Planning Bill (Programme) (No. 3)

I am pleased to be able to follow someone whom I would like to call my hon. Friend the Member for Meirionnydd Nant Conwy (Mr. Llwyd). He and I have served on many Committees over many years, and his words are always wise and should be respected. I hope that the Government will have listened carefully to what he has said, because he spent many hours serving loyally on the Bill's Committee, as did my hon. Friends on the Front Bench. However, the Bill that they were discussing in Committee is not the Bill that we are discussing today. It is a completely new Bill. I have no quarrel with the democratic process; if enough people in the House are against a particular proposal, the Government should table amendments. However, if the Opposition had come forward with the amendments that the Government have tabled today, they would have been accused of tabling wrecking amendments, so much would they have amended the Bill's original structure. We have only two and three quarter hours in which to discuss more than 110 amendments to the first part of the Bill, which will result in the complete alteration of the functions and structure of the infrastructure planning commission. That is a major part of the Bill. The whole principle behind the Bill revolves around how the new commission will operate. The Committee had many sittings in which to discuss this subject, and to give us only two and three quarter hours seems to me to be an abuse of the House's time. We shall then come to the rest of the Bill, which is huge, and has many important implications. Not many people have commented on that. The local review boards will be covered, as will the way in which appeals on minor planning applications will be treated. There will be no external appeal in future; the process will be covered by the local review boards. At the very least, we need time to discuss that matter. However, there are 104 amendments relating to the second part of our discussions today, and they will be discussed in less than two hours by the time that the preceding vote has taken place, which is a real abuse of the House's time. When it suits the Government, they produce a timetable that protects the time from Government statements, but they have not done that today. They did it for the 42-day detention debate, and this is just as important a matter taken in the round, but they have not protected the time. If they were really generous, they would protect the time for this debate, but they have not done that, which will restrict the time we have available. The Government are treating the House in a cavalier manner. If they were to allow the House proper time for discussion, they might end up with better legislation on the statute book. As the hon. Member for Meirionnydd Nant Conwy has said—I should call him my hon. Friend—it is wrong to leave the detailed scrutiny of a complicated Bill such as this solely to the other place. No doubt when amendments come back from the other place, we will have even less time to consider them. I hope that the Government will think carefully about this matter, which smacks of their not knowing what they are doing. They are rushing around talking to all sorts of people, but they have no central idea on how to amend the planning system. Nobody argues that the planning system does not need amending—of course it does. Taking seven years to get the planning application for terminal 5 through was too long, and that situation hampers the economic development of this country, but I say in all sincerity to the Government that this is not the way to do it.