Clause 54 - Wales Spatial Plan
Planning and Compulsory Purchase Bill
3:00 pm
Mr David Wilshire (Spelthorne, Conservative)
I begin by welcoming the Under-Secretary of State for Wales. He has missed some fascinating debates. I am sure that he would have enjoyed them, and no doubt he will have read the report of the proceedings of the Committee with great care into the early hours of the morning. Our paths have not crossed much over the years that we have both been in the House of Commons. I hope that he has the eloquence of his predecessor as Member of Parliament for Islwyn because he will need it if he is going to persuade his colleagues to do a U-turn from what they have been saying until now to what he wants them to say. I wish him well, and it is a pleasure to be in the same Committee as him.
I have a dilemma—as a Bristolian, I should describe it as a ''dilemmol''—because for a long time I have consistently argued against the Government's jackboot approach to planning in England. At every turn, the Bill would impose things by diktat from the Secretary of State. Whenever we have moved an amendment to stop that approach, we have been told that the approach is necessary. The jackboot has been trampling over English planning for days.
I suspect—if this is wrong, the Minister can leap up and say that he is happy immediately to accept the amendment—that the amendment will be opposed. He is not standing up, so my guess is probably correct. My hon. Friend the Member for Cotswold, who speaks for the official Opposition, invites me to vote for the jackboot, which would introduce a procedure whereby the Secretary of State for Wales would deliver diktat. I occasionally have fits of compassion for the Government—they cannot help being as bad as they are—and think that I should try to help them. On this occasion, I urge the Minister carefully to think about the amendment, which has been drafted in a spirit of helpfulness and co-operation.
If the Government are nothing else, they should be consistent. We have spent weeks and weeks saying how important it is for the Secretary of State to do this, that and the other. If the Minister is to say that the Secretary of State for Wales should have nothing to do with planning, that would be inconsistent. He will not be inconsistent, however, because he believes that he is right. We have become used to various Ministers from various Departments saying entirely different things, but it is curious when that contradiction is in the same Committee.
I hope that the amendment will help the Minister, for whom I have regard, to persuade his colleagues to
do a U-turn and rethink the Bill on Report in order to scrap the rubbish that they support as far as England is concerned.