Planning Bill (Programme) (No. 2)

I rise to support the opposition to the programme motion. It is another travesty of democracy that we should be expected to be allocated time on a range of sensitive and important constitutional matters about how something as crucial as planning should be decided. It may be that there are provisions for which the time allocated by Ministers is too great. However, there will undoubtedly be occasions on which the issue is so important that many more Members would like to join in and to have the opportunity to be here, if only a more sensible time had been chosen for considering such matters. I urge Ministers to think again, even now. It may be that we can consider the Bill in the total amount of time that they have made available, but they should allow the House to decide how that time is best spent and how the priorities should be reflected in that debate. Often, when we give people greater freedom, they show greater responsibility, and we get a better quality of debate that concentrates more on the issues that matter. My hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Mrs. Lait) powerfully made the case that the Bill will set up an unelected quango to make extremely important decisions, whereas I and many of my constituents believe that there should be a stronger democratic input. I would add that many of my constituents feel that there should be more influence from the locality, not less. They do not feel that their local views are properly considered under the current process, because there is so much centralising, railroading and regional, overarching influence. The situation will be even worse if we have an unelected national quango making important decisions and forcing consequential decisions on local authorities once the main decision has been taken. We need proper time to debate safeguards and guarantees for local empowerment and influence over such decisions. I am not one who wishes to stop every new development, and I certainly am not one who thinks that we need to resist all the important infrastructure and energy projects that this country is crying out for. The reason why such projects have been delayed in the past decade is not so much the planning system, but the Government, who have singularly failed to have a positive energy or transport policy. They have singularly failed to provide a framework in which the private sector can operate, or to make public funding available for public projects, so that that infrastructure can be put in place. They have wasted 11 years, and now come forward with this fig leaf of a Bill, saying that it was the planning system that was wrong. Eleven years into a Labour Government—somewhere near their end, we hope—they have decided that they can reform the planning permission system to try to accelerate the projects that they have prevented by chopping and changing, dithering and delaying and going to endless consultation on all the infrastructure issues to do with energy and transport. I also wish to condemn the guillotine because the Bill contains a taxation measure that will provide the opportunity, through secondary regulation, to set up levies on development projects. I shall not go into whether that is good or bad, as I hope that we will have time to discuss that properly within the limits of the timetable motion, but such a tax measure is surely of some importance. It therefore deserves prime-time debate and as much time as the House thinks necessary to consider the whys and wherefores of the matter. It might restrict, defer or delay development, and we need the opportunity to probe, test and examine that case. Above all, we need enough time to show that we are sick and tired of local communities being overridden by national and regional planners. We are sick and tired of mock consultations that go on for too long and do not take local opinion seriously. The Opposition do not want more delay, and we would welcome any sensible measure that reduced how long it takes to make important planning decisions, but the system has to understand the power and passion of local feeling and must find a way of coming to just decisions having taking those feelings seriously. The system proposed in the Bill would not do that, and it is a further democratic travesty that it is going to be railroaded through on a guillotine that will not leave enough time to debate some of the most sensitive issues and that might allow too much time for other issues. I ask the Government to think again, please. They are so unpopular because they have damaged our Parliament and undermined our democracy. Do they really want to stand arraigned again today for a further body blow against our democracy? This is an attack on the right of our local communities to be heard on planning and an attack on the right of this House to examine serious measures for more public spending, more quangos and more taxation. The Government are in the dock, and they will be even more unpopular if they insist on driving the measure through.