not believe that that is a very sensible answer, but it is the answer that the Bill gives and it would at least give a chance for learning.
My worry is that if the Bill is passed as it is at the moment, I do not know what I shall say to Suffolk Coastal District Council, Mid Suffolk District Council or any of the councils with which I discuss matters of sustainable development about what they have to do in order not to lose their planning powers, because it seems that even with the consultation paper—and
I hope that my noble friend the Minister will give us some help on this—these criteria will not be fixed for ever but could change and a different Government might think differently. I do not know what the local authority is going to do to understand that. The best way to do it is to give the local authority a proper period to consider what the Government have said and to see whether it can put it right or whether the authority will turn to its electorate and say, “We are not changing because we actually do not agree with the Government, and if the Government want to take it away from us, they will take it away because we are not prepared to do what it is they think they want done, because, in this locality, in this place, in this part of the world, which has given all the pleasures and powers of the Localism Bill, we think differently”. That is one result that might come if people are given proper advance notice. That is why I want there to be that 18 months.
One of the things that I find most suspicious about the whole provision is that nobody will tell me a single authority on which they would like to use this power. If you have a draconian answer, you really ought to have a draconian question. To cheer up the noble Lord opposite, who accused me of agreeing with him, which upset him enormously, let me give an example of a draconian question. There was an appalling time in Newcastle when the local government tax was driving people to bankruptcy, where it cost four times as much per square foot for John Lewis there as in Oxford Street. That was an appalling position, and the Government, quite rightly, produced a draconian answer. That was to say that the business rates could not be in the hands of people who did not appear to understand what business was about. My goodness, there was a good argument. I got up in Parliament and named the places; I was not ashamed. It did not make the noble Lord and I very good friends—although we got much more friendly afterwards when we discovered that we agreed on a lot of other things—but at least he knew, I knew and we all knew what the argument was.
I do not see how you can bring forward a draconian answer such as this without telling me which authorities are involved. Is it the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea? I have had a number of complaints about the speed of its planning. Is it Liverpool? Is it Newcastle? Is it Suffolk Coastal? Is it Forest Heath? Who is it? We need to see whether this is a suitable answer to a suitable question; or whether it is merely the only answer we can think of, given the pressure from the developers. Unless we can say that it is this, that or the other, everyone will believe what I fear I think, which is that this is an attempt to do something because something must be done. That is a very dangerous road to go down.
I say that after four years as Secretary of State for the Environment and a year before that as Minister of State—so I have five years of experience. I wondered whether this would be a good idea, but I said that it would not. That was because I could not see what criteria you could lay down except materialistic ones about time, and we have those already because you can call in an application if it is really a matter of time. I could not see what you could do which would not make this the subjective decision of a Secretary of
State, as against the subjective decision of the chairman of the local planning committee. On balance, in general, with everything taken into account, I prefer the subjective decisions of 400-odd chairmen of planning commissions to the subjective decision of one Secretary of State. That is why I very much hope that the House will support the amendments.