Government: Draft Legislative Programme

My Lords, in the limited time available to me, I shall refer to two rather unrelated matters in the Government’s draft legislative programme. First, I am delighted, as was my noble friend Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe, by the emphasis given in the draft legislative programme to housing. I am also delighted that the Government have rapidly followed their general draft with a Green Paper which clearly demonstrates their attention to and emphasis on housing and planning and, in particular, on a major house-building programme, which—I share the Government's view—is needed now. I strongly support the Government’s proposition that, to enable young people in particular to get on the housing ladder, they need affordable, fixed mortgages to give them some assurance over many years that they will not be faced with unaffordable rises in repayments. There is also great value in shared equity schemes. Of course, you do not end up owning the house, but there must be many low-earning young people who, if they had to borrow only the deposit, say, against the full purchase price, could get on the housing ladder, which they may not be able to do if they have to borrow anything like the whole of the purchase price. I also welcome the Government’s emphasis on maximising the potential for brownfield development and the new homes agency. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Shutt, that I am sorry that it is a new quango, but it has the useful task of ensuring, among other things, a social objective of mixed tenure estates, which I think is a good thing. However, I am somewhat wary of the call in the Green Paper for streamlined planning procedures. That sounds good if it means cutting through red tape, but I trust that it does not mean making it too easy to concrete over further chunks of the countryside or invading conservation areas. The other, quite unrelated, matter on which I wish to speak is the Government’s most impressive list of items for constitutional reform, which is in the paper on governance as well as in the draft legislative programme. It has amazed me over the years that, despite the growing democratic legitimacy of Parliament—the franchise was gradually extended in the 19th century and covered the whole of the adult population, male and female, in the 20th century— Parliament has had virtually no role in some of the most vital decisions that Governments have to make. Those include the making of war and peace and the ratification of treaties, which are prerogative powers, formerly exercised by the monarch alone and now by Ministers on behalf of the monarch, with only a slight bow in the direction of Parliament but not requiring parliamentary approval. As the Green Paper proposes, Parliament should be involved in, among other things, many major public appointments. I will not bother to give the list, but it sounds very appealing to have some sort of parliamentary—by which I mean House of Lords as well as House of Commons—pre-appointment hearings by an appropriate committee. However, I do not agree with the suggestion on page 28 of the Green Paper that there could be, "““conceivably a role for Parliament””," in judicial appointments. The Blair Government rightly took away judicial appointments from Ministers—namely, the Lord Chancellor of the day—and gave them to the Judicial Appointments Commission, which is a properly independent body. I am encouraged by the reported statement of my right honourable friend Jack Straw at the Lord Mayor’s annual banquet of judges last week that the independence of the judiciary is so essential that there should be no room for political interference in the appointment and selection of judges. I hope that the Minister can give me some reassurance on that.