Baroness Thornhill (LD)

My Lords, this has been a very interesting debate, with many different points made. Clearly, training is important to us, as is the status of planners, but I want to touch on issues that, much to my surprise, have not been mentioned. They have been hinted at very slightly by the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, who came close. I have attended and delivered planning training to councillors. You can take a councillor to training, but you cannot make him think or learn or go back into a committee room and act any differently from how he or she did before. To be perfectly honest, I have been shocked by the arrogance, attitude and behaviour of some councillors at meetings, which I was obliged to observe as part of my role within that council. What bothers me is that there seems very little ability to sanction or take to task. Often it is individuals. Within councils, they know who they are—but they still put them on the committee the following year. That cannot be ignored. It was not just lack of understanding or wilfully not wanting to understand or genuinely not understanding, but sometimes it was the tricky and thorny issues of probity and ethics within the whole area of this and public standards. Talking to planners, which I still do, with their work on the ground, I know that they say that the following issues are the rotten aspects of the job. There is hostility from the public—aggression, the way that they are spoken to. You have set up a positive consultation meeting with everything that you think they want to know and sometimes it deteriorates into some really quite shocking situations. They feel like they are piggy in the middle. The other side of that coin is the politicisation of planning. There is no doubt that this has happened. I said years ago that we have turned nimbys into BANANAs—build absolutely nothing anywhere near anybody. Even in my local area, I find that my local environment group, which I was very proud to get well and truly established, is objecting to developments miles away which could not possibly have any impact on them. It seems to be the new form of activism and we cannot ignore that. Planners hate their decisions being overturned by councillors, because they are professionals. They understand their role, but there are times when they just feel ignored, overruled and put in this position. They too need training in that regard.