Planning Bill

My Lords, I have not spoken before on this Bill, largely because I regard it as probably the most progressive planning Bill since the last great progressive planning Bill, that of 1948. I will say a little about the Conservative Party’s policy, the evolution of which I had some involvement with, in a strange way. If the Conservatives were in government, they would strongly resist the amendment, because it strikes at the heart of the Bill. I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, on the national policy statements, which I think should be the start of the process, but I agree with much else of what he said. He is right to be concerned about delays in the process. The reality is that we have never had in this country a planning system that allows us to promote infrastructure. Britain’s infrastructure lets us down in all sorts of ways. I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, when he says that people are disaffected because of bureaucracy and their inability to intervene in the planning process. I suggest that what frustrates people is their inability to understand why we cannot deliver infrastructure programmes in this country as we used to be able to do in the 19th and early 20th centuries and as Europe does now. I declare an interest, more for reasons of form than for reasons of substance, as a campaign director for Future Heathrow, which not only deals with the expansion of Heathrow but campaigns for the extension of the high-speed line to Heathrow and further north—I made a speech about this in Manchester two years ago. The two should go together. That hinges on one of the most important aspects of the Bill: how we deliver an integrated transport system in the UK. As I said, the evolution of Conservative policy on this is interesting. In the 1980s, I set up an organisation called the Labour Planning and Environment Group, a group affiliated to the Labour Party and of which I was chairman. We ran a number of successful conferences and invited members of the Conservative Front Bench to speak—although not the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, who might remember those occasions—and they did. The Secretary of State spoke at them because we were drawing together local authorities and business to address problems. We never dealt with the infrastructure problems. They were not part of the discussion then, which focused on things such as out-of-town shopping centres. However, there was recognition by all of us, almost across the political spectrum, that the infrastructure planning process in Britain was seriously flawed. We all know the importance of infrastructure—roads, railways, airports, sewers, water, the lot—but the most important part of delivering it is the planning process. If you get that wrong, an awful lot of other things go wrong as well, which is what has happened. I do not want to speak for long, so I conclude with a—slightly long—example. When the high-speed rail line opened in 2007 between the Kent coast and Paddington it had been about nine years in construction, while the French high-speed line had already been open and running for 10 years. Why? Was it because the British are not capable of building it fast? Was it because we did not have the money? Was it because of the urban density of the south-east? There is an element of truth in that; the density of the south-east corner of the UK is a problem. But urban density is a problem in Belgium and Holland, too, but they have a high-speed line. The financing is different here from France, and the French were better at getting that through. However, a major cause of the delay was planning. People were travelling around Europe at 180 miles per hour, then coming through the tunnel and slowing down to about 80 miles per hour—in the country that had invented the train, started the industrial revolution and achieved all the scientific progress that enabled that revolution to take place. The construction of the high-speed lines in Europe and Britain should warn Members to think twice before voting for the amendment. If you take away the independence of the infrastructure committee and place it within a political process, certain things will happen; the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, will know this as well as I do. If I am invited, as a local resident or politician, to object to something that local people say that they do not want, I will use every weapon in my arsenal to slow it down. That has happened for years, which is why we need a system in which we accept that problems for local people must be addressed through compensation and other things, without seizing up the whole country because of problems in particular areas. I beg those who are thinking of voting for the amendment—particularly the Liberal Democrats, but also the Conservatives—to go into the Library before they vote and ask for maps of transport infrastructure in the European Union countries. There is heading after heading: France, Italy, the Benelux countries and all the others, and the links between road, rail and air. That is integrated transport, to which we all pay lip service in this country but do not deliver. Looking at the maps, you get to the Channel and see one little link to London, with talk in just one section of a proposed west coast line. Britain is left out of it. The noble Baroness, Lady Thatcher, signed the single market treaty and believed in it very strongly. Whether you are pro-Europe or anti-Europe, if you are part of a single market, the last thing you want to do is design an infrastructure that excludes you from it. We are doing that, and it is a serious issue. Noble Lords who vote for this amendment will strike at the heart of the independent process. If it is accepted, we will lurch right back into the situation, which we all agree we want to get away from, of constant delays to infrastructure projects which are necessary for the United Kingdom’s economic development. It does not help anyone if we lead people to believe that they can slow something down and stop change happening. Of course, people often object to change and of course it causes problems when it takes place, but you deal with that by addressing the problems caused for people; you do not just accept that slowing it down is a good thing. My final warning is that if anybody thinks that either the objectors or the developer got any satisfaction at all from the planning process on terminal 5, they should forget it. It upset just about everyone. The one good thing that came out of the terminal 5 inquiry was that it made many people, myself included, go away and look at what was happening with regard to airports in continental Europe and ask why Heathrow was going downhill so fast. That was the only good thing about it. Everybody came out dissatisfied. It did us no good at all. I ask noble Lords please not to support the amendment. I ask noble Lords on the Conservative Front Bench, in view of their own history on this matter, not to push the amendment to a vote, and if they do push it to a vote, to look first at the maps of Europe and ask themselves whether they want Britain to end up as an offshore island that is cut off from the incredibly dynamic European economy, and with an infrastructure system of which we, as the first industrial power, ought to be slightly ashamed.