Planning and Compulsory Purchase (Re-committed) Bill
10:30 am
Mr Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (Cotswold, Conservative)
I start by welcoming you and Mr. Pike to the Chair, Mr. Hurst.
I assure you that the Opposition will try to be as constructive as possible within the constraints placed on us. I also thank the Clerks, who, as we will see, have done a huge amount of work in a very short period. I also welcome the new Minister for Housing and Planning. He and I have known each other for a long time, and I am sure that our relations will be cordial, although there will be difficulties, given the constraints placed on the Opposition.
The Bill places us in uncharted waters. It was originally introduced to the House on 4 December 2002 and the House treated it with—to use the Minister's words—great despatch: it had had its Second Reading and had passed through Committee by the end of January. We then heard nothing, and assumed—indeed, hoped—that the Bill had gone away, until June when the previous Minister, the hon. Member for Harrow, East (Mr. McNulty), who is now the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, announced his intention to re-commit it. He gave me certain undertakings that we would have adequate time to reconsider not only all the parts of the Bill that we considered during its previous consideration, which was heavily timetabled, but also those that we did not consider then. We should bear in mind the fact that of the original Bill, the Committee discussed only 30 of the 90 clauses, and one of the six schedules. A large proportion of the Bill was therefore never discussed in Committee at all—and now we have more than 120 pages of highly complex amendments, most of which are Government amendments. In other words, this Bill is far longer that the original Bill, which took up 74 pages.
When the Government lay Bills before their client Parliament—at least, I hope that they regard Parliament as their client—they should try to ensure that their legislation is more correct the first time. Indeed, that is a matter of professional pride. Bills should not be introduced to Parliament until they are in a more correct form. Now we have to deal with all these highly complex amendments in just eight sittings.
When the Bill was originally considered last January, we had 12 sittings. In June, when the motion to re-commit it was put before the House, I told Ministers that eight sittings were not enough. The Minister has been very kind, offering us flexibility and the opportunity to sit for more hours, but the problem is that these matters are so highly complex that unless one is superhuman, one cannot concentrate on them for longer than the six or seven hours already allocated, so we need more days. I hope that there will be some flexibility.
We are in uncharted waters not only because the Bill has been re-committed—I do not believe that that has happened to any other Bill in Parliament before—but because the resolution of the Programming Sub-Committee puts the Government new clauses and new schedules first. I have never heard of a situation whereby the Government have proposed an amendment, new schedule or new clause and the Committee has dealt with that, and then had to return to the same subject for Opposition amendments. Why are the amendments not grouped as they always used
to be, with new schedules and new clauses relating to certain matters in the Bill grouped together?
I must register my extreme displeasure with the programme motion. The Opposition will vote against it. However, we will try to deal with matters as well as we can. Very unusually, I have already signed some of the Government amendments, motions, because I agree with them and hope that they can be dealt with formally. There are many amendments on the amendment paper that could be taken formally, and if we could reach an agreement between the Opposition parties, that would allow us more time to debate the contentious issues. Surely that is our purpose.
We are going to have difficulties in dealing with such a large amount of stuff. The Minister has put a number of papers in the Library today, and there is a written statement on the Order Paper—but the Committee started at 10.30 on the first day back from the recess, and we are supposed to have taken in that huge wodge of papers before considering the Bill. That is a very unsatisfactory way of doing business. The Government ought to be able to lodge the papers earlier. I accept that this is the first day back, but we should not be in Committee on the first day back if the Government did not table all the papers before the summer recess, as I asked them to.
I have registered my strong displeasure, and we will vote against the programme motion, but I hope that we can proceed with the Committee with all due dispatch.