John McDonnell

The Government did not accept the amendments on Report, but the reality is that they had to negotiate with the other House and introduce amendments that were in the spirit of the amendments tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for North East Hertfordshire (Chris Hinchliff)—it is as simple as that. We need to be honest about that and admit when we make mistakes. That is why I worry about this. If we introduce legislation of this sort, we need to take people with us. My hon. Friend the Member for Northampton South referred, in a derogatory tone, to the well-funded environmental groups. I have been working with those groups for nearly 50 years. I have never seen a breadth of unanimity across them on an issue such as this. Some of them cannot be described as anything other than mainstream. What they are asking for, in some of these amendments, is relatively limited, so it behoves us, as a listening Government, to go that one step further and see whether compromises can be reached. I congratulate the Government on doing that for clause 3, in which compromises have been reached. For some reason, however, people are digging their heels in, particularly in relation to Lords amendment 40. Let me deal with Lords amendment 1 on national policy statements. As I said earlier, confidence must be built when dealing with huge developments. My hon. Friend the Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Ruth Cadbury) has mentioned the third runway at Heathrow. The proposal to build a third runway will never have my constituents’ confidence because, as I said earlier, 15,000 of them will lose their homes, whole villages will be wiped off the face of the earth, and 2 million more people in London will suffer from noise and air pollution —so we will not be able to convince them, to be honest. However, on more general topics, including major infrastructure projects, the role of Select Committees has been critical, as they are able to examine those issues in depth, have Ministers before them and present reports to the House, which we can debate. In many instances, Select Committee reports and the work those Committees have done has been of such a quality that—as my hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield (Mr Perkins) demonstrated in his description of the work his Select Committee does—they have influenced Government, enabled policies to be changed and, as a result, built up confidence in the general public. I am concerned about any lessening of the role of Select Committees in this whole process. The Minister has given us some assurances, and we will see how that works out in practice, but we interfere with that democratic process of this House at our peril when we are in government, because this is how mistakes get made.