Housing and Planning Bill — House of Lords, 2016-03-23
Topic: Housing
John Gummer (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, I do not wish to repeat the concerns I have had for some time over the amount of information that is available about this Bill, the regulations and the like. We are debating the Bill in these circumstances and therefore I remind the House what the planning system is for. It is a disagreeable necessity. We have to have it because you cannot have a circumstance in which the unlimited, private ownership of land has an effect on neighbours and communities. It is not about land owned by the local authority. The owner owns the land. Whenever I hear planning discussed by the parties opposite, I am fascinated because you might think it was owned by the local authority and that it should come back to the fact that this is a local authority matter The House has to recognise that there is an international agreement on human rights in which property is a basic human right—not only under the United Nations, but under the European Union of which I am sure we shall remain a full and active member, even though there is such nonsense spoken about it by the Brexit people. I am not getting on to that, of course. Even if they do not like the European Union, they are stuck with the United Nations human rights declaration, which we signed I happen to care about the right to property. It is basic in a community. It is basic for democracy. If you want to destroy democracy, the first thing you destroy is the right to property because it gives people independence. It enables them to stand up against government; it enables them to put two fingers up to a local authority if that is what it thinks. Yet, when I hear a debate like this, I understand precisely why I am on these Benches. Very often I find myself arguing not entirely on the side of the Government. However, I have been very much reassured, by the speeches of the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, and particularly of the noble Lord, Lord Foster, and I understand why I am not a Liberal Democrat. It is because they are neither liberal nor democratic. That is the reality All the Government are suggesting is that it would do local authorities a lot of good to recognise that this is not a little bit of business which they do themselves in the way they want to do it. It is something which should be open to public concern and public alternatives. Of course, we can produce all sorts of scare tactics about what might happen and what people could do and all the things that might arise. What we are really arguing in the amendment is that we should not try anything else—there should be no opportunity for alternatives and no one ought to deal with this. Why? Because local authorities do not like it and because that well-known organ of democracy, in which I declare an interest as an honorary vice-president, the TCPA, does not hold with it The TCPA does not hold with a lot of things, mainly because it is still burdened by the memory of that dreadful old man, Ebenezer Howard—still thinking in the past, not understanding that we are in a world in which people do not expect there to be one provider or just one lot of people to go to. Today people expect that we test it all the time. The noble Lord, Lord Beecham, went through a whole list of things, but in every one of those cases the nationalised provider is a lot better because there is an alternative. There are better prisons because they do not all have to be done in one way. Even when you have failures, the fact that there is an alternative is crucial in a democracy and crucial for the efficiency of the national system I come to the nature of planning. I cannot believe that there is anyone in this House who thinks that the planning system works well. That does not mean to say that an alternative would be better; sometimes planning may be thought of as Churchill thought of democracy—that it is a thoroughly bad system, but there is not a better one. Sometimes I think that that is the best definition of planning that we have. I have declared my interest and my pastimes; although I shall certainly not be involved in anything that may come out of this, I try to help people to produce sustainable buildings. One business with which I have an association tries to make buildings better, more sustainable and energy efficient. But in the course of that, I have to deal with planners, and we have very great difficulties sometimes. There was the lady who said to one of my constituents who wanted to have the next-door very small, knobbly and unimportant field as part of his garden, "You don’t need a bigger garden—therefore you won’t get the right to use it as a garden". That is ludicrous, to have to ask planning permission to turn a field into a garden. I can think of nothing more ridiculous than telling people that they have to get planning permission to do with their own land what most of us would like them to do, which is to turn it into a garden. But no—that is one of the things, because at some stage some local authority thought that it would be better telling people what to do with their land than people can do themselves.