Planning Bill

I shall confine my comments to the importance of national policy statements, and to how the House is involved in their scrutiny and whether there should be a vote in Parliament to approve them. It is clear from all our debates on the matter that the national policy statements are almost the basis for this legislation. They are absolutely key, and they have support, in principle, across the House. When an individual planning application is made, a basis of policy should already have been determined by which the application can be judged. That is right in principle; it is also right in terms of process. Clearly, one of the problems with the present system is that each individual planning application involves not only a decision on whether the location in question is the most appropriate for the development, but a debate on whether the development is right per se in regard to policy on transport, or on power and energy, for example. We need to find a better way of determining the policy and considering applications in the light of that policy, so as to shorten the process and ensure that the applications are dealt with more expeditiously, while still being given full consideration. The way in which policy statements are formulated is absolutely key. In Committee, I think that we were all in a bit of a haze as to how the scrutiny would take place. The Minister was unable to be as clear as he has been today, for obvious reasons. The House is quite rightly jealous of its own methods and procedures for scrutinising anything that the Government propose. It was therefore right that the Minister did not try to commit himself absolutely, although he did give an indication that he would try to reach an agreement on the proper process of scrutiny by the House and on how that would fit in with the overall process of Government scrutiny and consultation on policy statements. It was interesting to hear the Chairman of the Select Committee on Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, the hon. Member for Mid-Worcestershire (Peter Luff), speaking today to my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes, South-West (Dr. Starkey), the Chairman of the Select Committee on Communities and Local Government. There have been fruitful discussions between the Minister and those Committee Chairmen, who are now generally reassured that the Select Committees will be able to do their job of properly scrutinising the policy statements, and that they will be given adequate time in which to do it. My amendment (a) to new clause 8 is an attempt to flesh out precisely how that process will work. It also sets out what I would not want to see happening—namely, a situation in which public scrutiny was taking place in parallel with the Select Committee scrutiny, and in which Ministers, faced with potentially contradictory views, could play one off against the other. It is entirely reasonable—I described it as an end-on-end process—for the public scrutiny and public consultation to come first. Then, the Select Committee would have an opportunity to scrutinise the Government proposals, but in the light of what the public had to say. I accept that what my hon. Friend the Minister has done, in consultation with the Select Committee Chairmen, is reach a compromise. The process will set off and there will be consultation with the public and scrutiny in the House, but then there will be a gap after the public consultation has finished. The results of the consultation can be fed into the Select Committee, which can then take account of them before reaching its final view. That seems to be a reasonable compromise. I am sure that if, in the end, the four to six weeks do not appear to be satisfactory or enough time in practice, Select Committees will not be slow in coming forward to say to Ministers, ““We will need a bit longer on future occasions. It does not really work.”” There has been a genuine attempt to work through the interaction between the Government process of consultation and scrutiny and the procedures of the House. I am grateful to my hon. Friend for what he is trying to achieve, and what he has achieved, according to what I have heard from two Select Committee Chairmen. We then come to the issue of whether what the House does should be more than scrutiny and whether we should be allowed a vote on all the policy statements. We had that debate in Committee and the hon. Member for Beckenham (Mrs. Lait) has already reminded me of proposals that I may have moved, if not pushed to the vote. Instinctively, any hon. Member would want the House to play as big a role as possible and to have greater opportunity to hold the Government to account, as well as ultimately to say through a vote whether it approves of a policy statement. Those are incredibly important documents and we should not undervalue them. There are, however, two real problems. In an intervention, I asked the hon. Lady whether she was really saying that a Conservative Government, if we ever have one, would give up to an unelected second Chamber the right to decide whether their policy statements went through. Would the Conservatives give an unelected second Chamber a right of veto? She can say so today because she is in opposition, but if she ever occupies a seat on the Treasury Bench she will probably come to a slightly different view. Governments tend to do that, do they not? Once people get into power, they do not much like the idea of giving in to a body that is unaccountable. That brings me to another, quite important point. When my constituents talk about parliamentary accountability, they mean holding me to account because they elect me. They do not mean holding to account some Members of the House of Lords, because they know that that cannot be done. There is a fundamental problem here. In principle, the hon. Lady is right and the House ought to have some ability to take a view on national policy statements, but surely the House should not be put in a position whereby it could find its view on a national policy statement being overridden by the other place, with no right under the Parliament Acts or any other measure for the wishes of this House to take primacy in that argument. The hon. Lady has to untangle this one because there is a real problem here. Would we in the House seriously vote to set up a situation whereby we could vote for a policy statement only to find that nothing would be agreed because a veto had been given to the other place?