Clause 1 - Regional Spatial Strategy
Planning and Compulsory Purchase Bill
9:45 am
Mr Tony McNulty (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Office of the Deputy Prime Minister; Harrow East, Labour)
I welcome you to the chair, Mr. Amess, and agree with other hon. Members in expecting to have fun over the coming weeks. I am sure that that fun will be informed, controlled and disciplined under both you and Mr. Pike.
If I were being pedantic, I would echo some of the housekeeping matters that have been mentioned. It is not very helpful when the cards indicating sittings say that our 6 o'clock programming sitting is going to be at 7 o'clock and that our 8.55 morning sittings will be at 9.55. Many of us are confused enough without
occasional errors in the usually robust assistance of the House authorities. I have no declaration of interest to make, either unpaid, reversed paid, unpaid or otherwise. Some of that struck me as almost confessional, rather than simply as a declaration of interest. If we are making confessions, I have to declare that for my sins, in a perverse past, I spent 11 years on a planning committee in the London borough of Harrow. I enjoyed every minute of it, much to the perplexity of my colleagues, who thought that planning was for anoraks, and ran a mile whenever there was a vacancy on the committee.
I am also, happily, an ex-Whip who can speak. I enjoyed not speaking when I was in the Whips Office—something that I commend to the hon. Member for Spelthorne. Before I come to the amendments, it might be useful to consider where we are up to. Nobody on the Labour Benches would disagree with the substance and thrust of what has been said by Opposition Members about the environment. However, we would disagree about processes and structures.
We do not start from a vacuum. Much regional spatial strategy will be based on the current regional planning guidance system, the detail of which is set out clearly in PPG11. What is included in that guidance? Among other things, the scale and distribution of provision for new housing, and priorities for the environment, transport, infrastructure, economic development, agriculture, minerals and waste treatment and disposal. The environment is already at the heart of the RPG system from which the RSS system will grow and develop.