Planning Bill

Happily, I did not appoint it and I did fire him, so that situation does not really arise. [Interruption.] Well, perhaps I ought to say that he resigned. The situation is not as the right hon. Gentleman puts it. I am looking for sensible decisions that are taken centrally, whereby we, as Members of Parliament, take the decision in the House. I am a great believer in our taking decisions on all subjects and not going out to other people through referendums and the like. That is what we should do here. We should make decisions on the big issues, and people should know how we voted. We should stand up and say, ““We are in favour of nuclear power,”” or that we favour a new railway or whatever it is. That is what parliamentary democracy really means. When the political decision is made, however, it must then be subject to the views and attitudes of the locality. Unless we do that, we shall find that the public will not have it. That is what I meant when I mentioned Swampy. If people feel that there is no local ability to make the comments that they want to make to someone who is not appointed by the Government, but who is a professional person—whether it be an inspector or a judge—we will find that more and more attempts are made to try to hold up decisions because there has not been proper local consideration. We have to change that aspect, and do so to speed it up. That is my first point. Secondly, I am also not entirely opposed to the idea that the Government have now come up with as a variant on section 106. Although I take much the same view as the right hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Mr. Raynsford), I say to him that we must have clarity about where the money is to be applied. The negotiation has been Treasury driven, and we all know that the original proposition was a means of nationalising section 106 money. The idea was to get the section 106 money, add it up and take it off the Government grant. That is what was going to be done, and it could have been done without legislation being passed by the House. I am therefore very suspicious, and the Minister must accept that most of us are very suspicious, following the history of Treasury meddling. My worry is, if the proposal is to apply on a region-wide basis, what will that mean for Suffolk? We could have agreement on a nuclear power station in Leiston, but the money could go to Luton. Most people in Leiston have not been to Luton, do not want to go to Luton and are not interested in Luton. The fact that it is in the eastern region is nothing to do with them because they do not understand, nor are they interested in, the regional government that this Government have produced. They want to think that if money is for a development in their area, it will have an effect in that area. I was surprised that the Secretary of State was not prepared even to say that it would go to their county, which is at least something that they understand. I suspect that the change is much more dangerous than anything that she is prepared to say. Thirdly, we have the issue of hybrid Bills and the like. I agree with the concerns of the right hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich about those Bills. A huge amount has been achieved by them. There is proper public discussion of big infrastructure projects, and people feel that they have a way of reaching those who make the decisions. Even if we do not continue with that system, it reminds us of the dangers of the particular system that is proposed. Fourthly, I am concerned about some of the significant gaps in the Bill. This is the most autocratic Government since Cromwell. There is no doubt about that. They are centralising and like to do by secondary legislation what they do not dare debate on the Floor of the House for primary legislation. This Bill is a good example of that. We cannot debate it properly because the details on which those debates should take place are not known. Indeed, they are so obviously not known that when the Secretary of State was with us for that short period of time she admitted that we would get to know more about them as the Bill goes through its stages. Frankly, the Minister must understand that that is entirely unacceptable as a parliamentary system. Bills should come to this House with sufficient information for us to debate them. We should not be told that we might get other bits and pieces as we go through the Bill if it is convenient to the Government and if we press them so hard that they cannot fail to tell us, which is really what they are threatening us with on this matter. We cannot argue about a whole range of things that are seriously deficient in the Bill because we do not know the answers. That leads me to the fifth point. Some of the issues that we are going to cover are important. How on earth can we talk about aviation if the proposals in the aviation White Paper—that appalling White Paper, recently produced by the Government—are to be transferred lock, stock and barrel into what will, in fact, be the direction for this new independent commission? I consider that document to be very, very empty of an understanding of the environment. It is appalling when it comes to carbon and climate change, and it is ignorant when it comes to discussing most of those issues. Yet we are not going to have much discussion of such matters because, under this proposal, they will be part of the general guidance that will be brought before the House. We need to know a lot more about what the national policy statements are and about how they will integrate with other statements and policies, none of which we have been told about so far. Lastly, we have to recognise the advances that have been made by suggesting that permitted development should be extended. That was part of what the quality of life commission proposed. Soon after that, however, the Government made their announcement; it was the usual technique. However, as is often the case, they got it wrong. The Government have decided not to permit as much development in proper circumstances as they could have done. Our proposal was that people could develop as they wished on estates built since 1945. They would have to give notice to the local authority and the contiguous neighbours. If they objected, an arbitrator would decide whether the neighbours' interests were greater. That is a reasonable proposition. Much more development would have been possible, and many of the difficulties rightly identified by the right hon. Member for Streatham (Keith Hill) would have been avoided. If the process were removed from the planning department it would become a neighbourhood issue, and a decision would be made on the spot. The problem is that the Government have not only failed to adopt that proposal, but failed to do the other half of what should be done. They have made it possible to build, for example, a conservatory willy-nilly, with no requirement for it to meet the highest energy efficiency standards. However much such a development may accord with planning desires, constructing it with no regard for carbon emissions or climate change is an example of the ways in which we are increasing energy consumption to a significant extent. It will be too hot in summer and too cold in winter, which means more central heating and more air conditioning. But the Government seem to consider such developments perfectly reasonable. Again, I challenge the Minister. I want to know his precise estimate of the increase in global warming gases that will result from the Bill. The Government do not know the figures relating to the 2,500 post offices that they have closed or the effect of the heating provided for people to smoke outside pubs following the smoking ban. They do not bother to find those things out. It is all words, with no practical figures relating to the increase in emissions that results from their actions. These are my objections to the Bill. First, it ought to be unnecessary. The Government promised us that the last planning Bill was all we would need, and we should therefore suspect that this Bill will be as ineffective as they now claim the last one to have been. Secondly, it is not ““joined up””, in that they have not worked out how it will be implemented, and we will not have that information. Thirdly, it is destructive of local democracy. Fourthly, the Secretary of State can say as loudly as she likes that it extends democracy, but we should always be suspicious of Ministers who say that. What it means is that they know perfectly well that the opposite is the case, and if they say it several times, we know that we should be suspicious. The Secretary of State knows perfectly well that this is a centralising Bill, an autocratic Bill, and a Bill that is typical of a Government who have done more to reduce the rights and freedoms of the individual than any previous Government since Oliver Cromwell.