Localism Bill

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Reay, is nothing if not challenging intellectually. I find myself very much in support of some of the issues which he raises in his amendment, but I do not support one of them. On one point, I strongly disagree with him. The profession of the planning officer is a very honourable and demanding one, and with all the subjective pressures which operate in society—sometimes very crudely with very considerable amounts of money and innuendo about possibilities and non-possibilities—it is very important to have the objectivity of a professional in the middle who can look at the law and at the overall social challenges and get matters right. It seems to me that, if a person has put his profession on the line and made a particular recommendation, that is very important in deciding whether an appeal is appropriate. I am afraid that on that issue I strongly disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Reay. I certainly do not see my role in this House as helping to put the Conservative or Liberal Democrat policy back on course, but we have a responsibility to try to be objective and to see valid points that are made and, when they are made, to support them. In the middle of this, there are some very important and valid points. I referred to some of them in an intervention on a previous amendment. I am deeply concerned about the trend towards putting commercial economic interests above social, environmental and scenic issues. I strongly support anything that can be done to increase the well-being and dynamism of our economy—of course I want that—but my thinking does not totally coincide with that of the noble Lord, Lord Reay, as I also believe very strongly that wind power has a contribution to make. I put it to the noble Lord that if you have alternative energy, it will always be an aggregate of less dramatic quantities of energy than we have had from some of the methods with which we are familiar. Therefore, I do not think it is an issue of being on the side of wind power or against it. I am very worried by those who turn anti-wind power positions into a kind of ideological cornerstone. The issue is where you put the wind farms; and the issue is how you take into account the social challenges and social needs, so that you do not end up with the least articulate members of society becoming the waste bin for all projects because everyone else has been able to fight them off. There is a huge social planning job to be done, but planning will succeed only if it carries the sympathy and understanding of the population as a whole. There is of course a great deal to take seriously in the Government’s position, about making democracy as meaningful and relevant as it possibly can be, and as near to the people as possible. Therefore, the position of the communities is crucially significant. I believe that, if one looks at the Bill as a whole—not just on this issue, but on a lot of the issues that have been so painstakingly debated by colleagues in the course of the Bill—there is a very strange underlying paradox. The name of the Bill, and the cause of the Bill, is localism and enhancing local democracy; the effect of the Bill is an unprecedented concentration of central power. That has to be countered. It seems to me that from that standpoint the noble Lord is right. It is of course a great temptation to have increased authority for the Secretary of State at the centre, and all his civil servants working with him. If I was a civil servant with responsibilities in this area, I would get terribly vexed and frustrated at all this local democracy that was getting in the way of absolute logic; but if we are to have such increased authority at the centre, then it is very important that we make sure that there are firm rules about how that frustration is brought into play. I think that the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Reay, does something helpful: it in a sense takes the whole theoretical purpose of the Bill, and says, ““Right, if we really mean what we say here, we must have codes by which the Minister is operating in his decisions which override local wishes, and we must make sure that those are limited, and that they are clear, explicit, and understood””. As for the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, she is absolutely right: it is a charade, a nonsense and a provocation to talk about a Localism Bill and then deny the community the right to appeal. Of course the community should have that right. I conclude by making one point again—and I know that the Minister, who has not himself been participating in this debate, has been very good on this issue, and very sympathetic and understanding, as have some of his colleagues. If we talk about the importance of generating a vigorous economy, and giving priority to the measures that are necessary to make our economy strong, why do we want this? It is because we want a decent, civilised place in which to live. We want to have a society worth living in, and such a society needs a strong economy underpinning it. That is the whole point about the issue of balance: how do we ensure that we have strong policies, but at the same time that they are not so unduly, at the price of the quality of the wider dimensions of our society? That is why I repeatedly come back to the point of how previous generations ruined the countryside unnecessarily: we can now see with hindsight that it could all have been done much better. I think that the noble Lord is right, again, to be vigilant on these issues, although I profoundly disagree with him on some of his observations. I hope that the Government will take seriously what he and the noble Baroness have been arguing in their amendments.