Localism Bill

My Lords, like my noble friend Lord Hodgson, this is my maiden speech on the Bill. I intend it to be generic rather than go into detail and I hope, therefore, to be brief. I regret the hour at which we are holding this debate, although my noble friend the Minister showed admirable initiative in opening it with the statement that she did. It is a pity that the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, did not have the opportunity to paint the larger landscape before we started getting into the detail. I am speaking in particular to Amendment 136ZD, in the names of my noble friends Lord Gardiner of Kimble and Lord Cathcart, to which the former spoke a little while ago. I express my admiration for their exercise in clarification. The instincts that underlie generosity to one’s community are the big society writ early. I was a London inner-city Member of Parliament for nearly a quarter of a century, and London is nothing if it is not a collection of villages where the instincts of the big society apply. I have in a recent debate identified in my own constituency Pimlico and Soho as model inner-city communities, if in different modes. I have, however, had an address in Wiltshire for half my life and these characteristics of the big society or, as Burke might put it, the small platoon society, are perhaps evidenced even more vividly in the countryside because of the way everyone knows everyone else and where the roots of families are at least as deep as those of parallel families in the cities, if not more so. I pay warm tribute to those who give of their substance in rural areas and demonstrate their recognition of local need and to the imaginativeness of their responses. My one plea to my noble friend the Minister is that that generosity of spirit should not be unduly curtailed by the letter of the law, which can turn the landscape into briars and brambles which deter rather than welcome sensible development. I, in turn, have welcomed the amendment as being an insurance policy to support one’s desire to be helpful to the community rather than to ring one’s assets around with defences against hazard. I end with the amendment of my noble friend Lord Hodgson and support his Amendment 136, though by placing it in line 19 of page 61, it means it offers late rather than early assistance in illuminating the first four lines of that page. It is the opposite of the example once set by a Polish Bishop who was visiting a parish in his diocese, an episode that could be helpful to many a parliamentarian. When greeted by the curate, the Bishop said, ““When I visit parishes in my diocese, I am accustomed to be greeted by the sound of bells, and that has not happened today””. The curate said, ““My lord, there are three reasons. The first is there are no bells””. ““Pray go no further,”” said the Bishop. Although my noble friend Lord Hodgson has placed his amendment quite far down on page 61, I still think it is an extremely valuable contribution to the Bill.