Planning Bill

I thank those who produced the Marshalled List for doing so in a way that brings together all the clauses, so allowing us to debate the central issue of whether the commission should take decisions or whether it is an advisory body. I believe—backed partly by experience for four years as permanent secretary to the Department for the Environment, seared by planning inquiries such as NIREX waste disposal and Terminal 5—that that should be resisted and the existing provisions of the Bill be supported for reasons of both principle and practice. What might those reasons of principle be? The noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, said in his speech at Second Reading, and repeated in similar words today: "““The public accept the results of planning decisions … because a decision is taken by a politician””." He went on to say that there should be a, "““democratic final point of decision””.—[Official Report, 15/07/08; cols. 1167-68.]" That sounds self-evident, but there are problems with it. The first problem is that, as the noble Lord, Lord Woolmer, recognised at Second Reading only a few months ago, the noble Lord’s colleague, Lord Taylor of Holbeach, suggested exactly the opposite: that the Committee on Climate Change should be made a decision-taking body, not an advisory body. The more fundamental problem is that that doctrine is just not true; it is a fallacy. There are huge swathes of public life where Ministers and Parliament create a framework and then stand aside from decisions affecting individual citizens. For example, let us take the courts. Parliament decides what is an offence and, broadly, the penalty that should be attached to it. Individual cases and penalties are decided by the courts. The same applies to the resolution of disputes, whether in courts or in tribunals, whether between citizen and state or between state and state. Ministers and Parliament decide the rate of tax and what should be taxed and the Commissioners of Revenue and Customs decide how much an individual taxpayer should pay. Ministers come nowhere near those decisions. The Monetary Policy Committee was cited earlier in debates on the Climate Change Bill. Ministers decide what the inflation target is and the MPC makes operational decisions. The Competition Commission is now a deciding body—except, as we have seen recently, in very exceptional cases. You could say the same about admissions to schools and hospitals, arm’s-length grants to arts bodies. In huge swathes of life, exactly the opposite principle from that which is being argued for here is followed. It looks as though decisions on, for example, immigration and asylum may be the exception rather than the rule. Planning is something of a hybrid, with decisions being taken by a Minister in a quasi-judicial capacity. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Boyd, suggested, that is looking increasingly suspect and anachronistic, as a Minister is subject to political pressure and, with many projects being government-sponsored, being both judge and jury. How then will I decide which of those models to follow—advisory or decision-making. Two conditions are necessary. First, there must be a clear framework within which decisions are made, a framework within which democratic politics plays its part to the full. Secondly, when a decision has to be made about the choice between the benefit of one citizen or organisation and another, it is best to put Ministers at a distance. In the case of the Climate Change Bill, I thought that we came to the right answer, because the Bill was advising on what the framework should be. It was equivalent to advising on what should be the inflation rate that the MPC is targeting. In this case, I think that the balance of the argument goes the other way. Ministers, after consultation and subject to debate in Parliament, set the framework through the national policy statement, but the IPC decides the outcome in any particular application. I turn to practicality. I believe that the arguments of practice point in the same direction: the time that the process takes, its unpredictability, its tolerance of repetition and filibuster and its inability to distinguish issues of national importance from those which are principally local. To turn the IPC into an advisory body would, in my view, make things worse than they are today, adding two new processes, neither of which can lead to a definitive and timely outcome. The IPC would conduct its work not knowing whether it was advising or deciding, and when it made a recommendation the aim of anyone opposing the project would be to have another go at raising sufficient clamour to intimidate the Minister into reversing the decision, whatever it was. Issues that logically should have been resolved at a much earlier stage would be reopened, taking us back to square one. The IPC should therefore be the final point of decision, subject only, of course, to the courts. As the noble Lord, Lord Mogg, discussed at Second Reading, the ageing infrastructure and the need to adapt energy, waste and water systems to reflect climate change mean that, in the next 20 to 30 years, the planning system will come under unprecedented pressure. The delays and uncertainty of the present system cannot be allowed to continue, and the proposals in the Bill balance that sense of urgency with a proposal to give local communities and national interest groups a proper opportunity to make their impact at the right stage in the process. If one wants to close an apparent democratic deficit one should look to the way in which the NPS is handled in Parliament, rather than turning the NPS into an advisory body.