Planning Bill

I will not go over the ground covered by the noble Baroness and the noble Lord, who moved and spoke to their amendments so comprehensively and so admirably, but I will confine myself to the principle of the 18th-century Back-Bencher, who after a fine speech by Edmund Burke, simply stood up and said, ““Ditto to Mr Burke””, and sat down again. At the risk of making a brief Second Reading speech—I should stress perhaps that I did not speak at Second Reading—my own interest in architecture was stimulated at a school that had been founded in 1843, where the governors employed en série first Blore, then Street—I lived in a building by Street that was the first building in the whole kingdom to have concrete in its material—and then Bodley to build a new and larger chapel, because Blore’s chapel had been too small. In Bodley’s office was Comper, a boy of 18 then. Sixty years later, Comper returned to the school to refurbish and redesign the reredos that Bodley had built 60 years earlier as a post-war memorial. Then came Norman Shaw followed by Aston Webb. The cricket pavilion was by Alfred Waterhouse; I suspect that it is possibly the only cricket pavilion that Alfred Waterhouse ever designed. Even the school architect, who was an old boy of the school, although his father was an RA, contributed the science laboratories, which became one of the first of 50 buildings in the 20th century to be listed by the appropriate authorities. Great names are not everything, but its cumulative message had a profound effect on me. It is disloyal of me to say so, but the school has not used architects of the same quality in the past 50 years. I should, as a mea culpa, say that I served for nine years as a governor of the school in a couple of different spasms, but I do not recall our working under an articulated architectural policy. That is why I so support the emphasis of the amendments. I conclude with a tribute to the chairman of a characteristic West Midlands, Black Country business with factories all over the kingdom—a chairman no doubt long since dead—whom I visited in the early 1960s when I was in the private sector. He explained that his business had just employed a corporate architect for the first time, and that his first action as chairman was to send him on a three-month sabbatical to look at fine contemporary buildings in all the other countries of the globe. That is the spirit that should underlie the forthcoming explosion of infrastructure in our country.