Member

I am a bit depressed by the rather personal nature of all this—suggesting that the Government are somehow crooked and you cannot trust them, and that this is not worth the paper it is written on. We have a well-established planning process. I have to say, as somebody who was in charge of it for five years, that the thought that anybody would direct a Minister, even a junior one, on how to decide on a planning application goes against my experience in those five years. I myself took decisions that went against the known will of the Prime Minister because it was the right planning decision to make. People take these decisions very seriously. If there is a suggestion that people take decisions on political grounds, I absolutely deprecate the suggestion that, “Well, the Labour group and the Conservative group on Westminster Council said this”. I can tell noble Lords that, if those groups are meeting as a group to decide on a planning application, that is illegal and a breach of the planning rules. That would in itself be grounds for overturning their refusal. I am sure that that is not what—