Paul Holmes

The hon. Gentleman asks whether I have any proposals. The last Government built the largest number of houses in history. There are many things that we agree need to be done, and there are some areas of this Bill that we agree with, but the hon. Gentleman needs to realise that taking power away from locally elected councillors is a disgrace. The Minister is saying to the hon. Gentleman and his councillors that they should not be trusted to make decisions on behalf of their local communities. I am sure he will not be happy with that when he gets to his annual general meeting in a few months’ time to be reselected as a parliamentary candidate. There are other concerns about this legislation. As we have said, the Government have consistently said that they want to build 1.5 million homes, but the independent Office for Budget Responsibility—a body that Labour held in high regard when it was in opposition—has forecast that the Government will fail to deliver on their manifesto commitment and will fall short of that figure. As I have said, that was echoed today by Savills, which estimates that the Government will build just over half the number of houses that the Deputy Prime Minister has promised, even after coming out of her very testing meetings with the Chancellor. The Government’s proposal to reduce the number of legal challenges available to opponents of major infrastructure developments from three to two—and in some cases just one—should alarm anyone who believes in checks and balances. Legal scrutiny is not an inconvenience; it is the backbone of our democratic system. Infrastructure projects often have far-reaching environmental, social and economic consequences, and by curtailing legal recourse, we are not removing red tape but removing the public’s right to hold power to account. In the name of speed, the Government are undermining the legal mechanisms that protect us from Government overreach. As I have said, the clear implication of the Minister’s proposals today is that powers will be removed from locally elected planning committees. That is a disgrace, and it is in addition to a gerrymandering housing algorithm that punishes rural areas and rewards Labour councillors in urban centres for failure. We are told that the Bill will speed up planning decisions, but at what cost? Local planning authorities are indeed struggling, under-resourced and overburdened, but granting them fee-raising powers without guaranteed central support is like asking a drowning man to swim harder. More alarmingly, the shift of decision-making powers from elected councillors to unelected planning officers under the guise of efficiency diminishes local democracy. It takes key decisions out of the hands of public representatives and places them in the hands of a bureaucracy increasingly dictated by central policy. We are also told that the Bill will make planning more strategic. That is a noble aim, but let us not forget that the strategic failure of recent years has been due not to too much local input but to too little co-ordination. The requirement for regional spatial strategies was scrapped by this Government’s predecessors. Now, the pendulum swings once again, with combined authorities being told to draft regional plans; however, those same authorities are being starved of the funding and staff required to do so. We risk repeating history, only this time with fewer safety nets and a weakened capacity to challenge flawed strategies.