Planning Bill

I hope that mine is not the only voice to speak against the amendments. The Minister will reject them. As I see it, the Government are the Executive. The argument that moral authority would come about only if both Houses approved something is fallacious, for two reasons. First, the moral authority—I always look with great care when people call in aid ““moral authority”” when arguing for something—or legitimacy of national policy statements will come about from the framework in which they have to be formulated, the consultation and the care and rigour with which the outcome of those consultations is considered and responded to. At the end of the day, the national policy statement will be a very carefully assessed and balanced judgment of some fairly complex issues about which there are a lot of strong feelings. But a judgment has to be made. As with anything that the Government of the day do, they have moral authority if people feel, on balance, that consultation and taking account of public opinion and stakeholders in all kinds of decisions are done with care and that a judgment is overwhelmingly good. If the public start to feel that the Government are not listening carefully to what they say, or that they listen but have faulty judgment, any Government and Secretary of State lose that moral authority. Secretaries of State suffer the penalty of being sacked, and Governments are ultimately sacked by the electorate. The Government of the day, through the Secretary of State, will have the moral authority, provided all those things are done carefully. If they do not, they will suffer the eventual wrath of the electorate. Let us turn to the moral authority of Parliament. I shall turn in a moment to the question of both Houses or one House. Let us assume that the Government have set down draft proposals, have consulted carefully and widely over some months, have listened to what has been said, have responded carefully—perhaps even iteratively so by having more consultation—and then have reached balanced and careful judgments. Let us say that the proposals go to the House of Commons, where a committee might consider them. That committee will then form its own judgment, which might be quite different. Indeed, it might be—dare one say?—even more politically motivated than a Government. There is no necessity for that committee to have the same regard to all due processes. Noble Lords who have spoken on this have said that the mere act of giving parliamentary approval is the moral authority, whether or not Parliament takes a decision on the same careful, balanced judgment of facts. There could be a hung Parliament—the House of Commons could be hung, and there could be horse-trading. Look at how on Capitol Hill in the United States they dealt with the big loan bail-out: they added $200 billion on to the Bill just through pork barrel politics to get the overall figure. Anybody who wants to talk about the moral authority of elected Houses in reaching careful judgments should remind himself of the picture on Capitol Hill only a few weeks ago. Even if a committee was careful, it could not possibly spend the same amount of time that the Secretary of State spent in many months of careful consultation. Even if a Select Committee or committee sought to be careful, whatever its recommendations to the House of Commons, the vote there might have no regard whatever to what the committee recommended or the process that it went through. It would be a straightforward vote. I am reminded of the vote in the other place on whether the second Chamber should be elected or not. We all know that there was a vote for an 80 per cent elected Chamber but all those who really opposed an elected House got together and voted for a 100 per cent elected Chamber because they thought that it would sink the whole enterprise. The official position of the House of Commons is that it is in favour of a 100 per cent elected Chamber, exactly because they did not want that to happen. So let us not use words like ““moral authority””. It simply is not accurate. The Government have their job while the House of Commons has another in holding the Government to account. This is not the elected House and it should not duplicate everything that the House of Commons does. We should be very careful before we go down that route. We are here to scrutinise legislation; with the agreement of the Commons, we have done a lot more on European Union legislation than the Commons—but that might change over time. This House is given a role under Clause 9, which says that either House may make, "““a resolution with regard to the proposal””." The House can genuinely debate something and, if it is so minded, can pass a resolution; but we have to be very careful what kind of resolution we pass, because of the sheer complexity of the issues. What are we going to do, when all this public consultation and care has gone into the proposal? We are entirely entitled to debate and pass resolutions, but to have our own committee or sit on a Joint Committee with the other place would be simply wrong; this House would be seeking to go beyond its role and function. Of course, if there was a wholly elected second Chamber and the conventions started to change, you could well find that an elected House took a different view—but we are not an elected House. I hope that the Committee on reflection does not press the amendment to a vote and that it feels that on balance it has been a debate worth having but not a point to push.